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List of the Best Doctor Who Companions

This is my list of the best Doctor Who companions. It's a list because we're on the Internet, and its a list of ten, because we're humans and because we have ten fingers, that's how we tend to organize things. The criteria for "best" is "Which characters I like the most", which, while arbitrary, is pretty much what these lists come down to anyway, so at least I'm being honest. It's drawn from the Classic series, the rebooted one, the audio plays and the novels, except I don't have any novel-only characters here.

10.) Leela:  I was never a huge fan of Leela during my first viewing of the series. It was only through subsequent viewings, and listening to her in the Big Finish audio plays, that I came to appreciate her. But she's got a lot going for her. She's only in nine serials, but each one tells a distinctive and memorable story. I think that's the core of her appeal; she's not an ingenue from then-modern London, as are so many of the modern companions, but a primitive tribesman descended from the survivors of a survey team on an alien planet, who eventually leaves the Doctor on her own terms, to live on Gallifrey. You can tell stories with Leela that you can't tell with other characters.

On top of that, Louise Jameson still owns the part. When she announces that she is Leela of the Sevateem, she's neither boastful, nor apologetic. It's simply who she is.

9.) and 8.) Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot. Despite the fact that Jamie was on the show for almost two full seasons before Zoe (she had her debut in the final episode of season 5), I always think of them a package deal. You can't have one without the other. (Except for, you know, Season 4, or The Two Doctors.)

I like them for much the same reasons I like Leela. They're not the usual boring audience surrogates. (Well, for a 21st century super-genius, Zoe does have a lot of "But, Doctor, I don't understand" dialogue.) The characters had interesting connections with each other, and played off each other in interesting ways, and the actors all like each other, as well. I even find Frazer Hines' attempt at a Scottish accent endearing.

7.) Jack Harkness: Good old Captain Jack. He's the only NuWho companion on my list. He starts out as a time-traveling omnisexual con man and turns into a mopey immortal with a giant head in Torchwood. (Seriously, have you seen him in Arrow? Dude's got an enormous melon.)

I don't like his portrayal in early Torchwood at all. All of the joy was gone from him, but he has several lifetimes of goodwill from how he swaggered to his death in The Parting of the Ways.

"...as if the way one fell down mattered."
 "When the falls is all there is, it matters."

6.) Nyssa: The worst thing one can say about Nyssa is that she's Romana Lite, which isn't a bad thing to be at all. Like Zoe (whose name really needs an umlaut somewhere) and Jamie above, she's enriched as a character in large part due to her interactions with her fellow companions.

She's more a peer than a companion to the Doctor, particularly in his Fifth incarnation. In the Big Finish audio plays, the Doctor refers to her as the daughter he never had, and I like that conception of their relationship.

5.) Sarah Jane Smith: I wrote in my review of Shada that one of my favorite interpretations of the Doctor is that he was strictly an average Time Lord within their society, and only became exceptional after leaving it. Sarah Jane was a wonderful companion, but she became more than that after leaving the show. She was the elder statesman of former companions. When I picture Lis Sladen, I imagine her as she was when she passed, and not as she looked when she originally appeared on the program.

For most of the Big Finish stories, the actors reprise their roles as if they were the same age as when they originally played them. But not Sarah Jane. She's mentor to new generation in the audio plays, and on the Sarah Jane Adventures.  Her character grew in a way that the others didn't.

4.) Hex: I had briefly read about Hex when looking up something else on a Doctor Who wiki. He sounded just awful. Apparently his mom was some kind of bio-engineered vampire, and that name. Just the sound of it is like nails on the chalkboard. "Hex". Except it's short for Thomas Hector, which actually kind of works.

He's a nurse from the near future, a kind, caring and emotionally intelligent young man. Hex just wants to help people, and he's a wonderful counterweight to the dark Seventh Doctor and the darkening Ace. (In one of the behind the scenes featurettes, Sophie Aldred mentioned how odd it is to be playing a Will They/Won't They romantic relationship between the pair, as she's old enough to be his mom, whereas he's close to the age of his character.)

Like the rest of us, he's got a bit of a crush on Ace, who treats him like a younger brother.  Like Zoe/Jamie and Nyssa/Turlough/Tegan, he's a good character made brilliant through his interplay with the rest of the cast.

3.) Ace: Ace started out as kind of Wizard of Oz joke (A girl named Dorothy Gale whisked away to another world by a freak storm) and became one of the best companions of the series.

Like Leela, she was in fewer stories than I would have guessed. (Only nine stories/31 individual episodes). Each one was so memorable that it just seemed like more.

She matures in the spin-off media in a way that few other companions do (though her continuity is a bit of a nightmare), and she has wonderful chemistry with McCoy and Philip Oliver (Hex).

Ace had guts and independence, and everything you can say about Rose goes double for Ace. She's so awesome that she even points out to the Doctor that Silver Nemesis was the same story as Remembrance of the Daleks.

2.) Romana: Romana II, obviously. No offense to Mary Tamm, but Lalla Ward is where it's at.

