Doctor Who: 5 Ways To Ruin A Companion Departure (And One Way To Get It Right)

3. The 'I'm Sorry, You're Doing WHAT Now? We touched on Mel's departure a moment ago, and hers is definitely an example of this phenomenon. 'Yes Doctor, after 6 adventures of being a slightly bossy fitness enthusiast who may or may not be at the high functioning end of Asperger's syndrome (there's a solid argument to be made there) I've decided with no warning to travel the universe with a shady con-man in a completely different century with no way of ever getting home. Late's, brah.' The overarching sense that it's impossible to ignore - The writers wanted to get rid of her and didn't think it was worth even bothering to come up with a plausible reason. This is the Chuck Cunningham solution taken one step further. Instead of simply not giving the companion an exit scene and then pretending they never existed, here the script actually compounds the insult by giving them a reason for leaving so random, so out of the blue, and so utterly not in keeping with anything the character has ever said or done before that you're left wondering if the writers have ever actually watched the program before. It goes beyond being disrespectful to the character and enters the realm of openly insulting. When had Vicki ever expressed any interest in being stuck in pre-history for the sake of getting hitched? At what time had Steven shown the slightest interest (or ability for that matter) in public administration? And for the love of all that's small and furry, Nyssa was clearly a specialist in Bio-electronics, not Research Chemistry. They sort of mentioned it 5 or 6 thousand times in previous stories. Yet suddenly she opens up Terminus by indulging this never before mentioned passion for synthesizing enzymes, solely because the production team have decided that having her stay behind with a bunch of randy drug addicts to 'breed cultures' is a neat way of writing her out. The really egregious part about this is that not three stories earlier they had the triumphant(ish) return of the Cybermen. The Cybermen. If there was ever a villain that screamed for the input of an expert bio-electronic engineer, it's the freakin' Cybermen!But No, we were too busy planning to throw Matthew Waterhouse at a planet at that point, so Nyssa had to spend the whole story in the TARDIS watching Tegan change clothes with other women, and the opportunity was lost. If a long running character is going to leave, it would be nice if their reasons for leaving didn't openly contradict everything we knew about the character for no good reason.