 |
| India Fisher |
|
 Name: Charlotte 'Charley' E. Pollard; goes by
the alias of Charley Smith when with the Sixth
Doctor.
Format:
Audio.
Time of Origin: Earth, 1931.
Time
Span:
"Storm
Warning" to "The
Girl Who Never Was" (Eighth
Doctor), "The
Condemned" to Present (Sixth Doctor)
Doctor: Eighth
Doctor and Sixth
Doctor (Confusingly enough, in that order),
once travelled with holograms based on the Fifth,
Sixth and Seventh
Doctors.
Fellow
Companions: The
Brigadier, Leela, K9,
2nd
Romana and C'rizz
 |
Storm
Warning
(Alan Barnes) |
|
History: Charley marked one of The Doctor's most complex companions, even though she hadn't any real
mystery about her. She was a young girl from the Edwardian era of
Earth, having sneaked on board the doomed airship the R101 to meet
a young American trader in Singapore on New Year's Eve, as she'd impulsively
told him she would. However, once on board the R101 she met up with
none other than the Eighth
Doctor, stuck on the R101 after he materialised in the third ballast
tank while trying to escape the vortisaurs, fifth-dimensional predators,
and the TARDIS
was flushed out of the ship. Meeting Charley, The Doctor was forced
into a desperate attempt to get off the R101 before its fatal crash,
at the same time as the pilot had a rendezvous…with a two-mile
wide flying saucer. The ship belonged to a species called the Triskele,
one of whose members had crashed on Earth a while ago, and the R101
was modified to make contact.
However, things went wrong when one of
the R101's crew launched an attack on the Triskele saucer after the
captain failed to return in the allocated half-hour, and killed the
Triskele Lawgiver, the free will that had kept the most violent crew,
the Uncreators, from attacking the engineers. Fortunately, The Doctor
managed to keep the Uncreators back long enough for the R101's captain
to take over the position of Lawgiver, but in the ensuing struggle,
a crew member, waving an axe around, damaged one of the R101's gas
tanks and caused the crash. The Doctor and Charley evacuated on the
vortisaur's back before the crash, getting back to the TARDIS and
Charley joining The Doctor. However, The Doctor had a dilemma - there
were 54 corpses in the R101, and 54 people had boarded it, not counting
Charley. Therefore, at some point, The Doctor would have to go back
on board the R101 before it crashed, send Charley off the TARDIS,
and let her die to preserve the Web of Time…
 |
The Time
of the Daleks
(Justin Richards) |
|
Still, despite the rather annoying fact
that he would eventually have to kill her, The Doctor got along with
Charley rather well. Charley was one of the small group of companions
who didn't know about a lot about technology but still had a fairly
basic knowledge of it, (The others being Jamie
and Victoria)
but she still managed to get along in her time with The Doctor.
She
has even learnt how to operate the TARDIS to a certain degree, knowing
how to work the Fast Return Switch following their fight with the
Nimon
in "Seasons
of Fear", and also briefly went into a Dalek time machine
in "The
Time of the Daleks". Despite being not too far removed from
Victoria in terms of time, she was far from a 'shrinking violet'
- she's helped
The Doctor break a curse on the family of an old Italian Count, has
stood against the Nimon, and was even prepared to sacrifice her
life
to save all of reality from collapse. Like The Doctor himself, she
was able to gain trust very easily; even a ruthless android gave
its
life to save hers on only her first trip in the TARDIS.
