Doctor Who: 10 Essential Changes To Make With Peter Capaldi's Doctor

1. Companions (Part Two)

One of these days, just for a change, it would be wonderful beyond description if a companion left the Doctor a 'Dear John' letter and just slipped away quietly in the night.

Once upon a time, the role of the companion was clear: they'd run through lots of corridors behind the Doctor, they'd scream a bit, they'd conveniently sprain their ankles tripping over tiny little tufts of grass, they'd scream hysterically as they fell down embankments with a lesser gradient than the average speed hump, they'd ask the Doctor lots of scene-setting questions, there'd be a bit more screaming, running and falling and that was basically it. Typically, they'd only known him all of five minutes before somehow convincing themselves (or being convinced) that they wanted to go travelling with him and, once safely tucked away inside the blue box, there was rarely any reference to their pre-TARDIS life, nor to when €“ or even if €“ they were likely to get home, nor to how they'd explain away their absence if they ever did. Then before you knew what was happening, they were gone again. If they'd been around for a while and you'd become especially fond of them you might've shed a tear or two, but that was about it. Like the Doctor, you'd just maintain a stiff upper lip and carry on as normal. By the time the next episode rolled around, it was as if the dearly departed companion had never been there at all. New Who's not quite like that. It's big and bold and climactic. Companions still scream a bit. Some of them scream a lot. Some of them fall in love with the Doctor. Some of them have their own boyfriends, fiancés or husbands. Some of them aren't even girls. But these days they all have one thing in common €“ instead of just being good old-fashioned reliable supporting characters and co-stars, they get some bigger-than-Ben-Hur sub-plot about who they are or where they're from or why they're there and viewers and fans alike spend entire series trying to work out what the hell's going on. With each new companion, you just know there's going to be some elaborate back-story that will either come out from the off, or leak out over the course of a series or two. These days it's almost inevitable that there'll be some mysterious force behind them coming into contact with the Doctor in the first place. Even if there isn't, a suitably vague clue will ensure the seed is well and truly planted in viewers' minds, so everyone believes this new one isn't going be just any old lodger in the TARDIS. But I don't need all of that! I don't need companions to be saviours of the universe, I really don't. I don't need them to have a complex story arc behind how and why they've come to be with the Doctor. I don't need a mystery about who they really are. I don't need them to be the only person in the universe who can possibly save the Doctor and I don't want them to have to sacrifice themselves in the process of doing so. I don't need the companion to become a Time Lord. I don't need them to save the Earth. I don't need people all across the universe singing songs of praise to their memory or their God-like status. I don't need them to have every memory of the time they spent with the Doctor erased just to prevent them from dying. I don't need them to fall head over heels in love with the Doctor, then be sent to parallel universe and never be able to come back. And I don't need them to be sent back in time to live the life they just saw themselves at the end of during some unparadoxical timey-wimey paradox thing. Most importantly, I don't need to be emotionally broken and psychologically scarred by the departure of each and every companion! Why must it always be so dramatic and so desperately sad? Why can't they just decide that it's stopped being fun and give it up, or fall in love with some random and decide in the last three seconds of the episode to stay put and marry them? Why can't they go for a post-hypnotic rest in a country house, then ask someone off-screen to let the Doctor know that they're never coming back and just never come back? Seriously, there are so many beautifully simple ways it could happen €“ "no regrets, no tears, no anxieties". Had Martha not gone back into the TARDIS to deliver her touching "this is me, getting out" soliloquy to Doctor 10, it would've been perfect. When she got the chance to say goodbye the second time, she nailed it! She hadn't been yearning for an escape when she'd first met him, she didn't become anything that was wholly beyond the realms of believability while she was with him (except maybe that whole walking across the entire world for a year thing) and then she left. While her first farewell made unrequited love seem the most obvious reason, her second departure thankfully offered Martha a far more substantial out. And then she was gone. Capaldi's Doctor€“ keep it simple. Randomly find them, take them travelling, let them leave... and at even the slightest hint of complexity, get rid of them!