Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants (27 page)

Her home address, 36 Downview Crescent, is often used by Mel when she writes computer code to create a ‘backdoor’. She uses it to great effect in
The Juggernauts
, efficiently overriding the Mechanoids’ (the eponymous machines) programming.

Mel, it seems, often gets separated from the Doctor. In
Catch-1781
, a freak accident transports her back to 1781, and it is some time before the Doctor is able to rescue her. In
The Juggernauts
she is accidentally left on Lethe and it is three months before the Doctor can retrieve her. A testimony to Mel’s strength of character and sheer pragmatism though is the manner in which she is successfully able to blend into, and become a part of, the societies in which she finds herself stranded.

In the 2001 novel
Instruments of Darkness
Mel encounters Evelyn Smythe for the first time, and again, in a contradictory account, in the 2005 audio drama
Thicker Than Water
. In the audio drama,
The Vanity Box
she says it is her one wish to continue travelling with the Doctor; ‘I love all this, our lives, racketing about the galaxy.’ Unfortunately such a wish was not to come true, as we’ll discover in the next chapter…

The Sixth Doctor fares rather well with new companions in the audio plays, with no less than eight people joining him in his travels, as well as the previously mentioned adventures with Peri and Mel. He is joined by companions from his past, in the shape of both Jamie and Zoe, as well as audio-companion Thomas Brewster who travelled with the Fifth Doctor previously. He also meets future companion Charlotte Pollard (more details later), as well as two who have their own spin-off series, the eponymous
Jago & Litefoot
.

It isn’t just returning faces (or voices!) the Sixth Doctor has to contend with, but two brand new companions created for the audio series. The latter of the two is Philippa ‘Flip’ Jackson, a girl from 2010 London who slips through a temporal fissure, while on the Tube, onto the sentient world of Symbiosis. Despite the Doctor’s offer to return her home, she leaves her boyfriend, Jared, in favour of continuing her travels.

The first original-to-audio companion is Evelyn Smythe, who scores a first by being the oldest travelling companion the Doctor has ever had. When the Doctor meets her in 2000, she is a fifty-five-year-old university lecturer, specialising in Tudor history and politics. She is initially disdainful of the ‘young’ Doctor, waving away his concerns about her missing history, but she eventually accompanies him to 1555 where she meets Queen Mary I. She continues with the Doctor for some time, encountering Charles Darwin and Silurians on the Galapagos Islands in
Bloodtide
, the Brigadier in Cornwall in
The Spectre of Lanyon Moor
, and Daleks on Gallifrey in
The Apocalypse Element
. Up until this point she shows immense joy and fun in her travels, but it is her encounters with Nimrod and the Forge that change all this. In
Project: Twilight
she befriends the young Cassie who has been turned into a vampire, and with the Doctor they find a cure for her. But later in
Project: Lazarus
they discover Cassie has been brainwashed by the Forge and watch as she is killed by Nimrod. This devastates Evelyn, but still she remains with the Doctor in spite of her developing heart condition and falling in love with Justice Rossiter on Vilâg in
Arrangements for War
. However, a return visit to Vilâg sees Evelyn leaving the Doctor for Rossiter. The Doctor reacts badly, and does not return for another two years, by which time he is travelling with Mel. The Doctor and Evelyn make their peace. She is visited again, this time by the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex, in
Death in the Family
, and dies of a heart attack but not before discovering that Cassie is survived by Hex, Cassie’s son ‘Little Tommy’, first mentioned in
Project: Twilight.
The Doctor delivers a eulogy at Evelyn’s funeral.

Strangely for
Doctor Who
, the Sixth Doctor only had one companion during his comic adventures in
Doctor Who Magazine
that was exclusive to the Expanded Universe, and that is Frobisher. A wise-cracking Whifferdill, he first appears in
The Shape Shifter
(
issue #88-#89
), having accepted the bounty placed on the Doctor by Josiah W Dogbolter (who is really more interested in the TARDIS – something that continues in
Death’s Head issue #8
when the Freelance Peacekeeping Agent Death’s Head [already having his own score to settle with the time traveller] accepts the bounty and tracks down the Seventh Doctor), he infiltrates the TARDIS and makes the Doctor’s life hell. At the time he was living as Avan Tarklu, but upon joining the Doctor on his travels he takes the name Frobisher because it sounds British and he thinks the Doctor will like it. He takes on the shape of a penguin, and in
Genesis!
(
issue #110
) contracts mono-morphia which prevents him from shifting out of his penguin shape.

It would appear that at some point Peri left the Doctor, since she is later seen to be travelling with both the Doctor and Frobisher. Frobisher himself left the Doctor at least once, long enough for the Doctor to undergo his sixth regeneration since Frobisher appears in
A Cold Day in Hell
, a Seventh Doctor comic strip. It is in this story that Frobisher finally leaves, citing what happened to Peri as a reason (one assumes he was told about her ‘death’ in
The Trial of a Time Lord
).

Frobisher’s popularity among fans is proven by his many return appearances, not only in the comics but in one novel,
Mission: Impractical
, and two Big Finish audio plays,
The Maltese Penguin
and
The Holy Terror –
all of which are set during his travels with the Sixth Doctor.

