One Steve Limit / Doctor Who

Doctor Who has been around for over 60 years. Multiple characters sharing names was practically inevitable. This also covers spinoffs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, and Big Finish Doctor Who and the rest of the expanded universe.

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Lists are sorted alphabetically.

Companions

So far each of the companions has had a different name, although there have been some close calls.

• Amy: In one story arc, Big Finish used two characters called Amy and Zara. After the Eleventh Doctor's first companion was called Amy, the Big Finish character was renamed to Abby.
• Daniel and variants:
  • Dan Lewis, the Thirteenth Doctor's companion in Series 13.
  • Danny Bartok, Sanctuary Base 6's "ethics committee" (read: Ood handler).
  • Danny Pink, Clara Oswald's boyfriend in Series 8.
  • Dan Cooper, Kerblam! warehouse employee.
• Dodo and Ace are both nicknames, but have virtually identical real names: Dorothea and Dorothy, respectively. Both are almost always called by their nicknames, however.
  • Short-lived spinoff Class had headmistress Dorothea Ames.
• Elizabeth:
  • Dr. Liz Shaw, assistant to the Third Doctor in season 7.
  • The show has three monarchs by that name (the two historical ones and a future Elizabeth X).
• Grace:
  • Dr. Grace Holloway of San Francisco.
  • O'Brien, nurse and grandmother of Ryan Sinclair.
• Ian:
  • Chesterton, one of the original companions.
  • One of the elves in "Last Christmas".
• Jack:
  • Harkness, ex-Time Agent turned companion, immortal and leader of Torchwood Three.
    • The WWII pilot Jack stole the name from in the first place.
  • Robertson, American businessman with a tendency to cut corners.
    • Harkness and Robertson both feature and interact in "Revolution of the Daleks". To clear confusion, only the former is called "Jack" while the latter is on a Last-Name Basis.
• Jamie:
  • McCrimmon, long-time companion of the Second Doctor.
  • The eponymous Empty Child.
• Polly:
  • Companion to the First and Second Doctors, significant other of Ben.
  • Unhelpful telephone operator with the UK Security Helpline.
• Rose:
  • Tyler, the Ninth and Tenth Doctors' companion.
  • Noble, Donna's daughter. This turns out to be a case of Significant Name Overlap: this Rose inherited part of Donna's Meta-crisis, and it's implied that she subconsciously chose her name when transitioning by drawing on a memory of Rose Tyler.
  • The Thirteenth Doctor's third story focuses on Rosa Parks.
  • The faux Doctor Jackson Lake's companion in "The Next Doctor" is named Rosita; the Tenth Doctor lampshades the similarity to Rose Tyler's name.
• Sara Kingdom, short-lived companion of the First Doctor, and Sarah Jane Smith, companion to the Third and Fourth Doctors.
• Susan:
  • Foreman, the Doctor's granddaughter.
  • Susan Q from "The Happiness Patrol".
  • A transgender horse.
• Victoria and variants:
  • Vicki, companion to the First Doctor.
  • Victoria Waterfield, companion to the Second Doctor.
    • The Vicki/Victoria confusion helps bungle a Continuity Nod in "Pyramids of Mars", where the scene was scripted such that Sarah emerges in a dress belonging to Victoria, and for the Doctor to absently call Sarah by that name. Tom Baker fiddled with the line and said "hello, Vicky" (something Victoria was never called during her tenure in the show). Fans could be forgiven for thinking it's Vicki's dress — it's not really either girl's style, being an Edwardian gown (both girls mostly wore 60s fashion).
  • Queen Victoria has met the Doctor at least once.
• Though it was never said on-screen, production materials give Polly's last name as "Wright", the same as Barbara.

