Companions: Dodo Chaplet

Dodo Chaplet

(Jackie Lane)

Dorothea "Dodo" Chaplet came aboard the TARDIS during a particularly bleak time, after Steven and the Doctor fled from the massacre of the Huguenots in sixteenth-century France.  She saw a little boy get hit by a car, and wandered into the ship looking for a policeman (this was back when people actually knew what a police box was).  Steven came running back into the TARDIS warning the Doctor that policemen were approaching; fearing they would try and break in, the Doctor took off with Dodo still aboard.

Dodo was perfectly happy to be told that she was now on a possibly never-ending journey through time and space - she lived with her aunt, whom she said wouldn't miss her. Watching Dodo you get the feeling she also would have been perfectly happy to turn right around and go home and watch TV. Or get dumped on an alien planet and left there. Or have a burlap sack put over her head and asked to sit quietly on the floor. She wasn't very bright, is what I'm saying. But she was cheery and guileless and brought a much-needed touch of innocence to the TARDIS after the darkness of The Daleks' Master Plan and The Massacre.

And she maintained that cheery innocence even as she almost caused the extinction of the entire human race in her first full story, The Ark.

Here she is in a publicity shot from that story, in a non-existent scene in which she's happily carried away by a Monoid, one of the baddies of the piece.  The TARDIS landed millions of years in the future on a great spaceship carrying the last of humanity to their new home as they fled from the destruction of Earth.  This far in the future the common cold had died out, and humanity had lost all resistance to it.  Sadly, Dodo had a killer case of the sniffles, and humanity's last hope started dropping like flies (along with future-boy Steven, who also had no resistance).  The Doctor came up with a cure, but not soon enough - humanity was weakened, and when the TARDIS reappeared on the Ark seven hundred years later, humanity's former servants, the aforementioned Monoids, have enslaved the human race. Oh, that Dodo! You start to get mad at her for causing death on a massive scale and being responsible for the enslavement of humanity, but then you see that smile and you have to forgive her!

After putting this situation to rights the TARDIS trio moved on, and next encountered The Celestial Toymaker.  This story was fun and frilly with very little substance - perfect for Dodo.  Sadly, only the final episode remains, the others having been long-since destroyed by the short-sighted BBC. But here's the cast in that story - don't they look like they're having fun?

At the end of the story the trio are in fine spirits after having defeated the Toymaker, and Dodo offers the Doctor a piece of candy - which promptly cracks his tooth open. Oh, Dodo, is there anything you can't ruin? The TARDIS delivers its crew to Arizona in the old west in the next serial, The Gunfighters, so the Doctor can get some dental care from Doc Holliday. Steven and Dodo, meanwhile, dress up like Donny and Marie putting on an old-timey saloon sketch.

The Gunfighters is, quite frankly, a terrible story, but Dodo makes the most of it - the Doctor even acknowledges that she quickly lives up to "every cliché-ridden convention in the American west".  She sings and dances in the saloon, she gets taken hostage...

...and she even gets to pack a six-shooter herself.

Granted, she looks like she has absolutely no idea what to do with the thing, but that's ok, this is Dodo.  She's deadly without even trying.

Dodo says goodbye to Steven in her next serial, The Savages, and she and the Doctor travel on alone.  They land on present-day (well, 1960s) Earth in The War Machines, and things are looking rosy.  The Doctor is fond of Dodo - she reminds him of his granddaughter Susan, he once said - and she seems inordinately fond of him in return.

Unfortunately, fate - and the Doctor Who writers - aren't kind to poor Dodo. She's quickly mind-controlled by WOTAN, an evil super-computer, and brainwashed into trying to kill the Doctor.

Here she is being all evil or something.  Halfway through the story WOTAN's hold on her is broken and she's whisked off to the country to recover, never to be seen again.  At the end of the story we're told she's given her TARDIS key to her soon-to-be-replacement Polly, along with a message to the Doctor that she's decided to stay behind.  And that's the last we hear of Dodo Chaplet.

Dodo gets a lot of grief from Doctor Who fans - she's a fairly generic, unmemorable companion as they go, with neither a proper introductory story nor even an on-screen departure.  Nevertheless, I have a bit of a soft spot for her - yes, she's fairly lacking in characterization, and I still think either Katarina or Sara Kingdom would have made more interesting companions. But it's sort of charming how Dodo is relentlessly, almost aggressively cheery; she tends to wander blithely into the most dangerous of situations without a hint of concern or awareness.  She sort of like the big dumb dog of the TARDIS crew - she makes a lot of messes but she's too lovable to stay mad at.

