Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants (15 page)

We meet Sarah again, just over a year later from her point of view, in Christmas 1981 in the spin-off episode
K9 & Company: A Girl’s Best Friend
. We learn she once lived with her Aunt Lavinia in Croydon. Lavinia moves to Morton Harwood and Sarah eventually follows her there, but as Lavinia says she is so hard to pin down and, much like a butterfly, never in one place for long. Once settled in at her aunt’s house Sarah discovers a large box addressed to her. She opens it to find K9 Mark III, who is a gift from the Doctor (delivered to Croydon in 1978). K9 has a message from the Doctor; ‘Give Sarah Jane Smith my fondest love. Tell her I shall remember her always.’ Never before has such an expression of love come from the Doctor, and Sarah whispers, with a smile, ‘Oh, Doctor, you didn’t forget’. She eventually returns to London with K9, and it is from there that she is scooped to Gallifrey to take part in the Game of Rassilon, where she re-meets the Third Doctor. She is confused at first, wondering why he looks the way he did when she first met him, and his explanation that maybe he has changed, but he hasn’t yet, doesn’t help her one bit. During the Game, she encounters the Cybermen again, meets Tegan Jovanka, companion of the Fifth Doctor and is briefly reunited with the Brigadier. Between them they attempt to work out which order the four Doctors come in (the first, second, third and fifth incarnations), but ultimately it comes to nothing as when Sarah is returned home her memory of that adventure is wiped clean. This is revealed in 2007 when she meets the Tenth Doctor and she confesses she believed him to be dead, since he never ever returned for her, and in 2010 when she mentions that, ‘I can’t be sure, but there’s a Tegan,’ suggesting she doesn’t know Tegan. To be continued...

For a short while the Doctor and Sarah were joined by Harry Sullivan – the first bona fide male companion since Jamie in 1969. At the time it was possible that the Fourth Doctor might have been played by an older actor, and so Harry was created to carry much of the action, in much the same way as Ian did at the beginning of the series, but in the event Tom Baker was cast and Harry seemed surplus to requirements. He lasted only six stories, plus one return appearance, but during his time there he certainly helped create a memorable team, alongside the Doctor and Sarah.

Harry Sullivan
– Ian Marter
(
Robot
to
Terror of the Zygons
, and
The Android Invasion
)

Harry is quite distinctive as companions go; he only travels in the TARDIS twice (two times more than Liz) and he is mentioned in a story previous to his introduction. When the Doctor falls into a coma, briefly, in
Planet of the Spiders
, the Brigadier puts in a call to Doctor Sullivan, but cancels it as soon as the Doctor is revived by a cup of tea brought in by Benton. Surgeon Lieutenant Harry Sullivan is called in, some weeks later, in
Robot
to attend to the Doctor, who has just undergone his third regeneration.

Harry is quite baffled by his new charge, and attempts to humour him before the Doctor strings him up in a nearby utility cupboard like a pair of old boots. For reasons unknown, despite being the medical doctor at UNIT HQ, seconded there from the Royal Navy, Harry is completely unaware of the Doctor’s alien physiognomy, as shown when the Doctor tests his own hearts’ rate; ‘I say, that can’t be right’, Harry says, shocked at the double heartbeat. He keeps close to the Doctor during the investigation into Think Tank, and even suggests he should be a spy (a real James Bond, as Sarah puts it), which he does rather successfully, posing as a man from the Ministry of Health, until he is making a report over the phone and is coshed unconscious. When Sarah is also taken captive by the Scientific Reform Society she finds Harry held at gun point and mocks him with ‘James Bond’. It is the first of many such moments of light mockery and banter which soon comes to characterise their relationship. Later, once Think Tank is defeated, Harry pops by to see the Doctor and Sarah who are planning a trip in the TARDIS. He scoffs at the idea, thinking the whole concept of the TARDIS is absurd. The Doctor asks him inside, just to prove that it is indeed absurd, and Harry agrees if it will help. Upon entering, his only response is, ‘Oh, I say’. The Doctor and Sarah follow him in, and while the TARDIS dematerialises Harry decides to play with the helmic regulator, sending the TARDIS far off course.