Other Characters

• Abigail:
  • Naismith, billionaire's daughter.
  • Pettigrew, singer with a terminal disease.
• Adam:
  • Mitchell, short-lived companion of the Ninth Doctor.
  • Smith, short-lived infiltrator of Torchwood Three.
  • Wiggs, young son of Jimmy.
• Alex:
  • Harriet Jones' aide.
  • The father of a very scared boy.
• Alistair:
  • Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, long-time commanding officer of UNIT.
  • A crewmember of the starship Byzantium chasing River Song.
• Angela:
  • There are two Angelas with the last name Price in the Whoniverse:
    • A freedom fighter against the Cybermen in a parallel universe, using the alias "Mrs. Moore".
    • The descendant of someone who helped Sarah Jane find a piece of Chronosteel in The Sarah Jane Adventures.
  • Angela Whittaker, passenger on the number 200 bus.
• Angelo:
  • The leader of a group of werewolf-worshipping monks.
  • The first member of a group of clerics to fall to a Weeping Angel they were hunting.
  • Colasanto, Jack Harkness's lover in 1920s New York.
• Cass:
  • The pilot of a spaceship in distress above Karn.
  • A deaf military officer at an underground drilling site.
• Cathy (and variants):
  • Salt, reporter for the Cardiff Gazette.
  • Nightingale, victim of the Weeping Angels.
• Clive:
  • Finch, conspiracy theorist.
  • Jones, Martha's father.
• The Controller: Interestingly, both of these characters worked for the Daleks and ended up turning against them.
  • A male character in "The Power of the Daleks".
  • A young woman who was wired into the Gamestation's computers.
• There are two characters named Dave in "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead". They get called Proper Dave and Other Dave by each other and their coworkers. Both die. And are saved — literally.
• Frobisher:
  • A shapeshifting Sixth Doctor companion.
  • John Frobisher is a villain in Torchwood: Children of Earth.^note The latter was the one played by Peter Capaldi, in case you were confused.
• George:
  • A deranged former botanist/explorer.
  • The scared boy in "Night Terrors".
  • The security guard from "Closing Time".
• Hyperion:
  • A ship in "The Mutants".
  • Hyperion III, the ship in "Terror of the Vervoids".
• Jast:
  • A member of the Cult of Skaro.
  • A Sontaran commander fought by Mickey and Martha.
• Jenny:
  • A freedom fighter in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth".
  • A companion in one of the stage plays.
  • A woman inhabited by the Family of Blood.
  • The Doctor's daughter (technically Opposite-Sex Clone).
  • Flint, Madame Vastra's maid and later wife.
• There is a Captain John Hart in the serial "The Sea Devils". The Torchwood antagonist and old frenemy of Captain Jack Harkness played by James Marsters seems to have taken the same name and title by sheer coincidence.
• All this said, the surnames "Jones" and "Smith" are disproportionately common in the Russell T Davies era:
  • Jones: Harriet, Ianto, Martha. Jo Grant can be included since she took her husband Clifford's name on marriage. Also Eugene from the spinoff Torchwood.
    • In the teleconference scene in "The Stolen Earth", three of the participants are named Jones: Harriet, Ianto, and Martha. And another's Smith (Sarah Jane).
    • The Adventure Games with the Eleventh Doctor and Amy has a computer quarantining an underwater base called Jones.
  • Smith: Sarah Jane, Mickey, and the Doctor's traditional alias of John Smith, plus Sarah Jane's family^note son Luke, daughter Sky, and "extraterrestrial supercomputer" Mr. Smith and Mickey's parallel-universe counterpart Ricky. Also, Adam Smith in one episode of Torchwood, who also shares his first name with a short-term companion of the Ninth Doctor. Lampshaded in "Journey's End" when Mickey takes down a Dalek that was about to kill Sarah Jane, and quips, "We Smiths have to stick together."
  • The first episode of series 3 was appropriately called "Smith and Jones".
  • According to episode credits, Martha became Dr. Smith-Jones after her marriage to Mickey.
  • Of course, it is completely coincidental that the Eleventh Doctor was played by the real-life Matt Smith. Or is it?
• Kevin: A bus driver and former colleague of Graham's, and Jack Robertson's bodyguard.
• Kroton: The Second Doctor fought monsters called the Krotons. The Eighth Doctor had a Cyberman companion called Kroton in the Doctor Who Magazine strip.
• Linda and variants:
  • Lynda "Lynda-with-a-Y" Moss, Big Brother contestant in the future (and former, never-seen contestant Linda-with-an-I) from "Bad Wolf"/"The Parting of the Ways".
  • The London Investigation 'N' Detective Agency, a Fun with Acronyms fan-club of the Doctor.
  • Clara Oswald's stepmother.
• Lucy:
  • Saxon, the Master's wife.
  • A diabetic stripper who was going to jump out of a cake at Rory's stag.
  • Hayward, one of the Minotaur's victims.
  • Big Finish Doctor Who has companion Lucie Miller.
  • Fletcher/Lombard, a reporter from New York, Grant's love and later wife.
• Mandrel:
  • "The Sun Makers" features a character named Mandrel.
  • "Nightmare of Eden" features a race of monsters called Mandrels.
• The Master: Besides the evil Time Lord who's the Doctor's "best enemy", it's also a title of the Great Intelligence and a character from "The Mind Robber", though he is not a villain.
• Milo:
  • An eager student.
  • A driver on the Motorway.
• Missy: A minor character in "Nightmare in Silver", or the Mistress, female incarnation of the Master? This was pointed out to Mark Gatiss in a Q/A, and his reaction caused some Epileptic Trees.
• Omega:
  • A legendary Time Lord who went insane.
  • One of the original three humanized Daleks in "The Evil of the Daleks".
• Penny:
  • Carter, a reporter investigating Adipose Industries.
  • Bill's date.
• Perkins:
  • The engineer on the space Orient Express.
  • A character in "Spyfall".
• Rani:
  • The Rani, villainous Time Lady who appeared in two serials in the '80s.
  • Rani Chandra, one of Sarah Jane's investigative team in The Sarah Jane Adventures.
  • There's a third Rani, a Slitheen, played by one of The Two Ronnies, who appears in an SJA charity special. Lampshaded.
• Rita:
  • Connolly, an abused housewife.
  • A Muslim woman who works in medicine vanished to an alien Hell Hotel.
• The Whoniverse now has two "R. Williams": Rhys and Rory.
• Sally:
  • Calypso, a holographic newsreader on New Earth.
  • Sparrow, a one-shot character that faced the Weeping Angels.
• Sandra:
  • Adam Mitchell's mother, thanks to All There in the Script.
  • A woman married to a man named Jason with A positive blood.
• Shona:
  • A shop assistant killed by Cybermen.
  • McCullough, a shop assistant dreaming she's a scientist.
• Sky:
  • Silvestry, a woman possessed by an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Smith, Sarah Jane's adopted daughter.
• Solomon:
  • The de facto leader of New York City's Hooverville.
  • A mass-murdering pirate.
• Tarron is the name of an official from the City of Millenius in the First Doctor story "The Keys of Marinus". Taron is the leader of the group of Thals the Third Doctor and Jo meet on the planet Spiridon in "Planet of the Daleks".
• The Fourth Doctor has tussled with two shifty organisations called ThinkTank: the scientific research institution subverted by Winters' Putting on the Reich political party in "Robot", and Skagra's Grand Theft Me research institute in "Shada".
• Thomas (and variants):
  • Tom, from "The Smugglers".
  • Tommy, from "Planet of the Spiders".
  • Tommy Connolly, from "The Idiot's Lantern".
  • Thomas Kincade Brannigan, from "Gridlock".
  • Dr. Thomas "Tom" Milligan, from "Last of the Time Lords".
  • Tommy Brockless in the Torchwood episode "To the Last Man".
  • The double offender Thomas Thomas from "The Crimson Horror".
• Tobias:
  • Vaughn, a cyborg one-shot villain working for the Cybermen.
  • Zed, a member of Sanctuary Base 6 under demonic possession.
• Travers:
  • A professor in "The Abominable Snowmen",
  • Another character in "Terror of the Vervoids".
• Varga:
  • Varga plants, from "Mission to the Unknown" and "The Daleks' Master Plan".
  • The lead Ice Warrior in "The Ice Warriors" is also named Varga.
• There are two characters credited as "The Woman": a Time Lady in "The End of Time" whom Wilf kept seeing, and a woman in the Dry Lands of Gallifrey in "Hell Bent". Given that Gallifreyans aren't typically limited to one actor, these two characters may be one and the same.

