Years ago, my friend Michael had a game. Take a movie or television show. Then imagine the TARDIS materializing. There are some stories you can look at and say, “This is a Doctor Who story; all it needs is the Doctor.” The game works best with a “base under siege”-type structure, so common to the Patrick Troughton era. Alien 3. Jurassic Park. Event Horizon.
One that works surprisingly well, despite absolutely no “base under siege”-ness, is DuckTales. But I’ve written of my desire to write a Doctor Who/Uncle Scrooge crossover before.
Historical series also works well, largely because Doctor Who has a foot in the past anyway.
My variant on the game is this — take a character from a television series or movie, and imagine that character as a Doctor Who companion.
This one’s trickier. Would the Doctor take this person aboard the TARDIS? Why? And would they mesh?
For years, I have considered Jean-Luc Picard a Doctor Who companion. Specifically, I think he traveled with the sixth Doctor and Frobisher. Yes, the shape-shifting penguin. For the Doctor, this is sometime after “Trial of a Time Lord,” but before he meets Mel. For Picard, this is after the loss of the Stargazer and before he’s given command of the Enterprise-D, during his seven “lost” years. Picture the stiff Picard with the bombastic Doctor and a snarky penguin, and it works. There’s no one to say that they didn’t travel together… 😉
Last weekend, another one came to me.
I was watching The Tudors. In a way, it depressed me a little; as I watched one episode after another, it only made me yearn for a pure historical on the new Doctor Who series, which I know isn’t likely to happen. Kids like their monsters, after all.
As I watched The Tudors, an idea kept nagging at me.
Princess Mary, Henry VIII’s eldest daughter and eventually Queen “Bloody” Mary, would make a fantastic companion.
She’s fiercely intelligent. She’s erudite. She’s bitter. She’s haughty. She’s snarky as all get out. She’s also stiff and prim and proper, and she wants things to be a certain way. She’s led a rough life, there’s anger simmering just beneath the surface. She’s very much her father’s daughter.
And I think the Doctor would take her on, just to try and fix that. Oh, he knows it’s a lost cause, he knows that she’s going to be bitter and vindictive as a reigning queen. The Doctor would know that he shouldn’t take her for a trip, but he also couldn’t help himself; he’d want to try and open her eyes. Which may actually result in the opposite effect; maybe Mary wouldn’t have been so “bloody” had the Doctor not attempted his intervention.
The Doctor and Princess Mary. It would be fantastic. 🙂
Anyone have their own thoughts on non-Doctor Who characters who would make excellent companions?
Ha ha!
That was one of the ways I dealt with the historical inaccuracies in The Tudors. I pretended it was set in the Doctor Who universe, that this was the Doctor Who version of Henry VIII’s story.
To answer your question, Eva Green’s character from The Dreamers would be an excellent foil, someone who’s passionate about everything but also slightly broken as a personality. Or Kristin Scott Thomas’s character Fiona from Four Weddings — I’ve always had a soft spot for an aristocratic character who the Doctor brings down a peg by showing her that there are other social classes in the universe.
I’ve written/drawn Buffy Summers, Saavik of Vulcan and Padme Amidala as TARDIS companions. However, when I want to insert the Doctor into the story I’m watching (as opposed to writing a crossover from scratch), I’m much less likely to just add him in than to substitute him and his supporting cast for the existing protagonists of the story. I was going to link to examples of each of these but your blogware decided it must be spam.
Stuart: Interesting choice, The Dreamers.
Paul: Sorry about the comment spam limbo; WP-SpamFree isn’t supposed to do that, and the downside is that the way it works doesn’t leave me with anything to spring from limbo. :-/
I do remember reading, many years ago, your outlines for Star Trek II with the fifth Doctor and The Ringworld Throne with the eighth. I didn’t recall that Buffy traveled with the Doctor in your stories, but I did remember Saavik (and even thought about mentioning her in my blog post, because she would make a good choice, half-Time Lord or not).
V for Vendetta would be interesting as a Doctor Who story. It really almost is already; just imagine V as the Doctor and Evey as the companion.