I’ve often said in the past that Russell T Davies’ genius in overseeing the return of Doctor Who lay not in what he changed about the series – and let’s not forget how controversial the focus on the companions’ families was, at least to begin with, nor how strange the change to the 45-minute story initially felt – but in what he didn’t. I myself was firmly in favour of rebooting the continuity from scratch, entertained various notions of a mercurial, Hartnellesque Doctor, and so on – but the series that eventually appeared stuck very closely to the template the original had used, especially from 1973 to 1977: the Doctor and a single companion, with frequent trips to a ‘home base’ of sorts on contemporary Earth, with a bunch of other recurring characters there.
At this point in the original run, the TARDIS was semi-steerable and so it was implied that the companion travelled with the Doctor out of the sheer joy of it – Sarah is clearly pretty distraught upon being told that she has to go home at the end of The Hand of Evil, and many years later it’s during Rusty’s tenure that this is properly articulated.
That it’s done so at all demonstrates one of the distinctive things about the modern show: the focus on the regular characters as just that, individual characters rather than ciphers carrying out plot functions – there’s an overall swing away from it being a plot-driven series to a character-driven one. Obviously this extends to how companion arrivals and departures are dealt with.
As part of the series’ new style, one thing totally (and thankfully) absent is the out-of-the-blue departure, with a companion deciding in the last five minutes of a story that this would be a nice to move on. (This may be due to the artistes’ contracts being handled much more professionally, who can tell – in at least one case during the original run, the producer kept hoping an actress would stay on, only finally accepting they were leaving while their last episode was actually being filmed.) Companion departures are foreshadowed, written into the overall story of a season, and arise seamlessly from the way they’ve been characterised.
And so it is that Rose, who is established (however objectionably, if you’re anything like me) as the Doctor’s One True Soul Mate throughout her stories, has to be physically ripped from his side and banished to a parallel universe by a series of wobbly and arguably contrived plot devices. There is no way this character, as written and performed, would ever leave the Doctor’s side voluntarily, and her departure reflects this. Doomsday, until very recently, was unique in that it is fundamentally the story of how a companion leaves the Doctor. This is not the story of how the hubris of Torchwood unleashes a Cyberman-Dalek conflict on present-day London – all that is just window-dressing for Billie Piper crying on a beach somewhere. The Daleks and Cybermen are just there to lend heft to the circumstances of Rose’s leaving – the same is not true of the Master in Martha’s final regular story or Davros in Donna’s.
If you want to properly characterise companions and not make them basic ciphers, you almost instantly run into the problem of how to differentiate them. We have yet to see how Steven Moffat will make the new girl distinct from Pond – although having someone likeable whose backstory isn’t completely wrapped up in the Doctor would be a good start – but in Rusty’s case the defining characteristic of the lead companion was the nature of their romantic feelings for the Doctor. After the quasi-romance between the Doctor and Rose (and I’ll fight to the death to keep that ‘quasi’, dammit), the dynamic between the Doctor and Martha was one of unrequited affection (the way this is played has the unfortunate consequence of making the Doctor look like a thoughtless arse and Martha a drip, but that can’t be helped) and this again feeds into her departure and provides a decent rationale for it – all the business with her traumatised family helps too.
(Although one has to wince a bit at the way Martha Jones gets treated after her initial departure – shuffled over into Torchwood for a bit, then dragged back for three dud episodes with Donna, then a lot of running around with plot devices in the finale where she plays third fiddle to Donna and Rose, and then finally showing up in what can only be described as a marriage of convenience never even hinted at before. Really? Really?)
In the same way, the relationship between the Doctor and Donna is explicitly framed in platonic terms – that this, which was implicitly the default setting throughout the original series, was stressed as something new and unusual at the time, tells you a lot about how the series has changed – but again, she is, like Rose, presented as someone who finds travelling with the Doctor to be a transformative, utterly fulfilling experience.