At the beginning of
The Ark in Space
, he staggers out of the TARDIS, ‘burbling’, telling the Doctor that he could make a lot of money from the time machine by selling it to the police; the space inside could contain a lot of bobbies in Trafalgar Square. Harry is sceptical of the idea that they are in the distant future, but soon learns otherwise when confronted with the cryogenic bay of Nerva Station. His twentieth century knowledge of medicine puts him on the back foot for a while, having never encountered anything like the advanced medical techniques of Nerva, but he soon works out the basic principles and is able to perform the resuscitation process on his own. It is notable that from the moment they arrive on Nerva Harry starts addressing Sarah by her first name, and not ‘Miss Smith’, but begins to fuss over her a lot, taking on a chivalrous attitude that is not entirely appreciated by her. During their time aboard Nerva, the Doctor claims that Harry is improving, although that is entirely down to the Doctor’s influence, of course, and Harry must not take any of the credit. He is a strong believer in the sanctity of life; when Vira asks if Sarah is of value (having been accidentally placed in cryogenic suspension), he responds quite abrasively with, ‘Of value? She’s a human being!’ His lack of experience with the Doctor leads him to suggest that they could use the TARDIS to ferry the revived humans down to Earth to begin the repopulation of it; the Doctor balks at the idea, but does agree to go ahead of the humans to make sure the transmat relays are safe. Harry and Sarah go with him, and Harry particularly enjoys the sensation of transmitting his atoms across space. When he finds a man tortured by Styre in
The Sontaran Experiment
, his Hippocratic Oath comes into play and he does his best to save the man, but with little success. Such a wilful loss of life incenses him intensely. Later, on Skaro, Harry shows an amazing level of bravery when the Doctor accidentally places his foot on a landmine in
Genesis of the Daleks.
Despite the Doctor’s insistence that there’s no sense in them both being blown up. Harry refuses to leave and manages to steady the landmine enough so the Doctor can safely move his foot away.

His humour is demonstrated throughout his association with the Doctor, taking most things in his stride, and keeping up a playful banter with Sarah. He observes much, and learns quickly. Just from watching the Doctor he learns how to operate the transmat controls. He thinks in practical terms, but can be clumsy, at one point causing a rock fall that knocks the Doctor unconscious. Seeing the prone Doctor, with something strapped to him, Harry attempts to remove the strap. Unbeknown to him, releasing the strap will cause the bomb to go off. The Doctor stops him in the nick of time and shouts, ‘Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!’ Of course, Harry could have no idea about the bomb, so the Doctor’s claim is a little unjust. Indeed, Harry proves time and again that he is far from an imbecile, but rather a brave man with a good head on his shoulders, often thrown into situations far beyond his comprehension.

After returning to Earth in
Terror of the Zygons
Harry elects to take the train back to London, rather than continue travelling in the TARDIS. It is unclear why he would make such a decision, since he clearly learns a lot during his short time with the Doctor, and both the Doctor and Sarah enjoy his company. Perhaps it is his duty to UNIT, after all he is standing next to the Brigadier when the offer is made and the Brigadier is Harry’s commanding officer. We see Harry once more several stories later in
The Android Invasion
, when he is stationed with UNIT at the Devesham Space Defence Station, and his knowledge of ‘space medicine’ is of special use. During the course of the story, however, we learn that no one in Devesham is real – they are all android duplicates created by the Kraals, inhabiting a fake Devesham on the planet Oseidon, a testing ground for an eventual invasion of Earth. When the Doctor and Sarah finally get to Earth to warn the administration at the real Space Defence Station Harry is indeed there, serving the same role his android double did. However, we do not see much of the real Harry since he is soon captured and replaced by his android duplicate.

Like Dodo, Harry never gets a proper goodbye scene; Still, he at least gets a goodbye in
Terror of the Zygons
, but it is somewhat voided by his inconsequential return appearance in
The Android Invasion
and then that is it. Never to be seen again. The question, therefore remains, what happened to this strong, but often forgotten, companion?

