companions – Stories That Are All True

If you are not a Whovian, you might get something out of this. You might not. But I do know that most of my audience is overseas, and there’s more a chance that they’ll have seen it than my American friends…… so I’m going global by going micro. I love Doctor Who an autistic special interest amount (and I am choking with laughter as I type this). There are just so many things I want to know.

For instance, at first, Amy Pond was The Doctor’s companion, and then her husband, Rory, joined them…… and Rory never stopped working. They did not explain how this was possible, you just had to assume that Rory was able to make it to work with time travel. They also never showed him at work, so it seemed like he never went home at all. I think it would be hilarious to explore another companion’s real life in reaction to The Doctor. Like, what does it take for The Doctor to get them to school, work, doctor’s appointments, etc?

I also want to know more about the companions. What they go through emotionally in their real lives regarding the pull of traveling and the responsibility of family. This is because even with time travel, their experiences are worlds apart and they lose connection easily. Normal people stuff just doesn’t register like it used to, and parents and partners notice. I am so glad that in the last special, they made it clear that Sean Noble was going to be all cool with everything, because it’s a lot. Sylvia and Wilf know that better than most.

The one thing that’s really cool about being a companion is that you have a job for life if you want it. Kate Lethbridge Stewart has taken in lots of former companions at UNIT, and as I joked, “UNIT candidates being offered 60,000 pounds a year was the most realistic part of this episode.” For intelligence officers all over the world, the government has the money for making deals and such. They’re just regular government employees. But good on Donna for never accepting the first offer. 😉

I am so happy that lots of people are saying the show is too woke. It means that the show is doing what it’s always done, which is create a space for the dispossessed to feel powerful. Most autistic people I know describe being neurodivergent as feeling “alien.” There is a reason there’s a large number of people on the spectrum at sci-fi conventions. In utopia, we all belong.

I am also glad that Russell T. Davies has clarified that 14 is retired. They’ll mention him, but there is nothing to take away from Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor in it. It makes me happy because I knew it would be an issue if David continued. Let’s not pretend that Conan losing The Tonight Show had nothing to do with Jay Leno’s refusal to just go away.

I am not being mean to David Tennant, either. I think that it might be a good idea to reboot Torchwood as well, and 14 can be an employee like everyone else. That way, Ncuti and David are playing two entirely separate roles. If they reboot Torchwood, David’s doctor would be more like Al Pacino in “Slow Horses.”

I’ve always loved the interplay between MI-6 and Doctor Who, so it’s been a kick to see CIA on it as well. In the Torchwood reboot, I’d love to see a project with UNIT, MI-6, and CIA all working together. Plus, David has already played a detective in Broadchurch, so I think he’d make a bang up intelligence officer archetype as well.

In case you are completely lost, UNIT in the Doctor Who universe is an intelligence agency in the British government that deals with alien attacks. The Doctor is basically “C Emeritus.” Other people run UNIT, but he’s the last word. The acting head of UNIT right now is a woman with a long history with The Doctor, so she makes her own decisions and The Doctor can override them. Her name is Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and she’s the daughter of The Doctor’s dear friend, the Brigadier General Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. Because of their long history together, they trust each other implicitly and work well together. However, I think the reason they get along so well is that The Doctor is not there to drive her up the wall all day. That’s the part David Tennant would absolutely smash.

“Do I have a desk?”
“No.”

The idea is funny just based on The Doctor’s episodes with James Corden as a roommate and the episode where they’re a houseguest at Rory and Amy’s. I cannot imagine how much it would play with your emotions to have The Doctor as a coworker, because you can love them and also want to stab them with a fork.

The Doctor even knows they’re annoying, which makes it funnier. My favorite line about this comes from a conversation between 12, Clara, and some random character. The random character asks who Clara is.

Clara: I’m his carer.
Twelve: Yes, she’s my carer. She cares, so I don’t have to.

For my Americans, in Britain, a carer is someone who works in a nursing home. Peter Capaldi was much older than Matt Smith, and I loved how they worked that one in.

I also hope that Neil Gaiman does more with both Doctor Who and Good Omens. I don’t want him to limit himself to those shows if he doesn’t want it. It would just be nice to get a standalone from him once in a while. Good Omens is already greenlit for season 3.

But mostly I like the way that Neil writes for David Tennant, so perhaps the answer is to lure Neil Gaiman into rebooting Torchwood.

If you see him, could you ask?

Doctor Who has been running in the UK since 1963, but not continuously. “Rose” is the title of the first of what is now called “New Who.” Every day, I realize that her story tells mine, because if you watch her story from beginning to end, you see mine so clearly without me actually having to say anything.

Most people don’t see what happens when the TARDIS lands on their lawn in real life. Doctor Who doesn’t even really take the companions’ families into account. I have seen the look on Mickey’s face, and I never want to see it ever again.

