![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethNarrative function: get in trouble. get rescued. get in trouble again. get rescued. rescue Doctor a bit. scream.
Be the person that asks the questions, and someone the Doctor talks to. Otherwise he has no one to show off his brilliance at. And he ends up talking to himself and being sad.
Emotional function for the Doctor: immortal lord of time and space he may be, but sad little lonely geek boy he is. He alternates between one and zero friends. Sometimes, when things are going really well, he had as many as three friends at once. That one time with UNIT there could have been, oh, five people around, maybe even more if you count the ones the old series didn't much name and the new series made a point of getting to know. And one wonders why he stayed with UNIT so long...
(PS has much empathy. I'm sure I had 3D friend around here somewhere... er, possibly back when I was in high school...)
The BFI Doctor Who book I got out the library has slight alternate theory:
secretly, they are all Susan.
and that's why there's so many young women.
... and may I just say *facepalm* and *eeeeew* because hello, kissing!
Also, the Brigadier is in no way shape or form a teenage girl.
Brigadier Bambera was once, but that's not really her role by the time the Doctor meets her.
What the book says in particular:
p41
Of course, all long-running series have to cope with cast changes. Doctor Who first tackled this thorny problem in 'Flashpoint', Episode Six of 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth', as Susan (Carole Ann Ford) opts not to travel on in the TARDIS but remain on twenty-first [er, no, 2150 is 22nd century] century Earth to help rebuild human civilisation and marry a freedom fighter. As would often be the case, this arises not from logical character development but a performer's decision to quit. In that story, Hartnell, as the Doctor, ad-libs to Ford, as Susan, 'what you need is a jolly good smacked bottom!' This suggests why the twenty-four-year-old actress might have had problems with the way her notionally sixteen-year-old character was being treated by the show. The problem was that it had been established that the Doctor's primary (indeed only) personal tie was with his granddaughter. It was reasonably likely that the chick would want to leave the nest, but this left the series stuck for a reason as to why the Doctor might continue to haul his departed relative's not-always-congenial teachers about time and space with him. If marrying off Susan was conventional and awkward soap plotting, the strategies devised to replace her and keep Iana nd Barbara at least temporarily in the frame were ingenious enough to count as a survival trait. In 'The Rescue' (1965), the TARDIS takes on Vicki (Maureen O'Brien), a spacewrecked and (crucially) orphaned girl, who may be from Earth and the future but serves as a surrogate child for the Doctor and even a new pupil for the other adults.
The inference is that all the temporary travelling companions who come and go throughout the series are substitutes for the lost Susan. [this writer may infer that, but I think they're being very silly] The 'orphan' gambit whereby a new regular loses an actual or substitute parent during their first adventure would be reprised many times, for example with Victoria (Deborah Watling) in 'The Evil of the Daleks' (1967), whose father (John Bailey) charges the Doctor with looking after her as he is exterminated by the Daleks, and Tegan (Janet Fielding) in 'Logopolis' (1981), whose Aunt Vanessa (Dolores Whiteman) is shrunk to death by the Master (Anthony Ainley). Heroic teamings often arise from such circumstances: the adult orphan Bruce Wayne adopts the bereaved Dick Grayson after the lad's circus aerialist parents have been killed by gangsters in Detective Comics No. 38 (1940), which also means Batman takes on Robin as a partner in crime-fighting; a striking deductive exercise in The Sign of Four (1890), involving a much-pawned family watch, reveals that Dr Watson lost a brother to alcoholism and madness (just as Arthur Conan Doyle lost a father) shortly before forming his near-fraternal bond with Sherlock Holmes. The arc of Rose Tyler in Doctor Who (2005-) addresses the question of what happens if the Doctor takes a companion who has a mother (Camille Coduri) and boyfriend (Noel Clarke) back home who don't respond well to what seems like her virtual abduction. Even she has a dead father (Shaun Dingwall) in the background to emphasise the Doctor's parental status; Rose's mum even briefly considers the Doctor as possible replacement husband before settling into exasperated resentment. [And I'm pretty sure this was written with only the 2005 season shown. Because: kissing.] The notion of surrogate Susans makes restrospective sense of comings and goings which have more to do with production circumstances than the unfolding over decades of any coherent story.