In
Mawdryn Undead
, when the Brigadier reunites with the (Fifth) Doctor in 1983, they reminisce about their UNIT days and the Brigadier tells the Doctor that the last he heard of Harry was that he had been seconded to NATO and was doing something ‘hush hush’ at Porton Down. Harry is fondly remembered by Sarah, who considers naming her adopted son after him (
SJA: Invasion of the Bane
), and in 2010 she mentions Harry in the past tense, suggesting that he may be dead; when she tells her friends Clyde and Rani that Harry went on to do great work developing vaccines and saving thousands of lives (
SJA: Death of the Doctor
).

With Sarah’s departure it was time for another shift in the companion/Doctor dynamic. Enter Leela, a character who, in some ways, harkened back to Jamie. Like Jamie, Leela appeared to come from an uneducated and often superstitious culture, primitive in many ways. But to think of Leela as stupid was a mistake, often proven to those who she met on her travels.

Leela – Louise Jameson
(
The Face of Evil
to
The Invasion of Time
)

Leela comes from an unnamed planet in the distant future and is a descendant of a human expedition that settled there. She is a warrior of the Sevateem, a tribe living in a jungle wilderness, one half of a long-term eugenics experiment conducted by the mad computer, Xoanon. Like all her people, and indeed that of the Tesh, the advanced second half of Xoanon’s test, she knows nothing of her history. She has been brought up to believe Xoanon is a god. When she is cast out from the Sevateem for heresy she bumps into the Doctor and believes him to be ‘the evil one’ with whom he shares a resemblance. With the Doctor, she discovers that her ancestors were a Mordee expedition; the Sevateem being descended from the survey team sent out to explore the planet and the Tesh from the technicians, who remained behind in the ship. The Doctor had previously repaired the Mordee computer, but forgot to remove his own personality from it, thus causing an imbalance between Xoanon’s personality and his own, resulting in split-personality madness. From the moment we meet her it is clear that Leela has a hunger for knowledge. She may be uneducated, but she has a sharp brain and soaks up information with the sponge-like mind of a child. She is prone to using weapons to solve her problems, notably a knife and her trusty Janis thorns which cause paralysis and then death. The Doctor warns her to stop using them. Leela doesn’t agree, but the Doctor takes her silence as such anyway, a fact he mentions when Leela later kills a Chinese coolie in Victorian London. Once the Doctor has solved the problem with Xoanon, he is all set to leave on his own, but Leela pushes past and rushes into the TARDIS. The Doctor barely has a chance to close the door before Leela plays with the controls of the time ship and they dematerialise.

In
The Robots of Death
the Doctor is busy teaching Leela that there is no such thing as magic, merely misunderstood science. She believes making a yo-yo go up and down helps the TARDIS fly – that it is part of the magic. Still not understanding, she asks him to explain why the TARDIS is bigger inside than out, and he tries to explain using a large and small box. He places the large one at a distance and brings the smaller up to Leela making it appear bigger. He tells her that if you can have the large box at that distance
and
in the same place as the small one, then the large can fit inside the small. Leela calls this silly, which amuses the Doctor, and when the TARDIS materialises inside the sandminer (a large mobile ore processing vessel), Leela asks how one box (the TARDIS) can fit inside another (the sandminer), the Doctor reminds her of his previous explanation, which Leela still doesn’t think is very clear. As she goes to leave the TARDIS for the first time, she picks up the laser gun (a Tesh invention), but the Doctor tells her to leave it behind. She shrugs but keeps her knife in its sheath anyway – a fact that the Doctor doesn’t comment on (her knife proves useless when they come up against the murderous Voc robots). Leela displays a sixth sense about danger; can almost predict or feel something is wrong with no external evidence. Having spent a life surrounded by little or no technology, Leela finds herself feeling uncomfortable around the Voc robots, who she calls ‘creepy mechanical men’. She is fiercely protective of the Doctor, as Borg learns when he foolishly attempts to attack the Doctor, receiving a gut punch from Leela that floors him. She is also very adept at reading body language, no doubt something that makes her such a good hunter, being able to spot at first glance that Pool is not what he seems.