Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20140713043536/@comment-1293767-20140716055749

CzechOut wrote: So the matter of determining which characters go into a navigational comes to a series of common sense questions, both in-universe and out-of-universe.
 * Is there a press announcement that introduces their actor to the world as a "companion", "assistant", "regular" or "semi-regular"?
 * Does the publishing company refer to them as a "companion" or "assistant", if not a televised character?
 * Do their actor's names appear before the title of the programme on television, and are they not also a main antagonist?
 * Do they occupy a narrative space equivalent to Wilf or Christina de Souza in a non-televised story in which no other, more obvious, companion also appears?
 * Do they travel in the TARDIS in a single story when there's no other, more obvious companion in the story?
 * Does the Doctor refer to them as his companion, assistant or maybe even friend during the course of the story, particularly, but not exclusively, when there is no other, more obvious companion in the story?
 * Does any reference work refer to them as a companion or assistant?
 * Were they under contract to appear as a regular or semi-regular in at least one series on TV, and are they protagonists?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, chances are they belong in a companions of the nth doctor navbox. The point of a navbox, after all, is merely to guide people from one page to another. It's to suggest, "This person could well be considered a companion, particularly given the text at companion". The point is to get you to read the article and make up your own mind as to whether you'd call that person a companion.

Is this system perfect? No. Are there always going to be a few people in these navboxes that are going to make you scratch your head? Of course. But given that the source material gives us nothing to hang our hats on, and that fans have been arguing about whether the Brig is a companion for forty years now, it's as good as it gets.

Narrative ambiguity
Finally, there's the question of how to use the "narratively ambiguous" thing. To be honest, this wasn't a big policy decision. I never really envisaged it being used outside the case of Chang Lee, who is certainly a one-off on television. A lot of people do consider him a companion, but he is for a time the companion of the Master as well. It was a way to get him on the navigation template, for the benefit of those people who do think he's a companion. Such believers have a strong case, after all. The TARDIS does restore him to life, and at the end of that story he does exactly what Grace does — not travel with the Doctor.

I didn't really think it would be used in other circumstances, and I would far rather see it retracted from than expanded for use elsewhere. If we start using it more broadly, tonnes of people might get moved around — Katarina, Liz and the Brig for a start.

I don't like the "narratively ambiguous" category either. If tight reigns are kept on it, it might occasionally be useful. But used as Bold Clone has used it on the Tenth Doctor's Companion Template, it's very messy and just muddles up some fairly obvious one-off companions. Jackson, Christina (who is being mentioned as a gauge for companion status in non-TV stories alongside Wilf in the above quoted post), Astrid, and Adelaide all act in the companionate role in their episodes and the actors who play them are credited in the pre-title sequence. Georgia Moffett is credited for the seven animated minisodes that makeup Dreamland. Cassie and Jimmy both take one trip (and a second is implied) on the TARDIS. Not to another time or planet, but simply from one place to another, equivalent of Wilf's TARDIS trip in The End of Time. In the case of Astrid and Jenny, both are invited to be full time companions and accept, but both die (or "die") before they get to step in the TARDIS. In Jenny's case, she acts in a companionate status equivalent of Donna's role in the episode and the plot of Prisoners of Time is about all of the Doctor's companions getting kidnapped by Adam and among those companions is Jenny, indicating that the narrative does consider her a companion. Christina (and many others) fills the same narrative role Rose, Martha, or Amy fill in their debut episodes. She just does it for a single episode instead of a season's worth. It's absurd to say that's ambiguous.

Now characters like Rosita, River, and Jimmy are a little more complicated. In the questions posed above, their actors don't have their names in the opening credits, for example. (I'm not sure how they were marketed, as I was much newer DW at the time and didn't track DW new so I can't speak how many of the other questions they may answer a yes to.) Donna, the seasonal companion, spends most of Forest of the Dead in The Library, leading River to act in the companionate role at Ten's side for that episode. In Dreamland, Jimmy and Cassie fill a two-companion role just like Rose and Mickey do in The Girl in the Fireplace or Amy and Rory do in The Vampires of Venice, even though only Piper, Gillan, and Moffett get pre-title credits.