(/quote p45)
It goes on a bit. It leaves the Susan theory behind fairly quick.
The 1st Team TARDIS was designed to appeal to a broad demographic.
Old Man Doctor - grumpy and gets the others into trouble. He developed into the hero, so started thinking and talking them all out of trouble again too.
Grown Up Teacher People - one for Science, one for History. A sensible woman who starts out very concerned about Susan and goes along being very concerned about, well, all kinds of everyone I guess. And Ian the big strong hero guy. Bring in someone who was action hero guy in other TV shows. Sir Lancelot, wasn't it?
Point being - these are the heroes.
Teenage cool yet weird girl - for the younger people to identify with.
So that's three generations to appeal to the family audience, a balance of men and women, and a balance of thought, feeling, action, and... getting into trouble a lot.
The Doctor turned into the hero. He was more of a catalyst for trouble initially. But once he was willing to get stuck in and help people then he didn't need quite the same set of companions.
And Susan never had quite as much to do as she could have, to put it politely. She was stuck being actually a teenage girl instead of a Time Lady playing at one.
When you think how young Romana was when she got out of school and compare it to an actual teenage time person... she's really incredibly young by local standards. Unless she's not a Time Lord type at all. No evidence though, since they hadn't invented it at the time.
So, anyway, new setup - Doctor for thinking, sidekick guy for action hero, sidekick girl for getting emotional. That's from the BFI book too, they go through demonstrating how people fit. Ian and Barbara only almost fit that. But with the teenager gone there was no identification figure for the younger audience, only a show with three grown ups. So they had to get a young person back again.
... this bodes ill for Donna.
... but we knew that.
When there's a guy and a girl sidekick then the guy does hitting things (or shooting them - Brigadier) and the girl does having feelings about it. Except for when that doesn't fit.
Sometimes the 'feelings' are squishy hugging emotional attachment type feelings. Sometimes they're more ethical concerns. Or caring about the mission. Or, to make Leela fit, having instincts. So I think it's a bit of a stretch to label it that way.
Women do personnel. They do connecting with people and reading them. Leela did body language.
This works because the Doctor is Not Of This World, or indeed any other we've ever seen him in. Gallifrey, lets face it, think he's as entirely nuts as the Master. So the sidekick has to do Fitting In. This often involves dressing up. And a tension between the companion's values and local norms which is quite a lot of fun, because you can ring the changes a lot, whereas the Doctor has some pretty clear attitudes even if he has variations on theme as well.
Romana... does not do fitting in. But she does do adapting to worlds. She doesn't fit in, but in interesting ways. Which is actually more true of all the travellers than the fitting in thing.
There's a suspicion that women fall into stereotyped roles in Doctor Who. Because, basically, they do screaming and running away and getting rescued. This is a necessary story function, having someone around to get in trouble and scream and run and stuff to increase the tension. Sometimes it's the Doctor. But he's the Hero these days, so, not very often in real trouble. Companions can get killed off, not just regenerated, so there's a lot higher stakes. Also companions often have stuff to lose. The Doctor only has his companions. These days he can't even risk Gallifrey. To give him stuff to lose you have to threaten his friends.
Men do particular roles too. There's the Muscular One, the Math Geek, and the Backstabber. Sometimes they combine. Harry was theoretically a medic, but he was written in to be the Muscular One if the new Doctor was older. Then he was written out again when the new Doctor did fighting after all. That says a lot about the role of men in Doctor Who really.
appeal to a broad demographic is the thing again. With the Doctor around they already have a male character. And they long since ceased to try and appeal to grandparents by giving them an identification figure. Young is In.
... blame the decline in ratings on there not being any old people. I'm sure you could make a case for it...
So, anyway, Adult Male is already covered. Why do you need another one?
