There are thousands of ways Danny could be an interesting character on his own without becoming a useless appendage like Adric, Harry Sullivan, and Mickey Smith all sometimes seemed to be. All it requires is for writers to show a little more ingenuity and give each character his or her own "beats." In script-writing, "beats" are the portions of a script where a character shows action or otherwise grows; in a balanced script, each character gets his or her own development, and this helps keep a story balanced. One excellent example of this can be found in a Third Doctor story called "Spearhead from Space," which started with "meteorites" made of plastic falling to Earth. (As a matter of historical interest, this was the first appearance of the Autons and the Nestene Consciousness, which later started off the modern series.) In this story, just about every character involved with the meteorites got some sort of beat, from the poacher who discovered one of the orbs to the soldiers of U.N.I.T. Now, this may make for longer stories, but it does guarantee that every character involved has some use. Besides, what's wrong with longer stories that take more than one episode, perhaps ending in cliff-hanger endings that create some cool suspense and expectation that may or may not be resolved right away at the start of the following episode? All this ads to the overall sense of fun to the series. Anyway, it's entirely possible that the rumors and clues related to Danny are all wrong in some way, and...
Michael Marcus is a game designer, author, and mad scientist living in Hamtramck, Michigan; his current project list include a series of comic short-stories collectively called "One-Punch," a book on hypnosis and language called "The Prometheus Codex," a collaborative game project called "Art War," and a fun spy story called "The Adventures of Jack Uzi" at http://tinyurl.com/JackUziChannel (for those interested).
