My favourite companion

Elisabeth Sladen passed away last week. Her most famous role would have been that of the character "Sarah Jane Smith" on BBC's Doctor Who. I watched her in that role as a young lad & always thought that she was the best of the Doctor's traveling companions.

When you are dealing with characters in the Sci-fi & fantasy field, or any type of film where there is a fantastical element, you need to have a secondary character in place to ground the whole thing**. In Star Wars, we had Han Solo. In Star Trek, we had Leonard McCoy. In Doctor Who, we have his companions. The Doctor is such a bizarre, impulsive, madcap genius that he needs to have people alongside of him who make him appear more human (which of course he is not).

I always thought that Sladen did this best of all out of all the companions that were ever on the show. To be truthful, i haven't seen ALL of them in action, but i've seen probably 80% of them (i've seen little of the 6th, 7th & (why do we count that crappy) 8th Doctors & their episodes. If you watch the tribute that i've attached, you'll see evidence of this in her performances*. She brought a wonderful element of down-to-Earth humanity to the role.

They appeared to have killed the embedding feature for this one, so just click the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH2_LFZpk5s

Another nice thing about her life & career was that after she'd been off Doctor Who for several decades, the BBC put her into another show based on the same character. The show did quite well & introduced Sladen to a new generation of younger fans.

**yeah, there are literary terms that apply here, but i don't feel the need to throw them around. Either that or i can't recall them. You decide which.
*thanks Justin S for posting this. It's really good, even with the typical slow song montage at the end (they did pick a song by a good artist).