The Worst To Best Companions Of The 'Doctor Who' Revival

It's tough work being a companion to a centuries-old time-travelling alien who has seen more things and places and people than most humans could even begin to conceive — so it's little wonder that, especially since Doctor Who was revived in 2005, the Doctor's companions have tended to wear themselves out pretty quickly. Even Jenna Coleman, who plays current companion Clara, is looking to exit the series by Christmas.

With skeezy gamblers already placing their bets as to who will replace the exiting Coleman — highest odds are on Game Of Thrones star Rose Leslie, closely followed by new Doctor Peter Capaldi's former Thick Of It co-star Chris Addison — and a new season just started, it seems fitting (...for some reason) to rank the companions the Doctor has dragged into his box of intergalactic madness over the past few years.

Now, to be absolutely clear — the only people who qualify for this list are the "primary" companions who have joined Doctors Nine through Eleven during the first seven seasons of the revival. This means: no Adam. No Jack Harkness (sorry). No River Song (not sorry; she's really more the Doctor's equal, amirite?). No Jenny, Vastra or Strax (sorry). Nobody from Doctors One through Eight (kind of sorry, I guess).

And no Kylie Minogue.

OK. With that out of the way, in order of worst to best, in terms of overall value to the Doctor as both humans and actual space-faring companions:

5. the ponds (s5-7.1)

Before you blow up at me, you have to know that I feel at least a little bit bad about ranking the long-serving Ponds, the parents of (really belated spoilers, sweetie) River Song, dead last.

To tell the truth, if Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) weren't such a package deal, the latter would be placed more towards the middle, sheerly for the value he brings to his wife's trans-planetary field trip with the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith), in terms of humanity and utility as a companion.

Rory does not ever suffer the Doctor's shit; he hangs around protecting Amy for nearly 2000 years while she is trapped in the Pandorica (if you don't watch the show, I really don't know what to tell you); and he dies and is resurrected more times than I can be bothered counting right now — all that, and still he gets anchored to the bottom. Why?

Because Amy is useless as a companion. After meeting the Doctor at the age of seven, she spent the next twelve years utterly obsessing over the sky-fallen raggedy man who would one day return to save her and show her the stars — and when he did, she tried to bone him and then spent the entire time getting kidnapped, or mind-wiped, or trapped for 2000 years or accidentally freeing time-warping entities that get all paradoxical on the timeline's shit, and generally screws everything up for everybody.

Meanwhile, the Doctor just stood around giggling about how cute it all was, because he never actually managed to separate Amy Pond, the woman he brought on as a companion, from Amy Pond, the little girl he'd met only minutes before. Because, after all, it's easy to forget that, when he met her — both versions of her — Eleven was technically only a child himself, and, after the TARDIS-destroying tumult of the death and regeneration of Ten (David Tennant), it's unsurprising that he regressed somewhat.

Two grown children on an all-powerful spaceship with an exasperated, ancient nurse-warrior keeping watch. It's a total disaster, when you think about it.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Clara "Oswin" Oswald, the Impossible Girl, who pseudo-joined Eleven twice in different time periods before Clara Prime came on as full-time companion following the departure of the Ponds. I say "other end of the spectrum", because where the Ponds — well, at least Rory, less so "The Girl Who Waited And Had A Giant Temporal Crack In Her Bedroom Wall" — had a decent amount of humanity in them, Clara's ultra-utilitarian nature as the girl who let herself be strewn throughout time and space to save the Doctor's many incarnations, in some ultra-British version of Groundhog Day that doesn't even have Bill Murray in it, ultimately removes any hope she has of being a relatably human companion.

Sadly, she also kind of suffers from having been handed some of the weakest, or least memorable, adventures of the revival, but more than that, she suffers from Eleven's doe-eyed crush/all-consuming fascination with solving the mystery of Oswin Oswald, rather than actually ever stopping to get to know her. Even when he's dying, he hallucinates golden girl Amy right after Clara quite literally screamed her way through time-space to give him another chance at, you know, not being a dead man. His simultaneous reverence and yet complete disregard for her is completely baffling at times — but who knows, maybe it's just that pairing that never really gelled with me, and she and Twelve will have a better dynamic.

I may reconsider her placing at a future date. But it's gonna be hard. The top three are nigh unshakeable.

BOOM. Weren't expecting that, were you? Yeah, you probably thought beloved first companion Rose (Billie Piper) was going to cruise her way straight to number one, or at least maybe two, but sorry, friends, I'm here to upset you. It's what I do.

