“He will not abandon me! And I will not abandon him. I will be with the Doctor, no matter what.” - Adric, Psychodrome
Hello, welcome to my blog! This used to be a general aesthetics blog focused on frutiger aero and old tech (and there probably still will be some of that), but now I’ve repurposed it to be a Doctor Who blog.
My name is Hannah, I’m 21 and I use she/they. I’m currently finishing up a degree in History. I like the colour green, horror movies, capybaras, and a good sense of humour. I’m also from the UK!
My current fave is obviously Adric. I really relate to him as a character (read: autism) and I love how tragic his arc is. I’m still watching Classic Who so I’m sure some of my opinions are bound to change, but I’ll always appreciate Adric for being such a compelling character.
Outside of that, I love the 3rd, 5th, and 7th Doctors from Classic and the 9th from NuWho. My favourite companions outside of Adric are Sarah Jane, Jamie, Jo, Turlough, and Bill.
Please send me Big Finish recs and your Doctor Who fanart!
Also, I met Janet at the con today! Very fun! She talked a lot about her roles on other shows, how she got into Doctor Who, John Nathan-Turner, etc. She’s very great to meet if you ever get the chance. However, since this blog is an Adric-centric one (yes, I’ve branched out to Turlough in recent weeks), I feel like I should share two really funny anecdotes about him.
When I went up to the signing desk, I asked for a picture of Janet with Sarah and Matthew and I told her that Adric was my favourite character. Later on when I was paying, she was struggling to add up the costs, and I made a joke about how I’m terrible at maths for an Adric fan, and she looked me in the eye and told me “if you’re an Adric fan, you’ve got bigger problems!” Absolutely hysterical interaction.
When she was on stage taking questions, she shared a really funny anecdote about how Peter Davison called up one of the nuwho producers about the death of a character (she says RTD, but I’m pretty sure it was Moffat and she was talking about Clara/Amy/Bill.) Basically, his kids were upset over the companion death, and the producer told Peter “you can’t complain. You KILLED ADRIC,” as if Peter Davison himself had boarded that freighter.
went to a DW convention today and had a good time, though the sun was quite hot. as you can tell by my purchases, I have absolutely no bias towards any specific companion. and turlough.
Okay, so I just watched Four to Doomsday and it got me thinking about Adric quite a lot.
To preface this, I absolutely love Adric from all the previous serials. I have not watched anything beyond Four to Doomsday, so sorry if anything I say here is later contradicted, but please no spoilers (although I do know what happens in Earthshock, but not any of the build up or reasoning).
I can't help but feel like that bit of extraordinary misogyny there was kind of out of character. Like, I can't recall him ever expressing any sexist opinions like that before, whether overtly or unconsciously, or at least nothing more than any other character written in the early 1980s. So to have him, seemingly out of the blue, say something incredibly misogynistic felt really weird to me.
That's not to say that Adric doesn't have what I might describe as a superiority complex—I think he does. But I don't think gender really has anything to do with it. I think it's more to do with intelligence (at least, intelligence as he perceives it).
Thinking back, I can't ever imagine Adric talking to Romana like he did to Tegan. He also doesn't talk to Nyssa like that either (the show kind of writes it off as him seeing Nyssa as a 'girl' not a 'woman' but I think that's a pretty weak explanation personally); it's just Tegan. And the difference here is that Romana and Nyssa both have high levels of understanding of maths and science: the things that Adric seems to care about the most. Romana is a Time Lord after all, so she knows much more than he does, and while Adric seems to be a better mathematician than Nyssa, she has the upper hand with science and technology. In fact, in Four to Doomsday itself, we see Adric asking Nyssa a bunch of questions about science, because he knows that she will understand the things that he doesn't. In general, he seems to have a lot of respect for her. And the big difference between Nyssa and Tegan in Adric's eyes? Tegan isn't a scientist. Traken's technology is far beyond Earth's (at least in the eras that Tegan and Nyssa are from), and Tegan isn't even a scientist; she's an air hostess. So, to Adric, Nyssa is a lot more intelligent than Tegan, so he respects her more.
A frequent trend that I've noticed with Adric is that he seems to default to the most intelligent person (in his view) present as the highest authority. For example, in Full Circle he sees himself as 'above' his brother and the others because he's been awarded and praised for his "mathematical excellence", which leads to him saying something along the lines of "of course I'm better than you; I'm an elite". I'm fairly certain that this is something that he's been told many many times—that his intelligence makes him important and elite, and so he considers intelligence to be the mark of authority. This means that when he meets the Doctor and Romana (and sees the TARDIS) he immediately latches onto them. I think this can also be linked to the two conflicting sides of himself—he wants to be like his brother, so a bit rebellious and adventurous, but he also wants to be able to show off his maths skills and be recognised for them. Meeting the Doctor allows him to have both of these things.
