New Doctor Who Companion Announced

eternaldoctorwho writes "Jenna-Louise Coleman will be the newest companion to the Doctor (Matt Smith) on the hit series Doctor Who. The announcement came earlier today on the BBC's Twitter page devoted to the program, along with some other details about the upcoming season of the show. Miss Coleman is also known for her previous roles on Emmerdale and Captain America: The First Avenger."

Comments

Male companion

[Stargoat]

Why can't we have a long term positive male companion? Yes, it's nice to look at young women, but that isn't what Doctor Who is all about. Is it going to take a female doctor before we have can have a decent male companion that isn't a coward or dies every other episode?

(If it does require a female companion, can I vote for Emma Thompson?)

Re:Male companion

[jimmerz28]

Yea younger than Captain Jack please. He's getting too old to be the hot boy on the block; it's getting a little unbelievable.

Re:Male companion

[Stargoat]

errr, (If it does require a female doctor, can I vote for Emma Thompson?)

Re:Male companion

[martin-boundary]

Unfortunately, somebody or something always needs rescuing or helping, otherwise it's not drama.

Do you really want to see a helpless male companion running and screaming, and needing to be rescued every episode? It gets old pretty quick if you're a guy watching the show (can't comment on the alternative). What's the demographic split between male and female viewers of Dr Who anyway?

Re:Male companion

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't we have a long term positive male companion?

Because the Doctor likes nice young girls to show them that it's bigger on the inside.

Re:Male companion

[owlnation]

Why can't we have a long term positive male companion?

Probably because the BBC is trying to hit the right advertising demographic in the US. It's one of the very few scripted shows that the BBC can sell abroad, and they want to milk every penny out of it they can (even though its production is wholly subsidized). The BBC loves to get paid twice for things -- and more so with Dr Who as it has lots of merchandising too.

They did used to have male companions, back in the days when the BBC actually gave a fuck about its Charter. It was originally supposed to be an educational show for children, but now it's wholly-commercial, ratings-driven TV (of variable quality) -- something the BBC is not supposed to produce.

Hopefully this girl can act better than the ginger girl, who could not act to save her life. But since this new girl is an ex-soap opera actress, I'd think it's likely she's been hired for her other assets.

You'll probably only see a male companion if the Doctor gets a sex change.

Re:Male companion

[LordLucless]

Back in the day, male companions were vastly outnumbered by female. And there's male companions in the new series too - Captain Jack, Rory, and Donna's Dad for that Christmas special (if you count that). But it's not like Doctor Who is alone there. Pretty much every show with a lead character has a supporting character of the opposite gender.

Re:Male companion

[fermion]

We have had several male companions. Turlough, Adric, the Brigadere, The first companions were the doctors granddaughter, her teacher, and Ian. Not to mention Jamie.

In this current incarnation, the males have been less present, perhaps because the companions have been more explicitly romantic objects. Certainly most of the girls were sexualized, many more than the current companions, but then so was Turlough, wearing the fewest clothes that we have ever seen on Doctor Who, until Nicole Bryant(did Slader have a bikini scene at the beggining of the B&W episodes?)

Re:Male companion

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not claiming this is in any way representative of Who viewers as a whole, but my university has a Who fan club (we call ourselves the Society of Gallifreyan Scholars) and the membership is ~75% female.

Re:Male companion

[Beardo the Bearded]

I'd like to see more "companion rescuing the Doctor" events.

Re:Male companion

[mjwx]

Probably because the BBC is trying to hit the right advertising demographic in the US. It's one of the very few scripted shows that the BBC can sell in the US,

Please remember that USA != world. In Commonwealth countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) the BBC sells a lot of programs both in DVD and Syndicated TV. Lets not forget the rest of Europe.

Even in India, you can get a lot of BBC programming. BBC have pay TV channels all over Asia and the BBC's and ABC's (Australian) children's programming is exported the world over. It was a surprise to see Thomas the Tank Engine dubbed in Tagalog (Filipino) on TV in Davao a few years back.

Re:Male companion

[Anonymous Coward]

The female companions don't run and scream and need helping very often. And how many shows have a bumbling male? Why wouldn't that work?

