Character Highlight: Vislor Turlough (Doctor Who)

I debated over what sort of write-up to do for Turlough.  I do enjoy him, shifty little sneak that he is, but in the end, I couldn’t quite put him in Favorite Characters territory, so a Character Highlight it is.  Turlough allowed classic Who to cover some new companion ground, which, 20 years into the series, was appreciated (a few Turlough-related spoilers.)

Turlough stands out from the “typical companion” in quite a few ways, even considering the wider variety of companions we see in the classic series compared to new Who.  He’s both a male and an alien – not unknown in classic Who, of course, but there are a lot more who are female and/or human.  More interestingly, he’s an alien who’s been stranded on Earth in the 1980s, stuck at a preppy boys’ school and desperate to get off this rock.  The full story of who he is, where he came from, and why, isn’t explored until the tail end of his time on the show, but from the start, it’s clear he doesn’t belong.  (In a weird way, he’s a tiny bit like the First Doctor back when he and Susan were living in London, only Turlough doesn’t have the safety net of a ship he can use to leave.  He’s stuck, and that makes him edgy.)

This unique position as an alien stranded on Earth leads to the other point that sets him apart as a prospective companion:  the only reason he gets in with team TARDIS in the first place is to kill the Doctor.  I mean, not just for the sake of killing him – Turlough is under orders from the Black Guardian, with the promise that the Black Guardian will fulfill Turlough’s desire to leave Earth if he does as he’s told.  Still, regardless of his reasons, Turlough talks his way onto the TARDIS with the (increasingly-reluctant) intention of committing murder.  That’s a level of moral corruption we just don’t see on board the TARDIS, along with the self-serving drive that fuels it.  When Turlough enters the Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa’s lives, he’s entirely focused on what he sees as his own untenable situation and prepares to do something unconscionable in order to change that.

Of course, Turlough doesn’t kill the Doctor.  In part, he can’t work up the nerve to do the deed, but also, the more time he spends with our heroes, the more he realizes 1) the Doctor doesn’t deserve this, 2) the way the Doctor does things is better, and 3) Turlough doesn’t have to become this.  He actually takes a bit of time to reckon with the act he comes close to committing and begins taking small steps to change himself.

But when I say small steps, I mean small.  Turlough’s automatic tendency is still toward the self-serving, and being noble or heroic doesn’t really come naturally to him.  When the shit hits the fan, his first reaction is usually to look out for himself, but then his second reaction, more and more, is to remind himself to act a little more like a companion.  At times, this can be a tactical advantage for the crew – if Turlough goes all “every man for himself” and books it when the bad guys show up to capture everyone, that means he’s free to eventually come back around and try to rescue them from the outside.

Slowly, by fits and starts, with a lot of backsliding, Turlough attempts to be better.  When he first appeared on the show, it was a new sort of story for Who to be telling, and I really don’t think they’ve quite done another like it since.