As fans of Doctor Who around the globe are preparing for this week’s 50th anniversary, Cassie McCullagh takes a look at another aspect of the TV show’s legacy—the time lord’s female companions and their often conflicted relationships with the elusive man from Gallifrey.

Much has been written lately about the eleven Doctors and the men who have played them over the last 50 years. We’re in the middle of a Doctor Who extravaganza, as the BBC deftly consolidates the show’s legacy and cashes in on what has become one of Britain’s biggest pop culture exports.

The BBC has learnt a lot from the Royal Wedding, the Queen’s Jubilee and the London Olympics. Climaxing in a global event—the simultaneous screening in 75 countries of the feature-length special, The Day of the Doctor—the 50th anniversary is successfully connecting with audiences across a number of generations. Or regenerations, if you’ll pardon the pun.

I know many people who feel that even though the modern show actually refers to same-sex couples, for instance, it has also in a lot of ways become more explicitly heterosexual because the Doctor seems to be more obviously written as fancying girls, whereas in the old days they didn't make it explicit that he fancied anybody Tansy Rayner Roberts, sci-fi author

But, in the unending avalanche of articles, TV specials and re-screening of the classic episodes, rather little has been said about the show’s other legacy—its women.

As each Doctor has charmed his way through time, relative dimensions and the living rooms of what was once the Empire and beyond, he has been accompanied by a series of females who have reflected the broader cultural changes of their successive eras.

For girls who grew up watching Doctor Who, the female companions made strong and interesting role models.

In the show’s 50 year history, there have been more than 40 companions—from the first Doctor’s grand-daughter Susan Foreman, the dizzy Jo Grant and the doe-eyed Sarah Jane, to the jungle wild-cat Leela, and the super brainy Romanas (One and Two). In the ‘80s there was Tegan the stewardess from Brisbane, and Ace, the rebellious teen with a taste for explosives.

The post-2005 reboot brought us the boldly sexual Rose Tyler, ‘the girl who waited’ Amy Pond, the enigmatic River Song and the current Clara Oswald, the so-called ‘impossible girl’.

Each of them is a fragment, a moment, a temporary embodiment of the feminine at any particular stage of both the show and the society it has striven to entertain. Seen as a continuum, they form an oddly fascinating historical picture of both the show’s development and the female experience over the last half a century.

‘Doctor Who is a show that can do anything and it taught us as children that women can also do anything,’ says Erika Ensign, a founding member of the Verity podcast, which has a rotating cast of six female Who fans. At the age of five, Ms Ensign, a native of Wisconsin in the US, began watching the series on PBS. Her all-time favourite companion is Romana (played by Mary Tam from 1978 to 1979), who is a Time Lady and also from Gallifrey.

‘As a little kid I really appreciated seeing a companion who was every bit as smart as the Doctor, maybe a little bit more. It was the first time I saw the companion one-upping the Doctor on a fairly constant basis, and I really appreciated that,’ says Ensign.

The exact number of companions depends on your definition—do you count the robot dog K9? Do you count the commanding officer of UNIT, Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart?

And, of course, a number of the Doctor’s companions—or assistants as they were formerly known—were men. In the classic era there was action man Ian Chesterton, the brave (though dull) Harry Sullivan, maths genius Adric, and the untrustworthy Turlough. Since 2005, the males have reflected an increasing diversity, with the thrillingly non-heterosexual Captain Jack Harkness, the dark-skinned, working class Mickey Smith and Amy Pond’s beau, the gormless yet loyal Rory Williams.

But, it was really the female companions of the third and fourth Doctors (Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker) who established the role of the assistant as complex individuals with distinct capabilities—and perhaps no-one more so than the late Elizabeth Sladen’s Sarah-Jane Smith.

‘It's really hard to talk about Doctor Who and the companions as a whole without talking about Sarah Jane,’ says Tansy Rayner Roberts, a Tasmanian fantasy author who won the World Science Fiction Society’s prized Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2013 for her blog series, A Modern Woman’s Guide to Classic Who. ‘In some ways she’s the definitive companion, if there can be such a thing because, of course, they’re all so different.’

‘As a kid, [I liked] the fact that Sarah Jane Smith also had a job, she was a journalist, she was a writer, and she was a feminist. She stood up for herself, and if she didn't like what someone was saying she would argue back,’ says Ms Rayner Roberts.

Lynne M. Thomas, a Verity member and co-editor of several books including Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It, agrees Sarah Jane is a touchstone for the role of the female companion.

‘Sarah Jane I think is a very good example of the companion who is supposed to represent feminism at a point when the production team is just figuring out what this feminism thing is, even if often they give her things to do that are not particularly feminist,’ says Thomas.

On a functional level, the companion is a useful device, giving the audience someone to identify with and providing the Doctor with opportunities for scientific exposition.

‘The Doctor needs someone to talk to so that he can explain over and over again just how brilliant he is being,’ says Ms Thomas. ‘You also need someone to get into trouble over and over again so that the Doctor has the opportunity to save them.’