Well with Mickey he was sort of hanging around highlighting the fact that it's white male. White everyone. Soon as I notice that I feel all *facepalm* about it, I tell you. I mean, how many years, and they're still all white? I vote for a ban on white Doctors or Companions for the next few years. Even things up a bit.
He's also got 'working class' covered. He's not the first on that one, but the others were all military. There's a lot of that around - spacemen, sailors, soldiers, but some sort of military. Makes Jack seem rather traditional.
But Jack was there being omnisexual male.
So there are indeed demographics that the Doctor - officially - does not cover. Even with gender noted.
But the big one is, he's currently not a she. Therefore, someone else on the show has to be. Otherwise there's nowhere for women to identify with.
Hello, female sidekick companion setup.
And she's centrally important. There's a bunch of times the Doctor travels around with just one woman, but there's no times he travels with just one man, except Adric when the Doctor has just been dumped. And that doesn't last out the story. Adric - and Turlough - were playing at Young Male, because clearly teenage boys want to identify with the irritating smart kid rather than the, er, irritating smart grown up.
... insufficient diversity there, maybe?
... but I like Turlough. Backstabbing cowardly little sneak... except for when he's totally not. He's the guy who is adequately afraid and self interested and yet gets into this hero stuff anyway. I mean some of the others you end up wondering if they even understand the stakes. Lalala I shall wander around this alien world and act like I'm on holiday oh look an ood oh I shall stay here even though it's certain death because hey the Doctor will save me... er, I have issues, okay? ANYway... Coward is a useful story role. It's hard to feel scared if none of the characters are. Someone has to be worried enough. And it's great to have tension within the TARDIS, you're carrying around an ongoing plot thread, instead of having to set it up from nothing every week.
... Adric didn't work very well though.
Kind of like Wesley Crusher. Even those of us who could identify with him didn't really want to. If someone has their flaws on display so often it's not comfortable when they exactly match, sort of thing. There's a bit in the Science Fiction Audiences book about MIT students and their really ambivalent non-identification with teen genius characters.
Also... how large is the teen genius demographic? And do we really want a character with such a narrow identification possibility? I mean, smart, yes, but because they're trying really hard. The Doctor is the one that's swish without really trying... until it blows up in his face. We don't really need a teen genius to not know how to save the world yet think they're still all that.
... as I said, Issues.
SO... anyway...
One male doctor and one female sidekick covers the gender basics. Since the Doctor is older - really really a lot older - the sidekick is usually younger - as in older teen or young twenties. I thought Martha was a bit older than usual and she's meant to be 23. But now we have Donna, and she's more ... I was going to say 'mature student'. That's where I connect with the character anyway. She's got that thing where she wants to change her life but doesn't quite know how. That's the thing that gets you into college again twice the age of everyone else there. Or you know, and you know where to get the tools, and you just keep going after them until you get there. The same determination that got her caught up with the Doctor - hero training figure extraordinaire - is the kind of determined that gets you through a course. I feel like I know this woman, you know? Every year there's a classroom full of us.
Can young people still identify? Are they still interested?
Well I don't really know. I mean, I know the theory. But theory can be wrong. They used to put a cute kid character in TV shows so kids will watch, but then they discovered that kids mostly don't want to watch kids their age, they want to watch older kids and young people. So teenagers works, but younger than that loses people a bit. Which helps also with employment laws, because it's hard enough when they're knocking a decade off full grown people (one of these books I read refers to school uniforms as fetish wear, because they're clearly on adult actors. sort of skanky way to phrase it, but I can see their point.) Trying to pass for little kids heads into creepy comedy world. Emphasis on creepy.
But that thing where there's got to be a woman there for women to identify with... well, put it this way, when we write fic, do we always write women? Not so very.
Yet I stopped watching Heroes because I felt specifically pushed out of it as a woman. The space in the narrative for women didn't allow me any Hero roles. So I went to watch a show where there's always a woman around helping save the world.
Yes, leading save the world stuff would be nice.