Unless, of course, you are a writer of officially licensed Doctor Who tie-in media, in which case you probably hate Dodo Chaplet with the intensity of a supernova.  Yes, like all companions, Dodo makes a few appearances beyond what we see on the TV.  Considering how innocuous her on-screen travels were, Dodo's spin-off adventures are comparatively...brutal.

In the novel The Man in the Velvet Mask Dodo falls in love with a Frenchman from an alternate timeline, sleeps with him, and contracts a disease in the doing - actually, microscopic engineered cyborg maggots. Yay. A cure is found, but she decides to keep the maggots as a souvenir of her first time. Yes, that's right, this was her first time. (Here's a quote from the TARDIS Data Bank, a sort of Wikipedia for Doctor Who - "She was also one of the few companions known to have lost her virginity whilst an active TARDIS traveller." Fun fact, kids!)

In Who Killed Kennedy?, we learn that WOTAN's mind-control triggered a psychotic break, and Dodo spent years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, convinced that her travels in the TARDIS were hallucinations. She wound up homeless, but found hope when she fell in love with a reporter. She became pregnant just in time to be murdered as part of a plot by the Master.

Oh, also, she once killed a guy who tried to rape her.

And the moral is, if you ever travel with the Doctor, do not grant licensing rights to novelists.  They will take your innocence and piss all over it.

Companions: Sara Kingdom

Sara Kingdom

(Jean Marsh)

When the producers of Doctor Who decided to kill off new companion Katarina, the writer of the serial in which she was to make her swan song was given the task of quickly introducing a new companion to take her place for the remainder of the story. That story was The Daleks' Master Plan, a twelve-part epic by the Daleks' original creator, Terry Nation. Nation had big plans for his creations; buoyed by their popularity, he pitched a pilot to American TV networks. When nobody bit and the pilot remained unproduced, he dusted off and reworked some of the concepts from it for use in this Doctor Who story, including one of the heroes of the original piece, Space Security Service agent Sara Kingdom.

Sara's tenure on the show was short-lived - nine episodes, all contained within one story. When she meets the Doctor she's convinced that he and Steven are criminals; she's been told so by her boss, Mavic Chen, the Guardian of the Solar System (unbeknownst to Sara, he himself is secretly in league with the Daleks). What's more, he convinces her that her brother, Bret Vyon, is a traitor; when Sara next encounters Bret, she shoots him dead without giving him a chance to explain. Bit rash, that. An accident with an interplanetary transporter sends Sara off with the Doctor and Steven; she learns that she's in the wrong and that her brother was innocent. Whoopsie. To make things right, she joins the TARDIS crew in their attempt to stop the Daleks' evil scheme.

The crew suffers through a few detours along the way, owing mostly to the Doctor's inability to steer the TARDIS properly. One such trip leads to an encounter with fellow renegade Time Lord the Meddling Monk in ancient Egypt.

The Doctor steals some components from the Monk's TARDIS, and he's able to finally (twelve episodes in) get them where they need to go. Sara helps the Doctor steal the Daleks' time destructor, a devastating weapon. Not knowing Sara would disobey his instructions to seek shelter in the TARDIS, the Doctor activates it - it destroys the Daleks, but also ages Sara to dust.

Of course, as we learned with Katarina, death is never the end for a Doctor Who companion - not when there's fan-fiction officially licensed tie-in media stories to be written. Although Sara only appeared in one serial, there's a handy gap right around episode 7 where plenty of other adventures can be shoe-horned in by the determined author. In recent years Jean Marsh has reprised the role for Big Finish Production, narrating months of unseen adventures taking place in that tiny gap.

In fact, thanks to Terry Nation, Sara was having her own spin-off adventures decades before devoted fans would make it the norm. In 1966, Nation repurposed more of his discarded Dalek pilot into The Dalek Outer Space Book, featuring stories of the Space Security Service versus the Daleks - including a short comic featuring our heroine.

Don't fuck with Sara Kingdom, boys. She kills Daleks for a living, she's not going to be bothered by a couple of thin-headed hoodlums.

Sara was a great companion; it's a shame her dismal fate was predestined, especially considering her replacement was (shudder) Dodo. She was a strong woman of action, sensitive, smart and handy with a ray gun. She had a great rapport with the Doctor and Steven, and her role as the action hero of the trio (sorry, Steven) didn't preclude a bit of fun - just listen to the three of them having a ball in the Christmas special episode The Feast of Steven, in which Sara's mistaken for an actress on a 1920's Hollywood film set. At the end of the episode, the trio celebrate the season by getting their drank on. Sara was anything but one-note.