I think the biggest argument against it is one of tradition. The Doctor is an old guy who likes young women. Always has been.

Re:Male companion

[morari]

I was always disappointed that Jack Harkness didn't stick around for more than a few episodes. Of course, I guess the character did get his own show to make up for it.

What I really want is for the Doctor to take on a non-human companion. That would open things open a lot more, I think. Also, while we're at it, why doesn't the Doctor ever regenerate into a female form?

Re:Male companion

[Malc]

Forget about America. The BBC is just trying to reach out to a broader audience at home. The ambiguous romance angle allows them to appeal to the less nerdy.

Re:Male companion

[evilviper]

Why can't we have a long term positive male companion?

Because the old Dr Who had an audience the skewed heavily male, and the makers of the new series are dead-set on getting and keeping a significant number of female viewers, or die trying... That's why there's been such a heavy dose of romance in the new series.

Re:Male companion

[wonkey_monkey]

I'm not claiming this is in any way representative of Who viewers as a whole, but my university has a Who fan club (we call ourselves the Society of Gallifreyan Scholars) and the membership is ~75% female.

I am interested in your society and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Male companion

[Grimbleton]

Dr Who already has a rather bumbling male character who only seems to get his head in gear on occasion, and mostly near the end of the episode. Currently he's played... by Matt Smith.

Re:Male companion

[kannibal_klown]

Why can't we have a long term positive male companion? Yes, it's nice to look at young women, but that isn't what Doctor Who is all about. Is it going to take a female doctor before we have can have a decent male companion that isn't a coward or dies every other episode?

(If it does require a female companion, can I vote for Emma Thompson?)

Well they have Rory, who's been a partner of Doctor + Amy for quite a number of episodes. IMDB says 22, so discounting the pilot and the odd "remember me" episodes that's about as much as Martha Jones.

Though perhaps that's who you meant about "dies every other episode" as he has died a number of times.

Re:Male companion

[CarbonShell]

The lizard chick with the katana!
It would be quite interesting because it adds the extra problem of non-humans milling about in human history/future.

Re:Male companion

[Nutria]

Except that it makes no sense for a bog-standard human without any cool toys to regularly rescue a sonic-screwdriver-weilding Time Lord, especially if she is a new companion.

Re:Male companion

[JosKarith]

Matt Smith went to UEA, Norwich. A friend of mine shared an accomodation block with him - seems that he had a bad habit of shouting "Who loves the c*ck" when entertaining a young lady in his room... Unfortunately that knowledge has made it hard to take the 11th Doctor seriously despite my being a life-long fan of the show...

Re:Male companion

[Baron_Yam]

No, a person cannot be forgiven for implying Canada when they say US.

There are 50 states in the USA, and Canada has over 10% of the population of the Americans, meaning Canada is bigger than 5 average state populations combined. Though there are at least six major cultural groups within Canada, each of them is distinct enough from what you'd find south of the border that lumping them together is imprecise as best.

Anybody who thinks of Canada as 'North Wisconsin' is invited to either completely ignore us or educate themselves on the subject.

Re:Male companion

[dintech]

The BBC is unique in that is has the license fee. Everyone in the UK has to pay a yearly fee of about $240 if they have a TV or go to jail / pay a huge fine.

The BBC cares quite strongly about what we license fee payers want. The reason for this is very clear; it makes them nearly 6 billion dollars a year but yet it's unpopular as it's seen as a tax on televisions. If they don't keep license fee payers happy, it is possible that enough of a revolt would mean that the license fee is finally scrapped. I don't think any amount of US syndication is going to replace 6 billion dollars a year.

The choices made in Dr Who are for a traditional British audience who have been watching the show since childhood. It's one of the few programs that is popular enough that people think the license fee is 'worth it'. Sorry if this bursts your bubble in that everyone in the world is just trying to keep the US happy.

Re:Male companion

[TheRaven64]

I think most of us try to forget Adric. When he dies, you can tell when he dies that all of the characters are thinking 'we have a time machine. We only saw the spaceship crash from the outside - we could go back and rescue him before it does. I really hope no one else thinks of that...'

