Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants (14 page)

He is very much the comic relief in both of his radio appearances, only accidentally joining the Doctor, Sarah and the Brigadier on Parakon – he carries some equipment onto the TARDIS and the Doctor forgets he is on board when he dematerialises it. Jeremy is always polite, constantly amazed and horrified by the events unfolding around him, and, much like Harry Sullivan, he likes to play the role of gentleman for Sarah. It is not a role Sarah appreciates, especially since she proves herself braver than him in every way possible. His mettle is sufficiently stronger when he returns in the 1996 radio play
The Ghosts of N-Space,
although he is still a ‘wimp and a wally. And if you can think of anything else that begins with a w, then you’re probably that, too,’ as Sarah puts it. Nonetheless, he is keen to prove himself and smuggles aboard a boat owned by the gangster Max Vilmio – even when found out, and faced with physical violence, he tries to stand up to Vilmio, with horrible results.

In the short stories
The Dead Man’s Story
(2004) and
Sedna
(2006) Jeremy is consistently clumsy and adept at getting himself into trouble. At this point he is travelling alone with the Doctor, although one suspects not at the Doctor’s request. In the former story it is Jeremy’s clumsiness that leads to an explosion that accidentally throws an innocent bystander, Jake Morgan, into an altered state of being – essentially turning him into a ghost. And in the latter, after landing on Sedna and coming into contact with the Siccati, a race of inter-galactic artists, it is Jeremy’s ineptitude at pottery that saves the day. The Siccati, looking for a rare piece of art, are more impressed by Jeremy’s imperfect vase than the Doctor's amazing painting – a fact the Doctor is less than impressed with. It is also Jeremy who finds a way to end the war and save both Sedna and Neptune.

Jeremy returns one final time, in the novel
Instruments of Darkness
, as the amnesiac villain, John Doe. At some point in the intervening years, it transpires that Jeremy’s memory was wiped after he messed with the Doctor’s IRIS machine (seen on TV in
Planet of the Spiders
), and he is later used psychically by a race of aliens. Unfortunately ‘John Doe’ is killed before he comes face-to-face with the Sixth Doctor, and so any chance of redemption is lost.

The Fo
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tor

Tom Baker

‘I have the advantage of being slightly ahead of you. Sometimes behind you, but normally ahead of you.’

The Doctor
– Pyramids of Mars

Sarah Jane Smith – Elisabeth Sladen
continued… (
The Time Warrior
to
The Hand of Fear, K9 & Company: A Girl’s Best Friend
and
The Five Doctors
)

Although clearly worried about the Doctor (
Robot
), who has a bout of rambling madness, Sarah keeps herself busy with work, visiting UNIT from time to time to check up on him. The Brigadier finds himself confiding top secret information in Sarah, simply because the Doctor is not around to be told. After meeting the new UNIT doctor, Harry Sullivan, who is assigned to look after the Doctor, she decides he is a bit old fashioned, a view that continues when he joins Sarah and the Doctor on their travels – she doesn’t care for his insistence on calling her ‘old girl’. When the Doctor attempts to abruptly leave, it is Sarah who convinces him to stay and assist the Brigadier, which he does while Sarah continues her own avenue of investigation with the Think Tank organisation – actually a front for the Scientific Reform Society. When confronted with the experimental robot, K1, Sarah’s experiences with the Doctor prove valuable as she entertains the notion that the robot is alive. Her compassion for the robot puzzles those around her, especially Miss Winters, but these concerns are proven well-placed when it is forced into performing functions against its prime directive – to serve and never harm humanity – and as a result kidnaps Sarah. After the robot is killed because of the risk it poses to humanity, Sarah is very glum and is not even cheered up by the idea of travelling in the TARDIS. That is until the Doctor rants about the Brigadier’s insistence that he talk to the Cabinet and write seventeen reports in triplicate – she points out that he is being childish and he agrees, ‘No point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.’ After he offers her a jelly baby, Sarah agrees to join him again – she rather likes this new incarnation of the Doctor – but she fails to stop the Doctor teasing Harry, who doesn’t believe a word about the TARDIS. She does, however, sympathise with Harry when the TARDIS arrives on Space Station Nerva in
The Ark in Space
and he finds it hard to understand the inside dimensions and the fact that the TARDIS has moved, ‘That’s how I felt the first time.’

