Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants (10 page)

In another possibly contradictory story, the Sixth Doctor and Peri reunite with a man the locals call ‘Mad Jamie’, who claims to have travelled to the moon and beyond. In
The World Shapers
(
Doctor Who Magazine
issues #127-129
, published in 1987) it is revealed that Jamie, some forty years after he left the Doctor, remembers his adventures. Following an adventure against the Voord, Jamie sacrifices himself to stop the Worldshaper from evolving the Voord into Cybermen.

The most recent appearance of Jamie, post-TARDIS travels, is in the audio play trilogy produced by Big Finish in 2012
City of Spires
,
The Wreck of the Titan
and
Legend of the Cybermen
. The Sixth Doctor arrives in the Scottish highlands in 1780 and comes across Jamie who, posing as Black Donald, is the ruthless leader of rebels fighting the Redcoats. Jamie has no memory of the Doctor, but still agrees to travel with him. They soon discover they are in the Land of Fiction, now run by the Mistress of the Land, and become involved in a series of adventures which leads them to Zoe, who Jamie doesn’t remember either. Zoe is able to release the Time Lord’s block and later discovers that he is not the real Jamie at all, rather a work of fiction created by the Mistress of the Land. Fictional Jamie is not keen on learning that the Doctor never returned to the real Jamie. It is eventually revealed that Zoe is also a work of fiction, and the Mistress of the Land is actually the real Zoe (more on her role later). At the end of the adventure, fictional Jamie makes the Doctor promise that he will one day seek out the real Jamie.

There is one final piece of the Jamie puzzle in the Expanded Universe and that is a comic-exclusive companion of the Tenth Doctor, one Heather McCrimmon, a descendant of Jamie’s. More on her later.

Victoria Maud Waterfield, as the 1996 novel
Downtime
reveals, was born in 1852 – meaning she was only fourteen during her travels with the Doctor. Her mother, Edith Rose, died in November 1863 when Victoria was eleven. And she was once photographed by Charles Dodgson, implying she was the physical model of his heroine Alice while writing under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.

Once again her travels with the Doctor, though covered in many novels, short stories and audio books, remain largely unaffected, although a few authors are keen to explore the fallout of her father’s death. In the 2010 audio book
The Emperor of Eternity
she reveals to Jamie that she has forgiven the Daleks for killing her father, and in the novel
The Dark Path
Koschei (later to be known as the Master) offers Victoria a chance to change the past by destroying Skaro, thus ensuring the Daleks will not be around to kill her father. Faced with such a decision, she cries to make it happen, but fortunately the presence of the Doctor is able to prevent this from happening. A further link to the Daleks comes in the comic strip,
The Bringer of Darkness
in a
Doctor Who Magazine Special
published in 1993. In this Victoria is appalled at the way the Doctor destroys the Dalek force and realises she will leave the Doctor and Jamie soon.

Her life in the twentieth century, after leaving the Doctor, has been explored by several authors to varying degrees. In a prelude to the 1993 novel
Birthright,
published in
Doctor Who Magazine issue #203
, the Seventh Doctor visits Victoria when she is with her adoptive parents (one presumes it is the Harrises) and takes her back to 1868 to take care of her father’s fortunes before returning her to twentieth century life.

Her father’s fortune comes back to haunt her in 1980 (in the video drama and novel
Downtime
) when she is visited by a lawyer with her father’s will. At this point in her life she still feels displaced, despite a stint working at the British Museum. Haunted by the voice of her father she returns to Det Sen in Tibet, and once again comes under the influence of the Great Intelligence – manipulating her through the body of her old friend, Professor Travers (from the television stories,
The Abominable Snowmen
and
The Web of Fear
). With her fortune she founds New World University. She hires journalist Sarah Jane Smith – unaware that Sarah was once a companion of the Doctor – to investigate the cover up of the Great Intelligence’s previous invasion attempt. This attracts the attention of retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who once met Victoria during the previously mentioned invasion attempt (
The Web of Fear
), and eventually helps UNIT to overpower the Intelligence, Victoria escaping in the confusion. It is only later that Sarah realises who Victoria is, having been told about her by the Doctor in the television story
Pyramids of Mars
. At the end of this little adventure, Victoria is visited by the Third Doctor who apologises for not checking up on her sooner. He gives her a letter of recommendation for UNIT, as well as asking her to travel with him again. She refuses, and refuses again when the same offer is made by the Fourth Doctor.

By 2008 she is married and expecting her first grandchild. She has never told any of her family about her adventures or that she was born in the nineteenth century (
The Great Space Elevator
).

The last appearance of Victoria is in the 2012 audio play
Power Play
. Now over sixty years old Victoria is reunited with the Doctor who is in his sixth incarnation. She knows nothing of regeneration and it takes both the Doctor and Peri to convince her that he is the same man she once knew. Not unlike Jo Grant, here Victoria is shown to be fighting for Earth in her own way, by protecting the environment.

Zoe, as one would expect, alters very little in the books and audiobooks, but much is made of her life after the Time Lords return her to her own time, with only the knowledge of her initial adventure intact. These events are difficult to put into chronological order, especially as much is contradictory. For instance, in the 2003 short story
The Tip of the Mind,
Zoe is seen to be working on Space Station XZ49 for UrtiCorp. Although she doesn’t remember her time with the Doctor, she can access her memories unconsciously. The Third Doctor visits the station, believing that Zoe holds the secrets to the dematerialisation codes he needs to help him beat his Time Lord-imposed exile. Fearful of the damage such a recall may have, the Doctor knows he must tread carefully, but a spiteful supervisor working on the station brings Zoe into contact with the TARDIS intentionally. This contact unleashes the floodgates – she remembers everything, causing her to fall unconscious. Yet when she wakes it is revealed she has forgotten every single memory of the Doctor, permanently.

