Relationship Spotlight: Rose Tyler & the Doctor (Doctor Who)

The first season of new Who has some majorly clunky episodes.  The early episodes do have a few good ones in there, even the misfires have strong moments, and it mostly evens out by episode 6, while the pilot and the Slitheen two-parter are not examples of the show putting its best foot forward.  As such, there was no guarantee that I’d have even stayed with the show long enough to fall in love with it as much as I did.  But as almost always with the rough spots in Who, when the story isn’t working, it’s the characters and the relationships between them that keep me watching.  And the Doctor and Rose are what held me through until Who became a show I could adore (a few Doctor-Rose-related spoilers.)

Rose’s first meeting with Rose is iconic, that grab of her hand and that single word, “Run!”  As an episode, “Rose” is far from the show’s finest, but nearly every moment between those two is magic.  Right away, we see how the Doctor, still raw and reeling from the end of the Time War, needs Rose.  He’s lived such dark days and made such unbearable decisions, and he needs that earnestness and light to ground him and remind him why he stays.  That moment between them at the end of “The End of the World” is excellent, when the Doctor confesses to Rose that his planet and people are gone, when she herself has just seen the destruction of her own planet in the future, and now, standing on a 21^st-century London sidewalk, Rose proposes that they go get chips.  Everything ends, but not everyday; love what you have while you have it, and savor joys no matter how simple.  The Doctor needs that so badly in that moment, and Rose is the one offering a hand to lead him.

So too, Rose needs the Doctor tremendously.  She needs the person she can become when she sees the universe he can show her.  At the end of series 1, she struggles to explain to those back home why she can’t go back to a normal life.  It’s not just about seeing planets and wonders – it’s about being better, standing for what’s right and being a force that helps others.  Before meeting the Doctor, Rose doesn’t see any consequence in her life or think much about what she can amount to.  But on the TARDIS, she has opportunities to be truly extraordinary, and with the Doctor telling her how fantastic (and later, brilliant) she can be, she loses sight of the unspoken limits she’d placed on herself.

In their later episodes, Rose and the Doctor do tend to get a little insular, like they’re their own private in-crowd gallivanting around the universe.  Even though they’re still helping people, there can be a sort of smugness or flippancy about them, which obviously doesn’t do as much for me.  I also think that, the more overtly-romantic their relationship becomes, the more insular it feels, more like they’re traveling to be together and seeing/saving worlds is just a side perk.

But at their best, they’re gorgeous together.  The joy he takes in showing her something she’s never seen before.  The care with which she reaches out to hold his broken pieces in place as he tries to mend himself.  Her tough love when he’s getting in too deep, the responsibility he feels to always bring her home safely, the way they laugh at each other’s silly jokes, the way they hold hands when they run, the way there’s nothing they won’t do to protect one another.  At its heart, their relationship is a deep, deep knowing, and I think that’s beautiful.

A Few Thoughts on “Special” Companions (Doctor Who)

When you get down to it, there have been a number of times in new Who when companions have had that Extra Something – most particularly, a special tie to the season’s arc, the full nature of which isn’t revealed until the finale.  I’ve had different reactions to this device over the years, although, by and large, I’m not a big fan.  Spoilers pretty much across the new Who spectrum.

A lot of genre series have Chosen Ones, but new Who’s “special” companions generally tend a different way.  On Who, it’s not usually about a predestined hero, but rather, something tricky to do with time that connects them to a central mystery on the show.  Sometimes the Doctor starts to twig to it before the reveal, and sometimes it’s brought out at the last moment.  But it always leads to a huge climactic scene that’s probably at least half deus ex machina, and depending on the emotional execution of the scene, I’ll either lap it up anyway (i.e., Rose as the Bad Wolf in series 1) or give it the side-eye (i.e. Clara the “Impossible Girl” in series 7.)

