u/foxparadox

Let's be honest, the companions of the last few years haven't been greatly served. Gone are the days when the Doctor's friends had rich backstories or ongoing character arcs or complex relationships. Instead we ended the most recent series with a companion having their entire character retconned in their last episode. Fun!

So let's compare two of the worst offenders.

Yaz: Poor Yaz. The fact that she is one of the longest serving companions is perhaps itself a damning indictment of how little character time she's given across her four years on the show. She starts off with a lot of promise: a fledgling police officer, perhaps a little green and naive, suddenly thrown into an unpredictable and uncompromising world. But after her first episode things start heading downhill.

For much of her first series she's...there, certainly. Mostly reminding people that she's a police officer and that she's from Sheffield, just like normal humans do. She's a little drowned out by the Graham and Ryan storyline (even in Demons of the Punjab which by all accounts should be her episode) and is mainly just there to fill the default 'But what's that Doctor?' role. By the second series she's starting to be defined as the 'Doctor diehard', putting unrelenting faith in the Doctor no matter what, and even making some weird shrine thing for her in Revolution of the Daleks. She's still not really getting much to do, and the one bit of backstory and character work we do get in Can You Hear Me? is almost instantly forgotten about.

Then we get to Flux and Yaz gets the pleasure of playing second fiddle to yet another white middle-aged man. To be fair, there is work to make her into more of the 'Doctor-lite' self-assured companion in a Clara-esque way, but it all starts feeling a bit too little too late. Speaking of which, she then declares her love for the Doctor and then she's gone. (BTW I will never subscribe to the theory that the breadcrumbs of the romance we're being laid from the beginning. It was a last-minute decision to play into fan theories in an attempt to get an easy win - I refuse to believe otherwise).

Belinda: Poor Belinda. I remember after the first episode a lot of fans were in love with her and rightly so. She presented as intelligent, strong, and not willing to put up with any of the Doctor's schtick. She was the first companion in a very long time that wasn't travelling in the TARDIS 'by choice' and it felt refreshing, for the first couple of episodes, to have someone literally begging to go home because this wasn't for them. And then somewhere around episode three something weird happens. Blame it on the reduced episode count, blame it on RTD not giving other writers enough character info, blame it on whatever the hell was generally going on behind the scenes, but the interesting, layered character from episode one seemingly dissolves and kind of leaves...nothing.

This is nothing against Varada Sethu who I think does a whole lot with very little, but suddenly Belinda just gets to stand there for most episodes. And even worse than that, in The Interstellar Song Contest (Happy anniversary, by the way) the character who formerly chastised the Doctor for scanning her without her permission happily embraces and comforts him after he just tortured someone. And then we get The Reality War, and if you needed any more of a reminder that nothing about Belinda or her story mattered, everything about her is rewritten and she's now 'A Mum'. The imagery of her literally being placed in a sealed box for almost an entire episode is just some beautiful irony.

But which is more egregious? And when did showrunners forget how to create compelling companions?