With more than five decades of history under its belt, Doctor Who is quite a unique piece of television indeed.

Its nature is in many ways very much the same as it was when William Hartnell first graced our screens back in 1963, and yet in many other ways, it is a show in continuing flux, changing and evolving with and within each new iteration.

Amidst all of these changes, the relationship between the Doctor and his companions has remained central to the show. This does, however, give rise to one of those very polarising questions that fan debate has been raging over for years: just who is the main character of the show? Is it the Doctor, or the companion?

It seems at first glance that the key to the protagonist question is coded directly into the title of the show itself: Doctor Who, indeed. But surely that’s at least a little bit reductive, isn’t it?

It goes without saying that the show would not exist without the Doctor – a fact which, in itself, may make a reasonably compelling argument for his place as main character. Without him, the very first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ may well have ended ten minutes in, with two schoolteachers questioning their student’s unusual behaviour, shrugging their shoulders, complaining about how many papers they have to grade, and going home.

On the other hand, the show could conceivably exist without a companion, and has: ‘The Deadly Assassin’ features a companionless Fourth Doctor, for instance. That being said, beyond Tom Baker’s solo outing, most companion-free stories otherwise at least feature a substitute character or characters joining the Doctor in his adventures to perform a companion-type function, as in specials like ‘Voyage of the Damned’ or ‘Planet of the Dead’.

If anything, the space left vacant where a companion would normally be feels something of a presence in itself – we feel the absence of that person acutely enough that it is missed. Indeed, Doctor Who would doubtless not have endured without a person or people performing the function of companion at least most of the time.

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