There are four main “special companion” bits I’m looking at today.  In addition to the Rose and Clara moments I already mentioned, we also have Donna becoming the Doctor-Donna in series 4 and Amy’s connection to the Time Crack in series 5 (Amy also gets the Schrödinger’s Pregnancy thing in series 6 – poor Amy! – but I’m mainly gonna focus on the Time Crack.)  I’m not here to rank them according to what I feel are their merits or lack thereof.  Rather, I want to look at two narrative consequences of these storylines that tend to fall back onto the characters they effect.

First, there’s the tendency of a companion to be more of a mystery than a character.  We see this especially with Amy and Clara, and I’ve talked about both before.  Whereas the Doctor has been drawn to other companions by their curiosity, intelligence, bravery, compassion, and whatnot, qualities he admires, Amy and Clara get their initial invitations onto the TARDIS under false pretenses.  Regardless of how the Doctor feels about what they can do, the real reason he brings them aboard is to give him time to figure this out.  What’s with this weird Crack in Amy’s wall?  How does he keep meeting different versions of Clara throughout time and space?  Even though these mysteries don’t get a huge amount of screentime devoted to them throughout their respective seasons, there’s still this sense that the mystery is “enough” for those companions.  Throughout series 5 for Amy and series 7B for Clara, I have little handle on who they are – so few occasions when I can say, “That’s so Amy!”/“That’s Clara all over!”, because I genuinely don’t know.  It’s not until their following seasons, after their mystery has been revealed/solved, that the show starts putting in the work of showing them to us as fuller, more defined people.

Rose and Donna escape this issue, by the way.  Both of them are quite distinct from the start, and the Doctor appreciates them both primarily for who they are, not for the puzzles they represent.  It helps that their respective season mysteries are a) subtler and b) not immediately tied to them specifically.  It’s not until this very end that Rose discovers that she was the Bad Wolf all along, and while the Doctor notices some strange force manipulating the timelines to bring him and Donna together, the series 4 arc has several different threads woven into it, so it’s not such a major focus on What’s This Thing with Donna?

However, none of these companions are immune to the other problem I see cropping up here:  once the mystery is over, it ceases to matter.  Rose looks into the heart of the TARDIS and absorbs the Time Vortex.  She sees all of time and space and, for a short time, has the powers of a god.  But even though the Doctor is forced to regenerate after he pulls that energy from her, there is little lasting impact on Rose herself.  It seems at first that she has no memory of what happened, and she goes back to her regular self in series 2, but the next time she meets the Daleks, she tells them about atomizing the Emperor.  So she does remember?  But has no thoughts about what it was like to be a god?  That’s what we like to call a wasted opportunity.

Donna gets less of this than the others, since she exits the show immediately after the biological metacrisis that mixes her humanity with a Time Lord mind.  Like Rose, her power is taken from her to save her life (against her will,) and she most definitely forgets – the Doctor erases all her memories of him in order to protect her, and she reverts back to the shallow person she was before she met him.  Except, when Donna returns for Ten’s final episodes, that whole “she can never remember, or her mind will burn!” thing turns out to be meaningless.  Not that I want Donna to die – of course not!  But first, I hate that there’s a loophole to keep her safe but not one to let her be who she was, and second, it undermines your solemn declaration when you so easily work around it the first time it becomes an issue.

Amy, for my money, is probably the most adversely affected by this problem.  The years she spent growing up next to the Time Crack (“the universe pouring into her head,” as per the Doctor) are what allows her to remember the Doctor and bring him back when he’s trapped on the other side of Crack, and to be fair, this specialness is brought up again at the end of series 6, when she can remember both versions of the world.  But what happens has zero bearing on her as a person.  Amy grew up with no parents because the Time Crack in her wall ate them, and then time was rewritten and she had parents!  And she was exactly the same.  Nothing different about her – not even any references to her parents after the series 5 finale.  That makes no sense to me, because she’s had two completely different upbringings, she remembers both simultaneously, and none of it matters.  How does that even work?  I’d say it’s the biggest disservice done to a character who the show never treated all that well, and it annoys me on her behalf that there was apparently no point to her backstory.

