User talk:ShadGray

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• ShadGray •

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Welcome back!

Hi :) Good to see you around again. I'm just gonna replace the previous welcome message with something a little more up-to-date, if you don't mind. Also, I should tell you that since you were last here in 2010, we've formalised our rules about signatures, and yours is currently in violation. Please read T:SIG LOOK and Help:Signature and the whole of Signature policy for more info. Basically, your sig fails because it doesn't include separate links to both your user page and your user talk page.

Thanks for your suggestions on the whole companion thing, but they were a little vague. You mention that our list doesn't tally with yours, but don't give any specifics. Which list are you talking about — for there are several lists of companions — and who specifically has been ignored or included contrary to your expectations?

Also, I would't say that our previous discussions failed to come to any conclusion. Instead, our consensus is that there is no definition. Those two things are subtly, but importantly, different. To agree that there is no definition is very different to saying that there is a definition, but we just haven't found a way of expressing it. The truth is that there is no definition, which is the sentiment expressed at Companion#What does the word "companion" actually mean?.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  15:29: Sat 29 Jun 2013

Thanks again for the thought you've put into this. As someone who's wrestled with this problem before, I know it makes the brain ache. So it doesn't give me any great glee to tell you that your criteria fail for a number of reasons.

Lemme go broad first. "Companion" is, at its heart, an out-of-universe designation, though the word does occasionally pop up in dialogue — along with "assistant" and just "friend". The word really means "co-star". It means the person who is contracted, usually but not necessarily for multiple stories, to occupy the narrative space of asking the Doctor the questions the audience would. In the modern series, it's a person whose name appears in the title sequence who isn't playing the Doctor. Or it's a person whom Doctor Who Confidential, the Doctor Who website, Doctor Who Magazine or the BBC Press Office or a licensed reference work tells us is "the companion" or "the assistant" in a story.

The classic litmus test is Sara Kingdom. The only reason she is called a companion today is because JNT said so in The Companions. DWM picked up on that, and — seemingly having two "sources" — fans, who would later become responsible for making the [{Doctor Who website]] cemented the notion in their mind. Thus we have Sara Kingdom on the "official" list of companions — despite Jean Marsh herself protesting in at least two direct interviews with her — one on the Battlefield DVD and one on a Companion Chronicles CD — that she in no way believed herself to be, or was contracted to be, a companion. She was merely a guest star whose duties happened to include being in the TARDIS — just like dozens of other guest stars. You've created a rule just to allow Sara Kingdom in, which is kinda not cricket. The reason she's a companion is because JNT didn't understand the history of Doctor Who. Period. That's the only reason. And she was never, ever going to be a companion because Terry Nation wholly owned the character. There was precisely zero chance of her appearing in any story where Nation wasn't already getting royalties.

[While we're in DMP area, I'll say as an aside that your rules split the hairs with unsupportable fineness on the Vyon family. You're basically saying that the only reason Vyon doesn't count is because he didn't take a trip in the TARDIS. But he fully has the "bigger on the inside" moment in "The Nightmare Begins", is clearly on the Doctor's side throughout the next three episodes, and, I would say, "dies before he gets a chance to go on a trip". Indeed he dies quite nobly protecting the Doctor and Steven in "The Traitors". And does he invite Sara into the TARDIS in "Coronas of the Sun". Kinda yeah, kinda no. He certainly invites her to open the TARDIS doors and go inside — but only because they are under imminent threat of Dalek extermination. And this being the sixties, when the Doctor has no control over the TARDIS, once she's in the TARDIS, she's in. He does not intend her to be a companion. He merely intends for her not to die.]

On another broad point, you can't make rules on this wiki that disregard audio, prose and comic companions. The reason that using out-of-universe criteria works is because it allows us to identify characters in works that offer no such criteria that match the same narrative position as someone so identified in a televised episode. So if we can find someone like Christina de Souza in a TV Comic story, then we can class them as a companion. Now if you're dead-set against lady Christina being counted as a companion, which apparently you are, you might not like that approach.

But it does give us something solid to hold onto.

Rules which begin and end with television go against the entire spirit of the wiki. And at the end of the day, that's why your rules fail. I could pick apart your rules with exceptions from other media without too much difficulty. For instance, Finney is a Third Doctor companion from the comics who's only in one story, doesn't die at the end, doesn't travel with the Doctor where there's another companion, and doesn't appear during the exile on Earth period of the Third Doctor. But he's obviously a companion, critical to the resolution of a problem. Indeed, a pattern for a year or so in the TV Action era was that the Third Doctor would have single adventures with people. There's no definable difference between the TVA stuff and the 2009 section of series 4.

Indeed, the fact that you've completely ignored the whole exile on Earth question is massively problematic to stories in other media, given the Second and Third Doctor stories that have one-off companions. You can't spend a whole book with someone like Serena and say that she wasn't a companion.

So that being said, let's look at why your rules specifically fail. I'll mostly use the lens of televised stories here, because you've claimed not to be too familiar with other media.

