Why It’s Time For A Minority Companion

Guest contributor Isabel Pelech explains.

With Jenna Coleman gone to become Queen, it’s time for Doctor Who fandom to speculate about who the next companion is going to be. Obviously, we’re all bystanders to the casting process; in the absence of leaks, we won’t even know about it until it’s over. However, if I had one piece of input to give the creators of Doctor Who, I would ask them to make the new companion a member of a minority group—to write that into the part from the beginning, rather than rely on a powerful young actress to make herself known. Here’s why.

It seems like it should be an intuitive process: advertise a part, audition actors and actresses, choose the best one. In practice, it doesn’t seem to work out that way. Series 5 of Doctor Who was made without much deliberate attention to diversity, and it shows, not only in the main characters, but in the background casting. There are a number of reasons why this happens, starting with purely unconscious bias. Studies show that even when people are very much against prejudice in all forms, their amygdala—the “split second judgment call” center of the brain—often produces negative associations based on racial appearance. Harvard’s IAT project gives a pretty good rundown of the practical effects of this. It’s not intentional, it’s not conscious, it’s certainly not a measure of a person’s character, and it’s often overridden by the brain’s cognitive centers, but unconscious biases do have a measurable effect. That effect is almost certainly magnified in situations such as casting calls. Casting is an art, not a science, and the deciding vote will often come down to “gut feeling”—which is all very well, except when your gut is actively lying to you.

Still, specifically writing for a minority companion may seem like an unnecessarily large over-correction. I think it’s a worthwhile endeavor, in part, because of what a minority companion could do for Doctor Who as a program. When you look at the numbers for New Who, the diversity among companions doesn’t look that bad. Out of the main five—Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, and Clara—Martha is black, and Clara is strongly implied to be bisexual.

Secondary companions include Mickey, a black man, and Jack Harkness, an extremely open pansexual. However, Doctor Who has a fifty year history, and not all of that history has been kind to minorities. Martha is the first full-time black companion in the entire history of Who. There has never been an Asian companion onscreen. There has never even been an Irish companion onscreen, or a Jewish companion. (Carole Ann Ford is Jewish, but I think it can be safely assumed that Susan followed no Earth religion.) There has also never been a disabled companion onscreen. Amy Pond shows some symptoms of mental illness, but given that most of her issues are caused by superscience, she’s more of a metaphor for mental illness than a straightforward case of it.

This means several things. First, people who belong to those minority groups are a bit left out in the cold. It’s always possible, of course, to empathize with someone who’s different from you, but it’s depressing to notice that “you,” or people like you, never get to be the hero. This is especially hard on children, and Doctor Who is a family program. As a matter of idealism, I feel like Doctor Who should have something for everybody. You may not find it in the current companion, or even the current era, but somewhere in the huge history of the show, there ought to be something that sings to you. Doctor Who is unique. It encompasses fifty years of fiction, all kinds of fiction, from television to prose, from audio plays to video games. There should be room in this sprawling, deadly, silly, contradictory, complex, emotional, and occasionally exquisite universe for anyone who wants to get on the ride. If there isn’t, we make some.

Secondly, making Doctor Who diverse makes it reflect the real world. The universe of Doctor Who not only has frequent alien incursions, but organizations which were formed to deal with alien incursions as a matter of routine. It contains everything from malevolent water to cute animated fat. The program may be at its most brilliant when it’s daring and bizarre, but that’s also the place where it runs the risk of floating away from reality like an untethered balloon, leaving us with no familiar points of reference. This means that verisimilitude, if not realism, is an important part of creating the Doctor Who universe. Rose may have ascended briefly to godhood, but she started in a shop. Clara may have spawned reflections across half of space and time, but her students are still unruly teenagers and way too interested in her love life. Diversifying the program adds to that verisimilitude.

Third, there’s the fact that diversity leads to new and interesting story possibilities. Imagine an episode set in ancient Egypt (really, who doesn’t want an episode set in ancient Egypt?) Imagine the setting with a white companion—let’s say Donna—and then reimagine it with Martha. Different avenues present themselves. Different complications, different bluffs, different excuses on the psychic paper. Perhaps Martha is mistaken for Egyptian nobility, giving her an opportunity to meet with a major historical figure. For instance, Imhotep the engineer would be a prime target for anyone, time traveler or alien, seeking to prevent technological progress on Earth; what if Martha saved him from assassination? As a genius, how long would it take him to figure out that Martha isn’t what she seems, and how would he react? Although it would be possible to write a story in which Donna and the Doctor meet Imhotep, there is no way to make it the same story. The more diverse the casting, the greater the likelihood that some writer will find a plot that couldn’t exist with any other companion—and it might be a really good one.

Lastly, there’s us. I don’t know about you, but the thought of my gut instincts lying to me makes me angry. My conscious mind is full of information, experience, and ideals; why does my amygdala even get a vote? But the truth is, our gut instincts wouldn’t be working against us if society didn’t conspire to feed them bad data, and a surprisingly large amount of that bad data comes from fiction. If you don’t see minority heroes, your gut doesn’t look for them. If you mostly see minority villains, your gut certainly expects to see them. If most of your fiction shows people in a group acting a specific way, whether that way is dangerous, vulnerable, or heroic, sensible or emotional, shy or flirtatious, your brain will be primed to see those attributes. It doesn’t entirely make sense, and a race of logical robots would doubtless arrange it differently, but part of our ability to see others as complete human beings is shaped and refined by our fiction. So I would appeal to the producers and writers of Doctor Who to do what the program has always been best at: show us something new. Show us something exciting. Show us something that might, in some tiny way, make us better for seeing it.

Do it for the amygdalas.