Doctor Who companion spotlight: Helen Sinclair

For the past years, Helen Sinclair has been an excellent companion in The Eighth Doctor Adventures. We look at a few reasons why she stands out.

There are a lot of reasons why I enjoy the Eighth Doctor’s audios. There are the many strong stories, the exploration of an era not seen on television, and of course, Paul McGann himself.

But there’s one more reason why I love listening to his stories: his companions. The Eighth Doctor has traveled with many friends over the years, (one of which he even claimed to love,) and they’ve all been brilliant in their own way.

The recently released Ravenous 3 highlighted this especially with the companion team-up story Companion Piece. The episode featured a lot of the Eighth Doctor’s friends, and they’re all so great that I’ve decided to look at each of them. We’ve already covered Charley, so let’s cover one of Eight’s more recent companions: Helen Sinclair.

Helen Sinclair

Helen Sinclair (no relation to Ryan Sinclair (that we know of)) originally came from London in the 1960s. The Doctor and Liv first met her when she was working at the National Museum and studying ancient languages in The Red Lady in Doom Coalition 1.

After being turned down for a promotion that she was extremely qualified for, she ended up helping the Doctor and Liv deal with a monster in the form a “Red Lady”. When she was then offered the chance to travel through time and space – and therefore, get far closer to ancient languages and civilizations than she had ever dared dream of – she could hardly turn them down.

There are many key reasons why I love Helen Sinclair. She’s a very strong and highly intelligent woman who’s initially living in a more openly sexist society. She’s clearly frustrated at being held back, and knows she can and should be doing a lot more. Characters that have strong drive and personal ambition who find themselves being held back are always great to explore.

She’s also a good fit for the TARDIS team. Her and Liv make an interesting pairing. Liv is from the planet Kaldor in the future, so there’s a lot of major Earth history that she’s completely unfamiliar with.

Helen, on the other hand, is always learning a lot about the universe, finding herself incredibly excited when meeting some of her heroes, while feeling utterly perplexed by some basic sci-fi or even real world concepts that we’re all familiar with. So together, they help each other to understand the universe just a little bit better.

Intelligent yet flawed

Helen is an intelligent woman but, as with the rest of us, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t make mistakes. Unfortunately, she made a pretty big one in Absent Friends, the opening episode of Doom Coalition 3.

When the TARDIS team arrive in the mid-Nineties, Helen sees an opportunity to visit home and see how her family have been doing. The Doctor has warned her not to look into her own personal future, but honestly, what harm could it do?

As it turned out, quite a lot. When she meets her brother (disguised as her own long-lost daughter), she finds out what happened to her family after she left London in The Red Lady, and none of it was good. The events of that story didn’t exactly leave Helen looking good in London society, and her disappearance made everything worse, effectively destroying her whole family’s reputation in the process.

She thinks it would be easy to go back in time and fix things straight away. But not this time. Because Helen found out what the future held for her family, she’s effectively set it in stone. And there’s nothing she can do to save her family now.

We don’t often see the consequences of time travel for the companion’s personal lives, so finding out what happens when a companion tries to look ahead is a very intriguing idea. It also helps that Absent Friends is, quite possibly, one of the best Eighth Doctor stories ever written, and features a high amount of personal drama, for both Helen and Liv. It’s a major turning point for the character, one that has the companion make a terrible mistake while growing significantly from it as a result.

Hattie Morahan

Of course, I can’t discuss how brilliant Helen Sinclair is without a word on the performance of Hattie Morahan. I’ll be honest, I’m not very familiar with much of her work outside of Doctor Who, but I do know that Paul McGann was hugely excited when he found out that Big Finish had cast her as Helen.

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And it’s really not hard to see why. Morahan is amazing at bringing Helen to life, giving the character a real sense of passion for both her work and her life. From her very first scene in The Red Lady, you get a clear sense of her frustration and even share it when she’s passed over a promotion for purely sexist reasons.

However, along with portraying the frustration and the passion of the character brilliantly, Morahan is equally great at exploring the character’s more vulnerable side. It’s funny that Helen is a character from the Sixties, and so could easily come across as unrelatable at times, especially when she’s in more of a modern or recent setting.

But when she’s feeling confused or alienated by the simplest things, such as not knowing how to use a credit card in Absent Friends, the audience can strongly relate to her. And that’s as much due to Morahan’s performance as it is to do with the strong writing.

Of course, both of these elements are key reasons why Helen Sinclair has really stood out as a companion for the Eighth Doctor. She’s a very well-written and fleshed out character who’s performed brilliantly by Hattie Morahan, and she’s a great part of the TARDIS team featured in the series Doom Coalition and Ravenous. Here’s hoping the character doesn’t go anywhere anytime soon. (I hope you’re listening, Big Finish.)

Are you a fan of Helen Sinclair? Have you listened to any of her stories? Do you think the Doctor should travel with twentieth-century companions in twenty-first-century stories on television? Let us know in the comments below.