Clara, at the end of series 7, jumps into the Doctor’s timestream and is splintered into innumerable different Claras scattered throughout time and space.  (Of course, she’s also told the she’s very definitely going to die if she does this, and then it’s so easy to save her the show doesn’t even bother to say how it happened, but that’s a whole other thing.)  And after that, there are… maybe two references to the fact that any of this ever happened?  In “The Day of the Doctor,” Eleven points out that she’s met his past selves before, and she’s like, “Oh yeah, right,” suggesting that, like Rose, she sort-of-maybe-but-not-quite(?) remembers.  The Impossible Girl moniker is used once more in Twelve’s first episode, and then none of this is ever mentioned again.  Even if Clara can’t remember the experiences of the other Claras, she still knows that it happened, right?  (Right?  Does she?)  Does she ever think about the other Claras?  Has she ever wanted to meet any of them?  Who knows – ‘cause who cares, right?  :eyeroll:

Those are the biggest takeaways for me.  1)  Don’t let your companion’s mystery get in the way of your companion as a character.  2)  If you want the Big Finale Moment, go for it, but make it matter afterwards.  Seeing what happens to a human after they go through an experience like that has the potential to be even richer and more satisfying than that Big Finale Moment, undeniably cool as it is.  I’d sure like to see that follow-through sometime.

Thoughts on New Who Companion Introduction Episodes

I’ve already looked at how new Who has said both hello and goodbye to Doctors, so why not companions, too?  Intros today; we’ll save the extreme angst for another time.  Also, rather than look at the quality of the episodes as a whole, like I’ve done for the Doctors, I’m really just looking at the companions themselves and how they’re presented.  Because I have to make the cut-off somewhere, I’m only including Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, Rory, and Clara – sorry, Mickey, Jack, River, and other short-term or recurring companions!  Spoilers for “Rose,” “Smith and Jones,” “Partners in Crime,” “The Eleventh Hour,” and “The Bells of Saint John.”

“Rose,” obviously, kicks things off with a whirlwind look into the life of Rose Tyler.  It starts a trend for new Who, increased emphasis on the companion’s home life.  RTD tends to focus more on family while Moffat seems to prefer romantic partners, but it’s the same general idea.  The important part, though, is what Rose does when she comes in contact with the Doctor.  I’d say she proves herself companion-material in a reasonable way.  Although she doesn’t do anything too jaw-dropping (she does do a bit of gymnastics to free the Doctor from some Autons, but that moment is more about her determination to help than her amazing moves,) she still demonstrates why the Doctor is interested in her beyond the Living Plastic in the department store where she works.  She gets in some Excellent Questions and makes good observations.  She takes the initiative to try and figure out who the Doctor is, researching online and then meeting with Clive.  And while she’s clearly overwhelmed to step inside the TARDIS for the first time, she handles the revolution that it and the Doctor are both alien very well.  I’m a fan of this intro; it shows off Rose’s brand of ordinary-person awesomeness potential.

For my money, Martha is the biggest boss of the group.  She’s terrific throughout “Smith and Jones.”  Her medical training to keep calm in a crisis serves her well, which allows her intuition (realizing there must be an air bubble around the hospital,) bravery (standing up to the Judoon,) and resourcefulness (thinking to grab the manual when she absolutely needs to able to operate the X-ray machine in a mad hurry) to shine through.  I also like that she doesn’t spend any time denying that what’s happening is alien, as well as the fact that she takes a moment to go outside with the Doctor and just enjoy standing on the moon.  Oh, and did I mention she saves the Doctor’s life, remembering to factor in his alien biology as she resuscitates him, all while dealing with extreme oxygen deprivation?  Martha Jones can get things done!

