Talk:Victoria Waterfield

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Can someone please edit the last line of paragraph one, I dont' know how to – The preceding unsigned comment was added by 59.167.101.253 (talk).

Age

1852? I don't know about anyone else, but I really don't believe that Victoria was only 14 years old in Evil. Leda74 ☎ 04:51, June 14, 2013 (UTC)

And yet that's the way the math works. If you combine Downtime with The Evil of the Daleks, she's the youngest companion ever seen on television. Although it kinda doesn't make sense in terms of apparent visual age — Deborah Watling does appear to be in her late teens rather than her early ones — it really does make sense to the way she was performed. Watling's oft-criticised screaming and general fear makes sense if she's only 14-15. Now it maybe that some members of the modern audience recoils from thinking of Victoria as quite that young because of Jamie's flirtation with her. But remember, these are both companions from about 150 and 250 years ago, respectively. Jamie making passes at her isn't "inappropriate" since, to a man of the 18th century, that's kinda "marrying age". In fact, even for her time of the mid-19th century, it's perfectly fine that he's a little flirty with a 14-15 year old. Let's face it, the most he ever does is suggest that she wear a slightly higher-cut dress. Big deal.

If you look at the mild season arc of season 5 — and, yeah, there actually is one — it's really about helping Victoria cope with her father's death and move on to a new familial situation. She's meant to be an actual orphan, not a twenty-something whose parents died too soon. She's the only companion who leaves in order to be effectively adopted by a new mother and father figure. If she weren't actually a minor, her departure in Fury from the Deep wouldn't ring true at all.

I think the reason that a lot of people have issues with Victoria is because they don't quite get that she's supposed to be an actual girl. I think if Evil actually survived, the point would be a lot clearer and more people would "get" Victoria. Certainly, she gets way more character development on the point of being an orphan than did the only-marginally-older Nyssa. But Nyssa has had the benefit of a number of audios and books to fill in the televised gaps, whereas Victoria has barely appeared outside of her (mostly missing) television season.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  14:32: Sun 08 Sep 2013

Thank you. That does make things a little clearer. I suppose it was inevitable that there would have been too many problems hiring a child actor to play a regular companion, and so they had to cast an adult actress as a teenager. It just jars a little, that's all. Especially when you consider that in the 1860s, girls didn't go through puberty until an average age of about 16, and so the fact that Debbie was, ahem....quite prominent in the chest area was all the more incongruous for that fact. Leda74 ☎ 15:20, September 8, 2013 (UTC)