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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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...'

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

[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

[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

[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:Lucky Doctor

[pseudofrog]

I still miss Donna.

Are those torches I see over the horizon?

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...

[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:Lucky Doctor

[stonedcat]

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

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: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.

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.