Don't get me wrong — Rose is, inarguably, an all-time great companion. She was as human as they come, a happy-go-lucky shop assistant who travelled the skies and brought immeasurable joy to, and out of, Nine (Christopher Ecclestone), freshly regenerated and hardened in the throes of having been born of the Time War; she showed Ten what it is to love and be loved, in a way no other companion has; and she was Bad Wolf, temporary goddess, omnipotent being, and saviour of Jack Harkness/everyone ever.

At the same time, she was kind of a not-so-great companion, too — responsible for no less than one (pretty major) time paradox, which resulted in dinosaurs flying around England, while the very humanity she brought to Nine and, especially, Ten was as much a curse as it was a blessing, because she was also kind of a — and, Jesus, do I tread ever so lightly in using this word — distraction for Ten, in the totally cold, scientific, Doctor-on-a-mission-as-well-as-an-adventure kind of sense, and it was ultimately the romantic blurring of the lines — a new experience for the Doctor, remember, at least with a companion — that led to their heartbreaking separation in Doomsday at the end of season two.

Don't worry, I'm not gonna post a picture. I'm not a monster.

However, it is worth noting that, after she was no longer a permanent companion, Rose did bring a hefty degree of usefulness to the table again in the form of being a dimension-hopping badass, but it might've been a little too little, too late by that point.

Ooh, yes, now we're getting contentious. Donna (Catherine Tate) often gets maligned by Whovians for a number of reasons, mostly centring on her perceptibly average life and demeanour and accent and the like. But those aspects of Donna are all things the show pretty much all but slapped us in the face with during her run as a companion, specifically to demonstrate by proxy precisely how special — and yet utterly human — she was.

And, although other companions ranked lower on this list were also just as human, Donna stands out uniquely in that her humanity is by and large a lot of the value that she brings to the TARDIS and her time with Ten. When she first met him, during The Runaway Bride, before she even became his full-time companion, she could read him well enough to know that he was not a man in a state to be travelling the universe alone. He'd lost a planet. He'd lost a love. He'd lost — to his knowledge — the last remaining member of his species in a grand one-on-one fight for the fate of reality. And Donna saw through the affable jester mask and knew that he was one bad day away from going on an all-out space rampage, so she dedicated herself to finding him again.

Unlike Amy Pond, though, Donna had no interest in the Doctor to begin with, per se — it was his life she was fascinated by. There is a universe out there, after all. And, yes, increasingly, she did come to know and very much like the Doctor, which is another point that puts Donna so high on the list — in the entire revival, she has (other than, obviously, Rory) been the only full-time companion who has been a real, true, friend to the Doctor. Not a love interest or an infatuated non-interest or a crush/pet project; a mate. A good, old-fashioned, mate, right when he needed it most.

Hell yeah, Donna Noble.

Let's talk about Martha motherfucking Jones, shall we? Well, to begin with, she's a doctor in her own right, with, much like fellow medical professional Rory, specialist qualifications in the field of Not Taking The Doctor's Crap as well as Being Dedicated Beyond Reproach.

Granted, her one major weakness comes in the form of her unrequited adoration for Ten, who spends their season together overlooking the ridiculous efforts to which Martha is going to prevent him from spiralling even further into post-Rose mopiness and re-creations. That's kind of the one stain on her otherwise iron-clad resume, which includes that one time she woke up a regular doctor who then suddenly found her hospital on the moon and handled it like a brass-spined champion, or consequently ending up a fully-fledged Amazon-esque warrior as The Master, UNIT, and everyone else between here and fourteen suns away bore down upon her and her Gallifreyan Time Lord friend.

Ultimately, it's the strength that Martha displays during her one season with the Tenth Doctor that puts her atop the list as the "best" of the companions — for while she shares some of their faults, specifically the "falling in love with the Doctor" thing, she realises that he's all caught up on Rose still and, even though she supports the Doctor and his cause unconditionally, she gets the job done, and then she gets out, on her terms. None of the other companions of the revival can say that, at least so far.

Martha quite literally walked the Earth for a full year spreading the legend of the Doctor to help the third season's finale move towards its incredibly fucking stupid conclusion, which — despite the end result — is an act of soldier-like discipline, and monk-like dedication and belief in something that, again, none of the other companions have really had to endure.

She did that for a man she loved, knowing he was too blinded by his loss at the time to notice, and then she just got up and got out. No muss, no fuss. And she didn't bail on just any crush, mind you — the Doctor is someone who could legitimately make good on a promise to show you the universe, at any time of its life. Could you be Martha Jones?