New companion for Doctor Who announced

It is official that somebody named Jenna-Louise Coleman has been announced as the new Doctor Who companion, to take over after the Ponds exit, which will be partway through the coming series.

Apparently she was in the Captain America movie.

I know nothing about her, but judging by this pic, she’ll be great

Your link didn’t work for me, so here’s another:

Jenna

Great - another young chippie who’ll fall madly in love with the Doctor within two episodes. I miss Catharine Tate.

I must admit I was hoping for somebody tomboyish, along the likes of Ace.

Indeed. Yawn

At least please let her not be from Earth. Or Earth in a different time period. Or something apart from current era UK.

Yeah. I mean, I don’t mind a cutie once in a while, but can we either have some companions who aren’t in grade school (or at least make the Doctor ask why he never travels with adults?). Or at least have the young chippie fall madly in love with Donna or River for a change.

[On preview I agree with amanaset. At least can it be someone not from 201x AD England? Heck, even Ireland would be a change…]

Looking back at Companions Through History–most of them have been quite young.

Mostly, the Doctors have been older. I certainly thought Matt Smith was far too young–until about 5 minutes into his first episode…

Well…technically Amy’s Scottish, right?

I’m getting so tired of “Doctor Who: The Tween Years.” She looks even younger than Karen.

Meh. Count me in with those who would have liked to see someone older, or more tomboyish, or both. (Or male!)

She better be careful. River Song has very good aim.

I was watching classic Who and the lack of variety among companions nowadays stands out, I think I even mentioned in a thread why does the Doctor no longer have any male friends?

I guess you could fan wank something like an emotionally ruined Doctor fresh off the time wars is just surrounding himself with the young things.

Male Companions are less prevalent and long-lasting than the Who girls, but they haven’t been absent from NuWho. We’ve got:
Adam - one episode with Ninth Doctor
Captain Jack - five episodes with Ninth Doctor, three episodes with Tenth Doctor.
Mickey: Three episodes with Tenth Doctor.
Wilfred Mott: One two-part special with Tenth Doctor.
Rory: Twenty episodes with Eleventh Doctor.
Craig: One episode with Eleventh Doctor.

(These counts don’t include the ‘Companions reunion’ in Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, where those episodes might apply.)

Arguably, many of these were tagging along to come with a female companion as much as to travel with the Doctor. (Rory, Adam, Mickey - maybe Jack the first time??)

Young, female, and human. (The second point is overemphasized by that wallpaper. That only shows the primary female Companions.) Also, generally rather attractive, but that ranges into matters of taste, and also gets kind of skewed by being a TV show.

The Doctor Who wiki has a comprehensive list.

I just did a quick rundown…of the 37 Companions I felt major enough to make the list*, 12 are male, and slightly trend towards being older. Of the 25 females, 19 of them are young (based on either canonical reference or age of the actor, depending whether I could find the former). ‘Young’ in this case, going up to the mid-20s. If we raise it to 30, all but 4 of the women are young (Romana, Grace, Donna, River), and the males trend toward the young at a similar rate. Most were in their 20s, most of the outliers being teens if female, 30+ (or K9) if male. (And the new series has only one teenager: First season Rose. Mickey, Martha, Amy, and Rory (and post-first-season Rose) are all in their early 20s, Donna in her early 30s and Jack nearing 40 (before his immortalizing and subsequently taking the long road to meet the Doctor again) for their travels with the Doctor. River’s confusing, but her main actress was in her 30s, so let’s call it that.)

Where the new series does diverge is by having all of the main Companions (save Jack and River) taken from contemporary Earth.

  • Only TV companions there for more than 3 or 4 stories were counted. Short timers and non-TV Companions are more diverse, but that counts for the new series as much as the old.

He’s got more male Companions than he’s had since his fifth incarnation…that is to say ‘any’ - Turlough seems to have soured him on the concept of travelling with dudes for a while. (That’s counting only TV…he’s got plenty of male Companions in non-TV stories for 6, 7 and 8.)

1-5 give the boys a bit more screen time…but that’s offset by the fact that 4/9 of the old series male Companions are UNIT soldiers, and thus Companions not by mutual assent, but by the fact that they’re all working for the same organization. (Well…3/9…the Brigadier seems a more normal Companion relationship.) Plus Turlough was a villain who was only travelling with the Doctor in order to kill him, so once Adric split and K9 got busted for the last time, he arguably didn’t have a proper male Companion, at all.

Ah, I should have trusted in the anoraks to have analyzed The Companions.

The same artist has depicted a selection of male Companions

All I hope is that Moffat avoids any “New/Old companions are jealous of each other” storylines, which I absolutely hated from the Davies era. It’s so annoying to hear someone complain that their 900 year old friend once had another friend.

But I can understand every single word she says. That’s not real Scottish…

(If I was semi-benevolent-but-capricious World OverRuler, I think I’d have Brad Pitt’s character from Snatch as the next companion (he is a Traveller, right?). In my head I’m already enjoying the dialogue where another character/companion asks the Doctor “So, the TARDIS has a telepathic translator, which is why I can understand and talk to all these aliens, right? So why can’t I understand Traveller-boy?” and the Doctor looks uncomfortable and starts talking about ‘wibbly-wobbly dialecty-wialecty things’. )

Hmm. I kind of like the idea of exploring some of the grown-up issues with the Doctor that earlier series just ignored. For instance when the Doctor ran in to (was it Donna?) recently, who basically said “You took me to the most wonderus exciting spots in the universe for two years, then dumped me back on Earth where nobody even knows those spots exist. And I’m supposed to just get on with my life now?”

I mean, if it’s realistic enough for xkcd, Doctor Who should acknowledge it, right?

Hmm… now I’m wondering if it would work the other way, if you could have a companion who couldn’t fluently speak English without the TARDIS field, but when they’re within the TARDIS field everybody can understand them fine. Bonus points if they overdub the TARDIS translation while the actor is speaking something less intelligble. :slight_smile:

I came in just to say this.

I’d love to see another character like the Second Doctor’s companion Jamie. He was long running, non-romantic, companion from a historical period other than contemporary England. There are hundreds of times and places to choose from (infinite, really, if you count the show’s abilities to make up future eras and distant planets). Please pick a combination besides “now” and “the UK”.

Similarly, I’d really like to see the Doctor pick up more companions who didn’t know each other previously. It’s great to have multiple companionsas they have with Amy and Rory, but I’d like to see people from different backgrounds getting to know each other, not just getting to know the Doctor.