Character Highlight: Professor Eustacius Jericho (Doctor Who)

*Spoilers.*

While not as utterly beloved to me as Bel and Vinder, Professor Jericho is another side character from series 13 that I really enjoyed. He can definitely be a product of his time, but he’s also a character with a lot of curiosity and heart, one who’s remarkably brave when it really counts. What more could you ask for from a companion-adjacent Who character?

We meet Jericho in the second half of the short series 13, meaning he’s only on the show for three episodes. But in that time, he makes an outsized impact. The first time we see him, he’s in 1967 conducting research on Claire, a young woman who claims to have prophetic visions. Here, we’re introduced to a learned man with a passion for things he doesn’t understand, the more unexplained the better. He takes a scientific approach to the fantastical, wiring Claire up to a machine to take readings as he studies the phenomenon before him.

He's at once forward-thinking and a little behind. He doesn’t dismiss things out of hand just because they seem impossible, and his joy for all things unprecedented borders on Doctor-esque. His trials and experiments might be poking about in the dark, but that’s because he’s venturing into unknown scientific territory where no maps exist. When Weeping Angels lay siege to his home, he’s astonished at what he sees but holds his nerve—instead of panicking, he simply begs the Doctor to let him record the event when she psychically connects to Claire.

At the same time, though, Jericho is missing certain remarkable things right under his nose. Not only is Claire a low-level psychic, she’s also a 21^st-century woman who’s already been displaced in time by an Angel. When she gives a wrong but non-anachronistic birthdate, his polygraph-like machine goes haywire. But even though he’s investigating the impossible, Jericho notes the strange readings and merely assumes the machine is acting up. “You clearly know your own birthday!” he says, rejecting the very data as he's recording it.

All this puts Jericho in a good narrative position as he’s pulled deeper into the sci-adventure. His academic enthusiasm comes in handy after he too is displaced in time, stuck with Yaz and Dan in 1901. As they travel the world, searching for clues that will help the Doctor avert the final Flux event, he has some nice investigative instincts, even if he makes it clear in the more actiony scenes that he’s no Indiana Jones. In these sequences, we also see that, while he’s a good guy overall, he’s also an older Englishman from the ‘60s who’s not immune to colonial attitudes. When the time-displaced trio uncovers a prophecy on an artifact from an Aztec temple, he’s flush with excitement at their “discovery,” and Yaz throws cold water on his sense of triumph by reminding him that they need to return the artifact after decoding it. Similarly, when they climb a mountain in Nepal to consult a legendary seer, Jericho is prepared to take the lead but flummoxed when the man talks to them like a regular guy instead of an oracle.

I appreciate that we see Jericho’s curiosity and his blind spots, his respectful attitudes and his more myopic ones. It makes him a more well-rounded character, and let’s be real, new Who could use more quasi-companions (and hopefully at some point full-time companions!) from different times and places. His presence shakes up the dynamic in the trio, and I like seeing how his reactions to everything going on are both similar and different to Yaz and Dan’s.