Companions: Katarina

Katarina

(Adrienne Hill)

Katarina lived in ancient Troy at the time of the famous war as a handmaiden to the princess Cassandra. The Doctor, Vicki and Steven met her in the last episode of The Myth Makers, when all hell was breaking loose. She made friends with Vicki, who sent her to help the Doctor get a wounded Steven back to the TARDIS. Katarina came aboard and the Doctor promptly absconded with her, without asking if she'd like to come along. (Most of the early companions were either stowaways or kidnap victims.)

With Vicki having stayed behind in ancient Troy, Katarina served as her replacement aboard ship. When the TARDIS landed on the planet Kembel at the start of The Daleks' Master Plan, Katarina stayed in the ship to tend to the still-wounded Steven while the Doctor set off to look for help.

The TARDIS is found by Space Agent Bret "not the Brigadier" Vyon, who demands that Katarina fly him off the planet. Operating a time machine wasn't covered in Trojan handmaiden school, so Katarina is somewhat at a loss. Luckily Steven comes to long enough to knock Bret out before passing out again.

But Bret's not all bad, and, with a promise that he will help Steven, Katarina agrees to let him free from the Doctor's restraining chair (don't ask). Bret cures Steven and helps the the duo escape from the Daleks who have surrounded the TARDIS.

Isn't Bret dashing? The three of them meet up with the Doctor, who's surprised that Katarina let Bret go free.

Katarina convinces the Doctor that Bret's on the side of the angels, and the four set off to foil the Daleks' evil scheme of the day.

They steal the rare element taranium from the Daleks and flee the planet in a convenient spaceship. Unfortunately, the Daleks shoot them down, and they are forced to land on a prison planet. They manage to take off again, but not before one of the convicts, Kirksen, sneaks aboard via the ship's airlock. When Katarina is sent to check the airlock - because why wouldn't you send the girl from ancient Troy to check the airlock? - Kirksen grabs her.

Kirksen demands to be taken to the nearest planet, which just happens to be the planet where the Daleks are waiting to kill all of them. The Doctor and Steven agree in order to save Katarina's life, but she reaches for the airlock controls...

...and ejects herself and Kirksen into space, sacrificing herself to save the Doctor, Steven and Bret from the Daleks. Let's take another look at that picture, shall we?

Not horrifying at all. Poor, poor Katarina. With one push of a button she became both the first Doctor Who companion to die, and the shortest lived companion from the original run. Although she spanned two stories, she only appeared in five episodes total, and she only really appeared fully in three - we met her at the end of the last episode of The Myth Makers, and she became vacuum food at the start of the fourth episode of The Daleks' Master Plan. Kamelion the shape-changing robot got more airtime than that, and he didn't even work. (More on him later. Much, much later.)

Katarina handled her travels in the TARDIS (ok, travel - she only made one stop) remarkably well - perhaps to keep herself from instantly dying from culture shock, she decided that the Doctor must be a god (Russell T Davies would later take this idea and run with it). He was Zeus, she rationalized, and the TARDIS was his flying temple. She was already dead, and the TARDIS was her conveyance to the afterlife. The Doctor protested, and although she stopped calling him a god at his insistence, she never stopped believing it.

Although Adrienne Hill was signed on to be the new "Doctor Who girl", the writers very quickly realized that they didn't know what to do with the character. They felt her naive world view would make for limited story-telling options, and so they killed her off, replacing her (in the short term) with Space Security Agent Sara Kingdom (more on her next time).

It's a shame, really, because Katarina had a lot more potential than the writers gave her credit for. She's often described as naive, but that doesn't seem quite fair - she showed good judgement in defying the Doctor's orders by releasing Bret to save Steven - which must not have been easy for her, since she would have believed she was defying her god. And she clearly isn't stupid - in her final scene, she figures out which button to push to jettison herself out of the airlock, despite barely understanding what an airlock was (Steven's horrified cries of "No, not that one!" may have helped, serving as a morbid game of hot-and-cold).

Keeping Katarina aboard the TARDIS could have helped the writers, not hindered them, if they had so chosen. She could have easily served as the stock question-asker to move the plot along ("What are you doing, Doctor? What does that mean? What does this button do?" Maybe not that last one.), with Steven as a more experienced counterbalance. Her journey from bewildered innocent to worldly traveler could have made for great stories - just a year later they'd do exactly that with 18th century Scottish piper Jamie McCrimmon - but the writers' weren't interested in that kind of character development for a companion at this time, so out the airlock she went.

In the expanded universe of Doctor Who, though, leaving the TARDIS is never the end. Companions are constantly brought back in tie-in novels, comics and audio adventures, with new stories taking place in the gaps between the original television adventures. Katarina has presented a problem for writers of these licensed spin-offs, though - there are no gaps in her appearances in which to fit new stories, since the end of her first story leads directly in to the start of her last, and her death makes it a little difficult to write about her life after leaving the Doctor's company. ("Katarina froze. Her body floated a bit, then got caught in a planet's gravity well. She burned up on re-entry. The end.")

But Doctor Who fans are nothing if not creative, and Katarina has managed to make a handful of post-death appearances. The Seventh Doctor met her as a child in a comic in Doctor Who Magazine (time travel, you know), and also encountered her as an adult, inexplicably alive on a far-off world.

Spoiler! She was really a shape-changing alien. Ah, well, nice to see her again anyway. Short stories have shown her in the Greek underworld trying to make it to the Elysian Fields, and in an alternate timeline having all sort of adventures with the Doctor and Steven.