In State of Decay, Adric isn't taken in by the vampires and their promises, even if he pretends to be. I think this is largely because he has both the evidence of his own eyes and Romana there saying that the vampires are evil and destructive. Also, the vampires seem to rely more on innate abilities than intelligence or technology, so in that situation Adric sees Romana as the highest authority figure (since the Doctor isn't there) and so, even if he lies and pretends to side with the vampires, he trusts her the most.
Then, in Warrior's Gate the Doctor introduces him to the ideas in the I Ching about randomness and the holistic view (which K-9, who Adric has learned knows a large amount of information, then expands upon) and Adric spends a large amount of the serial putting that philosophy into practice by tossing a coin as he wanders around the void. Another interesting thing to note here is that he does this once K-9 is broken and his navigation systems have failed, so when the more certain or logical methods aren't working, Adric then goes to the philosophy that he saw the Doctor adopt when in much the same circumstances. Again, the Doctor is Adric's point of reference when he himself is out of his depth and he has nobody else with him. The Doctor is in many ways Adric's guide, whether he is present or not.
This trend is present again in Four to Doomsday. Adric and Nyssa get separated from the Doctor and Tegan, on a spaceship with technology that seems to be more advanced than anything on Alzarius or Traken. So, Adric now sees Monarch as the authority figure and ignores Nyssa's concerns. I think this is also, in some ways, mirroring the Doctor's behaviour. After all, the Doctor's general attitude to meeting new people is to be friendly and hope that they will be friendly too, which Adric mimics. Unfortunately, he's, to use the Doctor's words, "idealistic", so he doesn't notice the sinister undertone to the things that Monarch is telling him, which Nyssa does. However, Adric defaults to higher intelligence instead of trust in a friend's perspective, presumably because he sees one as an objective while the other can be completely wrong. He seems to think that anyone sufficiently intelligent will also be kind, which is an assumption that he may have made based on the Doctor, or possibly based on what he desperately wants to be true. It's only when the Doctor himself tells Adric that Monarch has ill intent that he actually believes it, because the Doctor, to him, is the figure of greatest intelligence (and therefore authority) in pretty much any situation.
I do also think that we have to consider Castrovalva here. From what we see in The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis and Four to Doomsday, Nyssa is generally a fairly logical and, mostly, quite perceptive (I'm not really counting the thing with the Master fooling her because her judgement was compromised there due to her thinking that he was her father) person, which should mean that Adric would trust her judgement, but in Four to Doomsday he clearly doesn't. This could be partially to do with the superior technology on the spaceship, but we see that Nyssa understands most of it just fine, so I'm more inclined to believe that it was to do with Castrovalva.
I'm honestly not sure how the thing with the Master using Adric to spy on the others worked, but I think it's implied that Adric is receiving signals a fairly large amount of the time; he's just trying to block them out (or maybe just block the Master from seeing them? Idk, as I said I didn't really understand that bit). So from there, it can be inferred that he saw and heard a pretty sizable amount of the things that Tegan and Nyssa were saying in relation to him and rescuing him. This means that while he was being tortured and potentially making things much worse for himself by resisting (the Master saying "I'll burn through your barrier" implies that by hiding the things he receives, Adric causes the Master to make things even more painful in order to extract them), he knew that one of his friends could barely remember him and the other two were actively hiding his disappearance so that the Doctor actually let himself recover a bit instead of spending all his energy trying to find Adric. I completely understand why they did this, but from Adric's perspective he'd basically just been abandoned until they'd taken care of other things that they considered more important than saving him. I think it's pretty understandable then that Adric would trust Nyssa and Tegan less, and that he might try to be a bit more self-reliant. We see him becoming quite offended when Nyssa compares Monarch to the Master, which reinforces the idea that Castrovalva was an incredibly traumatic experience for him. Everything we see of him in Four to Doomsday may be something of a response to that. In this serial, we see the Doctor paying more attention to Tegan (he gives her the spare TARDIS key, he takes her with him and tells Adric to stay behind with Nyssa, and it's Tegan who the Doctor ends up with when they get separated), which probably makes Adric very jealous. Because of this, he's trying to do things by himself and be kind of independent from the Doctor. However, he's still a teenage boy, and I think it's fair to say that he's a pretty insecure one. He's lost his parents and his brother, so the Doctor is basically all he's really got as a parental figure. We also see the Doctor ignoring him a bit—Adric is literally flying the TARDIS by himself, which the Doctor had considered something impossible for Tegan to do in the last serial, but when Adric does it the Doctor isn't even in the console room. Again, he also offers Tegan the spare key first and tells Adric to stay behind with Nyssa while they go and explore. At the end of Castrovalva, the Doctor acknowledges that he's not the same person as he used to be, and most of what Adric's seen of this new version of the Doctor is him forgetting, dismissing and ignoring him. It's reasonable to suggest, therefore, that Adric thinks that he's not as important to the Doctor now. I'm not trying to blame the Doctor here because a) he was very unwell for most of Castrovalva and b) he's suddenly become responsible for two extra people, but it does show why Adric is so eager to trust someone else who flatters him and views him as important.
