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| Maggie Stables |
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 Name: Evelyn Smythe.
Format:
Audio & Book.
Time of Origin: Earth 2000.
Time
Span:
The Marian
Conspiracy - Present,
Instruments
of Darkness and Thicker than Blood.
Doctor: Sixth Doctor.
Fellow
Companions:
The
Brigadier, 2nd Romana, Melanie Bush and technically Jeremy Fiztoliver.
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The Marian Conspiracy
(Jacqueline
Rayner) |
|
History: Evelyn started off her
time in the TARDIS
in a rather unique way. A history lecturer from 2000, she met The Doctor when he was tracking a temporal anomaly that was traceable
to her, and was caused by an ancestor of hers - according to the TARDIS
databanks, her ancestor John Whiteside-Smith had never actually existed.
Despite believing The Doctor was someone hired by the faculty to make
her believe she was crazy and retire, she went along with him to the
TARDIS (Dispelling those beliefs, naturally) and went back to the
era of Queen Mary of England, where The Doctor ended up in the Queen's
room trying to help her through her phantom pregnancy while dealing
with her lovesick lady-in-waiting Sarah Whiteside, and Evelyn was
picked up by a few people who believed that Elizabeth should be on
the throne. Briefly, there was one moment where Mary engaged The Doctor
to Sarah as thanks for helping her, leading to it apparently seeming
that he was the father of John Whiteside-Smith, who was beheaded,
but the father was really the Reverend Thomas Smith, who was killed
after his attempt to kill the Queen (What altered history in the first
place) was foiled. Evelyn thus joined The Doctor as his new companion,
unable to turn down the chance to really see history.
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| Maggie Stables with Colin Baker and Bill
Oddie |
|
Evelyn was radically different from the other female
companions The Doctor has ever had. For one thing, she was
about in her early fifties, while other companions have
always in something around their twenties.
For another, she was a far cry from the average female companion
that stuck by The Doctor and screamed at the first sign
of trouble. On the contrary, The Doctor once mentioned to
Mel that she was one of the
few companions who could
hold her own against the monsters he faced without his help.
She has, to date, stood toe-to-toe with Daleks,
Cybermen,
Silurians,
Vampires, and had to briefly deal with threats to Time itself,
in the form of both a Dalek invasion of Gallifrey in ‘The
Apocalypse Element’ and
the accidental creation of an alternate timeline where the
British Empire conquered Earth with Dalek technology after
she and The Doctor thwarted
a Dalek invasion (‘Jubilee’).
However, she managed to cope with both confrontations
fairly well; she stayed ahead of the Daleks during their
invasion of Gallifrey - indeed, she played a crucial role
in their defeat thanks
to The Doctor
locking all of Gallifrey’s retinal security systems to respond only
to her eyes, -and she actually befriended a Dalek in the
alternate history, the Dalek having been disarmed and helpless
for the past hundred years
and thus grateful for someone to talk to who didn’t just hate it.
She has met her fair share of famous people in her time,
namely Elizabeth I and Charles Darwin (‘Bloodtide’), as well
as spending time with Daft Jamie, one of the last victims
of William Burke and William Hare
(‘Medicinal
Purposes’). She has also run into The Doctor's
old companions The
Brigadier and Romana, and has twice met
The Doctor after she left him, also meeting Mel.
Evelyn never really had it easy in her travels
with The Doctor. Not only did she once become the only hope to stopping a Dalek
invasion of Gallifrey, she has also taken on enraged Silurians while Darwin
creates his theories, battled vampires, been briefly infected with a Cybernetic
virus, and had to deal with an alternate timeline created by the unintentional
interference of a future version of The Doctor and her, in which the British
Empire ruled the whole Earth and The Doctor was kept in the Tower of London,
with both of his legs cut off. Whatever her travels threw at her, she managed
to deal with, even if she couldn't actively fight it all on her own. Evelyn
also had a knack for seeing the true colours of the people she met, which came
in useful when she met a vampire called Cassie; she had looked into Cassie's
eyes, and knew she was no killer at heart, even if she did now need blood to
survive. However, nothing could display her fighting spirit more than one
simple fact; the fact that she was being talked into leaving her job because of
a combination of her husband having left her (Not a major deterrent in
wandering around Time) and a heart attack (OK, that could be problematic), and
yet she continues to confront, as the Second Doctor once said 'creatures that
act against everything we believe in', and that 'must be fought'.
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| Maggie Stables with Nicholas
Courtney |
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In
her time with The Doctor, Evelyn has had few more shocking escapades than
in 'The
Sandman' when the TARDIS materialised on a mass of Galyari
spaceships all gathered together, in a group called simply 'the Clutch'.
While there, she
learnt that the entire ship was being haunted by a creature
called 'the Sandman', who tore the very skins off all the young and old
of the planet,
could not be looked at without great pain… and also went by the name
of The Doctor. What was worse was that The Doctor actually
admitted that he was
the Sandman, and it wasn't all just a misunderstanding!
