How Doctor Who’s Newest Companion Is Breaking the Mold of Those That Came Before

In the world of Doctor Who, everything old is often new again. It’s kind of inevitable. Yes, change is a foundational element of the show’s DNA—alongside its perennially hopeful outlook and huge heart—but the sci-fi behemoth is also sixty-some years old at this point, which means there aren’t a lot of stories it hasn’t told before. Part of its magic lies in the way it manages to make familiar narrative beats feel brand new, no matter how many times we see the Doctor face off with an age-old enemy or experience the wonder of the universe through a pair of fresh eyes. But the show’s shaking up the status quo a bit for Fifteenth Doctor Ncuti Gatwa’s second season in the TARDIS. 

The arrival of Varada Sethu as new companion Belinda Chandra is notable for several reasons. The actress is not only continuing the longstanding Doctor Who tradition of guest performers who have returned to the show in larger roles (see also: Peter Capaldi, Karen Gillan, Freema Agyeman, and even Colin Baker), she’s portraying the rare TARDIS traveler who…doesn’t actually want to be there all that much. This isn’t entirely unprecedented; classic companion Tejan Jovanka (Janet Fielding) initially wanted to return to Earth and start her new job at Heathrow before she ultimately became a mainstay of the Fifth Doctor era. But it’s certainly something we haven’t seen in modern Who, where wide-eyed sidekicks have enthusiastically embraced the idea of both time travel and the weird idiosyncrasies of life with a two-hearted alien. In fact, most are so into it that they can only be removed from the Doctor’s side by means of some particularly cataclysmic or personally devastating event. That’s certainly not Belinda’s story.

Season 2 (or 15 or 41, depending on how you’re keeping track) also appears to feature a more contained sort of arc than this series generally adopts. As the marketing materials and taglines have repeatedly pointed out, this run of episodes will primarily focus on the Doctor’s attempt to return Belinda to Earth after she’s essentially kidnapped by giant alien robots who happen to think she’s their queen. (It happens!) There’s a mysterious roadblock preventing him from doing so, because this is Doctor Who, after all, and Fifteen will be forced to try to “Get Her Home™” on a more circuitous path than originally intended. And their unorthodox situation will apparently challenge the Doctor in new ways. 

“It’s different this time because Belinda has no interest in being a companion. She don’t want to be on this adventure, man,” Gatwa tells Paste with a laugh. “She wants to go home. And while every other companion relationship has obviously been very enriching [for him], they have all been kind of starry-eyed. This time is different, and the situation forces the Doctor to look at himself introspectively and grow in a new way.”

Unlike many of the companions who have come before her, Belinda isn’t looking to find herself. She’s a bit older than Fifteen’s first companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson, who will also show up at some point during the Doctor’s adventures this season). She’s got an established career she loves enough to tolerate some seriously aggravating roommates to keep. And she’s already had plenty of experience dealing with difficult and potentially dangerous situations. 

“The twist, the innovation that Belinda brings with her this season is that she’s wise. She’s clever. She’s not as wide-eyed as Ruby was, but Ruby was only eighteen and just discovering life and discovering her family. She was born to be wide-eyed in Doctor Who,” showrunner Russell T. Davies says. “Belinda is a nurse. She’s seen life, and that’s quite significant. I made her a nurse in the emergency department, so she’s seen [rude] doctors, and she’s dealt with terrible cases. And the minute she sets foot on an alien planet, someone is fried by a laser beam right in front of her. Someone who is nice to her gets blasted into smithereens. No, thank you. She doesn’t need that.”

It’s true, Belinda’s inaugural visit to an alien world isn’t particularly fun. Season premiere “The Robot Revolution” sees her forcibly taken to the planet Miss Belinda Chandra-1, orbiting the star she was once gifted a certificate proclaiming her ownership of as a child. (FYI, ‘90s kids, we should all check our childhood bedrooms to see if something similar could happen to us.) There, she’s threatened with a forced marriage to the planet’s evil A.I. overlord, before joining an underground rebellion to overthrow it and meeting the Doctor, whose presence she largely ignores in favor of doing what she can to help the injured in the rebels’ ranks. 

Davies says Belinda is “very unimpressed” by Fifteen, which may be because it doesn’t feel like she needs the Doctor all that much. And this fact makes her an extremely interesting choice for this particular point in his story—and in her own. But a hallmark of Davies’s storytelling has always been his interest in the Doctor’s companions as three-dimensional characters whose journeys are just as important as those of the Time Lord they’re traveling with. Belinda’s journey home will obviously be about much more than simply returning to Earth, but about the person she’s meant to become by the time she gets there.

“I do like Doctor Who companions being ordinary people discovering how extraordinary they can be,” Davies says. “I mean, I love Star Trek, but my sadness about Star Trek is that if I were alive in the 25th century, they wouldn’t have let me on board. I wouldn’t pass the exams. They wouldn’t even allow me in the kitchen of the Enterprise, frankly. And so the person I would turn to is the Doctor, because that’s what he does. He has a TARDIS, and anyone can walk through those doors and discover they’re extraordinary. That’s Belinda.” 

For both Davies and star Varada Sethu, who plays Belinda, the character’s nursing background isn’t just an opportunity for a fun running gag involving the Doctor’s title. (Though referring to the duo collectively as “the Doctor and the Nurse” is pretty cute) It’s the core of who she is, and will play a big part in her journey through time and space.

“For me, her main North Star is her career as a nurse,” Sethu says. “This is a woman who is clearly an innately caring person, a selfless person. She has strong boundaries and a sense of humor, but she suffers no fools, which is probably because she has to deal with all sorts of people turning up in the hospital in various different and sometimes difficult states. But she leads with compassion, always.”