Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: bbc, doctor who, janet fielding, Mark Strickson, matthew waterhouse, peter davison, russell t davies, Sarah Sutton

Doctor Who: Tegan, Nyssa and The Lost Promises of The 1980s

Seeing companions like Tegan & Nyssa return to Doctor Who is great, but it's also a reminder of how they never got the stories they deserved.

There's a reason the reappearance of Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton as Tegan and Nyssa on any Doctor Who causes a frisson to fans who remember them from the 1980s. Yes, it was a thrill to see a reunion between former companions. Even though it was a short episode that served as a trailer for the Doctor Who Season 20 Blu-Ray box set, the original story by Pete McTighe was also a continuation of some old stories from the Fifth Doctor era of the show and unfinished business, which remains unfinished.

During the 1980s, the TARDIS was a crowded place: the Doctor (Peter Davison) has Adric (Matthew Waterhouse), Tegan (Fielding), Nyssa (Sutton), Turlough (Mark Strickson), and shapeshifting android Chameleon (a barely animatronic puppet that couldn't even move because of BBC budgets). The Fifth Doctor himself was, for the first time, less of an older patrician figure and more of a big brother figure. The TARDIS felt like a 1980s flatshare between a bunch of university roommates who had nothing in common and sometimes couldn't even stand each other, though off-screen, Davison, Fielding, and Sutton shared a close friendship that continues to this day.

Adric was the teenage math prodigy. Turlough was a spy assigned to assassinate The Doctor in the guise of a 40-year-old high school student (go figure!); Chameleon was supposed to be a useful plot device who didn't work because budget and special effects were too primitive to use at the time. That kind of sums up everything wrong with that era of Doctor Who: too many characters that the writers didn't know what to do with, whose story potential was never realized and eventually abandoned. In the end, it was just The Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa, and even that trio never fully fulfilled its promise.

Janet Fielding wanted to play Tegan as "Lucy van Pelt in outer space," a feminist, opinionated proactive companion who called out BS when she saw it. Nyssa was an orphaned alien princess and scientific genius. Unfortunately, the (male) writers of that era truly did not know what to do with female characters other than have them run away from monsters and be in peril. These characters needed writers of Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat's calibre to give characters like these their due. They were ahead of their time, and to see them again is to be reminded how much they were wasted. Scriptwriters of the 1970s and 1980s were preoccupied with the plot and frequently neglected characters, whereas times have changed, and now there's a greater emphasis on character and emotion, which serves the companions on Doctor Who better than during the era of the old show. To see Tegan and Nyssa again is to wish to see more of them in better stories.

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