Bill Potts of Doctor Who: Challenging Companion Stereotypes and Identifying with Viewers
Wright (2013) notes a need for social learning through science fiction, and what better example than the long-running British TV show Doctor Who? The show follows the adventures of “the Doctor”, a time-traveling alien who protects the universe from evil, and his traveling “companion(s).”
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This Medium will look at the most of these recent companions, Bill Potts, as one of the few companions of color and the only openly lesbian companion. As Doctor Who companions have been largely straight and White, Bill represents a step in the right direction for representation in the Doctor Who universe. Specifically, I will address how Bill’s character challenges the stereotypes of what it means to be a student and companion, as well as how viewers on social media have positively identified with this new spin on a character.
Claim 1: The ways in which Bill challenges the typical college student stereotype are also the ways in which she challenges the typical companion stereotype.
We first meet Bill Potts as a non-traditional “student” at the university where the Doctor has been hiding and posing as a professor. Bill actually works in the university’s cafeteria, where we see that she’s not just the typical “undergraduate enjoying a “golden life”” (Reynolds, 2014a, p. 82). While not an officially enrolled student, we soon learn that when Bill’s not on shift she actually attends the Doctor’s lectures. Even more interesting because of our preconceptions of the passive and directionless college student, we find that Bill attends these lectures simply because she likes them.
Knowing that Bill is not an actual student but noticing her engagement in the material, the Doctor offers to tutor her. Bill seems to sincerely enjoy learning by constantly asking the Doctor questions. With Bill, it’s not about “rote knowledge and trivia” but rather the “creativity” with which she asks about things (Reynolds, 2014a, p. 104).
We also learn early on that Bill is openly lesbian (at least to all but her foster mother). However, she is neither the stereotypical college student consumed with “intimate encounters” (Reynolds, 2014a, p. 84) nor is her sexual identity is not treated as “something temporary, as an experiment or a vacation from heteronormativity” (Reynolds, 2014a, p. 84). Given that the majority of companions in this revival of Doctor Who develop romantic feelings for the Doctor, Bill’s lesbian identity represents a welcome change in direction; however, she is more than just a “conventional” companion “who just happens to be gay” (Dalton, 2004, p. 6).
Pearl Mackie, the actress who portrays Bill, explains “[being gay] is … something that’s part of her and something that she’s very happy and very comfortable with” (Mzimba, 2017) and so her character naturally gets a few flirtatious interactions that easily flow within the storylines. One Reddit user, annoyed at how some people felt Bill’s lesbian identity was “shoved down [their] throats”, even took to analyzing “the sexuality of companions and whether Bill’s was overplayed” and determined that she actually had fewer romantic mentions than most other companions.
Bill ends up joining the Doctor as a “companion” by accident, when an alien (who took over the body of one of her campus crushes) begins stalking her. Although the Doctor had previously determined not to travel or take another companion, Bill’s penchant for noticing — as one reviewer puts it, “…enough about the world and all the bizarre incongruities that herald the Doctor’s presence… to ask about them at all” — is what leads the Doctor to invite her to travel with him.
Her non-typical attributes allow her to continually challenge the Doctor and remind him why he really does what he does.
Claim 2: Bill’s character as a companion of color and a lesbian allows for wider identification with the audience.
First, it’s important to understand that the Doctor Who companion acts as an “audience surrogate,” which is a character with whom “the audience (or the children in the audience) doesn’t just sympathize with, but are supposed to actively see themselves as — by desire, by default, or by author inference” (Audience surrogate, n.d.). Bill’s character becomes especially interesting then because female, Black, and lesbian viewers are likely the minority in Doctor Who fandom.
Dalton (2004) reminds us, though, that it’s important to recognize who is included and who is left out in popular media such as Doctor Who. Pearl Mackie, the mixed-race actress who plays Bill, noted in an interview with The Guardian “when I was little there weren’t that many people who looked like me on TV, so it’s great to have [viewers] thinking: ‘OK, she looks like me so I’m going to dress up as her, and I don’t need a different kind of face make-up, I don’t need to straighten my hair.”
We can see how important it is then that Bill has been depicted as a “genuine [individual] with distinctive (rather than stereotypical) features” (Derman, 2009, p. 1). After all, it is difficult for viewers to connect with and make meaning of the character’s representation “unless there’s something in the picture with which [they] can even imaginatively or imaginarily identify” (Hall, 1997, p. 16).
Wright (2013) explains that “within the arena of popular culture, diverse individuals often share an enthusiastic, unifying space called fandom” and the Twitterverse shows just how these individuals feel a connection to Bill Potts. One user describes herself as “the happiest nerdy lesbian” -
and another emphasizes how “ALIVE” she feels at seeing “black lesbian supergenius foster kid” companion Bill Potts.
Finally, Bill puts a fresh spin on the companion character, along with a down-to-earth attitude that viewers appreciate. As one blogger notes, she brings “a nice bit of realism to the kind of scene that’s usually simply met with just starry-eyed wonder.”
It is precisely this subversion of viewers’ expectations of what a companion can and should be, and as Hall (1997) would describe, the “marking of what is different from what is expected, as it were, [which] allows meaning to begin to operate” (p. 22) among Doctor Who fans on social media. Mackie herself found that her “Twitter follower count went from 400-and-something to 16,500 in about two hours” (Mzimba, 2017) showing the magnitude of connection to the new companion.
Conclusion
The writers of Doctor Who have openly acknowledged that they need to do better with diversity, representation and tropes. While it’s unfortunately “almost impossible for us to fix good” stereotypes (Hall, 1997, p. 20), Bill Potts’ character seems to be a step in the right direction, and social media users seem to agree. In addition, for the first time in the show’s history the next Doctor will be a portrayed as (and by) a woman, also with two companions of color. It’s this kind of forward movement for representation and identification that helps change viewers’ conceptions of the “very limited range of definitions of who people can be, of what they can do, what are the possibilities in life, what are the natures of the constraints on them” (Hall, 1997, p. 20). [1189]
References
Audience surrogate. (n.d.) In TV Tropes. Retrieved April 14, 2018 from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AudienceSurrogate
Dalton, M.M. (2004). The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.
Derman, L.S. (2009). Ten steps for reviewing children’s books. Retrieved from http://www.uua.org/sites/live-new.uua.org/files/documents/derman-sparkslouise/1206_233_review_books.pdf
Hall, S. (1997). Representation & the media. [Video transcript]. Retrieved from http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/409/transcript_409.pdf
Mzimba, L. (2017). Doctor Who gets first openly gay companion. BBC News: Entertainment & Arts. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-39444025
Reynolds, P. J. (Ed.). (2014a). Representing “u”: Popular culture, media, and higher education [Special issue]. ASHE Higher Education Report, 40 (4).
Wright, R. R. (2013). Zombies, cyborgs, and other labor organizers: An introduction to representations of adult learning theories and HRD in popular culture. New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development, 25(1), 5–17.