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<\/i> 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<\/i>. Jurassic Park<\/i>. Event Horizon<\/i>.<\/p>\n
One that works surprisingly well, despite absolutely no<\/b> “base under siege”-ness, is DuckTales<\/i>. But I’ve written of my desire to write a Doctor Who<\/i>\/Uncle Scrooge<\/i> crossover before<\/a>.<\/p>\n Historical series also works well, largely because Doctor Who<\/i> has a foot in the past anyway<\/i>.<\/p>\n My variant on the game is this — take a character from a television series or movie, and imagine that character as a Doctor Who<\/i> companion.<\/p>\n This one’s trickier. Would the Doctor take this person aboard the TARDIS? Why? And would they mesh?<\/p>\n For years, I have considered Jean-Luc Picard a Doctor Who<\/i> 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<\/i> and before he’s given command of the Enterprise<\/i>-D, during his seven “lost” years. Picture the stiff Picard with the bombastic Doctor and a snarky penguin, and it works<\/i>. There’s no one to say that they didn’t<\/i> travel together… \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n Last weekend, another one came to me.<\/p>\n I was watching The Tudors<\/i>. 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<\/i> series, which I know isn’t likely to happen. Kids like their monsters, after all.<\/p>\n As I watched The Tudors<\/i>, an idea kept nagging at me.<\/p>\n Princess Mary, Henry VIII’s eldest daughter and eventually Queen “Bloody” Mary, would make a fantastic<\/i> companion.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/i> take her for a trip, but he also couldn’t help<\/i> himself; he’d want<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n The Doctor and Princess Mary. It would be fantastic<\/i>. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Anyone have their own thoughts on non-Doctor Who<\/i> characters who would make excellent companions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 theContinue reading “On Non-Who TARDIS Companions”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4082,198,536],"class_list":["post-2718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doctor-who","tag-doctor-who","tag-jean-luc-picard","tag-the-tudors","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2718\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}