Despite her objections to Harry’s old fashioned way, she strikes up a very easy friendship with him during their few travels together, and develops a lot of affection for him, clearly loving the way he fusses over her. Throughout their journeys there is a lot of gentle ribbing and banter between them – indeed, decades later, her affection for Harry is confirmed when she explains that she always loved him – albeit not in a romantic way (
The Sarah Jane Adventures: Death of the Doctor
)
.
After nearly suffocating on Nerva, she is accidentally placed in suspended animation for a short time and upon her revival she has an unusually strong and adverse reaction to the Wirrn. When she gets stuck in a conduit, she exhibits the symptoms of claustrophobia. It is only the Doctor’s goading that forces Sarah to drag herself out. She calls the Doctor a brute for being horrible to her, but soon realises she has been had and jokingly hits him. Later, on a war-torn Skaro in
Genesis of the Daleks
, Sarah is the first person to see Davros, secretly observing him test a Dalek gun. Whilst a captive of the Kaleds, she learns that she is being exposed to distronic toxaemia – which will kill her and her fellow captives after only a few hours. She organises an escape, which ultimately fails, but it does reveal her fear of heights (something we see again in
The Five Doctors
) and her suffering of vertigo, which is later exploited by Styre in
The Sontaran Experiment
. She and Harry are tortured by Davros, who uses them against the Doctor to learn secrets of later Dalek defeats, but despite the intense pain, Sarah demands that the Doctor doesn’t give in, knowing full well what such future knowledge could mean in the hands of a man like Davros. She has a very clear view of the Daleks, and believes them to be the most evil race ever created, and urges the Doctor on in his mission to wipe them out before they can spread out into the universe.

In Scotland, in
Terror of the Zygons
, Sarah once again uses her investigative skills to discover the truth behind the mystery of Tulloch Moor, by which time she is so used to Harry that she easily spots something wrong when she encounters a Zygon duplicate of him – who tries to kill her with a pitchfork after she gives chase. Once the mystery is solved, the Doctor asks if she is going to continue travelling with him – both Harry and the Brigadier refuse the offer – and she says only if they go straight back to London. She knows it is very unlikely, but still goes with him.

Her journalistic background surfaces again when they arrive in 1911 in the Old Priory, the building upon which the UNIT HQ was built, and she explains to the Doctor that the Priory was burned to the ground – presumably she researched the site after spending so much time there in recent months. When the Doctor is moody in
Pyramids of Mars
about returning to Earth, she suggests if he is tired of being UNIT’s scientific advisor he can always resign, and tries to cheer him up by wearing a dress that once belonged to Victoria, which only makes him more sullen. Fortunately, arriving in 1911 and the mystery presented there does lift the Doctor’s spirits somewhat. Cheered on by this, Sarah embraces the unexpected stop-over, and is heavily bemused by Marcus Scarman’s incredulity over her telling him that she is from 1980, and enjoys his bewilderment of the TARDIS interior which he claims is like something by HG Wells. When confronted with the unimaginable power of Sutekh, Sarah asks the Doctor to just take them home – after all she knows that Sutekh did not destroy the world in 1911, as she is from 1980. The Doctor shows her the barren ruins that Sutekh would leave; it would take someone with the power of Sutekh to make such a drastic alteration to the future, and that’s why they have to stay. Sarah never forgets her encounter with Sutekh, the last of the Osirians, because in 2010 in
SJA: The Vault of Secrets
, with the help of her computer, Mr Smith, she interferes with a NASA probe on Mars to prevent it from transmitting an image of the Osirian pyramid on Mars; she knows the danger should NASA discover such an ‘ancient and deadly civilisation’.

