Ranking Doctor Who’s modern day companions

Rose Tyler

Bringing Doctor Who back to television after being off the air for almost two decades was no easy feat. The show needed to find a compelling new Doctor, tell interesting stories and, most importantly, give us a companion that the audience could relate to. Doctor Who companions have always served as audience stand-ins to some degree or other, providing an easy and relatable entrance point into the wild world of alien planets and timey-wimey adventures.

Never was that more necessary than during the series’ return in 2005, which needed to introduce the show to a generation of viewers who had never experienced it, and remind long-ago fans why they had loved the show so much in the first place. Enter: Rose Tyler who, over the course of her time in the TARDIS, evolved from an everyday shopgirl into a leader capable of extraordinary things.

No one had a more thankless or difficult job when Doctor Who returned than Billie Piper, who was given the unenviable task of reintroducing the idea of a companion to the modern world. Her Rose is relentlessly regular, an everygirl who looks basically like anyone we all might know, and spends just as much time learning about herself as she does the wonders of the universe. Piper is particularly great at playing the magical within the everyday, highlighting the ways that Rose’s ordinariness is actually part of the reason she’s so special in the end. The scene in which the Ten says goodbye to her at Bad Wolf Bay is consistently voted one of the best (and/or most heartbreaking, depending on who you ask, moments in sci-fi) and it’s because we don’t want to let her go any more than the Doctor does.

Best episode: Season 1’s “Rose.” While many of Rose’s later episodes are probably better from a story perspective – “The Parting of the Ways,” “The Satan Pit,” “The Christmas Invasion,” “Doomsday” – her very first appearance still resonates, precisely because it told us everything we needed to know about her in a single installment.

Rose is kind, smart, selfless and brave. She’s a woman who – thanks to the appearance of the Doctor – discovers that she’s capable of more than she ever thought possible. Yes, she’s just an ordinary girl who never finished her A-levels, but she’s also a hero who saved the world – a lot. And this story is just the first time.

Doctor Who will return for a New Year’s Day special on Jan. 1, 2019 on BBC America. Season 12 is currently slated for some time in 2020.