I'll just say the things everybody says about her. City of Death is like a honeymoon episode, and it's the one you show your non-Whovian friends when you want them to like Classic Who. She was great with Tom Baker. The Second Doctor treated Jamie and Zoe as peers, but on some level that was just a courtesy to people he liked and respected. They weren't true equals in the way that Romana was. (Sorry, Jen!)

Like some other companions, she has had a rich (and sometimes complicated) life beyond the series. She was Lord President of Gallifrey, which is something I could really believe. Apparently, Juliette Landeau voices Romana IV in some of the later Big Finish plays, which is pretty cool.



1.) Evelyn Smythe: Another audio-only companion. I touched on how great Maggie Stables/Evelyn Smythe was in an earlier post.

Maggie Stables retired from acting after an illness, but not before Evelyn received a wonderful, bittersweet, poignant send off in the aptly titled Death in the Family.

She was a superb foil for the Sixth Doctor, giving as good as she got. Older, not as traditionally pretty, feisty, opinionated. Anyone who tries to cockblock Julius Caesar's parents by barging in to play a kazoo during their romantic dinner is a companion for the ages.


That's my personal, biased list. Please add yours in the comments, and stay tuned for the list of the worst Doctor Who Companions, coming soon!

Not Milk

My lovely wife threw out my delicious home-brewed Irish Cream. She claims she thought it was expired milk.

Honest mistake, or conspiracy? You be the judge. Here is a reference photo.

*Clearly* labelled

Game of Thrones: The IMAX Experience

As I've mentioned, we're fans of Game of Thrones, and we live next door to a superfan.  One of the local theaters was showing the last two episodes of the season on the IMAX screen, so we decided to see it before we left. Some thoughts.

We had already seen these episodes. There were maybe twenty people in the theater, and I would be extremely surprised if any one of them hadn't seen the episodes we watched multiple times.

The first of the episodes was The Watchers on the Wall, the one where Castle Black goes all Helm's Deep. I was pretty disappointed the first time I saw it, as I don't find this storyline particularly interesting. As AGOT usually splits up its episodes (I think this is only the second one that didn't, Blackwater being the first), I can usually wait through the storylines I don't like in anticipation of the ones I do. I didn't have that option this time, so I didn't enjoy the episode much of the first viewing. (When our neighbor asked me what I thought of the episode when it first aired, I believe my response was "I liked it all except for the parts on the Wall).

Now that I knew what I'd be getting, I could appreciate it for what it was, and not disparage it for not being what I had hoped. It's still a very good episode, and certainly the best suited for the big screen treatment. I could see every one of Maester Aemon's nose hairs.

317!

On the flip side, Jen commented that the intro seemed grainy, and I couldn't dispute that. It's CG optimized for the small screen, so, of course it wouldn't upscale as well as the rest of the show, but a new IMAX introduction wouldn't have been out of the question, and it wouldn't have left us with our first impression as mildly negative one. (On a tangent, I found this article on AGOT from the perspective of a cinematographer, and I found it interesting)

Watchers on the Wall was extremely well executed from a technical point of view, though sometimes the top of the Wall looked like a set.

The Children was the second episode. It was less suited for the IMAX treatment than tWotW, as the scenes have a lot of emotional heft, but not as much cinematic spectacle.

Something I did notice for the first time: I don't think the actor who plays Stannis knows how to ride, or get off a horse. I don't think we ever see him riding (though I could be mistaken), and there is an extremely awkward cut where he begins to dismount, it cuts away for just a moment for no particular reason, and then he's standing next to his horse.

I mean, I can't ride a horse either, but I don't have a job that requires me to.

It was fun. I enjoyed going with friends, and the episodes were followed by the season 5 trailer, which looked much better on an IMAX screen than it did on my phone.

I'd probably do something like this again. I'd like to get some kind of Rocky Horror Picture Show thing going on, and have people yell "You're not so pretty anymore!" when Brienne bites off the Hound's ear.

Worst XKCD ever:Are you ready for some sportsball?!

I generally like xkcd quite a bit. It's consistently one of the best sites on the internet, and the worst things I usually have to say about it are:

1. That was slightly less awesome than it usually is,
2. That was funny in a way that didn't appeal to me, and occasionally
3. I don't get it

However, this one bothered me. It's really uncharacteristically condescending and judgmental. 

I don't care about sports, and a lot of other people do. It's not some sense of ironic distance; they just don't interest me. Just the same, I tend not to shit all over them in front of my friends who do like them, because I'd like to keep them. That's generally good advice anyway.

The second panel sets up a bogus comparison by comparing enthusiasm about niche interests to aninterest in sports, as there exists a real possibility that a listener might not have been exposed to macrame meteorology charts or whatever, and there exists a possibility that by expounding on the subject, you could inform them why it means so much to you.

The same opportunity is not available when talking about sports, as discussion about them in ubiquitous in almost all aspects of our society, and it's very nearly cradle to grave exposure. Anyone who has an opinion on sports by definition has an informed opinion on sports.

It didn't ruin my life, or even my day, but I won't pretend I didn't find the chastising tone kind of insulting.