Day 2 - Favourite Companion
While I wait for Game of Thrones to load, I'll finally get around to answering this. I'm afraid I'm far too inconsistently on here to be a good game partner.
Norna: Don't torture yourself. Nobody expects you to go back down there.
Turlough: No, of course they don't. I'm Turlough.
I just LOVE this character's attitude. Cynical, huffy, snarky, dry, slightly cowardly, easily frustrated. I love his opening where he teases the supposedly "fat" young man and his car [wow, wonder what he'd think of today's population. Turlough himself was unhealthily thin though, like, break-in-the-wind sort of thin]. I mean he was a mean, manipulative, charming, heartless sort of guy from the get-go. But a lot of his attitude is explained later [though some of it is just his personality. xD]
How do you beat rude AND ginger? [Donna, I love you, but you don't even come close to half as rude as Turlough was]. Smart, snarky, a great liar, and clever enough to work the TARDIS on occasion. Human-like alien. Great storyline from the "evil" and "cowardly" companion with ulterior motives [enough so Five actually enjoyed him as a companion because he could never quite tell what he was thinking] trapped in a tight spot... finally learning through the Doctor how to become the person he wanted to be, the cynic turning into the optimist. I liked that the actor who played him had a cruel, edgy look not quite unattractive [I, like the Doctor, am rather partial to redheads] but something sharp. He was a bit haughty and judgmental, especially when it came to humans. He got irritated and frustrated easily and one of my favorite moments with him was when he simply got fed up with the Master and drew a sword on him [had no idea what he was getting into, but again; he gets frustrated easily].
By far the best part of Turlough was that he showed the strength of Five's character... because Turlough was who he was, but for all his survival instincts he didn't want to kill the doctor. It went against his entire personality to hesitate and then finally be won over but Five was such a good person it stayed Turlough's hand. And he finally became a better person because of him, to the point where he started doing the "right" thing instead of the thing which would save his own hide, something he'd mocked before. That is why he beat out Donna for me. I mean, I love her character but the tragedy at the end [while heartbreaking] really meant she'd not changed at all [which made for a great storyline but shut her character off entirely]. He grows and is allowed to keep what he has gained as a character.
His only real problem was, really, the lameness of some of the alien trouble in his storyline but I thought the back-story with his home planet was human enough to make fun of it. That and, as the writers admitted, he was sort of written on the fly and they wound up having him captured all the time b/c they didn't know what else to do with the character. [but how is that different from any companion? xD]
<-- This.
