20 years ago, Doctor Who returned to the BBC and the Ninth Doctor – Christopher Eccelston in a leather jacket, wry and warlike in equal measure – took Rose Tyler by the hand, telling her to run.
'Rose' was the name of their first episode together, and it announced the arrival of what would go on to become possibly the most important fixture of the revival: the role played by the companion.
The Doctor's companion serves as a kind of surrogate for the audience; they are awestruck – or confused – by the same things that we are, asking questions about time travel and far-off planets that we would want answers to. It's no wonder then, that the best of those companions are the ones that feel deeply human.
In the first episode of the Doctor Who revival, Rose and the eponymous Time Lord find themselves battling against the Nestene Consciousness, a disembodied life force that possessed plastic shop window dummies, and turned them into murderous Autons.
As she prepares to save The Doctor from the clutches of the Autons, Rose says to herself, "I've got no A-Levels, no job, no future. But I'll tell you what I have got: Jericho Street Junior School Under-7s gymnastic team. I got the bronze!" She grabs onto a chain and swings on it to free The Doctor, knocking a vial of anti-plastic solution into the Nestene Consciousness.
In this scene, Rose doesn't use alien technology to save The Doctor. She simply relies on childhood gymnastics. Rose's problems in life are also deeply human: no job, no sense of direction, an uncertainty about her relationship. But not all companions have been written with this human perspective; there have been much more high-concept companions like Clara Oswald and Amy Pond, who have complicated relationships with The Doctor that span time and space.
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And now, 20 years later, there's Belinda Chandra (played by Varada Sethu). When we're introduced to Belinda in the new-season premiere, titled 'The Robot Revolution', her shift at the hospital is coming to an end.
There are fragments of her talking to patients, detailing in rapid-fire the medications that someone is on as they're wheeled through hospital corridors on a gurney. In the background of all this, the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) is frantically dashing around the hospital looking for something, or someone.
"There's a doctor looking for you," one of Belinda's colleagues says to her before she leaves the hospital for the night. "Yeah, tell me about it."
Belinda's home life is just as chaotic as her work. In a cramped house share, where none of the people seem to like each other very much, there's a sense that Belinda might just want to run away from it all. Above her bed is a certificate proudly declaring her ownership of a star, a gift from a childhood romance.
Outside of her window is the rumbling of a spacecraft, but it doesn't have the familiar thrum of a TARDIS. Out of it emerge robots that kidnap Belinda and take her to a planet where they claim she is queen. Even when she's being kidnapped, she complains about her landlord, and asks a neighbour to make sure her parents know she loves them.
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It's here, trying to escape capture, that she meets The Doctor for the first time and finds herself falling in with the human resistance, fighting back against the robots that rule the planet.
It's the way Belinda dives into the resistance, immediately asking what she can do to help and how these far-flung medical supplies work, that bring to mind Rose's display of gymnastics in her first adventure with the Ninth Doctor. For the show, this shows an understanding that the best thing the companions can bring with them is a sense of their lives before the Doctor, their inherent humanity.
This emerges in Belinda's first conversations with The Doctor as well. She's more than able to meet him on his level, bemoaning the ways in which, amid the hard work of nurses, there's always a doctor there in the background to take the credit. She's bemused about why the robots would want her in the first place, insisting that she's "not special".
In many ways, she isn't – something that the episode leverages in order to make Belinda, and her relationship with The Doctor, feel dynamic. And as tensions flare between them, it brings with it another memory of a great companion from the past: Catherine Tate's Donna Noble.
There's a grounded humanity to Belinda, a refusal to get swept away in The Doctor's world. Even in her first appearance, Belinda feels like a complete person, and we see this in the way that she interacts with The Doctor throughout 'The Robot Revolution'.
Everything that she does is informed by those fragments of her life that we saw back on Earth – not just her willingness to get stuck in, but her frustration at a world that seems set on taking her for granted.
And more than that, she's fallible and allowed to make mistakes, only adding to a sense of authenticity.
Doctor Who is a show that's been constantly evolving since it was first revived two decades ago. While at first glance, the crux of that evolution is the changing nature of The Doctor in each of their regenerations, 'The Robot Revolution' serves as a reminder of just how important the companion is as a role – and how much their proximity to Earth, and to the audience, is what gives the show that special spark of life.
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Sam Moore is a culture writer from the UK, writing mainly about film, TV and music for the likes of The Guardian, GQ, The Independent and many more. He is currently working on a book about the making of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
