Who’s your favorite 1st Doctor companion? Note that this is from across all mediums and includes all TV companions and multi-story companions only from other mediums. Feel free to comment explanations for your choices, but you don’t have to.
I still need to listen to the 1st Doctor big finish stuff
I voted for Barbara. I’ve only seen the TV series, not any First Doctor audios, books, or comics yet.
Barbara was just such a great companion. She was often logical and level-headed, kind and compassionate, and always wanted to do the right thing. She was also very good with Susan and Vicki, a motherly figure to them.
Barbara is awesome. And you can vote for multiple companions.
Having recently ‘watched’ The Smugglers, I’ve decided Ben and Polly are hugely underrated - probably because so many of their episodes are missing. They’re awesome.
But Barbara is the GOAT.
My opinion changes in every rewatch
I’m enjoying doing these Farorite Companion polls. It’s absolutely no surprise that Barbara is at the top of this one. It’s also not surprising that John and Gillian got no votes as their stories aren’t easily accessable. I look forward to seeing the results on the rest of the Doctors.
Also John and Gillian aren’t the best companions imo, victims of the style of comics they were in
I mean, that true too. What I’ve heard about them (having only read one or two of their stories) doesn’t paint them in the best light. I just figured they might still have one or two defenders.
I was tempted to vote for John and Gillian as I do like to champion the underdog but in the stories they appear in they do little to enamour themselves to the reader - often they’re told to stay in the TARDIS while the Doctor has the adventure, especially after he regenerates.
I reviewed a few of their stories in the early days of my marathon:
That said, DWM did a lovely strip with them for the 40th anniversary of the comics in issue 337:
Withholding from voting proper until I at least finish 1st’s televisual tenure, but from what I’ve seen my favourite is probably Sara Kingdom, despite her short tenure. Definitely curious about her “expanded universe” stories, as well as Katarina’s (whose name is misspelled in the OP, as a sidenote); while I understand the rationale behind her not being considered a very audience-friendly companion, I find her perspective as someone who basically thinks she’s already dead and adrift in a Greco-Hittite conception of the afterlife very compelling.
Shame not to see Tom Campbell (Bernard Cribbins) from Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. · · TARDIS Guide in the list when other single movie companions have been included in other polls (I’m looking at you, Grace Holloway)
Hmmm but those movies aren’t the same “First Doctor” are they? 
he is kind of an alternate universe / unbound Doctor.
It’s a tricky one. When the movies were released he was clearly intended to be the same character, but what we got was an ‘adaptation with differences’ in the same way you see with a movie based on a book. In the McGann movie the Doctor said he was half human, which seems quite a big divergence in lore, but we usually gloss over that and still treat him as a mainstream Doctor these days.
Looking at other long-running franchises, for example, a lot of different people have played Hercule Poirot, and in quite different ways, but we always consider them to be the same character. It’s only in the context of 60 years of regeneration and exploration in Doctor Who that those re-casting and re-writing differences seem significant.
In summary, I tend to fall in to the view that the Peter Cushing Doctor is just a ‘movie version’ of the First Doctor, but I know opinions vary.
I personally tend to go with that people heard enough about the Doctors exploits in universe that Doctor Who movies and a tv show were made, and the Peter Cushing movies exist in-universe.
Ace saw the announcement of the tv show in Remembrance of the Daleks…
There’s also the theory that the Cushing Doctor is an elderly version of the Meta-Crisis Doctor as he is explicitly described as being human.
I’m not sure Cushing was ever meant to be the First Doctor though - too much about those films depict him in a very different light to the TV Doctor - two granddaughters (and a niece); human; built the TARDIS in his back garden.
Yeah I think I am more Doyleist about the Dalek movies. They are a different continuity from the TV show that were made to ride the coat-tails of Dalekmania.
I suppose if you want to have them fit in the greater storyline the meta-crisis Doctor is one approach 
Admittedly, it’s one of these areas I really need to go back to one of these days. I’m pretty sure I saw one of the movies once, but I barely remember it, and I’m not even really sure which one, since I just largely remember it having Daleks in it. I watched it once more than 20 years ago, so everything kinda blurs.
I do actually end up filing the Curse of Fatal Death Doctors under being a different continuity…
Nope I’ve got it now. The Dalek movies are the result of Susan and Ian meeting in the memory TARDIS, but the TARDIS has developed a fault so they misremember those adventures. Something about the fluid link I’ll bet!