The Doctor really needs to regenerate female. After someone has written all the scripts with the current Doctor in mind. Just change the outsides and keep the Doctor-ness.
I fear for losing important Doctor-y qualities if they make big outside changes.
Next Doctor: Asian woman. Cover some of the more obvious gaps right quick.
Then the sidekick can be a guy but still in ye traditional scream-run-rescued role and we can has interesting instead of feminist-worrying.
So:
Companions- identification figures for a range of demographics
and
plot devices for generating trouble
as well as
someone for the Doctor to talk to and bounce off and be pulled into relation to other people by
Also, a way of introducing philosophies that combine or clash with the Doctor's in interesting ways. So you get his stated anti-violence stance meeting his willingness to work with people who do the fighting, and the two positions have arguments, some of them revealing his contradictions.
I like Jenny.
Okay, that was rambly and not so much useful for an essay.
To make an essay of it I'd have to concentrate on keywords. Ideology is always a good one. Role of women. Role of power structures. Doctor as patriarch, as aristo, as white colonial dude bringing knowledge to poor uncultured everyone else. Companions then get to be the everyone else. So how they're represented and if they put up with his stuff and if they leave having grown or lost and if they step up to more powerful roles all has ideological impact.
... they are not all Susan. It's not even useful to say that. It doesn't help you read them all at all. And if they were all Susan, why would someone think they had to be, and what would that say about power imbalances within Team TARDIS?
I like the companions that are there to get in fights with the Doctor and tell him off and get told off. Which is, well, rather a lot of them, can't say all without having seen them all. But they're there to point out when he's not being cuddly, or when there's a case for doing violence, or whatever their particular thing is. And he's there to pull or push in the other direction. And how they resolve it says a lot about the ideological stance of the show. Which changes over time. As evidenced by different companions.
Can't lump them all in as one function. Even the Doctor doesn't stay as one function.
The only thing you can say is the Companions are there as the Doctor's other parts. What he doesn't cover, they bring to the party.
Tom Baker thought he didn't need a companion.
... clearly his companions needed to bring the humble.
Be the person that asks the questions, and someone the Doctor talks to. Otherwise he has no one to show off his brilliance at. And he ends up talking to himself and being sad.
Emotional function for the Doctor: immortal lord of time and space he may be, but sad little lonely geek boy he is. He alternates between one and zero friends. Sometimes, when things are going really well, he had as many as three friends at once. That one time with UNIT there could have been, oh, five people around, maybe even more if you count the ones the old series didn't much name and the new series made a point of getting to know. And one wonders why he stayed with UNIT so long...
(PS has much empathy. I'm sure I had 3D friend around here somewhere... er, possibly back when I was in high school...)
The BFI Doctor Who book I got out the library has slight alternate theory:
secretly, they are all Susan.
and that's why there's so many young women.
... and may I just say *facepalm* and *eeeeew* because hello, kissing!
Also, the Brigadier is in no way shape or form a teenage girl.
Brigadier Bambera was once, but that's not really her role by the time the Doctor meets her.
What the book says in particular:
p41
Of course, all long-running series have to cope with cast changes. Doctor Who first tackled this thorny problem in 'Flashpoint', Episode Six of 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth', as Susan (Carole Ann Ford) opts not to travel on in the TARDIS but remain on twenty-first [er, no, 2150 is 22nd century] century Earth to help rebuild human civilisation and marry a freedom fighter. As would often be the case, this arises not from logical character development but a performer's decision to quit. In that story, Hartnell, as the Doctor, ad-libs to Ford, as Susan, 'what you need is a jolly good smacked bottom!' This suggests why the twenty-four-year-old actress might have had problems with the way her notionally sixteen-year-old character was being treated by the show. The problem was that it had been established that the Doctor's primary (indeed only) personal tie was with his granddaughter. It was reasonably likely that the chick would want to leave the nest, but this left the series stuck for a reason as to why the Doctor might continue to haul his departed relative's not-always-congenial teachers about time and space with him. If marrying off Susan was conventional and awkward soap plotting, the strategies devised to replace her and keep Iana nd Barbara at least temporarily in the frame were ingenious enough to count as a survival trait. In 'The Rescue' (1965), the TARDIS takes on Vicki (Maureen O'Brien), a spacewrecked and (crucially) orphaned girl, who may be from Earth and the future but serves as a surrogate child for the Doctor and even a new pupil for the other adults.
