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Doctor Who: Why One-Off Companions Totally Fit The Christmas Vibe

Doctor Who Christmas Specials feature companions who show up only once, but there's a deeper meaning under all that beyond the big names.

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Doctor Who Christmas Specials are now a time-honoured tradition. The Gods of the series, or rather the showrunners Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat, have spoken! Let's pretend Chris Chibnall putting them on ice in favour of New Year Specials was just a hallucination. Or a dream. Or a temporary fall into an alternate universe. Or temporary collective brain damage. And what comes with Christmas specials? New companions who only show up once in the Christmas special! A Doctor Who Christmas means a one-off companion! That's been a tradition in the modern era of the show.

Doctor Who: One-Time Only Companions are Totally Christmas
Image: BBC

Christmas for Doctor Who means a self-contained one-off story, though some of them are special events, like the first one in 2005 featuring David Tennant's debt as the Tenth Doctor. Christmas specials are still supposed to be special events on top of being Christmassy. It's celebrating the spirit of Christmas, and one thing TV specials have always done when given a chance is to get a high-profile guest star. Kylie Minogue was a huge get, considering she's one of the planet's biggest pop stars. And Russell T. Davies killed her off in it! Yeah, yeah, you can say she might be back, but do you really believe that? You can see the one-off companions who guest star on Doctor Who in a compilation video below that sometimes feels like a cry for help.

There's A LOT of Death in Doctor Who Christmas Specials

This is a feature, not a bug. Just look at every Doctor Who Christmas Special. People die in them. And never just the one! Steven Moffat, who has written the most Christmas Specials, killed two Doctors in Christmas Specials – the Eleventh and the Twelfth (Peter Capaldi) so they regenerate. Even the First Doctor (David Bradley) and frequent contributor Mark Gatiss got to be one-off companions in Moffat's final Christmas Special as showrunner. Jenna Coleman even showed up as a one-off companion version of Clara in the 19th Century before she became a companion because Moffat just can't resist being meta. She was killed off as both a one-off companion in a Christmas special and a regular companion later. She was nearly killed off in her last Christmas special, but she changed her mind and decided to stay for another season, and Moffat rewrote the ending. It's all meta and weirdly perverse.

Ultimately, Doctor Who is about teaching children about death and acceptance and appreciating the moments that you have, and the Christmas specials do that more than most.

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Adi TantimedhAbout Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh is a filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist. He wrote radio plays for the BBC Radio, “JLA: Age of Wonder” for DC Comics, “Blackshirt” for Moonstone Books, and “La Muse” for Big Head Press. Most recently, he wrote “Her Nightly Embrace”, “Her Beautiful Monster” and “Her Fugitive Heart”, a trilogy of novels featuring a British-Indian private eye published by Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster.
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