Doctor Who Needs To Be About The Doctor Again
Season 2’s storyline is as familiar as its companion.
Doctor Who loves to bring back an old companion. Donna Noble appeared in the Christmas special but then came back for an entire season. Captain Jack Harkness was in one of the first episodes after the 2005 reboot, but he came back again and again, even sparking a spinoff. Not one, but two, companions were played by actresses with previous roles in the series. The repetition is usually baked into the narrative — Doctor Who is about time travel, after all, so people can weave in and out of the Doctor’s life all the time.
But a new familiar face poses a big problem. The Season 2 trailer for the recently re-re-booted Doctor Who reveals its storyline arc is once again repeating a big theme — and making a big mistake. Watch the trailer below:
This trailer introduces Varada Sethu as Belinda Chandra, a companion unlike any we’ve seen before. She’s not interested in going on adventures through time and space, she just wants to get home. However, the TARDIS may have other plans for her, meaning she’ll have to take the scenic route with the Doctor.
However, one key part of her character is something we’ve seen before. Sethu previously played Anglican Mundy Flynn in the Season 1 episode “Boom,” but fans assumed the two characters were unrelated, much like how Karen Gillan appeared in “Fires of Pompeii” before she was cast as companion Amy Pond.
But in the trailer, we see Belinda face-to-face with a display of Mundy, meaning the reappearance is not only part of the plot, but a key point in the season-long arc for the episode. This is an incredibly common trope for Doctor Who in recent years. In 2012, Season 7 introduced Oswin, a mysterious soufflé-making crewmember of a crashed spaceship who turned out to be trapped inside a Dalek. She then appeared over and over throughout space and time, resulting in a season of the Doctor trying to figure out “The Impossible Girl.” Even in the previous season, the season-long mystery focused on both companion Ruby Sunday and mysterious recurring guest star Susan Twist, whose true identity proved to be a central plot point.
Belinda Chandra is yet another companion who comes with a season-long mystery.
Once again, it looks like Doctor Who will focus on figuring out the existence of a companion instead of focusing on the Doctor. Sure, meditations of the Doctor’s complex morality and existence can get tiring, but the character’s personality changes with each regeneration, and it feels like we haven’t been given the opportunity to get to know this version. He’s been too busy fixing the issues around him for us to get a clear sense of the character.
Hopefully, this rehash of an old mystery will find a way to keep things fresh, but it’s taking the “mysterious companion” story from a trope to just a bad habit. Maybe this time there will be room for the Doctor to shine, too.
