What Makes a Great Companion Departure?

Guest contributors George Wellard and James Kirkland look at past examples from the revival.

Clara Oswald’s departure is just on the horizon and it has left the fandom with all sorts of hopes of how the Impossible Girl will bid farewell and wondering whether her exit will be any good. We’ll be discussing just that, giving our thoughts on how she can receive the best possible exit she deserves by looking back on previous departures in the New Series and how it should apply to departures of the future.

Making a Statement

When we say goodbye to any character, it is normally supposed to be the last we’ll ever see of them again so you want to leave on a good final impression.

Exits should generally say something about those characters to remind you just why you love them and why you’ll be sad to see them go. If you look at Amy’s it speaks a lot about her devotion to Rory, how she’s ultimately grown up and prepared to face a proper married life (admittedly in harsh circumstances) compared to the girl in Series 5 who wanted the night before her wedding to be as long as she wanted. Despite the Doctor’s anguish that he’ll never see them again, it was touching to see how far Amy had grown.

Another example is Rose’s ending which is ultimately about her love for the Doctor, something that has come to define her. In the end it was Rose’s desperation to stay with the Doctor that was the thing that separated them.

Obviously a departure should also feel at home with a companion’s story. To look at a few examples, Martha’s exit fits perfectly well with her story. Having spent most of Series 3 being treated as second best to Rose, and seeing the threat to her family that being the Doctor’s companion brought, she ultimately decides that traveling with the Doctor isn’t really worth it. Therefore, she walks away. It shows some remarkable growth from someone who was rather charmed by the Tenth Doctor to someone who became much more independent and in the end didn’t need him, just as he started to appreciate her more.

Donna’s serves as a tragic twist of fate. Having spent her life with low self-esteem she finally finds her place in the universe by becoming the “Doctor-Donna” and saving the whole of reality from the Daleks. However this becomes too much for her mind to take and the Doctor is forced to wipe away any trace of him from her memory. It’s a terribly sad bit of irony yet it works perfectly with her character. She truly felt at home traveling with the Doctor, and wanted to do it as long as she could. But, in her greatest moment with him, that future is taken from her forever.

An important thing to consider with a departure is emotion. It is an easy trap to fall into with a more tragic departure that they could over do it while at the same time a walk out departure could run the risk of the audience simply not caring enough. For example the Ponds departure is not something we are overly keen on, despite our earlier praise of the justice it does to Amy’s character; it tries too hard to make you sad. With Murray Gold’s score blasting as loud as it can and almost every present character in fits of tears it’s all just too much, the emotion is lost because it’s practically screaming at you “be sad!”. No matter how tragic something may be there needs to be a layer of subtlety, whether it is music or performances, so that the scene can speak for itself.

Returns

Main companion returns are a subject we feel rather passionate about as aside from two notable exceptions we think they have been handled poorly.

We’ll get the bad side out of the way first. Back in 2006 Rose Tyler left our screens, seemingly forever. Rose fans wept as she became trapped in another universe but in the end it was very well received and rightfully became an iconic moment. When it was announced that Rose would return in Series 4 there was a lot of excitement, unfortunately this came at the expense of not only her perfectly good ending in Doomsday but her whole character. After a badass start in Turn Left and the first five minutes of Stolen Earth, she is reduced to a lovesick puppy who in the end doesn’t contribute that much to the plot aside from pushing a Dalek. To add further insult to injury the Meta Crisis Doctor rears its head and gives Rose an undeserved happy ending. Now there is no problem with the idea Rose returning in the Series 4 finale, with every other companion returning it would have been unfair to leave her out, but the way it was handled undermined everything that came before and cheapened what is one of the most iconic scenes of the New Series.

Donna Noble also fell into the same trap in The End of Time. Having previously been told that if she ever remembers her time with the Doctor she will die, we find that instead she only passes out because the Doctor had added a “defence mechanism” just in case. Once again, not only is it a cheap cop out, but it totally ruins Donna’s previous ending and does a disservice to her story.

More controversially we believe the Ponds had the exact same thing when they seemingly left in The God Complex only to have that dropped in favour of The Angels Take Manhattan, which we found was much less satisfying. In The God Complex, the little girl had finally grown up and didn’t need her “imaginary friend” anymore. She was given a very mature and strong exit. And it fit perfectly with the very “fairy tale” motif that ran with Amy and Eleven.

It is a worrying thought that Clara (who at this point has had several pseudo-exits) could be the next in line in this trend. Her return, if she is ever to have one, must be organic and fit with her ending. Otherwise, it runs the risk of damaging her exit and all the emotion that came with it.

In the end these returns either shouldn’t have happened at all or should have been handled in a way that didn’t undermine what came before.

However there have been times where returns have been handled well and even benefited a character, specifically Martha Jones. Martha is a unique companion in the New Series, currently being the only one who simply walked out. When we met up with her again in The Sontaran Stratagem we discover how she has changed thanks to her experience as a companion. She is now working for UNIT and eventually becoming a freelance alien hunter which briefly raises the question on whether the Doctor set her on the right path after all. Having already had life after the Doctor explored with Sarah Jane Smith, it was an interesting new direction to take it and opened many possibilities for Martha’s character in the future despite having already left. But it showed that her time with the Doctor changed her, one could argue, for the better. She became stronger through her time with him, and leaving when she did gave her a brand new place in the world.

So how should the story of Clara Oswald end?

Really, there is no one way it should end. As long as her ending serves as a fitting end to her story, any ending could work wonderfully for her, be it death or a simple departure. If her ending is a tragedy, it need not be one for the sake of tragedy. Let it speak to the way her journey with the Doctor has changed her from when we first met her in The Bells of Saint John and how her time with him changed her, perhaps, in the end, not for the better.

On the other side of the coin, if it is to be a happy ending, don’t make it so uplifting and triumphant that it ignores the heartbreak, loss and growth that has come, or may yet to come, before it. If Clara’s end fits well with her story, it could be that rare gem that caps off her time in the TARDIS in an intelligent and heartfelt way. And, at the end of the day, that is truly the type of ending that all companions deserve when their time with the Doctor draws to a close…