What if monsters came in a range of rainbow colors?

There’s an old saw in Doctor Who circles, apparently going back to the thirtieth anniversary documentary “More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS” (and perhaps the originally broadcast version, which lacked the “More Than”), when long-time script editor Terrance Dicks famously pointed out a de facto trend in design on the show: “The colour for monsters is green.”

It sounds a little odd, stated baldly that way, but upon reflection it’s clearly true. There are the Silurians and Sea Devils, Alpha Centauri, the Draconians, the Krynoids, the Rutans, the Jagaroth… The list goes on and on. And if any of the aforementioned can be argued to be anything other than green, it’s a muddy brown instead.

Occasionally we’ll see something further into the red part of the spectrum—the Zygons, for example—but other hues are distinctly lacking. Where are the bright yellow critters, or the blue ones? I guess we’ve had the golden Axonites in The Claws of Axos and the occasional blue-faced humanoid (e.g., Dorium Maldovar), but in the grand scheme of things, the pre-Hiatus palette in particular definitely trends to green.

Continuity is a tricky thing in Doctor Who. Due to the nature of the beast, with a plethora of writers contributing to the “canon” (a loaded, debatable term), contradictions abound. For large things, like humanity becoming aware of non-Terrestrial life, a showrunner will usually find a way to smooth over the issue with a clever (or not-so-clever) retcon. A few such instances were highlighted recently in an article at the Houston Press.

However, sometimes rather egregious inconsistencies remain unaddressed. Other times, writers throw in ideas that some fans simply find distasteful (while others, of course, couldn’t care less). There is at least one of the former category—and several of the latter—that still irritate me. Here are some of the blips in the Doctor’s adventures I’d like to see sorted.

I’ll start with the actual discontinuity, which involves the Blinovich Limitation Effect (BLE). First mentioned in Day of the Daleks, and later in Invasion of the Dinosaurs, the BLE began as a vague hand wave to explain (without explaining) why our heroes couldn’t simply go back and try again and again if they failed their mission the first time. Later, in Mawdryn Undead, we learned that an extension (or corollary, perhaps) of the Effect meant that if two versions of the same individual from different points on their personal timeline were to touch, there could be catastrophic effects.

[Note: In case you saw yesterday’s post but didn’t click through to read the comments, YES, it was an April Fool’s joke. I’ve no plans to end the blog, despite the fact that the first paragraph was gospel truth.]

Last week I talked about how nice it would be to see more “bromance” in the TARDIS—that male-male bonding that doesn’t hinge on competition or other head-butting dynamics. But there’s another type of common human relationship that happens all the time in real life but is relatively rare in fiction. It’s a female-female bond I’m going to call sister-friends.

Think about the women you know (yourself included, if that’s how you identify)—family, friends, coworkers, random people at the grocery store, whatever. How often do you find women keeping the company of other women and how often are they with men? Alternatively, think specifically now about women you know well. Who are the handful of people with whom each woman has the closest relationships? Are those people exclusively men? Or are there other women in that innermost circle?

Now compare to what we see of the Doctor’s Companions (especially in the modern era). Starting with our current title holder, note that while Clara can get chummy with other women (as she only does when traveling with the Doctor, as far as we’ve ever seen), the people she actually spends time with are (a) the Doctor and (b) Danny. On rare occasions we’ve seen her with her father and/or her grandmother (or mentioning her long-dead mother), but those relationships are incredibly thinly developed on screen.

When I mention the Doctor’s Companions, who’s the first person who pops into your head? Is it the current or a recent Companion: Clara, or maybe Amy? Is it the first one you ever saw: Rose or Nyssa or Liz Shaw or even Susan? What about your all-time favorite (if it’s not one of those I’ve already named): Sarah Jane, Jo, Ace, Barbara…?

When I say “Companion,” how often does a guy come to mind?

Even if we restrict the Companion count to television, there have been a great many folks who’ve traveled with the Doctor over the years. Using the fairly generous selection criteria on the relevant Wikipedia page, we get a total of fifty individuals, including such outliers as Kamelion and Adam Mitchell. Of those, seventeen are men (eighteen, if you count the male-presenting Kamelion; or nineteen if you include male-voiced K-9). That’s roughly 35%.

More strictly, if one doesn’t include those who were only on one adventure (like Sara Kingdom or Jackson Lake) or didn’t have their names in the opening credits (like Adam), but does include regular UNIT staff (the Brigadier, Sgt. Benton, and Capt. Yates), the Companion count comes in closer to thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Eleven or twelve of those are men (depending on whether or not you count Jack Harkness), or about 30%.