The Doctor’s new companion doesn’t want to be here, ‘And she’s right,’ says showrunner

There are more Doctor Who companions than there have ever been Doctors, and while they’re all unique in their own ways, there’s still a familiar pattern: The Doctor as the mysterious alien with the keys to all of time and space, and the companion as the eager adventurer, ready to be whisked away to a life of glorious discovery and thrilling peril. 

But this weekend’s premiere episode of the show’s newest season gives the usual formula a deliberate flip. To showrunner Russell T. Davies, it’s all about expanding the emotional range of Doctor Who. And for the actors playing the Doctor and his new companion Belinda Chandra, it was about partnership on screen and off. 

[Ed. Note: This piece contains mild spoilers for the first episode of Doctor Who season 2 on Disney Plus, also known as Doctor Who series 15.]

In “The Robot Revolution,” Belinda is kidnapped by robots, wrapped up in an alien revolution, and between her own smarts and the Doctor’s, saves the day — and makes her position on it all very clear at the end of the episode. She’d like the Doctor to take her home. Now, please. She is not about this very dangerous life, and she has responsibilities at home. 

That’s a surprising enough swerve on the usual Doctor/companion dynamic that we decided to ask Doctor Who’s stars and showrunner about it. Speaking Polygon via video chat, Davies said that the idea behind Belinda was absolutely to present a different kind of companion.

“I think Belinda simply has an awful lot of common sense,” he said. “That’s why she’s older than Ruby. I wanted to extend the range of the show; in extending the range of the show, you extend the range of the Doctor as well, which is always crucial.” Davies raised the example of last season’s companion character (who will return for season 2 in a smaller role), Ruby Sunday, a 18-year-old foster child played by then-18-year-old actress Millie Gibson, who was very much on board with the adventure of it all. 

“It’s great to swing the program around and say, ‘What if you’re not so enchanted? What if you’re Belinda?’ Belinda is right in looking at this man and sort of saying, You live a mad life, and a dangerous life.” Davies cited several of the dangers Belinda and the Doctor faced in “The Robot Revolution” and will face soon in the new season. 

“I think Belinda’s right,” he said, to want to go home right away. “And I think the more you acknowledge that, the more you open the emotional range of the show, and then the more people can join in. There must be people at home sitting, going, ‘That man’s mad! I wouldn’t join up with him!’ I’d like to think I’d be Ruby Sunday. I suspect I’d actually be Belinda Chandra Going ‘Get me home right now!’”

In a separate video interview, Belinda’s actress, Varada Sethu, told Polygon that she found Belinda and the Doctor’s dynamic to be “really, really interesting,” because “it puts this friction that enriched the evolution of [their] whole relationship. There was this equal push element, back to the Doctor. The Doctor saying, ‘No, come on this adventure.’ She’s like, ‘No, I have my adventure. I want to go back to mine, not yours.’ The whole season is their relationship, basically, and the love and the trust and the deep friendship that they have, in learning to love and respect each other and wanting to get her home because that’s what she wants. It lends itself really easily to a good story and a good team when there’s just as much… What am I trying to say?”

“Power, I feel,” the Doctor actor Ncuti Gatwa supplied, with Sethu agreeing: “They’re real equals.” 

Sethu said that she and Gatwa discovered that dynamic in last season’s episode, “Boom,” in which she guest starred as the futuristic Anglican Marine soldier Mundy Flynn. 

“Even just in the three weeks that we were filming on ‘Boom,’” Sethu told Polygon, “I felt like we found our rhythm. Because Mundy and the Doctor have a similar kind of… antagonist…”

“Trajectory,” Gatwa suggested. 

“Push pull kind of thing,” she agreed. “We found that rhythm. We had had that already.” 

Gatwa said that the Doctor and Belinda’s equal narrative footing in the season was very reflective of he and Sethu’s working relationship and vice versa. “Everything bleeds into one another,” he said. “What happens on set bleeds into life, in life bleeds into the set. And so it just felt like we were partners throughout the whole thing, which was very cool.” 

Doctor Who series 15 is currently airing on BBC One and, as season 2, on Disney Plus.