However, despite this horror, the whole situation was eventually
understood; the Sandman's first
appearance was caused by a General called Voshkar trading
in arms, and The Doctor took the skins of dead Galyari because
he needed dead tissue to power a device that triggered a long-lasting subconscious
fear of him as the Sandman.
As for the pain, it was because the Galyari had sensitive
vision, and The Doctor's multicoloured coat and waistcoat
were just too
dazzling for them to look at. The new Sandman, it turned
out, was Voshkar himself, created when the
device was reactivated; it had a duplicate of the neural
patterns of everyone who had been exposed to it originally,
and his was stronger than the others. He
had now become a living mass of skins, which proved his
undoing; the Clutch had several birds on it due to the near-living
nature of the community of ships that had gathered together, and, thanks
to the
shields being deactivated, the birds were able to eat all
the husks, destroying Voshkar for good.
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Instruments of Darkness
(Gary
Russell) |
|
Evelyn
has also had to briefly deal with a threat to Time itself;
either having to stand against the Dalek invasion of Gallifrey in 'The
Apocalypse
Element', dealing with the Cybermen preparing to alter Time in 'Real
Time', or arriving a in a 2003 where she and The Doctor accidentally
changed things so that the British Empire never collapsed and ruled the Earth
with Dalek technology, while she and The Doctor remained trapped in the Tower
of London. However, she managed to cope with all three fairly well; she stayed
ahead of the Daleks, The Doctor managed to stop her being converted into a
Cyberman, and she actually befriended a Dalek in the alternate history.
Evelyn
left The Doctor after only around a year of travelling with him, deciding
she’d seen enough although they parted on relatively good terms despite
her disagreement with some of his actions, such as him allowing Cassie
to die when he could have saved her. However, given that he needed someone to keep an eye on Earth
history for a brief while, he dropped her off in 1988 rather than 200, where
she remained for five years until The Doctor met her again on New Year's Eve,
1993, accompanied by Mel. Aided by a pair of psychics called Dudley Malvern and
Mel's old telepathic friend Trey Korte, the three of them managed to stop a
pair of unbelievably powerful alien called the Cylox from destroying the Earth
in their little grudge match, thanks to The Doctor and Dudley destroying their
psychic prison and forced them to retreat into an infinity symbol created by
The Doctor. With that behind them, The Doctor was persuaded by Mel into taking
Evelyn back to 2000… although she did ask The Doctor to take a quick
detour to the Eye of Orion, where he'd always said he'd take her but never got
round to it while they were travelling together.
By
the time The Doctor and Evelyn had next met, however, things were significantly
different; for one thing, Evelyn was no longer on Earth, but had created
a new life for herself on Vilag with Principal Triumviur Rossitier, attempting
to arrange for the alien technology left from her and The Doctor’s
last visit to be successfully integrated into Vilag society despite her
stepdaughter’s objections. After their rather harsh parting the last
time they met - when The Doctor simply left Evelyn behind after she told
him of her intention to marry Rossitier. While trying to deal with a hostage
crisis when Mel and Evelyn were abducted, Rossitier was able to convince
The Doctor to make his peace with Evelyn, the two also learning that Evelyn
had been the subject of experiments to infuse Killoran DNA with human subjects,
which was responsible for here recent health problems such as headaches.
Using his Gallifreyian immune system and a sample of Evelyn’s blood
to create a cure for the Killorian DNA, The Doctor subsequently remained
until Evelyn had recovered to attend Evelyn and Rossitier’s second
wedding, standing in as Evelyn’s ‘father’ for the wedding.
What Evelyn had never mentioned, however, was that, when she had been in
the hospital, she had been visited by the Seventh Doctor, who assured her
that he would always remember her fondly, and told her about his newest
companion; Thomas Hector ‘Hex’ Schofield, a medical student… and
Cassie’s son. Grateful that Cassie’s legacy would continue,
Evelyn and The Doctor parted on good terms, Evelyn assuring The Doctor
that he had come into her life just when she thought it was all over and
showed her new experiences that she had never dreamed possible, and she
would always love him for that, the two sharing one last dance before The
Doctor departed.
(It
is unclear how, if at all, Mel’s ignorance of Evelyn in ‘Thicker
Than Water’ can connect up to their meeting in ‘Instruments
of Darkness’; for simplicity’s sake, it seems easiest to assume
that the TARDIS arrived on Vilag while Evelyn, The Doctor and Mel were
taking the ‘scenic route’ to her home time, with Mel remaining
in the TARDIS during the visit, and something happened shortly afterwards
that erased Mel’s memories of Evelyn, and The Doctor and Evelyn never
told her the truth about their previous meeting to avoid causing further
damage to her mind) |
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