However, that's not to saw she didn't fulfil
the required companion role of getting captured and needing to be
saved by The Doctor. On one occasion when she completely lost her
memory after an accident in the TARDIS and she was held hostage by
the Hellfire club and forced to work as a 'pretty little satin-bottom'
- basically, a rather fancy prostitute. While there, she was captured
by Charles Brigham Dashwood III, the governor of the new fifty-first
state of America, who wanted to use her body for possession by what
he thought was a demon, but was really a creature that lived in the
dust of comets and fed off negative emotions. Worst of all, The Doctor's
memories had become fractured between himself and another man, and
the two of them - a madman called Zebediah Doe and a journalist called
Gideon Crane - both believed themselves to be The Doctor! However,
despite Gideon's stronger belief that he was The Doctor, Zebediah
worked out the truth when a machine designed to cure madness briefly
sent his psychic matrix all through the hospital, thus making all
the patients think they were The Doctor - if he'd been the fake, that
wouldn't have happened. With his memories back, The Doctor and The
Brigadier, who'd been visiting the new state as a UN observer,
were able to rescue Charley and reveal Dashwood for the criminal that
he was.
 |
Neverland
(Alan Barnes) |
|
Charley
has had several other rather unusual escapades in the TARDIS. On another
occasion, she and The Doctor ran into Orson Welles while he was recording
his radio drama version of The War of the Worlds, and ending up using
it to trick invading aliens into thinking that Earth had already been
conquered by the Martians! True, the aliens then found out it was
a fake, but they were then blown up by a man who'd sneaked on board
their ship, so it all worked out. Then there was the time The Doctor
actually got her to her Singapore rendezvous, but unfortunately it
was in alternate timeline created so that a future foe of The Doctor's
could gloat at a past Doctor for his killing The Doctor in the future;
The Doctor's body had vanished afterwards, so he couldn't gloat over
The Doctor's dead body as he'd have liked. Fortunately, The Doctor
managed to survive, and the immortal foe was not only killed, but
his past self stopped him from ever coming into existence.
The paradox
of Charley’s survival was finally resolved in "Neverland",
when the Time Lords captured Charley on the grounds that her survival
was causing ripples in the fabric of reality that were permitting
aspects of ‘anti-time’ - a force as destructive to causality
as anti-matter is to positive matter - to seep into the universe.
Realising that the anti-time reality was populated by people who
had been erased from Time - including a former co-ordinator of the
Celestial Intervention Agency - and that they sought to detonate
a ‘bomb’ of anti-time in Gallifrey that would plunge
the universe into chaos. With the only apparent option being to kill
Charley to erase the breach, The Doctor instead used the TARDIS to
contain the explosion, thus making the breach - and Charley’s
survival - a fact of the timeline. Unfortunately, The Doctor was
contaminated by the Anti-Time released in the explosion, transforming
him into Zagreus, a being of pure anti-time
that Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society, wished to use as
an assassin against the Divergents, the race that would evolved to
replace the Time Lords before Rassilon took them out of history and
sent them to a pocket universe with no Time. With the aid of ex-companions
Romana, Leela and K9,
as well as holograms based on the Fifth,
Sixth and Seventh Doctors, Charley was able to help The Doctor fight
off the Zagreus part of himself enough to dispose of Rassilon in the
Divergence's pocket universe, before a sample of pure zero matter
stabilised The Doctor's mental state and submerged the Zagreus part
of him. However, unable to get rid of the anti-time infection itself,
The Doctor was forced to enter the Divergents' pocket universe himself,
as simply stepping into our universe would annihilate it completely...
and, unknown to him, Charley followed him.
 |
Zagreus
(Alan Barnes and
Gary Russell) |
|
Their
time in the Divergence Universe was never easy; early on in the universe,
the TARDIS was taken from them by an unknown force, and all the evidence
around The Doctor and Charley seemed to suggest that they were in
some sort of laboratory complex, being forced to go through tests
of some kind in their search for the TARDIS. During their travels,
they were joined by C'rizz, a chameleon-like alien raised to be naturally
passive, who was forced to murder the woman he loved when she began
to mutate into a hideous hybrid. Realising that they were on a planet
that was separated into zones without the inhabitants' knowledge,
The Doctor was able to convince the zone guardian - a mysterious intelligence
known as the Kro'ka - to let them pass through the zones, although
it was constantly hinted at that it possessed an ulterior motive for
its activities. Eventually, the TARDIS was discovered when The Doctor
was split into three different people after passing through a barrier;
the TARDIS had been unable to send The Doctor a complete message when
he was a single entity, so it had manipulated the barrier to split
The Doctor up so he could be in three places at once and receive the
entire message. This also (apparently) revealed the purpose of the
experiments; to give the Divergents access to the secrets of the TARDIS.
