The John Smith/Doctor - Joan Redfern goodbye scene from Family of Blood was one of the best pieces of acting I’ve seen on TV. The way Tennant was able to switch between Smith and the Doctor with just a few inflections of his voice was amazing, and the whole scene was understated but powerful. Jessica Hynes showed off some acting chops, too.
But the answer to your poll is Donna, of course, for all the reasons you put forth in post #16. You may ignore the witless maunderings of those who vote otherwise.
What about the one that got trapped in the Plague/“kindness” facility that spend most of her life until old age sets in hiding in the bowels of the building fighting off robots constantly trying to kill her.
The doctor does finally get back, saves one of the copies of her, but leaves the other copy to die.
Aging and dying in a freaky containment bubble world.
Getting kidnapped while pregnant and stuck in another freaky bubble containment world where she gave birth and her kid was stolen from her (while her freaky fake wandered around pretending to be her for god knows how long).
Losing Rory however many times it ended up being.
Having the Doctor screw her over so badly as a small child that she was nearly continually psychoanalyzed until he finally showed up and proved her right.
Yeah. A quick Doctor/Donna-style aneurysm would have been a mercy.
Adam did NOT get justice. He was left alive at the end. If you are seriously suggesting that Adam deserved life more than Osgood–or, for that matter, the average Norway way–you have lost your goddamn mind.
Most of that season. Everything from “The Impossible Astronaut” onward. But the Amy in the TARDIS wasn’t pretending, because it wasn’t like the gangers. It wasn’t a mental duplicate; the real Amy’s psyche was being projected thru it.
The Doctor let her and Rory spend their honeymoon night in the TARDIS while in the timestream, he instantly snapped to what this would mean(their child would be some kind of timelord caveman.)
He let that happen. I think I made a post here around that time saying man The Doctor is a dick!
Donna doesn’t remember anything, so I’m loath to say that she’s ended up poorly. Her loss is more meaningful to her grandad than to her, so I’d nominate him of the two of them.
Rory spent a few thousand years bored in a cave.
But I’m going to nominate the guy who’s getting BJs from a concrete tongue as my pick.
For that matter, there’s Arthur Williams (who rode the Tardis in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, and kept vigilant watch over the cube in The Power of Three, so he escapes Skald’s exclusion conditions). Dr. Who PROMISES him that Amy and Rory won’t be lost. I believe his exact words were:
And then they’re lost anyway. And Arthur never gets to find out.
The actual answer, of course, is “because that’s what the plot says,” but I’ve thought about this more than I’m sure makes any rational sense and what I could believe is that their being sent back in time by the angel, particularly from a place where the fabric of space and time was dangerously thin, made their entire continuing existence a fixed point, so any interference with their timelines would have the same catastrophic effect as what happened when River managed to not shoot the Doctor as she was meant to. Even directly interacting with the Doctor, with his chaotic time vortex energy, would cause something dreadful to happen.
Mind, this isn’t supported by much of what the Doctor actually said, but he was devastated at the time and if there really was no possibility of his just sending them a message to meet him somewhere far away from New York and then continuing their adventures together, then so what if he didn’t explain it well enough for someone else to understand?
And the answer to the poll can only be Donna. To grow so much as a person, to finally throw off the influence of that harpy of a mother of hers, to have seen the universe and to have briefly become the most important woman in it, and then to be slammed back into her limited former self and not even remember how much bigger she had become on the inside … it’s pure tragedy. Rose got her Doctor, sort of, Martha had the strength to walk away from what she knew was never going to work out for her, and the Ponds had each other and a long life together.
Didn’t vote, because despite the conditions in the OP, it’s clear that Clara is already the most screwed-over. She’s the only companion thus far to actually lose her non-Doctor lover, forever. I can’t really see anyone else topping that. She can get more screwed, I guess, but she’s already the winner so I don’t see any need to exclude her.
And I don’t much like Donna as a companion, so don’t really give a shit what contrived Doctor-Donna heights she fell down from (just a thematic retread of Rose’s Bad Wolf episode, after all), she doesn’t remember a thing and she’s still a better person than the literally shrill harpy she started out as, so that’s OK for her, then.
I’m going to go for Amy and Rory. To be trapped in one spot until death decades later sucks.
Donna might have had all her experiences and heightened brain powers taken away, but at least she doesn’t know it ever happened. She didn’t suffer years of regret like A & R.
and all his pomps (but particularly those ridiculous Pompeian eyebrows) it is silly to claim that Danny Pink
:: another ritual expectoration ::
died because of him. Pink died because he didn’t have the goddamn sense to get off the goddamn phone while crossing the goddamn street, and thus got hit by a car whose drier was probably also on the phone. Unpickled bastard. Pink, I mean. He made Clara cry, for Athena’s sake. That’s, like, four steps shy of making Eowyn cry. Dude deserved to die.
But none of that is Twelve’s fault. Don’t worry, there are many other reasons to hate him.