Doctor Who/Characters/Companions and Supporting Cast

The Companions (general)

Donna: Just… promise me one thing. Find someone. Tenth Doctor: I don't need anyone. Donna: Yes, you do. 'Cause sometimes, I think you need someone to stop you. —The Runaway Bride

Eleventh Doctor: I'm being extremely clever up here, and there's no one to stand around looking impressed. What's the point in having you all? —The Impossible Astronaut

• Classic series companions
• New series companions
• Other supporting cast

All Companions

• Action Survivor: Bare minimum, just surviving at least one adventure with the Doctor promotes them to this.
• Badass: Most, if not all companions will become some version of this if they aren't already.
• Badass Abnormal: Every companion becomes a low level version of this, since traveling in the TARDIS exposes them to time radiation, which gives all affected a limited immunity (of varying strength depending on companion) against time and space anomalies.
• Badass Normal: The Badass companions usually are of this variety, unless they were already some other form of Badass already.
• Badass Unintentional: Most companions are relatively normal until the Doctor walks into their lives. Through their adventures, though, they're given the chance to regularly thwart the horrors of the universe and save lives and planets.
• Damsel in Distress / Distressed Dude: It wasn't as if the Doctor or bystanders were immune, but the perils they tended to face meant that companions got this right, left, and center.
• Fish Out of Temporal Water: Well it's a show about time travel.
• Let's Get Dangerous
• Living Emotional Crutch: They can often become one to the Doctor, particularly in the New Series.
• Morality Chain: Come the Ninth Doctor and the show is outright admitting it. According to Amy, the Doctor becomes a bit more Master-like when he travels alone for too long.
• Sarcastic Devotee
• Took a Level In Badass: They usually start as bog-standard as could be before evolving into a Badass Normal who has played a vital role in saving, at the very least, a whole species and/or planet.
• Unfazed Everyman
• The Watson
• What the Hell, Hero?: They dish them out regularly to the Doctor.

The TARDIS a.k.a Sexy Thing

Vworp! Vworp! Vworp!

Played by: Several props (1963-present), Nicholas Courtney (2003), Suranne Jones (2011)

One of the centrepieces of Doctor Who, the TARDIS has been there since day one - and remained ever since, stuck in the form of a British police telephone box. Sure, she's a temperamental Type-40 TARDIS and has almost been through more face-lifts than the Doctor himself (the interior set has changed a lot, while the outer prop has had minor changes to its police box form), but the TARDIS is a constant of the franchise. Trope Namer for Time and Relative Dimensions In Space.