Like Katarina before her, killing Sara off seems like a missed opportunity. It would have been a lot of fun to see how the character developed, particularly in the more-than-capable hands of Jean Marsh, a wonderful actress, arguably the most famous actor to play a companion in the classic series. She's perhaps best known in America for her role in the TV sitcom adaptation of the movie 9 to 5. Oh, and Upstairs, Downstairs. She won an Emmy and some Golden Globes for that, I think. But mostly 9 to 5. 

I speak of Sara as a companion, but her official status has long been a source of debate amongst fans. She was never intended to last past this story, the BBC did not consider her the new "Doctor Who girl", and Jean Marsh herself insists to this day that Sara was not a proper companion. But for nine episodes she certainly felt like one - she traveled in the TARDIS, got caught up in more than one adventure (even if it was under one umbrella title), and, if not officially considered a companion by the Who office, was at the least intended to fill the role of girl companion for this story.

My position on the subject of whether Sara Kingdom counts as a companion is a firm "Who gives a shit?" Why not count her? It's not like there's such a thing as an "official" companion anyway, really - the new series has made that abundantly clear. Is Jackson Lake a companion? I guarantee in thirty years or so there will be officially licensed stories set between The Next Doctor and Planet of the Dead in which Jackson and Rosita finish their Christmas dinner with the Tenth Doctor and are whisked away by him for a whole string of adventures we just haven't heard about yet. So why not Sara? If it means more Doctor Who stories, I'm all for it.

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.

Companions: Vicki

Vicki

(Maureen O'Brien)

Vicki was the first new regular character to join the show since it began. After dumping wet blanket granddaughter Susan, the Doctor immediately replaced her with surrogate granddaughter Vicki, an orphan from the 25th century.  He traded up.

Vicki was highly intelligent, which was the norm in her time thanks to futuristic teaching techniques; something she never hesitated to tease 20th century teachers Ian and Barbara about. She was smart, but not necessarily perceptive. When the Doctor found her, in The Rescue, she was one of only two survivors of a spaceship crash, along with a man named Bennett. While they await a rescue ship, Vicki is randomly menaced by a creature named Koquillion.

Spoilers! In a twist anticipating Scooby-Doo by several years, Koquillion is Bennett in a mask. This never occurs to Vicki, despite the fact that she never sees the two of them together, and that Bennett always withdraws to his room just before Koquillion appears. To give Vicki the benefit of the doubt, though, this is classic Doctor Who, and she can be forgiven for not being able to tell the difference between an actual alien head and a cheap rubber mask.

Mystery sleuthing skills aside, Vicki was adventurous and brave. When the foursome relaxed in an ancient Roman villa for a month, Vicki complained about nothing exciting happening (until they met Nero and he burned Rome down, which she totally dug). 

When the crew landed in Palestine during the Crusades, the Doctor convinced her to disguise herself as a boy, for her own safety. Here she is, disguised as "Victor", along with Ian, the Doctor, and King Richard.

King Richard suspected nothing, because in ancient times the idea of a girl wearing trousers or a tunic was so inconceivable it was a fool-proof disguise, even though she clearly has boobs.

Here she is in the TARDIS, reading over Ian's shoulder. Don't you hate that? Leave him alone, Vicki, he just wants to read about monsters from outer space in peace.

Here she is in Ian and Barbara's final story, The Chase. And in another example of her fine observational skills, this giant walking fungoid monster is SNEAKING UP ON HER! Pay attention, Vicki! I know it looks like the set of H.R. Pufnstuf, but you're in real danger here!

Ian and Barbara were replaced by space pilot Steven Taylor. Here's the new TARDIS crew in the story Galaxy 4, being menaced by giant upside-down shower drain stoppers.

Fab dress, don't you think? Vicki matured a great deal during her travels with the Doctor, and I'm not just talking about her boobs. She took her leave in the next story, The Myth Makers, in which the TARDIS trio landed outside Troy, during the war. (Because really, if you're a time traveler, when else are you going to go to Troy?)

Here she is meeting King Priam. Provincial Priam thought the name Vicki was weird, so he renamed her Cressida. (Do you see where this is going?) Vicki promptly falls in love with Priam's son Troilus, and leaves the TARDIS to be with him and fulfill her destiny. For some reason the Doctor did not point out to her that this would probably not turn out well.

Still, if you ignore the whole definition-of-a-faithless-woman thing, going from future space orphan to famous literary figure isn't too bad a deal. Unless Chaucer was right, and she later got leprosy. Uh...maybe we should just leave off at the end of The Myth Makers, when Vicki's happy with Troilus, and try not to think about what might have come later...