The Companions of Doctor Who: Graham, Yaz, and Ryan

A couple weeks ago, the eleventh series of the new* Doctor Who came to an end. Lots of takes have been written on it; I've been enjoying Andrew Ellard's "Tweet Notes," which do a great job of analyzing the way the stories are constructed, and often broadly agree with my own takes. (Worst episode: "The Ghost Monument," best episode: "It Takes You Away.")

But I'm not hear to review the series or even Jodie Whittaker's performance; I want to discuss what I think is the most significant format change, which is executive producer Chris Chibnall's increase to three companions.

from 11x03: "Rosa"

New Doctor Who has typically relied on a model of a single companion: Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, Clara. Bill. Even when there are two companions, one is clearly the "main" companion and the other an ancillary figure: Rose and Jack, Rose and Mickey, Martha and Jack, Donna and Martha, Amy and Rory, Bill and Nardole. In each of those pairs, the former has the closer relationship with the Doctor, and is more aligned with the audience; one of Russell T Davies's innovations in the Doctor Who format in 2005 was to re-emphasize the companion as an audience surrogate in a way the show hadn't done since 1973, or arguably 1963. Jack, UNIT-era Martha, and Nardole are all sci-fi characters in a way that Rose, original Martha, Donna, Amy, and Bill aren't. Mickey and Rory might be romantic partners to the female companion, but they are an outsider to her relationship with the Doctor.

The new show's emotions have usually been anchored in the interaction between the Doctor and an individual woman companion.

The classic show stuck with a single companion the majority of the time as well; it's true for for fifteen seasons† (7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26). Most of the remaining seasons have two companions most of the time (3, 5, 6, 12, 18, 20, 21). Only four seasons had three companions: the original trio of Susan, Ian, and Barbara (seasons 1-2); Ian, Barbara, and Vicki (2); Ben, Polly, and Jamie (4); and Adric, Tegan, and Nyssa (19).

Three companions makes sense for the programme's original format: you had the mysterious Doctor, his mysterious granddaughter, and then two audience identification figures that also helped fulfill the show's educational mandate, as one knew history and the other science. When Susan left, Vicki replaced her as the "teenage one," but even though she was from the future, she was closer to an audience identification figure. I think when Ian and Barbara left, the production staff realized you don't really need three audience identification figures to make the show's format work, and so from then on it was usually one male and one female companion, until the format was stripped down even more with season 7 in 1970.

from 18x27: Logopolis, Part Three

The main exception is season 19, which was conceived by producer John Nathan-Turner as a self-conscious return to the program's 1960s basics, following the out-thereness of the late Tom Baker era. A less all-knowing Doctor, more explicit links between the end of one story and the beginning of the next, and three companions.

Which, finally, leads me into series 11, because it seem like Chris Chibnall has similar motivations to Nathan-Turner: a return to the programme's basics. A more stripped down title sequence, no complicated story arcs (the hallmark of Steven Moffat's producership), a less all-knowing Doctor... and three companions.

Even in 1982, where most of the stories were 100 minutes long, though, the writers clearly struggled with four main characters. Often one of the companions was substantially sidelined: Adric is captured by the Master for most of Castrovalva, Nyssa sleeps through most of Kinda, none of the companions get much to do in The Visitation, Nyssa keeps being left in the TARDIS in Earthshock.

Series 11 doesn't sideline them so obviously; most of the time all three companions are right in the thick of the action with the Doctor. But that's the problem: all three of them are right there. The Doctor doesn't need three people to stand there and go "what's that, Doctor?" One of the most inexplicable parts of "The Ghost Monument" is that it's about a race through space, and the Doctor and Yaz fall in with one racer, and Graham and Ryan the other... but within minutes all six characters are back together, co-operating! It removes all sense of urgency from the race, but also means that we've missed an opportunity to see how the Doctor and Yaz relate, and how Ryan and Graham relate.

Without distinct subplots (as most ensemble shows do to let their casts pop), you're left hoping for little moments to get to know these characters better. This has worked for some better than others. In order of favorite to least:

Graham

from 11x04: "Arachnids in the UK"

Graham is a big favorite in the Mollmann household. He's something different for the new show, an older male companion. More importantly, Bradley Walsh's performance is consistently strong; he does great with both the emotional moments and the comic ones-- and the writers seem to have noticed this, as they give him both emotional moments and comic ones. More than the other two companions, in those bits where all three stand there and prompt the Doctor to deliver exposition, he manages to do so in a characterful way. Often by being faintly amused or put off by the whole thing. In that regard he's like Nardole from series 10; he obviously likes the Doctor a lot, but he's less willing to take her seriously.