Re:Male companion

[TheRaven64]

What I really want is for the Doctor to take on a non-human companion

That sort of defeats the point of the companion. They exist in the show as a surrogate for the audience, someone who will ask the same questions as the audience and allow The Doctor to explain things for the benefit of the audience without breaking the fourth wall. An alien companion can work, but only if there is also a human companion.

Re:Male companion

[jamesh]

What I really want is for the Doctor to take on a non-human companion

That sort of defeats the point of the companion. They exist in the show as a surrogate for the audience, someone who will ask the same questions as the audience and allow The Doctor to explain things for the benefit of the audience without breaking the fourth wall. An alien companion can work, but only if there is also a human companion.

Sci-Fi usually operates on the basis that any alien we meet will be significantly more advanced and worldy (universly?) than us mere humans, but that is because we are working on the assumption that they have arrived on our planet and therefore have accomplished space travel, which we haven't.

That assumption doesn't necessarily hold for a Doctor companion though. He could arrive on an alien planet where the aliens are around our level of technology (and coincidentally speak english!) and it could still work. It could be a little more interesting as the alien could be asking questions about earthlings...

Thinking about an alien companion, a Doctor Who / Star Wars crossover with Jar Jar Binks as the companion would be really cool. Especially the bit where Jar Jar gets brutally murdered 5 minutes into the episode.

Re:Male companion

[harl]

Girls go for the doctor.

Guys go for the companion.

Re:Male companion

[Sporkinum]

And Steven Fry could be her companion.

Re:Male companion

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to troll, but is it really a good comparison to say "well, our entire country has more people than any of your states, well, except for California."

Re:Male companion

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody who thinks of Canada as 'North Wisconsin' is invited to either completely ignore us or educate themselves on the subject.

No kidding! The proper way to think about Canada is 'North Minnesota.' People in Wisconsin are generally too drunk to play hockey.

Re:Male companion

[Hatta]

If you haven't watched Torchwood yet, I'd advise against it. It's really pretty bad.

Re:Male companion

[spiralx]

The license fee is hardly unpopular unless you read the Murdoch press, which has been smearing it for years now. From Wikipedia:

In September 2009, The Guardian reported an ICM poll showing an increase in support for the licence fee to 43%; "The fee is backed by 43%, against 24% who think advertising should foot the bill and 30% who think people should pay to subscribe if they want to see BBC programmes. In 2004, only 31% backed the licence fee, 12 points lower than today."

So support has increased over the last decade by quite a bit despite all of the propaganda in the press; I don't see a public revolt happening any time soon.

Re:Male companion

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

Actually, Mogh is the (deceased) father of Worf on Star Trek: the Next Generation. You're thinking of the Face of Boe, and one of Jack's comments to the Doctor and Martha strongly suggests that he will become the Face eventually. The video on YouTube showing how Tennant and Barrowman learned of this plot twist is hilarious.

Re:Male companion

[harl]

Girls go for guys with confidence. The smart and geeky is optional.

Re:Male companion

[Tetsujin]

Why can't we have a long term positive male companion? Yes, it's nice to look at young women, but that isn't what Doctor Who is all about. Is it going to take a female doctor before we have can have a decent male companion that isn't a coward or dies every other episode?

I think Rory really developed nicely, actually. If you look at his first adventure away from home, he's kind of like, "Why the hell am I here in this crazy place?" But later on we have some nice "crowning moments of awesome" like Rory the Roman, his time with Flesh Jennifer and his involvement in the raid on Demon's Run. He probably was never entirely comfortable going on dangerous adventures, but he learned to deal.

Too Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Too Bad David Tennant doesn't want to act the Doctor anymore, Matt isn't bad, & does eventually grow on you but David is and in my opinion the best Doctor of the newer series.

Re:Too Bad

[apharmdq]

Tennant ran around and yelled a bit too much for my taste. Eccleston felt far more like the classic Doctors, in that he was more of thinker than a man of action. I definitely preferred Eccleston to Tennant. (Though Tennant does look dashing, and has some great moments.) I haven't gotten to Matt Smith yet, but from what a few friends of mine have told me, his Doctor is a lot closer to the classic Doctors, which is something I really liked. (FYI, my favorite Doctor is still the 7th, though I thought each one brought something unique to the table.) In any case, I have a feeling Tennant would have gone over a little better if it weren't for Russel T. Davies' writing style. But I guess I shouldn't complain, as RTD did bring the show back from the dead after all.