The inference is that all the temporary travelling companions who come and go throughout the series are substitutes for the lost Susan. [this writer may infer that, but I think they're being very silly] The 'orphan' gambit whereby a new regular loses an actual or substitute parent during their first adventure would be reprised many times, for example with Victoria (Deborah Watling) in 'The Evil of the Daleks' (1967), whose father (John Bailey) charges the Doctor with looking after her as he is exterminated by the Daleks, and Tegan (Janet Fielding) in 'Logopolis' (1981), whose Aunt Vanessa (Dolores Whiteman) is shrunk to death by the Master (Anthony Ainley). Heroic teamings often arise from such circumstances: the adult orphan Bruce Wayne adopts the bereaved Dick Grayson after the lad's circus aerialist parents have been killed by gangsters in Detective Comics No. 38 (1940), which also means Batman takes on Robin as a partner in crime-fighting; a striking deductive exercise in The Sign of Four (1890), involving a much-pawned family watch, reveals that Dr Watson lost a brother to alcoholism and madness (just as Arthur Conan Doyle lost a father) shortly before forming his near-fraternal bond with Sherlock Holmes. The arc of Rose Tyler in Doctor Who (2005-) addresses the question of what happens if the Doctor takes a companion who has a mother (Camille Coduri) and boyfriend (Noel Clarke) back home who don't respond well to what seems like her virtual abduction. Even she has a dead father (Shaun Dingwall) in the background to emphasise the Doctor's parental status; Rose's mum even briefly considers the Doctor as possible replacement husband before settling into exasperated resentment. [And I'm pretty sure this was written with only the 2005 season shown. Because: kissing.] The notion of surrogate Susans makes restrospective sense of comings and goings which have more to do with production circumstances than the unfolding over decades of any coherent story.
(/quote p45)
It goes on a bit. It leaves the Susan theory behind fairly quick.
The 1st Team TARDIS was designed to appeal to a broad demographic.
Old Man Doctor - grumpy and gets the others into trouble. He developed into the hero, so started thinking and talking them all out of trouble again too.
Grown Up Teacher People - one for Science, one for History. A sensible woman who starts out very concerned about Susan and goes along being very concerned about, well, all kinds of everyone I guess. And Ian the big strong hero guy. Bring in someone who was action hero guy in other TV shows. Sir Lancelot, wasn't it?
Point being - these are the heroes.
Teenage cool yet weird girl - for the younger people to identify with.
So that's three generations to appeal to the family audience, a balance of men and women, and a balance of thought, feeling, action, and... getting into trouble a lot.
The Doctor turned into the hero. He was more of a catalyst for trouble initially. But once he was willing to get stuck in and help people then he didn't need quite the same set of companions.
And Susan never had quite as much to do as she could have, to put it politely. She was stuck being actually a teenage girl instead of a Time Lady playing at one.
When you think how young Romana was when she got out of school and compare it to an actual teenage time person... she's really incredibly young by local standards. Unless she's not a Time Lord type at all. No evidence though, since they hadn't invented it at the time.
So, anyway, new setup - Doctor for thinking, sidekick guy for action hero, sidekick girl for getting emotional. That's from the BFI book too, they go through demonstrating how people fit. Ian and Barbara only almost fit that. But with the teenager gone there was no identification figure for the younger audience, only a show with three grown ups. So they had to get a young person back again.
... this bodes ill for Donna.
... but we knew that.
When there's a guy and a girl sidekick then the guy does hitting things (or shooting them - Brigadier) and the girl does having feelings about it. Except for when that doesn't fit.