So here again it’s obvious that there can only realistically be an involuntary departure for this character. I find it a little curious that after frequently vowing he would never kill off a companion – this would send the wrong set of messages to the show’s young audience – Rusty effectively does just this to Donna, or at least the Donna the audience has come to know and care about. Another set of wobbly plot contrivances is invoked, requiring the Doctor to wipe her memory of him – or, to be more precise, block it from her, on the understanding that if she gets it back her brain will fry. Hmmm. Or, possibly, she will just shoot energy out of her face and then faint for ages, which is what actually happens in The End of Time. So much of the latter end of Rusty’s tenure is deeply suspect in narrative terms that it feels mean to pick on this particular element: suffice to say that it is another example of a companion not quite leaving the TARDIS feet first, but certainly doing so kicking and screaming.
With two of the three previous companions departing via some form of banishment (with a liberal helping of mind-wipe mixed in in Donna’s case), should we be surprised that the same fate ultimately awaits the Ponds? It’s interesting that after a set of stories that specifically sets out to explore the consequences of a long-term association with the Doctor – lasting over a decade, if Amy’s maths is to be trusted – their actual relationship concludes with a bang rather than the whisper and a slow fading from each others’ lives that one might expect. It’s tempting to conclude that the overblown sentimental finale is now so entrenched as a staple of the programme that not even Moffat can break its’ grip; personally I rather hope not.
And so the Ponds are banished also. Even the bods at DWM, who are contractually obliged to be broadly positive about the new series, accept that the actual plot mechanics of The Angels Take Manhattan are chiefly notable for Not Making Any Sense. Once again, the need for an overblown sentimental finale trumps all other considerations – I’m tempted to make my standard complaint here that, currently, Doctor Who is much more interested in being Clever and Moving than it is in actually constructing coherent narratives, but that’s kind of the subtext of nearly everything I’ve written about the post-2010 series – and again it’s a finale revolving around an involuntary departure from the TARDIS.
It’s tempting to blame this spate of moderately soap-opera-inflected tragedies on the shifts in the series’ format that occurred in the mid-70s, most notably the convention that the TARDIS gradually became more and more susceptible to the Doctor’s controlling influence (The Doctor’s Wife probably constitutes a semi-retcon to this, but no matter). With this in place, the plot device of the companion wanting to get home (one of the series’ initial drivers) instantly became redundant, with the replacement idea being that the companions were there out of choice.
I’m not sure this explains everything, though. It seems to me that one of the key characteristics of the modern series, and one of the few which really betrays the deep fan roots of its creators. The characteristic in question is this: the new series routinely takes things which, in the original run, were either deeply-buried or unconscious subtext, and foregrounds them as key narrative elements.
The loneliness of the Doctor is never really addressed head-on in the original run, but only alluded to in passing in a few memorable scenes. It’s one of the key themes of many tenth Doctor episodes. His status as a mythic, titanic figure, which has been at the heart of so many recent episodes, never really gets going in the original run – significantly, the few references to this were picked up and elaborated upon in the fiction coming out of the fan culture which was in many ways the place of origin for the revived series’ approach and style.
One of the main principles of Rusty’s tenure on the show was ‘The Doctor is wonderful, and travelling with him is wonderful too’ – and Steven Moffat seems to have retained this as a precept, too. This is an idea which, stated in those terms, is entirely new to the revived series – it’s almost literally impossible to imagine anyone from the original run talking in such an on-the-nose fashion – emotional articulacy was an unknown concept back then. Watching the original run, you can infer that Jo and Sarah and so on must clearly feel this way, but no-one ever talks about it quite so directly.
Nevertheless – and this may be a consequence of the compressed storytelling demanded by a 45-minute timeslot – in the new series this idea is dragged into the foreground and recited almost as a mantra. Given that we’re frequently and explicitly told that Travelling With The Doctor Is Wonderful, options for plausible companion departures, particularly of the voluntary kind, naturally become rather limited. Hence the wobbly logic and involuntary nature of so many recent leavings of the TARDIS.
I hope I’ve made it clear that, even if I think recent companion departures leave a bit to be required in the plotting department, they’re no worse – and, in many ways, arguably better – than the way most companions were written out during the original run. With a few very distinguished exceptions, this is one aspect of the format that the series has always struggled to come to grips with in a truly satisfying way. Whatever the problems currently attendant in this area, they seem bound up with the wider issues of the series’ storytelling style. Whether a change in the latter would produce an improvement in the former remains to be seen: not that such a change would appear to be imminent. The big goodbye is now, I suspect, part of the format, for good or ill – and it’s likely to remain a tragic goodbye, too.
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