Graham's two modes of success were demonstrated well in the penultimate episode, "It Takes You Away." Near the beginning, the TARDIS encounter a kid who's been on her own for a while; Graham pulls a cheese-and-pickle sandwich out of his pocket:

It's a characterful moment that shows off Graham's practicality and also skewers 55 years of Doctor Who; as far as I know, no previous companion has ever complained about how infrequently they must eat on adventures.

But in the same episode, we see Graham's melancholy side. I don't want to spoil it, but there's this bit where you realize something that's going to happen to him just moments ahead, and I think I actually gasped when I realized, so much have I come to like Graham.

Yaz

from 11x02: "The Ghost Monument"

I like the idea of Yaz. A young, female, Pakistani police officer, not taken seriously by her colleagues, but wanting to do good in the world. Unfortunately, it seems like the writers continuously forget this! In "Arachnids in the UK," a man is waving around an illegal firearm, and Yaz doesn't react any differently than her middle-aged middle-manager mother. Like, she should have trained for this. Oddly, this episode was written by Chris Chibnall... the man who invented the character. This seems to happen a lot to Yaz; in "The Tsuranga Conundrum," it's Graham who notices someone is stealing supplies and confronts him over it. These moments seem tailor-made for Yaz to show us her stuff, but she just stands there.

When her character is communicated, it's in really awful exposition; in "The Ghost Monument," she just specifies her family situation for the benefit of the audience: "You're making me miss my family. That's quite some achievement, considering my dad drives me bananas and my sister's trying to get me to move out so she can have my bedroom. And I only saw them yesterday."

Which is a shame, because Mandip Gill does a good job when the writing does give her something to do. "It Takes You Away" has a nice moment where she calms a kid down relying on her police training; her and Ryan share a quiet moment discussing racial discrimination in "Rosa." In "The Witchfinders," she's actually sent off to talk to a witness about a death! I also like how she seems to have bonded with the Doctor the most of the three companions, though too often this takes the form of the Doctor spewing exposition at her.

Ryan

from 11x01: "The Woman Who Fell to Earth"

I feel like Ryan is meant to be the Rose/Bill companion archetype, the person who's had a humdrum life to whom the Doctor reveals the possibilities of the universe. The first episode is framed by him; he's our audience identification figure.

Nothing that he actually does on screen in later episodes nails this; usually he's just there. Rose would experience awe at the universe, allowing you to understand why she travelled with the doctor, but Ryan isn't given any moments like this. "Kerblam!" is probably his best episode, because when the characters all go undercover at Space Amazon, we get an indication of how humdrum his pre-Doctor life was. But most of the time he's just there, and when his character does emerge, it's primarily in relation to Graham, his step-grandfather. More than the other two, I don't get why he's there or what he's meant to contribute. Some have criticized Tosin Cole's acting, but I'm not sure he's given something to act often enough to know. (Like everyone else, he had great moments in "It Takes You Away.")

The Fam

from 11x09: "It Takes You Away"

Some have suggested that the problem of three companions is one of running time. Doctor Who used to have 45 minutes and two main characters; now it has 50 minutes and four main characters. But I'm not entirely convinced. In season 19, the show couldn't manage four main characters in 100 minutes. The problem wasn't running time; the problem was a showrunner for whom characterization was never a particular skill. I think the same is true here, too.

Not to turn this into an "it was better in the old days" thing, but give Russell T Davies 50 minutes and four characters, and you would know every single one of them by the end of the first episode. The man is a master of writing real people whose dialogue communicates plot and character at the same time, because for Davies, plot is character. Chibnall is one of those writers for who plot and character feel separate, like they get in the way of one another. Can't do character now, because the plot has got to move along; okay, stop the plot, so someone can say something about their backstory. Compare the elegance of Rose's second episode, "The End of the World," with the awkward construction of the the fam's second episode, "The Ghost Monument."

It's telling that a lot of the best moments for this cast have come in non-Chibnall episodes: "Kerblam!", "The Witchfinders," and "It Takes You Away" were probably my three favorite episodes of the series, and they all had the most for those characters to do, and did the best job of working the character into the plot.

from 11x07: "Kerblam!"

It's also telling that the characters don't all seem to relate to each other. I feel like we have Doctor-Yaz, Doctor-Graham, and Graham-Ryan. The first couple episodes set up Yaz-Ryan. But there's no Yaz-Graham (they don't even talk until "Demons of the Punjab," episode 6) or Doctor-Ryan. In an ensemble of four, it's criminal to have some cross relationships so poorly defined.

A good ensemble can be a great thing, and after ten series of Doctor Who as a buddy show, I'm interested to see how it can be done as an ensemble show. But the key to a good ensemble is a set of strong characters who interact with each other in interesting ways, and so far Doctor Who is not delivering on that as often as it ought.

* Thirteen years new, in fact!
† I'm going to follow a common fan convention here and use "season" for the classic programme and "series" for the new one.