COMPANION RETROSPECTIVE

Vicki

Doctor: First (William Hartnell)

First episode: The Rescue | Final episode: The Myth Makers | (9 stories, 38 episodes)

May 2023

Screencap, possibly from The Rescue: Vicki stares at a point above the camera with a calculating or thoughtful look, tongue poking out the side of her mouth. She wears a black sort of smock with a high collar which has a zigzag pattern on it, and her hair is down, resting around her shoulders.

Oh man. Vicki.

I’ve been reading a lot of Elizabeth Sandifer’s old writing about Doctor Who lately (on Eruditorum Press), where she writes about old Doctor Who as a lens through which to view British history. It’s really fascinating stuff, and I highly recommend it. But she brings up a point that somehow I hadn’t considered in The Romans, Vicki’s first story as companion: Maureen O’Brien, Vicki’s actress, had to do the same thing that Patrick Troughton would have to do two years later. That is, she had to reinvent the wheel.

In 1966, William Hartnell left the role of the Doctor, and the character changed his face (and personality) to be portrayed by Patrick Troughton. Troughton had to inherit the character, trappings, and companions of his predecessor, while simultaneously reinventing the character in his own light without removing what came before. Which, despite being a tremendously hard task, he pulled off excellently, and Troughton’s Doctor is (rightly, in my book) thought of as one of the greats.

In 1964, Carole Ann Ford left the role of Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, as she was left behind on Earth to get married (more on that later). The writers immediately planned to replace her (the youngest of the four travelers) with another young woman, and cast Maureen O’Brien as Vicki, a youth and survivor of a space crash from the distant future. What’s interesting is that Vicki then proceeded to fully blow the character of Susan out of the water as a companion, fully superseding her in a way that is reminiscent of how Troughton’s younger, more energetic, less mercurial Doctor superseded Hartnell’s.

In short, Vicki is allowed to do everything Susan was not. No one ever really seemed to figure out how to write Susan: in her first episode, she was a mysterious and thoughtful teenager who knew more than she should, and then she promptly was shunted into the regular role of damsel-in-distress. Bar a few moments, Susan gets very little to do in the television series. Vicki, in contrast, is full of agency and spunk: she starts a revolution, gleefully hacks a computer or attempts to poison Emperor Nero, and when confronted with this fact, offers nothing more than a shrug and a smile. In The Chase, Vicki is given an entire episode or two of sneaking around a Dalek ship all by herself. Vicki is given so much to do, and she pulls it off excellently, with a grin and a laugh! And it works! Vicki is an extremely charismatic character, and this charisma not only sings throughout the episodes she stars in alongside Ian and Barbara but additionally her relationship with William Hartnell’s Doctor is something to behold. Oddly, she feels much more like a friend to him than Susan ever did.

Screencap, probably from Galaxy 4: a close shot of Vicki and the Doctor with their heads propped up on a rock, looking off to the left. Vicki grins. Her hair is in small pigtails at the nape of her neck.

Vicki actually manages to have chemistry on screen with just about every repeated character she appears next to: the Doctor, of course, first and foremost, but also Ian and Barbara (well. in as much as she ever appears alongside them), and especially a delightful bickering-siblings relationship with Peter Purves’ Steven, which we tragically only get for a few episodes. It’s one of the things that makes The Time Meddler such a fun watch: the throughline of these two future-people bickering about whether or not they’re in the past.

Oh, right. Vicki is also from the future. This comes up most when juxtaposed against Ian and Barbara, decidedly from 1963 in knowledge and mannerisms, and allows for yet another axis on which she is allowed more than Susan: not only is she allowed more agency, or a stronger relationship with the Doctor, but she even pulls off the oddly-youthful genius brilliantly. And when Ian and Barbara leave to be replaced with Steven, the TARDIS crew becomes entirely composed of people not of our Earth. Nevertheless, the show never loses its groundedness: the cast of the Doctor, Steven, and Vicki is one that I will never stop being disappointed we didn’t get more of. Maybe there’ll be some in the audio stories.

I’m comparing Vicki and Susan a lot here, but as with William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, it is very hard not to compare these two contemporaries, one as a replacement for another. I went into this watch-through of the show knowing nothing about Vicki and regularly confusing her for Victoria (she would join some 2 years out from Vicki’s departure). Coming out the other side of her time in the role, she’s become one of my favorite companions, and (not to harsh Katarina, Sara Kingdom, Dodo, or Ben and Polly too presumptuously) I expect she will remain my favorite companion to play alongside Hartnell’s Doctor. In stories like The Romans, they become a dynamic duo of chaos and a spirit of fun and enjoyment.

That's not to say there are no flaws with Vicki. I don't like her exit very much: it's not as bad as Susan's, but it continues a slightly worrying trend of having young women companions exit the TARDIS to get married off to a man they met usually just days prior. It comes up a few more times throughout the series, but it is most notable for being strange to a modern audience when noted with Susan or Vicki - both of whom are explicitly defined as not being adults in one way or another. It's sidestepped slightly with Vicki, what with her naming Troilus as being "only a little older than [her]", but is still an uncomfortable note. Her exit is also marred by being the product of her contract running out, and allegedly it was not renewed due to an internal dispute around Galaxy 4: therefore, she leaves in the (admittedly compelling) muddle that is the end of The Myth Makers and subsequent overarching story of the first half of Season 3, which raises the question of whether or not Vicki, a girl from the future, would actually be, you know, happy in pre-Hellenic Greece and Rome. I'm doubtful!

Nevertheless, despite the awkwardness of her exit, I love Vicki. A lot. I love her a lot more than I anticipated doing so. In a very real way, every future-spirited-woman-companion, every Sarah Jane or Leela or Romana or Tegan or Ace or Rose or Donna or Amy or Clara or whoever else, inherits from her. Not to downplay the impact of Barbara, who has a rich character of her own as a woman written in 1963-65, but in the same way every youthful, charming, and decidedly silly Doctor past #3 inherits from Patrick Troughton, Vicki becomes the model for the modern companion.

She’s just that great!

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