 |
The Next
Life
(Alan Barnes and Gary Russell) |
|
However, in their final struggle in the universe, The Doctor, Charley
and C'rizz learned the truth about the universe; there was no Time
in it because it was locked in an endless cycle, going back to the
beginning after a certain amount of 'time' had elapsed, and there
were no temporal coordinates due to the fact that every moment had
happened before. The experiments had been carried out because the
Divergents wanted to see how a random element would affect the process
of evolution and change, wishing to confirm their belief that The Doctor alone could break the cycle they'd been trapped in since the
beginning. Facing off against Keep - a creature that was a combination
of both himself and Charley from their time in an evolution-accelerating
chamber at the start of their travels in the universe - The Doctor
learned that Rassilon had tried 83 times before to escape the loop,
and each time he'd failed, and been sent back again. Not only that,
but Perfection, Keep's 'wife', was in fact Zagreus - the anti-time
energies in The Doctor had been filtered out the second he'd entered
the Divergent's universe without his knowledge, and he could have
gone back any time he wanted. With time running out, The Doctor,
Charley
and C'rizz returned to our universe, leaving Zagreus and Keep to
sort out their differences... and leaving Rassilon trapped in the
evolution
chamber with the Kro'ka, unable to escape and with nobody there to
hear him scream as he was broken down once more.
Having returned to her universe, Charley was grateful to be back
on more familiar territory, despite some initial tension between
her and C’rizz due to his past as an assassin and the fact
that he changed the original status quo of just her and The Doctor.
Once this was resolved, however, the two became good friends, with
C’rizz even referring to Charley as his sister shortly before
his death. Although she decided to leave the TARDIS after C’rizz’s
death, a temporal hump - swelling in space/time caused by pressure
in the event ridges - resulted in them arriving in Singapore in 2008
despite Charley’s desire to return to her own time, forcing
Charley to agree to one last trip for the sake of the team as they
attempted to find the cause of the hump. Tracking the hump to the
SS Batavia - a ship that was marooned in the harbour in 1942, - The
Doctor and Charley discovered that the ship contained a small group
of Cybermen that had attacked it in 1942 after an experimental generator
designed to help them avoid detection transferred the ship to the
year 500 000 - by which point Earth had been abandoned, - the generator
being reprogrammed based on signals that were sent by the Cybermen.
Tracking the ship to its new location, The Doctor was horrified to
learn that the Cybermen intended to establish cybernetic conversion
facilities in 1942, forcing him to transfer the Batavia back to 1942,
allowing the ship to be hit by torpedoes to preserve history. Unfortunately,
at the last minute a deranged and partly converted treasure-hunter
who had sought the Batavia’s supposed gold reserves attacked
The Doctor, forcing The Doctor to take him to the future to acquire
Cyber-technology only to be subsequently killed by the remaining
Cybermen. Although Charley managed to destroy the ship, the subsequent
disintegration caused the TARDIS’s HADS to activate, causing
the ship to dematerialise with The Doctor’s recent memories
so scrambled that he was unable to recall what had precisely happened
to Charley.
Surviving the destruction of the ship only to be washed up onto a
nearby pier, Charley spent her days writing her memoirs and tapping
out an SOS on a radio set she’d managed to piece together from
the wreckage, until, finally, the TARDIS arrived to investigate the
message… with the Sixth
Doctor inside. Despite facing the obvious
problems of travelling with a previous version of her Doctor, Charley
nevertheless decided to remain with the Sixth Doctor, while simultaneously
taking care to avoid revealing that she knows him in the future.
Exactly how their adventures shall conclude in a manner that avoids
the Sixth Doctor retaining enough memory of Charley to recognise
her when they meet again in "Storm
Warning" remains to
be seen. |
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