Sometimes the 'feelings' are squishy hugging emotional attachment type feelings. Sometimes they're more ethical concerns. Or caring about the mission. Or, to make Leela fit, having instincts. So I think it's a bit of a stretch to label it that way.
Women do personnel. They do connecting with people and reading them. Leela did body language.
This works because the Doctor is Not Of This World, or indeed any other we've ever seen him in. Gallifrey, lets face it, think he's as entirely nuts as the Master. So the sidekick has to do Fitting In. This often involves dressing up. And a tension between the companion's values and local norms which is quite a lot of fun, because you can ring the changes a lot, whereas the Doctor has some pretty clear attitudes even if he has variations on theme as well.
Romana... does not do fitting in. But she does do adapting to worlds. She doesn't fit in, but in interesting ways. Which is actually more true of all the travellers than the fitting in thing.
There's a suspicion that women fall into stereotyped roles in Doctor Who. Because, basically, they do screaming and running away and getting rescued. This is a necessary story function, having someone around to get in trouble and scream and run and stuff to increase the tension. Sometimes it's the Doctor. But he's the Hero these days, so, not very often in real trouble. Companions can get killed off, not just regenerated, so there's a lot higher stakes. Also companions often have stuff to lose. The Doctor only has his companions. These days he can't even risk Gallifrey. To give him stuff to lose you have to threaten his friends.
Men do particular roles too. There's the Muscular One, the Math Geek, and the Backstabber. Sometimes they combine. Harry was theoretically a medic, but he was written in to be the Muscular One if the new Doctor was older. Then he was written out again when the new Doctor did fighting after all. That says a lot about the role of men in Doctor Who really.
appeal to a broad demographic is the thing again. With the Doctor around they already have a male character. And they long since ceased to try and appeal to grandparents by giving them an identification figure. Young is In.
... blame the decline in ratings on there not being any old people. I'm sure you could make a case for it...
So, anyway, Adult Male is already covered. Why do you need another one?
Well with Mickey he was sort of hanging around highlighting the fact that it's white male. White everyone. Soon as I notice that I feel all *facepalm* about it, I tell you. I mean, how many years, and they're still all white? I vote for a ban on white Doctors or Companions for the next few years. Even things up a bit.
He's also got 'working class' covered. He's not the first on that one, but the others were all military. There's a lot of that around - spacemen, sailors, soldiers, but some sort of military. Makes Jack seem rather traditional.
But Jack was there being omnisexual male.
So there are indeed demographics that the Doctor - officially - does not cover. Even with gender noted.
But the big one is, he's currently not a she. Therefore, someone else on the show has to be. Otherwise there's nowhere for women to identify with.
Hello, female sidekick companion setup.
And she's centrally important. There's a bunch of times the Doctor travels around with just one woman, but there's no times he travels with just one man, except Adric when the Doctor has just been dumped. And that doesn't last out the story. Adric - and Turlough - were playing at Young Male, because clearly teenage boys want to identify with the irritating smart kid rather than the, er, irritating smart grown up.
... insufficient diversity there, maybe?
... but I like Turlough. Backstabbing cowardly little sneak... except for when he's totally not. He's the guy who is adequately afraid and self interested and yet gets into this hero stuff anyway. I mean some of the others you end up wondering if they even understand the stakes. Lalala I shall wander around this alien world and act like I'm on holiday oh look an ood oh I shall stay here even though it's certain death because hey the Doctor will save me... er, I have issues, okay? ANYway... Coward is a useful story role. It's hard to feel scared if none of the characters are. Someone has to be worried enough. And it's great to have tension within the TARDIS, you're carrying around an ongoing plot thread, instead of having to set it up from nothing every week.
... Adric didn't work very well though.
Kind of like Wesley Crusher. Even those of us who could identify with him didn't really want to. If someone has their flaws on display so often it's not comfortable when they exactly match, sort of thing. There's a bit in the Science Fiction Audiences book about MIT students and their really ambivalent non-identification with teen genius characters.