1. "Seen to encounter The Doctor on more than one occasion and traveled in the TARDIS." — Tons of people encounter the Doctor more than once during a story then hop aboard the TARDIS for a trip. Easily defeated as unworkable, just by looking at the Davison era alone. Hell, we'd have to include almost the entire cast of The Awakening under this rule. Plus, you're playing semantic football with the word "seen". If the Doctor refers to multiple trips with a person, they happened. We don't have to actually see something on screen for it to have happened, especially in a programme that often didn't have the budget to show us that much. And, this is obviously prejudicial against non-visual story mediums. All Big Finish original companions could be argued to not be companions because they were never "seen". Your rationale for excluding Nefertitit and John Riddell is laughable. Sorry to be so harsh, but this "seen" business is completely unworkable.
2. "Traveled in the TARDIS and died in their first story." Honestly, truly, this happens all the time. It's slightly rare on TV, but really all the time elsewhere. Still, I'll play your "TV-only" game and simply refer you to Professor Kyle. Or Laurence Scarman. Or, better still, Lytton. I mean, two stories, two Doctors, a definite trip in the TARDIS, and he dies at the end of Attack of the Cybermen (TV story)|]] with Sixie lamenting Lytton's core nobility. Should be a companion according, really, to both rule 1 and this rule. But no one argues him a companion. Oh, and for that matter, Sabalom Glitz comes virtually as close to passing your rules, though I guess he doesn't quite travel in the Doctor's TARDIS. He's been in the Doctor's TARDIS, but I guess he travels in another TARDIS to get to the courtroom in The Ultimate Foe. Anyway, very, very easy to pick apart this rule.
3. "Invited to travel in the TARDIS with The Doctor, when he had no other companion." DOA cause it's obviously a "rule of convenience". The words "when he had no other companion" are a contrivance to allow you to include Grace Holloway but exclude "Lynda with a Y" and Madame de Pompadour. You know it, I know it, anyone trying to follow this rule later will know it. The Doctor is narratively at liberty to invite whomever he wants to. Plus, the rule immediately conflicts with your first two rules. Jamie McCrimmon passes rule 1, but he fails rule 2 because Ben and Polly were already in place. Do Nyssa and Tegan not count because Adric was already there? Do Martha and Rose not count in season 4 because Donna's there? Also, "invited" can't be applied to Ian, Barbara, Steven, Dodo, Ben, Polly, Sarah Jane (at least in The Time Warrior, but she is invited later), Leela, Adric — do I really need to go on? Though it hasn't happened yet in the BBC Wales series — save Donna's unusual "you didn't invite me but I don't want to be here either" twist — it's a flat-out trope of the old series that people start travelling with the Doctor because they barge in. And The Stolen Earth is gonna be completely unworkable by this rule, because, in-dialouge, all these people are actually called "companions of the Doctor" but your rule would have us saying that the only true companion in the story is Donna. So no thanks: won't be using this rule. Even if we were only talking about TV. Which we're not.

I'd also say that any set of rules that allows Abigail Pettigrew but denies Kazran Sardick is non-sensical. Seriously. (Note that there's a clear rationale for denying them both, or including them both, but to have one without the other isn't supportable.)

There simply isn't a way to articulate what counts as a companion using narrative alone because it hasn't been defined in-narrative. Narrative only allows us to dismiss rules that used to be prevalent in the fan community prior to about 2007.

• They can't include a "must travel in the TARDIS" rule, because neither Liz (on screen), nor Madge Arwell, nor Jackson Lake nor Christina ever travelled in the TARDIS. And it's extremely churlish to deny Christina, Madge and Jackson when their name appears bold-as-brass in the opening titles. And although later non-televised stories do give Liz that "qualifying" trip in the TARDIS, old school fans have long had a problem with Liz based on her televised work alone. But just looking at her TV work, it's clearly insane to deny her a place amongst companions because she got the full press roll-out and she, Nick Courtney and Jon Pertwee were the first actors to get a season-long contract in the history of the programme.
• They can't include a "must be in more than one story" rule, because the one-story companion is a clever solution to production scheduling in the new series, and we may fully expect these kinds of one-offs for the foreseeable future. In 2007, I think fans believe the "Runaway Bride effect" was a one-off phenomenon. But it's turned out to be a way to offer top-flight British talent an entrée to Doctor Who in a prominent, well-publicised story, but not have to worry about tying themselves down to 9 months of filming in Cardiff.

So if you can't use those two — long the fan demarcators — you don't have anything left. We are thus left with with largely out-of-universe declaration of who is the co-star in a particular story. As said above, there are a number of valid sources for such a declaration, all of them out-of-universe. In more obscure stories, where no co-star would have been publicly identified by the publisher, we're left with logic, really. We match the narrative position of a character against those clearer-cut, televised cases. In other words, Finney is a companion because there's no reason he wouldn't be a companion when we've said that Christina de Souza is.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  15:50: Sun 30 Jun 2013