Relationship Spotlight: The Doctor & Bill Potts (Doctor Who)

I won’t use this post to rehash my well-documented issues with Twelve’s relationship with Clara, but suffice to say, when series 10 came along, I was ready for a new companion, one whose relationship with the Doctor was hopefully quite a bit healthier and a lot more fun.Very happily, I got my wish and then some in one Bill Potts (a few Bill-Doctor-related spoilers.)

It’s not uncommon for Doctors, especially in new Who, to initially meet their companions under extreme circumstances – at the onset of an alien invasion, for example, or after falling out of the sky with a fresh regeneration. Things are kicking off, the Doctor and their soon-to-be companion(s) are thrown together, and over the course of the ensuing adventure, the companion(s) catch the Doctor’s eye through their bravery/ingenuity/Excellent Questions/etc. Bill is a little different.

When Bill catches the Doctor’s eye, it’s at an unusual time for him anyway. Stuck at Bristol University guarding the vault, he’s taken up a semi-formal lecturer role, teaching on whatever subjects tickle his fancy as he deals with the prospect of staying put for 1000 years (kudos to Twelve for lasting as long as he does, by the way – Eleven goes stir-crazy after a few hours of sitting around in “Vincent and the Doctor,” and again in “The Power of Three.”) We’re given the impression that alien invasions have been in short supply for him lately and he’s been living as close to a “normal” life as it’s possible for the Doctor to live. He first encounters Bill, not in the middle of blowing up Autons or just before a hospital gets transplanted to the moon, but at his lectures. In amongst a crowded hall of students is a canteen worker who sneaks in to hear him, and he notices the way that she frowns instead of smiles when she comes across something she doesn’t know.

It’s not an instant meet-adventure-TARDIS scenario, either. Again with the “guarding the vault for 1000 years” thing, the Doctor at first engages Bill in a moderately-“ordinary” way, pulling strings to get her admitted to the university and offering to be her personal tutor. While Bill’s debut episode does eventually get around to the alien adventure stuff – sentient engine oil! a chase through time and space! incidental Daleks! – they’ve already known each other for a number of months before Bill ever learns about the TARDIS or time travel.

As such, it occurs to me that it would make sense to Bill to be quite a bit more astounded to learn that her tutor’s an alien (I feel like that reveal would have a bigger impact coming from someone you’ve known for a while, rather than an intriguing stranger,) but Doctor Who doesn’t always do the best job with logical follow-through. However, once Bill does start traveling with the Doctor, vault be damned, their interactions are a positive delight. They maintain something of the mentor/mentee vibe from their university connection, with Bill’s innumerable questions and some of the Doctor’s more instructive moments (like the “history’s a whitewash” scene in “Thin Ice.”) More than anything, though, they’re just friends. The Doctor teases Bill over worrying too much about stepping on butterflies when she first travels to the past, she makes silly bets with him and gives him movie recommendations, and he uses the TARDIS to help her move in with some friends, after which he almost immediately crashes their low-key housewarming (to be fair, there are alien termites in the walls.)

There are parts of their relationship that aggravate me, mostly coming from the Doctor’s side: the way he keeps trying to get her out of the way in “Smile” (I get that it’s a dangerous situation, but accept that, if someone’s your companion, they’re gonna be in dangerous situations – stop trying to manage them,) hiding the whole blindness thing from her after “Oxygen,” and whatever the hell that regeneration fakeout in “The Lie of the Land” is about. I pretty much always dislike it when Doctors are manipulative and/or paternalistic with their companions, and these are a few between the Doctor and Bill that greatly annoy me.

That said, for the most part, they’re just fun, probably the most purely-enjoyable friendship the Doctor has had since Donna. I love watching them run around time and space together, and when Nardole joins in on the action, it just gets better. I wish we had more time with these two than we did (or, barring that, if we could’ve seen Bill meet Thirteen – would’ve loved that.) I love Bill’s ear-to-ear grin as she thanks the Doctor for taking her on her first extended trip to an alien planet. I love that the Doctor patiently waits while Bill enjoys herself at a Victorian Frost Fair, knowing that she’ll eventually recognize something weird’s going on and they can get to work. I love that she tells her friends he’s her granddad, and I love that he reveals the guilty pleasures on her Spotify. The Doctor and Bill Potts, seeing the universe and having a good time.