The Sixth Doctor also received a few prose-exclusive companions, most notably Grant Markham, created by Steve Lyons in the 1995 novel
Time of Your Life
. Grant comes from 2191 and is a computer programmer; although living in New Tokyo on New Earth he is originally from an Earth colony on Agora. It is unknown how long he travelled with the Doctor, since he only appears in two novels (the second being
Killing Ground
[1996]). In the second story he witnesses his father’s death during an unsuccessful attempt at being converted into a Cyberman. He continues with the Doctor after this story, and a man who appears to look like him is featured in the linking material of the anthology
Short Trips: Repercussions
(2004). If it is him, then he ends up stuck travelling the time vortex in a temporal zeppelin with others who can no longer interact on the linear plane, such as Jake Morgan who encountered the Third Doctor and Jeremy Fitzoliver.

The other Expanded Universe companions to travel with the Sixth Doctor do the rare thing of crossing over mediums; UNIT officers Colonel Emily Chaudhry and Lieutenant Will Hoffman appear in both prose and audio, while Jason and Crystal first appear alongside the Sixth Doctor (
and
the Third) in the stage play
The Ultimate Adventure
(1989). The play is later adapted into an audio adventure by Big Finish in 2008, with a sequel called, with great creative panache,
Beyond the Ultimate Adventure
in 2011. As if a stage play and audio adventures aren’t enough, Jason and Crystal also appear in one prose story,
Face Value
in the 2000 anthology,
Short Trips and Side Steps
.

The Se
v
enth Doc
tor

Sylvester McCoy

‘Every great decision creates ripples. Like a huge boulder dropped in a lake.’

The Doctor
– Remembrance of the Daleks

Mel
–
Bonnie Langford,
continued... (
The Trial of a Time Lord
to
Dragonfire
)

In
Time and the Rani
, the Doctor’s sixth regeneration goes unobserved by his companion (for the first time since his second regeneration), because for reasons uncertain Mel is on the floor of the TARDIS unconscious. The tumultuous buffeting the TARDIS endures as a result of the Rani’s attack not only knocks Mel out cold, but it somehow causes the Doctor to regenerate. It is never made clear at which point in Mel’s journey we meet her again – although the Doctor’s waistcoat and cravat suggest very little time has passed since
The Trial of a Time Lord
, so whether or not the Doctor returned Mel to her correct point in time and he got to meet her in the right order finally, remains unclear on TV. But when she does leave in
Dragonfire
the Doctor says, ‘You’re going. You’ve been gone for ages. You’re already gone. You’re still here. You’ve just arrived. I haven’t even met you yet. It all depends on who you are and how you look at it,’ which does suggest that Mel’s timeline is as confused as it appears.

She is left in the TARDIS by the Rani, but is later removed by the Lakertyan, Ikona. While being carried across the surface of Lakertya, Mel has enough sense to feign unconsciousness, until Ikona is the most distracted, at which point she causes such a fuss that he loses grip of her and she is able to make her escape. Unfortunately, this great escape ends in a shocking face-to-face encounter with another Lakertyan, Sarn, who runs away in shock and ends up dying in one of the Rani’s bubbletraps – Mel’s sadness at her death is only matched later by Feroon’s (Sarn’s mother) who shuns Mel’s sympathy. Despite Ikona’s unwillingness to accept that Mel is innocent of what is happening on Lakertya (his people being enslaved by the Rani), she still saves him from one of the Rani’s traps, and he accepts that she
might
be telling the truth. Away from the Doctor, who is being coerced into helping the Rani (at this point his memory is affected by both his regeneration and drugs administered by the Rani), Mel seems to be in a state of total shock – quickly shifting from histrionic to just plain dumb. When Mel finds her way to the Doctor she takes some convincing to believe the clowning oaf before her is the man she knew so well – such convincing includes her showing him some of the basic self-defence techniques she knows, throwing him across the lab. It is only when they finally agree to a truce and check each other’s pulse that they realise the truth. Mel, who knows about regeneration from his trial, is fascinated by the Doctor’s new appearance and personality, and responds favourably to it.

His presence seems to give Mel back her fire. She is all for the Rani getting a taste of her own medicine, after the callous way she has treated the Lakertyans. Before they leave Lakertya, Mel points out that the new Doctor will take some getting used to, but he promises her that he will grow on her. And he is not wrong, as proven when next we see them in
Paradise Towers
, by which point they have clearly settled into a nice playful banter, with the Doctor very happy to indulge her wish to visit the Towers.

After the promise of the video brochure, Mel is distinctly unimpressed by the run-down Towers, and is even more unimpressed by the Kangs – young girls who live in the Towers. They are the polar opposite to Mel – abrasive, rude, abrupt and quite violent. It is a wonderful irony that later in the story, Mel comes across two Ressies (the older residents who also remain in the Towers, when the in-betweeners went off to fight a war). On the surface Tabby and Tilda are exactly the kind of people you would expect Mel to like – they are very welcoming, friendly, polite and conversational. Mel responds, unsurprisingly, very well to them, but totally fails to see the undercurrent running through their conversation. She is, quite literally, being fattened up. It demonstrates the blinkered world view of Mel, and this is only enhanced later when she is ‘saved’ by Pex – the would-be champion of Paradise Towers (in reality something of a coward). Mel doesn’t think much of Pex’s bravado and will clearly dump him given the chance – indeed when she does manage to free herself of his company she finds her way back into the clutches of Tabby and Tilda, and still fails to see the truth of these two women, until they have trapped her in a net, and are all set to cook her. This time she does welcome the rescue of Pex, and develops a slight respect for him, not liking the way the Kangs later bully him. Throughout this adventure, her stubborn nature is on display; she is very driven, determined to make her way to the swimming pool at the top of the Towers, where she has agreed to meet the Doctor, and will not let anything prevent her from achieving this.