• Adorkable: Especially when she's in Idris' body.
• Alleged Ship: Navigation in the TARDIS is notoriously hit-and-miss. The Doctor can be dead on or miss by several years. Only to be expected, really. It was a bit of a jalopy when the Doctor ran off in it hundreds of years ago, and several centuries with only one man for maintenance and repairs, jury-rigging systems so they work with one pilot instead of six, combined with the heavy living of those centuries, mean it's a miracle it still functions at all.
  • Time Lords repeatedly remark on the age of the TARDIS and how it was an obsolete design. The Doctor's mentor, then in his final incarnation, even pointed out that the Doctor's TARDIS was obsolete when he was young. The new series explains that despite its age, there's not actually much wrong with the TARDIS. Any "mistakes" are due to a) The Doctor still not quite working out all the details of her operation for 700 years, b) the fact that she was designed to be piloted by a minimum of 5 more Time Lords and c) The TARDIS takes the Doctor where she thinks he needs to go instead of precisely where he wants to be.
• Badass: Burning an Eldritch Abomination to death inside your body will earn you this status.
• Beware the Nice Ones: As the House Entity learnt, you do not want to make her angry.
• Bigger on the Inside: Trope Namer. How much bigger she is varies from episode to episode however.
• Bond Creature: It has a strong mental connection with the Doctor. The translation field stops working when he's comatose in "The Christmas Invasion", and he can feel how close it comes to being destroyed in "Journey's End".
• The Bridge: The console room.
• Chaos Architecture: The Architectural Reconfiguration System (Arch-Recon) allows the pilot to change the "desktop theme" of the console room, alter the layout of the ship, delete rooms entirely or create them from scratch.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Part of her antagonism towards Romana and Clara. According to Thirteen, what really riles the TARDIS up is the Doctor piloting another TARDIS.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Even if one takes the whole "multidimensional Starfish Alien" thing into account, she still comes across as this.
• Companion Cube: So much so that she became the Doctor's tomb in an alternate timeline.
• Cool Ship
• Expanded Universe: Aside from examples mentioned elsewhere in this list, one short story, "The Lying Old Witch in the Wardrobe", has the TARDIS, in a fit of jealousy, force Romana into regenerating after impersonating her (the implication being the version of Romana seen in "Destiny of the Daleks" is actually a manifestation of the TARDIS).
• Failsafe Failure: Programmed to take a companion back home if the Doctor fails to return in at least five hours. Programmed to seek out the nearest planet if left adrift, as Ten lamented while stuck behind a porthole window. Programmed to find the nearest safe place if otherwise compromised, as Eleven realised with horror when the TARDIS appeared inside the TARDIS. Programmed to teleport anyone who's present in a room into the control hub when the room is deleted, as Eleven cleverly weaponised.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Discussed in-universe — the TARDIS really doesn't like Jack Harkness. He's a fact of the timeline, and that's never supposed to happen. She's gotten over it in "Journey's End", though.
  • She also despises Clara Oswald because her and the Doctor's mutual love causes them to turn into "The Hybrid" along with Clara's "impossible" nature. It's not as bad as with Jack because Clara saved the lives of both her and the Doctor.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: The Cloister Bell, the TARDIS' Red Alert signal.
• Ghost in the Machine: In the audios, this is portrayed by The Brigadier himself. The Doctor Who Magazine strip opts for a veiled grey lady instead.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: The Master jimmies the TARDIS into a "Paradox Machine," giving it an infernal red glow.
• Happily Married: To the Doctor, obviously.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • In "The Big Bang", the Silence blows the TARDIS up with River still inside. The TARDIS sets herself into a time loop for roughly a thousand years until someone could come and rescue River.
  • In "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS", her engine blows up and she wraps what little of her power around the explosion, delaying it so the Doctor and Clara can escape.
• I Call It Vera: The TARDIS likes to be called "Sexy Thing", or "Old Girl". On the other hand, she calls the Doctor "her Thief" or "Beautiful Idiot".
• Iconic Item: Of the series as a whole. Thanks to the show (and, admittedly, increases in technology which saw the need for phone boxes decline), the police box outer shell is immediately associated with Doctor Who.
  • The BBC has acquired the legal rights to the image of a British police box, taking them away from the British police. It's that iconic.
• Informed Attribute: How primitive and outdated she is. Though there's ample evidence that she's not functioning at 100% for a Type 40 and we've seen other TARDISes functioning smoothly, we never actually get to see what extra features a modern TARDIS has that she lacks. Add to that the fact that she seems to withstand just about anything that all but cripples other Time Lord technology.
• Like Mother, Like Daughter: Both the TARDIS and her daughter River Song consider themselves to be married to the Doctor.
• Living Ship
• Made of Iron: Even without the forcefield, this thing can take a hit.
• Magic-Powered Pseudoscience: Runs on "Rift Energy," which the Doctor periodically needs to refuel it with.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Especially when she's in Idris' body.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Chronic example. A small list of powers that have been revealed by the series include invisibility, telepathic communication, temporarily granting God-like powers, bringing back the dead, temporarily granting God-like powers to bring back the dead and towing a planet.
  • Towing Earth required some help from Mr. Smith and K-9 to use the Torchwood facility as a tow hitch, though.
  • But one thing it apparently can't do is teleport itself to the Doctor's location (and even then, it did so anyway in Revenge of the Cybermen). Several episodes involve the main characters being separated from the TARDIS.
• One-Gender Race: Apparently, every TARDIS is female. The TARDIS herself refers to the others as her "Sisters".
• Perception Filter: Trope Namer, possibly. The perception filter makes anyone who doesn't know what the TARDIS is instinctively ignore it, even in places where a police box would be out of place (which is to say, everywhere except for the UK from about the 1930s to about the 1970s).
• Phone Booth: The TARDIS is jammed in this form, though the Doctor has grown to admire its chic.
• Robo Ship: A very rare In-Universe example.
• Sapient Ship: Wanted to see the universe, so stole a Time Lord and ran away.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: A rare case where the viewers only see it in the "locked" form. The Doctor has long since grown too attached to the police box look to change it. Also, it's harder to misplace the damn thing when it's a big blue box as opposed to something cleverly camouflaged or invisible.
  • He tries to fix the Chameleon Circuit in "Logopolis", and actually does in "Attack of the Cybermen" (but quickly becomes annoyed with it, and leaves it alone after it breaks again).
  • Her true form, first seen in 2013, is a grey cylinder about 7 feet tall. Some later media implies the Chameleon Circuit is working again but the Doctor has deliberately left her in the form of a police box.
• Ship Tease: While she's quite Happily Married to the Doctor, the TARDIS seems to fancy Rory, calling him "the pretty one".
• Spaceship Girl: In "The Doctor's Wife", and elsewhere in the EU.
• Starfish Alien: Perhaps the weirdest creature the Doctor has met in all his travels is the one that he actually does the travelling in.
• Team Mum
• This Is My Time Lord
• Time Abyss: The TARDIS matrix exists in all points of time and space. Simultaneously.
• True-Blue Femininity: An inanimate example.