Sarah appears to have a strong distaste for fizzy drinks, since in
The Android Invasion
she doesn’t like ginger pop and later in
SJA: Invasion of the Bane
she is one of the 2% of Earth’s population who doesn’t like Bubble Shock!, a new fizzy drink and the front of an alien invasion. When the TARDIS automatically dematerialises from the ersatz village of Devesham created by the Kraals (having gone on to the real Devesham on Earth) she is, oddly, convinced the Doctor has simply left her. It is an unusual reaction from Sarah, who tends to display such unwavering faith in her relationship with him. Indeed, such is their bond that he later states that Sarah is his best friend (
The Seeds of Doom
). She re-meets Harry, who appears to be working against her and the Doctor, and doesn’t even consider that he may, once again, be a duplicate (an android duplicate, as it later turns out). Once the attempted Kraal invasion is thwarted, Sarah jokingly states she is going home by taxi this time, but in the next breath agrees to go by TARDIS. Despite the constant visits to her own time, it becomes increasingly clear that neither Sarah nor the Doctor intend to ever sever their contact with each other. Such is her influence that when they arrive on Karn in
The Brain of Morbius
and the Doctor is in a funk because he believes that the Time Lords are manipulating him, Sarah teases him to no avail. But upon discovering a graveyard of crashed spaceships she is able to easily get the Doctor’s interest when she finds the detached head of a Mutt.

When temporarily blinded by Maren’s ring, Sarah maintains her usual level of sarcasm, although her sudden return to full vision produces something of a shock when she comes face-to-face with the hastily assembled body of Morbius – one of the rare occasions in which Sarah is seen to really scream in terror. The Doctor’s love for Sarah is on full display when he later walks into an obvious trap in the hope that he can procure some of the Elixir of Life to restore Sarah’s eyesight. When she is taken by the thug Scorbie in
The Seeds of Doom
the Doctor’s anger is palpable. In all her travels, like most of the Doctor’s companions, Sarah never once questions how she can understand all the aliens and non-English speakers they have encountered, until they are in fifteenth century Italy in
The Masque of Mandragora
. The fact that she does, alerts the Doctor to the influence that the Mandragora Helix temporarily has on Sarah. His explanation, that it is a Time Lord gift he allows her to share, is later explored in
The End of the World
when the Doctor tells Rose that the TARDIS’s telepathic circuits get inside their heads and translate languages for them. When they next arrive on Earth in 1976, Sarah is convinced the quarry in which the TARDIS has materialised is an alien planet, having seen so many similar planets in her travels. Although, being possessed by Eldrad doesn’t seem to faze her so much, indeed she makes a joke about it, having become so used to such occurrences. When the Doctor heads off into a dangerous situation she sticks by his side, telling him that she worries about him, and he confesses that he worries about her too.

By the end of
The Hand of Fear
Sarah expresses her frustrations, but the Doctor is not really listening to her, more intent on fixing the TARDIS console. She gets in such a strop that she storms off to her room and returns with her things, determined that it is time the Doctor returned her home. Of course, it is an empty threat, but when the Doctor explains that he does indeed have to return her, she is certain he is joking. But, alas, he has been summoned back to Gallifrey and, although Sarah wants to see it, humans are not allowed. The Doctor sadly says that they have to say goodbye. Sarah tries to put on a brave face when the Doctor tells her that they have arrived in Croydon, but she is clearly hurting. She tells him not to forget her, and he responds with, ‘Don’t you forget me. ‘Til we meet again, Sarah’. Sarah watches the TARDIS dematerialise, and then realises that she is not on her street after all, indeed she suspects she is not even in Croydon. When she finally does meet the Doctor again, some twenty-seven years later, she reveals that he left her in Aberdeen.