Okay, so I’m gonna tackle this because this is ticking me off. Be warned.
I moved to a new state last year, over 600 miles away from where I grew up. It would take nearly ten hours to drive there, or two short airplane flights and a forty-five minute drive. That is where my parents and most of my siblings live. (The other sibling lives in Minneapolis, which is even further away.) All four of my grandparents are now deceased, as of this past March. My closest friends–mostly from college and graduate school–live, at minimum, an hour away from me, and while I am making a friend group at work and at church, that stuff takes time. This past Christmas, I could not afford to go home for the holiday, so I stayed here. The day of, I went and saw The Force Awakens. Yes, a family I know here also got me presents but I wasn’t expecting that and was really very surprised.
So my point is that it makes total sense for Amy, Rory, and Clara to have less “supporting cast” because, guess what? not everyone lives close to each other. And, even if they did live close by, you don’t always spend every waking moment with them–that family whom I love and who gave me presents at Christmas? I see them every once in a while, it’s not every day, heck it’s not every week. It’s lonely being an adult.
Add the fact that Amy and Rory spent “a year traveling” after their wedding and then were in and out. It takes time to build the kind of support networks–especially if you’re living in a new place, because it doesn’t seem as if the Ponds are living in Leadworth anymore (prior to New York, anyway).
And the fact that Amy’s parents had disappeared was a plot point of Series 5, but when they reappear, Amy’s already an adult. On top of that, I’m pretty sure Amy grew up (in any universe) with a distrust of parental figures for a variety of reasons–so why would she go to them for help or support?
Rory’s got Brian, yes, but Rory’s also got this ‘I have to prove to myself that I can do this on my own’ thing going on. And it’s clear that while they love each other, they both clash about stuff.
As for Clara–she loses her mom, that affected her; she was living with the Maitlands until they no longer needed her; she went to school. Like, the latter two are really transitory things, you build the relationships but then you move on. And she’s traveling with the Doctor and she’s working at Coal Hill (I mean, do you think she goes out for drinks and laughs with Adrian and the other teachers? I doubt it)–and her detachment from Earth is a plot point and part of a character arc.
I love Doctor Who, enjoy both RTD’s and Moffat’s work on it (and they enjoy each other’s work, too, fyi). So while I love it, you could also turn it around and claim that Rose, Martha, and Donna are too closely tied to their families. In the very first episode of New Who, Jackie’s all ready to make big bucks off of Rose surviving the explosion of her job, and she tells her nineteen-year-old daughter that working retail in such a shop had given her “airs and graces”. (They grow in their relationship, but sheesh.) And Francine–I mean, yes, she’s got Saxon’s people whispering to her about the dangers Martha is in, but still, she’s making demands on Martha that as a twenty-something Martha doesn’t have to do. Martha can make her own choices. And Donna’s mom is downright verbally and emotional abusive of Donna and probably thinks it’s encouragement.
And all three of them are more than the relationships they have with people, too. If anyone got the ‘supporting cast’ shaft, it’s Mickey [his mom and his gran are mentioned, but we never see them once] and Danny [he’s in a children’s home and that’s about all we know of that]. And we never meet Shireen, or any of Martha’s friends, and the ‘friends’ Donna has seem to mostly tolerate her being around. How is that making the characters seem more like people?
While a lot of adult life is like high school (in that politics never ends, which is infuriating), not all of it is. One is not always surrounded by supportive family and friends. Sometimes one has to build those networks–and put in the time and presence to do so (so if you’re spending most of your life running around time and space with the Doctor, you might not be best suited to build networks of people in a new place).
It pisses me off when it’s nearly directly stated that not having ‘a supporting cast’ is tantamount to not being a fully fleshed out person. Like, I am more than my relationships with other people. And, if the standard to judge a (fictional or not) woman’s personhood is by her relationships and her proximity to those she has those relationships with, then that’s not a great standard and I feel it’s
subtlymisogynistic.I am more than my relationships with other people. And so are these characters–all of them, RTD’s and Moffat’s characters. Now, are there places where characterization could have been improved? Sure, art is messy. But not everyone is defined by their relationships with other people, just fyi.