Other

• An aversion is lampshaded in "The Face of Evil", in which the Doctor goes out of his way to point out that he's never met anyone called "Leela" before.
• Repeatedly lampshaded in the Big Finish Doctor Who audiodrama "Tartarus", after the Doctor, having had to think up aliases on the fly for himself and his companions, decides to call both Tegan and Nyssa "Claudia". Also a case of Shown Their Work, as in ancient Rome, daughters all shared the same name ^note that being the nomen or family name, so Nyssa and Tegan, playing sisters, would have both been legitimately named "Claudia".
• A revealing aversion is in "Terror of the Vervoids", which uses the name Hyperion for the ship, the same as the ship from the Pertwee story "The Mutants". This appears trivial — you can't expect creators in 1986 to remember trivial details from 1972 — but makes a lot of sense if you know "continuity advisor" Ian Levine's first-ever script tweak was to reject the name Hyperion for the ship in "State of Decay" on the grounds of this trope. Levine had a fight with the producer over the casting of Bonnie Langford as the companion and quit, at exactly the same time as "Terror of the Vervoids" was being produced. From this we can surmise that the aversion was intended as a Take That! to Levine. As an extra hint, the ship in "Vervoids" was specifically Hyperion III.
• The ultimate villains in "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy" were named as the Gods of Ragnarok. The following season, "The Curse of Fenric" used many themes from Norse mythology, but the author was not allowed to refer to Ragnarök by name due to this trope.

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