In the later ‘
Companion Chronicles’
released by Big Finish we are told in several stories that Zoe remembers her journeys as detailed dreams and often talks about them with a psychiatric counsellor. And in
The Uncertainty Principle
she is targeted specifically because of her buried memories by a race who wish to unlock them for their own nefarious reasons.

In the 2012 release
Legend of the Cybermen
we discover that only a month after returning home, Zoe had somehow aged two years. From this she deduces that she must has had further adventures with the Doctor that she could not recall.

An attack by the Cybermen leads to some surprising developments. They realise she has above average intelligence and could be a suitable Cyberplanner, but the conversion unblocks all Zoe’s memories of her travels. Only partly converted, Zoe takes control of the Cybermen’s ship and takes them all to the Land of Fiction. She uses the Land’s damaged control computer to create fictional characters to fight the Cybermen. She realises she needs the Doctor to truly defeat them and, unable to create an accurate fictional version, she draws the TARDIS into the Land. It materialises far off course, and Zoe creates a fictional Jamie to protect the Doctor (now in his sixth incarnation) as he finds his way to the control centre. Together, the three manage to defeat the Cybermen, and the Doctor returns her back to the Wheel, but her removal from the Land causes her to lose her memories of the Doctor once more, this time completely.

As with the First Doctor, the Second also has exclusive Expanded Universe companions and once again they are his comic grandchildren, John and Gillian. They travel with him into their teens, making no mention of his change of appearance. The role of grandfather in the First Doctor comic strips in
TV Comic
doesn’t really take with the new impish Second Doctor. John and Gillian are soon written out in
issue #872
, when he abruptly enrols them into Zebedee University to keep them safe from the Quarks (even though they had fought the Quarks several times already), before he visits Scotland and reunites with Jamie.

John returns for a cameo appearance in a later issue, now as Professor John Who. And slightly different versions of them are seen later, first in the 1994 novel
Conundrum
in which they are fictional characters from the Land of Fiction, travelling with a man called Dr Who. They meet the Seventh Doctor, who has never heard of them. In a further and final appearance, they appear in the Eighth Doctor’s dream in
The Land of Happy Endings
printed in the pages of
Doctor Who Magazine
issue #337.

The Th
ird
D
octor

Jon Pertwee

‘A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting.’

The Doctor
– The Time Warrior

For the first time in six years of
Doctor Who
history the new Doctor encountered a new type of companion. The only carry over was UNIT, led by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart – a familiar element to reassure the audience that it was still the same show. However, the Doctor’s companions reverted to purely contemporary characters with not a single male voice amongst them. From a fully-fledged scientist, to a wannabe secret agent, all the way up to an investigative journalist, the Third Doctor was challenged by a very independent kind of companion.

Liz Shaw – Caroline John
(
Spearhead from Space
to
Inferno
)

We meet Liz as she is being driven from Cambridge to London at the start of
Spearhead from Space
. Much to her obvious irritation; she is far from impressed with her drafted position as scientific advisor for UNIT. She has important research programmes going on at Cambridge and is an admired member of the scientific community (known, for instance by Professor Lennox in
The Ambassadors of Death
); an expert on meteorites with degrees in medicine, physics and a dozen different subjects. She takes a while to warm to the Brigadier, initially finding him irritating and bemusing, not believing a word he says, ‘An alien who travels through time and space in a Police Box?’

She takes great pleasure in belittling him in front of General Scobie, UNIT’s liaison with the regular army and, technically, the Brigadier’s superior. When he questions the presence of the TARDIS in Liz’s quickly assembled lab, she points out, much to the Brigadier’s annoyance, ‘It’s not just a Police Box – it’s a space ship.’ Nonetheless she gets on with the job at hand, and starts examining the meteorites, which she realises, are not meteorites at all – but it takes the presence of the Doctor to reveal that they are in fact, containers for an alien intelligence called the Nestene Consciousness.

She finds the Doctor both amusing and charming and soon sides with him in his dismissal of the Brigadier, smirking when the Doctor tells him to go away and let him and ‘Miss Shaw’ get on with their work. She finds the idea of the TARDIS incredulous, in particular the supposed size of the interior. When the Doctor states that he has an entire laboratory in there, she laughs at him like he is an imaginative child, ‘Yes, I’m sure you have.’

Under the pretence of needing specialist equipment to further study the Nestene container, which can only be found in the TARDIS, Liz agrees to ask the Brigadier for the TARDIS key. The Brigadier pays her no attention and she cheerfully steals the key off his desk, reasoning that it is, after all, the Doctor’s property. When the Doctor then attempts to escape in the TARDIS, leaving Liz behind, she refuses to accept the Brigadier’s assertion that they will never see him again. When the Doctor does return Liz berates him for tricking her. At the end of this first adventure together, the Doctor requests the continued assistance of Liz, who notably doesn’t resist – a sign of her growing affection for him. Not to say that this leaves her blind to his inaccuracies – she is quite willing to confront him if she thinks he is wrong, and is quite happy to mock him over Bessie, the Edwardian roadster the Doctor insists on as a part of his agreement to work for UNIT.