Re:Too Bad

[skine]

Tennant was a theatrical doctor.

Which really should be considered a contradiction in character.

Re:Too Bad

[geminidomino]

. Eccleston felt far more like the classic Doctors, in that he was more of thinker than a man of action. I definitely preferred Eccleston to Tennant.

And here I thought I was alone in the world. (My brothers still mock me for it)

Re:Too Bad

[bryan1945]

My wife is still pissed Tennant left.

Re:Too Bad

[TheRaven64]

No, you're not alone. Tennant and Smith both seem more like self-parody (although there's some precedent for that in Doctor Who). I still enjoy their performances, but Eccleston was the only one who made me believe he was almost a thousand years old. Tennant and Smith seem like the Midlife Crisis Doctor - next thing you know he'll paint the TARDIS red...

Re:Too Bad

[TheRaven64]

The younger actors sort-of make sense. When The Doctor was young, he was played by old actors because very young people usually try to seem more grownup than they are. Now that he's over a thousand, he wants to seem younger, so he regenerates into a younger-looking body. On the other hand, it needs to be a young actor who can pull off the whole looking 20 while being over 1000 thing, which I don't really think Matt Smith can do very well.

Re:Too Bad

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

I'd love to see Robert Picardo play The Doctor. I'll admit it's 90% for the joke (he played The Doctor in ST:Voyager), but if he can do a British accent, I think he'd be able to pull it off well.

Re:Too Bad

[Tetsujin]

No, you're not alone. Tennant and Smith both seem more like self-parody (although there's some precedent for that in Doctor Who).

Personally I feel like the 2005 series started out with a heavy dose of self-parody (the initial Auton story, then the Earth's destruction story right after were both loaded with this - "New Earth" and the space station from "The Long Game" were pretty heavily loaded with this as well), and it's mostly just in the Matt Smith years that it's emerged from that. Some of that in the Tennant years was just holdovers from Eccleston (like "New Earth", Cassandra as the ultimate expression of plastic surgery gone too far, the Slitheen and Captain Jack, etc.) but there was a lot of "wow that's a goofy alien name"-type stuff and "veiled commentary on a contemporary thing" stuff (Adipose, for instance)

For sure there's a lot of the Eccleston and Tennant years that I enjoyed quite a lot, but to me season 5-6 with Smith is the best the new show's been. I think the show grew up a bit at that point, and developed into a better show with less reliance upon parody.

Lucky Doctor

[dimeglio]

I think the doctor would be quite happy with his new partner. Just saw a picture and she's quite pretty. I'll miss Karen of course...

Re:Lucky Doctor

[pseudofrog]

I still miss Donna.

Are those torches I see over the horizon?

Re:Lucky Doctor

[stonedcat]

Donna always made my skin crawl.. I kinda wanted to strangle her.

Re:Lucky Doctor

[FPhlyer]

Absolutely. Catherine Tate was brilliant as Donna Noble and really helped to balance Tennant's interpretation of the Doctor.

I'm hoping that a new full-time companion for Matt Smith's Doctor will enable us to see a different side to the Doctor than the current "Mad Man in a Box." It would be nice to see a more serious side to the Doctor a little more often.

Re:Lucky Doctor

[93 Escort Wagon]

I think the doctor would be quite happy with his new partner. Just saw a picture and she's quite pretty. I'll miss Karen of course...

You didn't see that picture on the first link of this submission. Why on earth would the submitter think the best link for this actress, Jenna-Louise Coleman, would be a photo-less Wikipedia page?

Actually I believe I know the answer. Said Wikipedia page was created yesterday (seriously - check the history). He actually created the Wikipedia page when he submitted the Slashdot story!

Now, for you slightly more normal readers... here is her IMDB page.

Re:Lucky Doctor

[type40]

Here's to the best temp in Chiswick.
(Raises a bottle of WhiteOut)

Re:Lucky Doctor

[SilverJets]

Yeah I never understood why people liked her either. Other than screaming at things she had the emotional range of a cardboard cutout and I never saw any chemistry between her and The Doctor.

