Doctor Who companions as puzzles, not people

For a while, something has been bothering me about Amy and Clara, and I finally figured out that it's because they're fundamentally different from the companions that came before them.

Amy and Clara are the Doctor's companions because he notices something special about them and then he asks them to travel with him. He is drawn to a mystery that surrounds each woman.

Amy is the "girl who didn't make sense"¹ and Clara is an impossibility. After "Asylum of the Daleks" and "The Snowmen," the Doctor realizes there's something strange about Clara. He says:

The same woman, twice. And she died both times. The same woman! […] Something's going on. Something impossible, something.

The Doctor asked Amy to travel with him so he could figure out what was going on with the crack in her wall, and now he's pursuing Clara to figure out how she could be alive in different places, in different times.

This is different from Rose, Martha, and Donna.² Each of these women started out ordinary, not tied to a larger mystery, and the Doctor met them while he was investigating an alien problem on Earth. Rose, Martha, and Donna became special after traveling with the Doctor because he showed them other life and other planets. Rose sums up the change in the season 1 finale, "The Parting of the Ways":

The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. You know, he showed you too. That you don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand. You say no. You have the guts to do what’s right when everyone else just runs away.

Rose, Martha, and Donna travel with the Doctor because he wanted a friend along for the adventure and not because there was something special about them.³ But Amy and Clara start as puzzles. They go on adventures with the Doctor too, but at the same time he tries to figure out their strange circumstances.

Why the change?

I feel like Rose, Martha, and Donna are stand-ins for the audience. They travel with the Doctor and through them, we go on adventures in time and space.

It's not like that, though, with Amy and Clara. They are not stand-ins for the audience because the Doctor is trying to solve them. It has nothing to do with us, but we're asked to be interested in Amy and Clara because the Doctor is interested in them.

The other odd thing is, Rory follows the same pattern as Rose, Martha, and Donna, even though he comes to the show after them and at the same time as Amy. Before meeting the Doctor, Rory was an ordinary nurse in a small town. After traveling with the Doctor, he becomes the Roman Centurion (his own version of the previous companions' Defenders of the Earth). Traveling with the Doctor made Rory special in the same way it made Rose, Martha, and Donna special.

I don't know why there's this shift in how the Doctor meets new companions, but we've lost something important to the series. An ordinary, everyday person as companion served as our tether to the Doctor and his adventures. But now that the companion is a mystery for the Doctor to solve, she isn't our tether anymore. Losing that Normal Person Connection distances us from the Eleventh Doctor in a way that did not happen with the Ninth and Tenth Doctors.


¹ The full quote is "The Girl Who Didn't Make Sense. How could I resist?" ("The Big Bang", series 5, episode 13)

² I can't say anything about the companions in the classic episodes because I haven't seen many of them.

³ Each women ends up being special: Rose is the Bad Wolf, Martha saves the world, and Donna becomes the Doctor-Donna. These are results of (not causes for) traveling with the Doctor. None of these things would have happened to these women if they hadn't met him.