In which we discuss things we can’t possibly know for sure about Doctor Who.
Now I know what you’re thinking. “The answer to this question is obviously Xxxxx Xxxxxx, but I also want to talk about how awesome Donna Noble was and whether Martha, Amy, or Clara is hotter, which will have the side benefit of pissing Skald off.” To which I say fooey. I’m perfectly willing to discuss anything Doctor or companion related in this thread. Why, I won’t even complain if people say that Billie Piper is hot, even though she is obviously 2/3 uruk.
Anyway: is there any textual evidence as to which companion spent the most time in the Doctor’s company?
ETA: Please note that I wrote travelled. If you’re going to argue for Amy, for instance, I’d say that her meeting the Doctor at age 9 (or however young a preteen she was) does not count as the beginning of her companionship. It’s the first time the character set foot in the Tardis.
Oh, and please assume that I said something else insulting about Rose. I have a quota to meet.
Well, Susan was his granddaughter, so in terms of spending the most time with him, that’s got to give her an edge. She was also already his companion in the first episode, making the length of time she’d traveled with him an open question. Every other companion, we at least know when they started and stopped traveling with him, and can make some sort of rough assumptions about how long they were together based off of that.
Amy and Rory had sporadic adventures with the Doctor for years by their timeline. Now this wasn’t continuous, they had at various times a stable home life and the Doctor would pop in every few weeks/months/years. And plastic Rory spent a thousand years guarding the Pandorica waiting for Amy. So measuring “time a companion subjectively experienced from first in-personal-timeline boarding of the Tardis to last in-personal-timeline stepping off the Tardis”, it’s gonna be hard to beat Rory. If you count plastic Rory as Rory, that is.
If the measure is “most subjective time spent on the Tardis” then guarding the Pandorica doesn’t count, and we’re back in the land of wind and ghosts.
You can’t possibly think I’d be fair-minded & rational enough to acknowledge Classic Who. That would violate everything it means to be a Rhymer. I haven’t seen the first Doctor, so he doesn’t exist. Why, I don’t even know that the show was originally shot in black & white and intended to educate kids about actual rather than made-up history.
I don’t know who Sarah Jane is either, or that she has a kid named Luke.
What made me open this thread was that I was thinking that, counting from the episode with the space whale, Amy spent about ten years with the Doctor (and yes,it was sporadic) and Rory only slightly less. Then I realized that I had no idea where I was getting that figure from, except that by their last two episodes they were both worrying that they had begun to age faster than their friends.
Clara was broken up and interspersed throughout his timeline, so therefore she has always been with him. What is he 2000 years old now?(He aged how much in the last Christmas episode?), and she has been there the whole time.
Rose is one of the few Modern Who characters that lived in the Tardis and traveled extensively. She returns home in an early episode and her mom had issued a missing persons report. They said she’d been gone 7 or 8 months. Poor Mickey was the cop’s main suspect in her disappearance.
The other new who companions return home more often and have more normal lives. I’m not a fan of part time companions that occasionally take Tardis trips.
Donna might be another candidate. She lived in the Tardis and rarely returned home.
No, I was actually trying to suggest her as a possibility. Since Amy & Rory are candidates despite being sporadic (unlike, say, Donna), Sarah Jane wins if she ever set foot in the Tardis during New Who.
It doesn’t matter that Twelve claims to be 2000 years old; Clara hasn’t experienced that.
And I’d say that only Schoolteacher!Clara counts. Minidress!Clara never set foot in the Tardis (and did not even have feet when she meet Eleven), and Governesss!Clara died less than half an hour after making her unique observation about the box.
(An before anyone comments: I am perfectly aware that Tardis should be in all caps.)
I’m not sure there’s enough NuWho companions to draw a distinction one way or the other. Rose clearly lived in the Tardis and didn’t intend to ever return home except for visits; likewise Donna. Martha might have stayed indefinitely if she hadn’t wised up emotionally. Amy/Rory (one companion in two bodies for this purpose) and Clara all went back and forth between time-travelling and real life.
I haven’t seen those episodes. They don’t exist. Which part of “Skald has his head in the sand and needs to be slapped” is unclear to you?
I assume you’re talking about the bit with the War Doctor showing the Time War, right? Because I own those episodes but haven’t watched them yet but plan to watch them this weekend, so anyone who spoils either here will be threatened with some elaborate and ridiculous fate I can’t possibly bring to pass. And if you do so TWICE, you will be THREATENED AGAIN.
There’s probably some companion from the Doctor’s early years that entered the Tardis, wandered around too much, and has been stuck in a time vortex deep in the bowels of the Tardis ever since. They’ll pop out of a door one day, five seasons from now, and be the new companion for a few more series.
What about Captain Jack? Since he is practically immortal and we don’t know how long the Doctor will live there may be lots of years in the future we don’t know yet.
Well she was supposed to return to the same day that she left but The Doctor was off by a year. I don’t think they ever said how long she had actually be traveling with him at that point.
Well, she appeared in several stories with the 10th Doctor, and she did in fact “set foot in the Tardis” at the end of School Reunion…though she does decline the Doctor’s offer to travel with him again.
So…do we have a winner here, or not?
Wasn’t Amy stuck in the Pandorica for 2000 some years? Does that count? And how old exactly is River Song? Can we start her clock from the time of conception?
He was never technically a ‘Companion’, but I don’t think we can let this thread go without at least mentioning Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. He first appeared with the Second Doctor (when he was himself only a mere Lieutenant Colonel), then they they had doings off and on through to the run of the Seventh Doctor, 21 years later. Since the Brigadier, to the best of my recollection, never left Earth, we can consider his tenure to be in ‘real time’.