I didn’t run toward Supergrover because she was romantically interested in me. I ran toward her because I could not travel and stay in place. Time always moved forwards, but at different rates in all three of my lives. Doctor Who showed me characters that suffered just as much under these constraints as I did. That it got harder and harder to go back to Mickey when you were fighting alien battles on distant planets or seeing the last day on Earth.

And, just like in the show, companions get tired and want to go back to their real lives.

The Doctor hates goodbyes.

I had that moment just like Rose did, of feeling butterflies. But they never mattered. Therefore, the way I feel is that there is a thread of me in every companion. That I am definitely Rose because I fell in love with The Doctor. That I am definitely Martha because she fell in love with The Doctor and got over it. I am definitely Clara because I am The Impossible Girl. I am definitely Amy Pond because I got used to waiting on my suitcase. I am also Amy in that I’d like to have other romantic interests while we are traveling together, and that is a delicate balance. I couldn’t move on with my life while our relationship was unclear because our agreement would have changed the world. I couldn’t go to another person and say “I’m with you, but only up and to a point.” Not many partners love when the TARDIS lands, but they’re fucked because they know anyone would go. It’s not personal.

Because she physically travels and I don’t, it is very much a relationship of convenience because I don’t have to care what time it is. Maybe she’s up, maybe she’s not. Best case scenario is when I get her on a long haul flight. It’s not that it really matters, just the image of her curled up reading my words means more than she has ever imagined.

Our relationship creates responsibility for me. The companions know up front that they’re going to do things no one will understand and people just have to roll with it. They’re going to show up at the same party but forget that they need to change back into their original clothes. I made it where my life could accommodate this because it was too hard trying to manage two lives.

We had different emotional requirements. Hers was always to move forward, and it irritated her that I wrote backwards because she didn’t want to think about the past. She didn’t see it as affecting her future. That the fights would continue to occur because we weren’t actively seeking common ground. At no time did that mean I wanted to stop being the one who stands there and watches her be clever.

The Doctor deserves that.

The only thing that The Doctor has is that her magic is created by real-life situations, and theirs is created by who they are. They can change things because they are Time Lords. No one asked them, they just showed up.

I am also River Song, born of the time vortex, but as a child, before she knew how her story with Amy and The Doctor would end. This is because I knew that my destiny was to be a companion, and not The Doctor’s Wife. Bonded to them by circumstance, happenstance, yet bound nonetheless. I hate to say that Supergrover missed a lot by not watching that show, but that’s not my call. 😉

That’s because she would have learned the sense of duty that being a companion requires. How there is no love greater than to lay down your life for your friends. That I didn’t make a sacrifice because of anything but it needed doing.

I heard the emergency brakes, and I grabbed my suitcase.

I thought of Michael and me as every companion combination ever, but it was humorous to picture him as Alex Kingston (River Song). That’s because everyone else has been more of a dalliance and River Song is the real deal. They are married in canon.

The problem in all my relationships has been how to explain this one. I can’t believe it’s been under my nose the whole time.

I am Jack Harkness, the relentless flirt that still does everything for everybody no matter how he feels. He can die on command. 😛

This is also me every time my beautiful girl makes me blush. I love it when my cheeks get hot because she’s struck comedy gold, and I hope to bring it out more when I write about her character. I want to be 3-dimensional in the best way possible. To be perfectly honest, I don’t even know what “Flat Stanley” means, but I have taken it to mean a term of endearment because there’s no way on God’s green earth that it’s true.

But if I hold the right to give her my feelings as fact, so does she.

The fact is that because she doesn’t watch Doctor Who, she has no idea the capacity for love that my friendships entail. They aren’t modeled very often. Maybe Will and Francie on “Alias.” I loved the Benedict Cumberbatch film “Courier,” because it was a very good example of the kind of platonic love story I would write if I could. Friendships like that cover all sorts of genres, and I could write Shirley Maclane and Olympia Dukakis in my sleep.

Supergrover will absolutely slap Ouiser Boudreaux, and sometimes it’s me.

Doctor Who is a big enterprise I’m using to describe this relationship because it’s international. I use the love of God in equal measure, mostly because God brings many names and I think one of them is The Doctor. There aren’t really many examples of doing what needs to be done, and I’ve met two of them. It was only in retrospect that I learned I’m one of them.

If there’s anything that Supergrover did for me that means more than all the other stuff combined, she proved to me that I was capable of being a companion.

Every one has that moment where they go from freaked out to being able to hang. Supergrover just didn’t know how that presented, and I didn’t handle it well. I felt like I was in the TARDIS alone a lot of the time,

Now is the parting of the ways, but I am not stepping away. I know that if you hear the emergency brakes once, you’re likely to hear them again.

I don’t want to go.