Katarina - potential squandered, all but one episode lost perhaps forever, only remembered for being the first to die. And not even remembered well - Adric's really the go-to dead companion when you want to dredge up some of the Doctor's guilt. What's a handmaiden gotta do to get some respect?

Companions: Steven Taylor

Steven Taylor

(Peter Purves)

In The Chase, when the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki were captured by the Mechanoids (basically giant geodesic spheres with flamethrowers) (so, basically awesome), they found themselves imprisoned alongside Steven Taylor, a spaceship pilot from the 23rd century (or thereabouts). They believed Steven died during their escape, so Vicki and the Doctor were understandably surprised when, after saying goodbye to Ian and Barbara, they found Steven waiting for them in the TARDIS.

Steven had gone back into the city to rescue his stuffed panda HiFi, who had been his only companion during his two-year imprisonment (like Tom Hanks' volleyball, only more adorable). Steven survived the destruction of the Mechanoids' city and slipped into the TARDIS while nobody was paying attention. Here's Steven with Vicki and HiFi at the start of his next story, The Time Meddler:

Adorable, right? Enjoy the picture, it's the last interesting thing you'll see about Steven Taylor.

Steven was brought in to replace Ian as the leading man, the action hero (Barbara, of course, was irreplaceable). And he fits the bill fine - young, strapping, handsome, and utterly and completely generic.  He's not a bad companion, he's fills a storytelling niche and Peter Purves does a good job with the material he's given. But after his exciting introduction, he doesn't do a whole lot; at least, nothing unexpected if you're familiar with his stock type. He gets very little in the way of character development - he's just kind of there.

Here's the new crew, hiding cheerfully behind a rock. Posing for publicity photos is fun!

Steven's development was not aided by the fact that his first few scripts were originally written for the previous TARDIS crew. In his next story, Galaxy 4, his role in the story and most of his dialogue were originally written for Barbara. As a consequence, he spends most of the story held hostage while the Doctor and Vicki get on with the business of saving the planet.

See? They even gave him one of Barbara's cardigans to wear.

He spent the next story, The Myth Makers, being all action heroey in the Trojan War, and getting near-mortally wounded for his trouble. Vicki departs in this story, and she's replaced by Trojan handmaiden Katarina, who carries the wounded Steven into the TARDIS.

More on Katarina next time, but suffice it to say, she doesn't last long. In the next story, The Daleks' Master Plan, she's quickly replaced with Sara Kingdom, who also doesn't last long. Steven was very, very lucky to have gotten out of that story alive.

All these deaths in the space of one story wear a bit on Steven, so the TARDIS takes him and the Doctor to Paris, where they can chillax in some fine BBC period clothing and get their drank on.

Except it's Paris in 1572, and the story is titled The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve, and ten thousand Huguenots, including all the drinking buddies Steven just made and the cute serving girl named Anne Chaplet he had his eye on, are all about to be brutally slain in a weeks-long purging that will see the streets of Paris run red with innocent blood. Because fuck you, Steven Taylor.

Every companion gets their lesson in the futility of changing history, and this was Steven's. He's furious at the Doctor for making them abandon their new-found friends to their fate, and when the TARDIS materializes in 1966 London, he storms out, determined to leave his travels with the Doctor behind forever. Ah, you say, that sounds like characterization to me! Well, no, because right away he spots some policemen running towards the TARDIS and comes back to warn the Doctor, who promptly takes off. On board the TARDIS with them this time is new companion Dodo Chaplet, and Steven convinces himself that, since they have the same last name, Dodo must be Anne's descendant, so Anne must have survived the massacre, and all is well. The Doctor is so happy Steven has stopped bitching about the constant slaughter that comes with a life in the TARDIS that he doesn't point out how staggeringly unlikely Steven's hypothesis is.

Here's the new team in Dodo's first full story, The Ark. Steven doesn't do much in this one, except almost die from catching Dodo's cold. It's a nice picture, though, isn't it?

Steven gets to have a bit more fun when the crew goes up against The Celestial Toymaker. The Doctor is sidelined for most of the story (the producers were considering letting William Hartnell go, as he was becoming more and more difficult to work with), so Steven and Dodo took the lead, playing the Toymaker's deadly games in order to win back the TARDIS.

Sadly, most of this story is lost, but it sounds like it was pretty good. Steven got lots of action in this one, and doesn't he look nice in color? Score one for you, Steven Taylor.

I take it back. In The Gunfighters, the trio visit Tombstone just in time for the gunfight at the OK Corral. They meet the Earps, the Clantons, Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo, bullets fly and people die, and Steven dresses like he's going to a Western-themed costume party at Liberace's house. Luckily, the Doctor passes them all off as entertainers, and even more luckily - and inexplicably - Steven can sing and play the piano. There's an awful lot of gunfighting in this story, and Steven doesn't take part in any of it. Ian would have taken out the entire Clanton gang with one bullet...sigh. I miss Ian.

But all mediocre things must come to an end, and Steven's next story, The Savages, was his last. On an unnamed future world, the Doctor negotiates peace between a race of scientific Elders and the primitive Savages they've been exploiting. For some reason the two tribes invite Steven to stay with them and become their leader - I suppose when choosing a leader after years of conflict, "vaguely nonthreatening" seems like a pretty attractive quality. Steven accepts, bidding the Doctor and Dodo farewell.

I've probably been overly harsh on Steven - he was perfectly serviceable, as male companions go. He was just bland, and it's hard to find anything funny or interesting too say about bland people.

Oh, I've got something. In the tie-in novel The Empire of Glass, set in 1609 Venice, Steven teams up with playwright Christopher Marlowe, who makes a pass at him. Steven ignores it, though, because otherwise something interesting might happen.