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Don’t Look at Me, I’m Only a Plot Device
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The perception that Doctor Who was an inherently sexist programme is mainly due to the fact that most women on the show were companions who asked loads of sometimes pointless questions and did silly things. However, what needs to be understood is that the reasons for this are nothing to do with being female and everything to do with the role of the companion as a plot device. (As an aside, if you want to talk about stupid companions I defy anyone to point out a single instance of a companion being stupider than Adric was throughout Logopolis).
There are three reasons why heroes have sidekicks in television: to give the audience someone to identify with; to make it easier for the writer to explain the story; and to help the writer add complexity to the plot (or add subplots if necessary). Of course, this is only a general theory that applies to programmes where the episodes are relatively short and action-driven and there is little time for character development.
We are supposed to look up to the hero. We aspire to be like them, but we don’t usually aspire to be them (unless we have big egos). There is generally an air of mystery about a hero in the beginning, and while over time some layers will be stripped away, there will always be things we don’t know about them. Little snippets of information that are used now and then to embellish a story and enrich the feel of the programme as a whole.
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In order for all this to work there has to be a main character who, in a sense, is the audience. A character who is someone like ourselves, who evolves and learns the way we might in a similar situation (this being the reason sidekicks frequently start out as fairly ordinary people with no special skills). In this regard the sidekick is the person whose relationship to the hero is similar to the one we have watching the show. We learn as they learn and they ask the questions we want to ask, be they about what’s happening in the story or the reasons behind the hero’s actions.
Further, for a programme to be realistic it is not feasible to have the hero explaining things aloud often or at all. This is where the sidekick again comes in, asking questions which get the hero to explain what’s happening in the story. Sometimes this happens as the story progresses, sometimes in the form of a question-and-answer session towards or after the climax of the story.
Without the sidekick there to ask questions and give us someone to relate to, a barrier would exist between the audience and the hero, and we’d have to try to figure out what’s happening for ourselves. An audience can’t care about a hero (or any character, for that matter) that they can’t relate to, and more often than not telling us everything about the hero usually means a long story that meanders rather aimlessly and takes ages to get anywhere. This sort of thing has been tried, but gets boring very quickly. The only viable alternative is to include a sidekick.
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If that isn’t enough, there’s a bonus reason. Apart from giving us someone to relate to and helping explain the plot, sidekicks can also add to the story themselves. They become part of the plot threads and often part of a separate plot thread that adds to the excitement and depth of the programme in question. Terrance Dicks explained it best in More Than Thirty Years in the TARDIS, when he discussed his "formula" for writing Doctor Who stories. Having companions means you can have them go one way, with one group of protagonists, and the Doctor goes the other. This gives you two main plot threads running parallel to each other which can be used to add suspense to the programme as it reaches the climax.
There is no reason why the Doctor’s companions couldn’t have been more fleshed out, more than just the two-dimensional characters they were most of the time. Unfortunately, despite Doctor Who’s 26 years on television, this almost never happened. We usually got the bare minimum of information about the character in the story in which they were introduced (Adric in Full Circle, Leela in The Face of Evil, for example), and very little was ever added. This changed with Ace, but of course the writers ran out of time when the show was cancelled.
Then everything changed with the introduction of the New Adventures. While preserving the Doctor’s mystery is still paramount, novels give their writers a lot more scope to explain the story through the eyes of other characters, because in a novel you have the time to more fully realise those characters. You don’t have to rely solely on the Doctor’s companion or companions. This means that the companion is freed, to a certain extent, of some of the responsibilities the sidekick has. They don’t have to ask all the questions or get rescued all the time. In fact, they can tear about having their own little subplot and do some rescuing of their own! As Ace would say, "Wicked!"
©KD 2001