Also... how large is the teen genius demographic? And do we really want a character with such a narrow identification possibility? I mean, smart, yes, but because they're trying really hard. The Doctor is the one that's swish without really trying... until it blows up in his face. We don't really need a teen genius to not know how to save the world yet think they're still all that.
... as I said, Issues.
SO... anyway...
One male doctor and one female sidekick covers the gender basics. Since the Doctor is older - really really a lot older - the sidekick is usually younger - as in older teen or young twenties. I thought Martha was a bit older than usual and she's meant to be 23. But now we have Donna, and she's more ... I was going to say 'mature student'. That's where I connect with the character anyway. She's got that thing where she wants to change her life but doesn't quite know how. That's the thing that gets you into college again twice the age of everyone else there. Or you know, and you know where to get the tools, and you just keep going after them until you get there. The same determination that got her caught up with the Doctor - hero training figure extraordinaire - is the kind of determined that gets you through a course. I feel like I know this woman, you know? Every year there's a classroom full of us.
Can young people still identify? Are they still interested?
Well I don't really know. I mean, I know the theory. But theory can be wrong. They used to put a cute kid character in TV shows so kids will watch, but then they discovered that kids mostly don't want to watch kids their age, they want to watch older kids and young people. So teenagers works, but younger than that loses people a bit. Which helps also with employment laws, because it's hard enough when they're knocking a decade off full grown people (one of these books I read refers to school uniforms as fetish wear, because they're clearly on adult actors. sort of skanky way to phrase it, but I can see their point.) Trying to pass for little kids heads into creepy comedy world. Emphasis on creepy.
But that thing where there's got to be a woman there for women to identify with... well, put it this way, when we write fic, do we always write women? Not so very.
Yet I stopped watching Heroes because I felt specifically pushed out of it as a woman. The space in the narrative for women didn't allow me any Hero roles. So I went to watch a show where there's always a woman around helping save the world.
Yes, leading save the world stuff would be nice.
The Doctor really needs to regenerate female. After someone has written all the scripts with the current Doctor in mind. Just change the outsides and keep the Doctor-ness.
I fear for losing important Doctor-y qualities if they make big outside changes.
Next Doctor: Asian woman. Cover some of the more obvious gaps right quick.
Then the sidekick can be a guy but still in ye traditional scream-run-rescued role and we can has interesting instead of feminist-worrying.
So:
Companions- identification figures for a range of demographics
and
plot devices for generating trouble
as well as
someone for the Doctor to talk to and bounce off and be pulled into relation to other people by
Also, a way of introducing philosophies that combine or clash with the Doctor's in interesting ways. So you get his stated anti-violence stance meeting his willingness to work with people who do the fighting, and the two positions have arguments, some of them revealing his contradictions.
I like Jenny.
Okay, that was rambly and not so much useful for an essay.
To make an essay of it I'd have to concentrate on keywords. Ideology is always a good one. Role of women. Role of power structures. Doctor as patriarch, as aristo, as white colonial dude bringing knowledge to poor uncultured everyone else. Companions then get to be the everyone else. So how they're represented and if they put up with his stuff and if they leave having grown or lost and if they step up to more powerful roles all has ideological impact.
... they are not all Susan. It's not even useful to say that. It doesn't help you read them all at all. And if they were all Susan, why would someone think they had to be, and what would that say about power imbalances within Team TARDIS?
I like the companions that are there to get in fights with the Doctor and tell him off and get told off. Which is, well, rather a lot of them, can't say all without having seen them all. But they're there to point out when he's not being cuddly, or when there's a case for doing violence, or whatever their particular thing is. And he's there to pull or push in the other direction. And how they resolve it says a lot about the ideological stance of the show. Which changes over time. As evidenced by different companions.
Can't lump them all in as one function. Even the Doctor doesn't stay as one function.
The only thing you can say is the Companions are there as the Doctor's other parts. What he doesn't cover, they bring to the party.
Tom Baker thought he didn't need a companion.
... clearly his companions needed to bring the humble.