Re:Lucky Doctor

[cyclomedia]

Clearly I'm the only Martha Jones fan around here.

Re:Lucky Doctor

[TheRaven64]

No, Martha was good. I was a bit surprised at how much I enjoyed Rose. When I heard they'd cast Billie Piper, I fully expected the show to suck. Martha Jones was slightly jarring at first because they introduced her straight after the episode where she'd played another character, but once you got past that, she was great: one of the few characters (Nissa probably being the best other examples) who could keep up with the doctor and match his intellect. Then there was Donna, a stupid annoying chavette.

Re:Lucky Doctor

[X86Daddy]

My thought on that aspect: they belatedly realized that they kinda already did "raise" her, by growing up with her as a best friend, and due to her influence on their lives, they couldn't go back and alter that. River's childhood already happened a certain way, and they even witnessed it already. It still doesn't account for ages zero through 8 or so, but causality and all that... *shrug*

I hate to say it...

[PCM2]

...but the last season of Doctor Who stunk so bad that I almost completely lost interest.

When Steven Moffat was first announced as the new show-runner, he gave a bunch of interviews about how the best Doctor Whos were the old ones where things were scary, and all these plans he had that sounded really great and like he could save the show from the worst aspects of Russell T. Davies' cloying writing.

Well, scrap all that, because he gave us an even younger Doctor, companions straight out of Australian soaps, even more of Davies' deus ex machina solutions, even more of the Doctor waving his sonic screwdriver around like it's Harry Potter's want (they destroyed it in the old show for a reason), incomprehensible stories full of characters you can't identify and don't care about, and he actually made the Doctor the sidekick in his own show. I never really got to the point where I thought New Who was better than the original, but now I think it's really much, much worse than the old shows, warts, cheap budgets and all.

Re:I hate to say it...

[FPhlyer]

Series 5 and 6 of the new Who actually did something that Doctor Who has needed for a long time: it made time travel an important plot point in several of the stories. Time travel has obviously been an important part of Doctor Who, a story about a time traveler, since it began in '63, but usually time travel has been used as a plot device to get the Doctor into a dramatic situation. Steven Moffat has taken time travel and made the paradoxes an important part of the story itself.

Unfortunately, Moffat has failed to resolve any of these dramatic time travel story lines in a way that makes any sense. He uses time travel as a device to get out of a sticky plot complication without worrying about if it makes any logical sense. The finale of Season 5 illustrates this: The future doctor goes back in time and gives Rory the sonic so that Rory can free the Doctor so the Doctor can go forward in time so that he can go back in time to give Rory the sonic... The only way that I can digest that poorly thought out resolution to the problem of getting the Doctor out of "the perfect prison" is to shake my head and let it slide because I like Doctor Who. But seriously... couldn't the writing staff of the series come up with a better resolution than that?

Re:I hate to say it...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. I'd much rather have that than any of RTD's resolutions. Moffat may in fact be a time traveler himself, though. That, or he has seriously been thinking about this show his entire life. In the mid-90s, he was posting messages on Usenet about plot points he'd later actually bring to the show.

Re:I hate to say it...

[lightknight]

Solution? Gender change. Bonus points if you chose a gender that doesn't exist on earth.

At the very least, you'll have something to talk about...

Re:I hate to say it...

[delinear]

They knew this once, that's why the TARDIS was written to be so unreliable. You couldn't rely on it to go back five minutes and give you time to defuse the bomb or whatever. At best, you point it at a destination in time and space and end up vaguely in the ballpark. This meant you could use it as a device to put the characters in new and interesting situations, but if your plan to save the day relied on getting it into one exact position at one exact time (using it to catch River Song after she jumps out of a tall building in the recent series, for instance), then you'd better go back to the drawing board.

Re:I hate to say it...

[Kalriath]

You mean how he talks about how we can't cross his own timeline, but there's an episode in series one where the entire premise is him doing it three times?

Don't care until it is on Netflix

[NotQuiteReal]

[fingers-in-ears] + "nananananaaaanaaanaaanaaa" (I can't hear you).