The role of the companion has certainly changed over the years, and Ms Thomas argues it tends to reflect the time in which the television series is made.

The burning question is about what really happens inside the ever-changing and logic-defying TARDIS. Are we supposed to assume that the Doctor has sex with his companions?

‘This is a big point of contention for us,’ says Ms Ensign, who has always felt that the relationships inside the TARDIS were essentially Platonic.

‘This is a very controversial issue in Doctor Who fandom as a whole,’ says Ms Rayner Roberts. ‘I agree that it has become more controversial in the modern day when there is sometimes more explicit romantic writing and acknowledgement.’

With the classic shows, Ms Rayner Roberts says the sexual aspect is ambiguous.

‘There are a lot of people who like to look back at the old show and read in romance, whether it's there or not,’ she says, adding that the waters were muddied after the real-life (though short-lived) marriage between Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, the second Romana.

‘Everybody knows they had a love affair while filming the show, and there is a certain chemistry between the Doctor and Romana. So, it almost feels like it is explicitly there, although they never go further than holding hands.’

Ms Rayner Roberts believes that the loosely defined sexuality of the classic series made the show more inclusive.

‘I know many people who feel that even though the modern show actually refers to same-sex couples, for instance, it has also in a lot of ways become more explicitly heterosexual because the Doctor seems to be more obviously written as fancying girls, whereas in the old days they didn't make it explicit that he fancied anybody, so people could put all sorts of alternate readings into it if they wanted to or if they felt that and saw it. It kind of makes it more inclusive.’

This shift in the latter years has met with some broader criticism, including an outcry over the episode ‘Flesh and Stone’ from the fifth series in which Amy Pond attempts to seduce the eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith).

In one scene Amy confronts the Doctor about his previous companions and whether any of them had been ‘hot’.

‘Maybe one or two... I didn’t really notice,’ he replies, disingenuously.

The Doctor’s relationship with Rose Tyler is complex (there’s a kiss, and a happily-ever-after with clone of the tenth Doctor, David Tennant). The arrival of River Song and the ongoing narrative about her ‘marriage’ to the Doctor is a source consternation for some fans. But Ms Thomas points out that Song is not the Doctor’s first wife.

‘The Doctor has announced in previous incarnations that he was married before - I mean, Susan didn't come out of nowhere, she is the Doctor's granddaughter,’ she says. ‘That said, I think that when you have a show that runs for 50 years you take advantage of every possible storyline that you think might work, and when you have an actress like Alex Kingston who can do so much, you give her as much fodder as you possibly can.’

The Who Girls: 50 years of women in the Tardis Friday 15 November 2013 As the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who looms, The List looks at how his female companions have changed over half a century. More This [series episode segment] has image,

It's a curious coincidence that the 50 years of Doctor Who has been paralleled by 50 years of James Bond, who of course had a very, different series of companions - most of whom were bikini-clad glamorous vixens who ended up meeting a dreadful death or ending up in bed with Bond, or both.

But where Bonds' relationships with women have been very straightforward, are the Doctor’s more problematic?

‘The James Bond comparison is really interesting,’ say Ms Rayner Roberts. ‘And whenever people go on about how terrible and sexist '60s Doctor Who is with the screaming and the spraining ankles and stuff, I always get kind of cross. It's like, do you know what else was around at the time? Not only James Bond but the Carry On movies, which I loved as a kid but I look at them now and the betrayal of women is quite shocking. And because sex was taken out of the equation [with Doctor Who] because it was aimed at a family audience ... apart from the occasional costume choices, they didn't have women there to be romantically or sexually available to the Doctor, and that actually meant that the woman got often to do more interesting things.'

And yet, despite the incalculable influence of these extraordinarily diverse and strongly individual female characters as gender models, the discourse remains focused on the Doctor.

Even the Twelfth Doctor, who is to be played by Peter Capaldi, and won’t actually appear until the 2013 Christmas special, is the subject of almost daily headlines. According to reports, Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor, thinks he’s ‘an accomplished actor’. The sixth Doctor, Colin Baker, is pleased Capaldi’s ‘a grown-up... not like these 12 year-olds we’ve had lately’. There’s now speculation about the thirteenth Doctor, as apparently the former foul-mouthed star of The Thick Of It has only been signed for 13 episodes.

However long he lasts, Capaldi, at 55 will be the oldest Doctor since the first Doctor, the late William Hartnell. Does this signal a return to a more chaste relationship with his companions?

‘Oh golly, I hope so,’ says Ms Ensign. ‘I am definitely one of the folks who like an asexual Doctor and no hanky-panky in the TARDIS, [although] Peter Capaldi is a very, very attractive man.'

‘I don't think the show dared to skew this old with the main actor until it had established itself so ...this is a little bit of a bold move, and I am very excited to see where it goes.’

Find out more at The List.