I realize that Donna’s real introduction comes in “The Runaway Bride,” but since she basically has two of these episodes, I’m gonna go with “Partners in Crime,” because how could I not?  It’s a different kind of companion intro, since she comes into it already knowing who the Doctor is and what he does (Moffat will do another take on that idea with Amy,) and that gives her something of an edge.  I don’t mind, though – she’s just too great here.  I like, beyond just investigating strange goings-on in the hopes of running into the Doctor, Donna does actual investigating into the strange goings-on themselves.  She’s quite the hustler, working at Health & Safety just long enough to get the badge she needs to infiltrate Adipose, snagging a customer list from a phone salesman, and pounding enough pavement to meet an Adipose client.  The parallels showing how her investigation aligns with the Doctor’s are pretty cool.  And once they do finally connect, it’s a lot of the awesome sci-fi hijinks I was hoping for – running around, making faces, and dangling outside windows – but Donna also proves how she can help.  I love that moment in the climax when the Doctor is freaking out about how he can’t stop the machine, and Donna gets through to him with that calm-but-stern, “Doctor, tell me what you need.”  The fact that she’s able to pull out that second capsule, critical to overriding the machine, is just gravy.

“The Eleventh Hour” is a bit unfortunate in that I feel like Amy comes off as better companion material as a kid than an adult.  Young Amelia takes the Doctor’s weirdness and alienness in stride and, with him beside her, takes on her fear of the Time Crack in her wall.  Adult Amy, meanwhile, doesn’t get a lot to do.  Probably her best move is passing herself off as a police officer when she finds the Doctor in her house, although that’s marred by no longer having the key to the handcuffs she uses and the camera’s sexualization of her in her cop costume.  When she pulls the trick again later, to get into the hospital, it’s only because the Doctor reminds her what she’s wearing.  Other than that, she holds up the Doctor to do an “explain now!!!!” when he’s insanely busy and on a massive time crunch, and she gets taken over by Prisoner Zero – though it’s not her fault, it’s an unfortunate position to put her in for her first episode.  I get that she’s not in her best state of mind, since being left by the Doctor as a kid really did a number on her and she can’t quite believe he’s actually back, but I wish we could see her doing more companion stuff.  As it is, if it weren’t for the Doctor’s memory of young Amelia, guilt at having come back so late, and suspicions about the Crack, I’m not sure if he would have invited Amy to come with him simply for her.

Strangely enough, it’s Rory who looks more like a pre-companion in that episode.  (I know, he doesn’t join the TARDIS crew till later, but “The Vampires of Venice” is his first trip, which doesn’t fit my pattern here – “The Eleventh Hour” is better.)  He’s the one who’s noticed something strange, Prisoner Zero disguised as the hospital’s coma patients, and he tries to tell his boss about it even though he knows how crazy it sounds.  But he’s come prepared for that, having taken pictures of Zero on his phone as proof.  Curious, determined, and smart; companion all over.  And yet, when he’s initially invited onto the TARDIS, it’s for Amy’s sake, not his.  It’s only after the events of “The Vampires of Venice” that both Amy and the Doctor suggest he stay on with them.  Tsk, tsk – the Doctor should’ve paid attention more.

For Clara, I’m going with “The Bells of Saint John,” since that’s when we actually meet Clara 1.0.  This is another one that comes in with some foreknowledge, but it’s on the Doctor’s side, not Clara’s.  He’s already met the “Impossible Girl” twice at this point and is totally weird and elated when he comes face to face with her.  Sadly, this is also one where the companion doesn’t come off great.  She’s taken out twice by the Spoonheads, and her only real contribution to the adventure – figuring out where the Great Intelligence’s base is located – is accomplished due to the temporary tech skills that the Great Intelligence gave her the first time it took her over.  It’s not knowledge she’s actually gained, and it’s not something she keeps going forward.  While she is brave and rolls with the shock of her first crazy journey in the TARDIS, she doesn’t get to do a lot that feels companionish.  Again, if it weren’t for the Impossible Girl mystery, I’m not sure if the Doctor would’ve asked her to come with him.