No "spoilers", please! What with this modern age, and all, we don't all live in "real time". If some entertainment is worth experiencing, it will be for a while, and not everyone can experience it at the same time.

Currently, I am watching "The Doctor", and "Emilia Pond" (with "Rory")... Don't confuse me with actors names, I don't want to NOT "suspend belief" to geek out about the (real life) details that don't affect me. I am not in the TV biz, this is just entertainment for me.

Sometimes watching "dead" series like "Firefly" (or whatever) is nicer, since you know there IS an end.

Another show I enjoy, "Breaking Bad" will have a final season, that THE SHOW CREATORS know is the end, so they get to create a satisfactory story too, I hope.

Are "fans" of any serial really good for an on-going work of "art"? Maybe a complete story is, by definition, better than an unfinished story?

Re:Don't care until it is on Netflix

[pseudofrog]

I "agree".

Re:Don't care until it is on Netflix

[TubeSteak]

No "spoilers", please! What with this modern age, and all, we don't all live in "real time". If some entertainment is worth experiencing, it will be for a while, and not everyone can experience it at the same time.

The last episode of Dr Who was about 6 months ago.
I don't know if there is an ISO standard for spoilers, but i can't imagine that it would mandate general internet silence for 6 months.

/The last Christmas special didn't really advance the overall story line

Re:too much change!

[SydShamino]

When I saw the headline "New Doctor Who Companion" my first thought was "Wow! Who is replacing Matt Smith as Karen's companion?"

I dislike the whole premise of the show.

[Karmashock]

I don't mean to troll so if this offends anyone that is unintentional. But I really don't "get" the show.

I like science fiction but Dr Who just seems to be endless deus ex machina. His "sonic screwdriver" can apparently do just about anything except when it's not convenient and then it's inexplicably useless. There's no logic or reason to anything. Everything seems to happen almost at random. And while some might argue that's part of the fun of it the show pales in comparison to shows like Red Dwarf that were also very random but at least had an internal logic that remained consistent to itself at least for an episode or two.

I just don't get Dr Who... I've tried to understand it... I've probably watched a couple seasons of it and I always walk away rolling my eyes.

I suppose I genuinely like the "Angels" while they don't make any more sense then anything else they at least create great suspense on the screen so the episodes are always fun. But the rest... It's just sad.

I get that the show was started in the dark ages of television but so were a lot of shows can concepts that have since been updated so they're not quiet so embarrassing.

As I said, I don't mean to troll... if I offend I'm sorry... I just don't get the show. It make me a lot happier if they make some effort to make sense... even in the abstract. If they made sense but it was highly complex or philosophical that would be okay as well. But as it stands, I'm pretty sure any brain power spent trying to make the plots make sense is wasted.

Re:I dislike the whole premise of the show.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's better to treat Dr. Who as "science fantasy" rather than as "science fiction". That is, it might present some scientific concepts every once in a while, but if you're depending on the science to be realistic, forget it. You're a bit more likely to find philosophical commentary (as in "Genesis of the Daleks", where the Time Lords send the Doctor to genocide the Daleks, and he asks whether he has the right to do it, even KNOWING for a FACT how evil they are, and what horrible deeds they are known to have committed in the future).

Star Trek makes more pretense to be science fiction, but it's always handwaving and doing bogus things, too. If you want hard science fiction, look for books by authors such as Larry Niven or David Brin.

Re:I dislike the whole premise of the show.

[stevencbrown]

And while some might argue that's part of the fun of it the show pales in comparison to shows like Red Dwarf that were also very random but at least had an internal logic that remained consistent to itself at least for an episode or two.

Would that be the Red Dwarf where Lister has his appendix removed... twice? :-)

Who cares about Doctor Who?

[MMC Monster]

Answer the question we all want to know:

When is The Amy Pond Show coming back?

Re:Best Dr Who ever

[JasterBobaMereel]

..all on the budget for the whole series that matches half an episode of an equivalent US show ...

The BBC have no money, and have to justify every penny spent, even if it is on mainstream shows ... every complaint has to be paid attention to

Try running a TV company like that in the USA and it would go bust in a second