In the end though, the Doctor is the person that Adric trusts the most, and relies on to guide him when he's uncertain. This is why Adric switches up on Monarch as soon as the Doctor actually talks to him.
All of this was an incredibly long-winded and slightly out of control way of saying that I disagree with whoever decided to characterise Adric as sexist. Is he deeply flawed? Yes. Does he look down on Tegan a bit? Also yes. But this isn't anything to do with gender, at least not from my understanding of his character. It's because he uses the qualities that he prides himself most on (mathematical and technological abilities) to establish which people's judgements he can trust, and so Tegan (who isn't particularly scientifically minded, instead acting more on emotions, morals and experiences) is someone whose judgement he doesn't trust anywhere near as much as he trusts Nyssa's, his own, or the Doctor's.
This is a great take and it makes me genuinely rather annoyed that people new to the show have to contend with the speed bump of Adric’s weird sexism in Four to Doomsday. I can’t imagine how many people disliked Adric because of this stupid writing choice. There are people out there who are glad Adric died because ‘he was sexist!’
OP, he’s not sexist for the rest of the TV show. You can rest assured in that; the Four to Doomsday bit was a weird writing choice. HOWEVER, if you ever choose to venture into audio dramas, PLEASE avoid The Boy That Time Forgot. Paul Magrs writes him as an uncomfortable pervert towards Nyssa. This is very much not in line with his character and (I personally believe that) its existence has since been retconned. It’s not pleasant, Adric is played by a different actor, and it feels so mean-spirited and gross that I cannot recommend it in the slightest.
Every audio with Matthew Waterhouse that I’ve listened to, however, has been absolutely lovely. If you like Adric now, you’ll love him on Big Finish. To my knowledge, he treats women pretty decently too. The relationship between him and Tegan feels less like a sexist thing and more just two siblings bickering. Modern writing has done those two a service (in fact, the whole S19 team under modern writers is just a joy to listen to. They’re very funny!)
I know you said no spoilers, but I will give you a little tiny one just to prove my point: in the audio Dream Team, Adric calls Tegan his family. From that alone, I think it’s safe to disregard the sexism element from their relationship as more of a misstep. Sexism in character writing can be done really well! It can be used as a tool to show a character’s bias and eventual growth. But here, it just feels so random and strange for Adric so there’s no harm in redacting it from his character entirely. Most current stories just choose to ignore it, which I think is the right choice.
(Also: you seem pretty interested in Castrovalva and the characters in that serial, so I’d give Psychodrome a listen! They go into depth about all that stuff and it’s easily a top 3 BF audio for me.)
Eldrad Must Die! has fundamentally altered my brain. I mean, I never hated Turlough, I always liked him, but man. Man. The voice Turlough has when he thinks he’s a soldier just breaks my heart. How old was he during that war?
The season 19 serial Time-Flight teaches the viewers important lessons like checks notes if someone chooses to die, we shouldn’t mourn them checks notes again Jesus Christ
Something so cute (read: absolute bastard) about adric and the Doctors relationship is sometimes adric will inconvenience or annoy the doctor in some way and the doctor will scold him with "you are such an insufferable delinquent punk, who raised you?" And guess who raised him.
at the doctor who panel at the convention today, nicola bryant told us all a story about planet of fire and basically. when they were on the coach for location filming (i assume) mark strickson had cactus needles in his head because he fell into one and nicola noticed this so she mentioned that he was bleeding. and he mustve misheard it as 'leaving' and he was all sad about it. and nicola told him 'no youre BLEEDING' and he was like 'oh yeah i fell into a cactus'. so essentially he was more upset about leaving than being physically injured
