|
|
 |
|
Harry Sullivan
(1974 - 1975) |
|
| Ian Marter |
|
Born in 1944 Ian Marter's acting career started when
he left university in 1969 to join the Bristol Old
Vic as an acting stage manager. His first professional
acting part was as a Russian soldier in The Hostage.
He auditioned for the role of Captain
Mike Yates but this part was given to Richard
Franklin instead. However, he still made an impression
and so his first role in Doctor Who was when
he played the part of merchant navy officer John
Andrews in the 1973 Third
Doctor story "Carnival
of Monsters". He was then given the opportunity
to join Doctor Who in 1974 as companion Naval
Surgeon Lieutenant Harry Sullivan. Since leaving Doctor
Who Ian Marter then became involved in novelising
several Doctor Who stories for the Target
range of books including the original novel "Harry's
Sullivan's War". He has also novelised several films
including "Spash", under the pen name Ian Dod, and "My
Science Project". Unfortunately, on 29 October 1986
and before he had completed the novelisation of
the 1965 Doctor Who story "The Rescue", he
suddenly passed away. This was only 6 weeks after
his last work in front of a camera for his Reeltime
Picture's Myth Maker interview.
|
|
|
|
 Surgeon Lieutenant Harry Sullivan was UNIT's
Medical Officer who was seconded to UNIT from the Royal Navy.
Due to The Doctor undergoing his third regeneration he found
himself assigned, by The
Brigadier, to look after The Doctor who was behaving rather
erratically. After helping The Doctor and Sarah
Jane Smith to defeat the threat of Professor Kettlewell's
robot he was invited to join them for a short trip in the TARDIS.
Harry of course thought that this was absurd and his remarks
about the TARDIS bridled The Doctor into to at least having
a look inside the TARDIS. He finally accepted so as to humour
The Doctor and so found himself whisked away from the UNIT Headquarters
and Earth in the 20th century ("Robot").
 |
| Robot |
|
Very
little was revealed about Harry's pre-UNIT life except that after
attending public school he read medicine at Oxford and that he
excelled in a variety of sports including cricket, rugby and
boxing before joining the Royal Navy. Like the Brigadier he was
a fairly conventional person and was very much of the old school.
He was also destined to be the very last member of UNIT to join
The Doctor in his travels.
His overall
appearance was as a burly young man with curly hair who
very much had an old fashion charm. With his zealous enthusiasm
he was unflinchingly brave but with a very modest nature.
He was unfortunately a bit of a bumbler and he did though
tend to be rather clumsy and somewhat accident prone. Even
though he was a dashing young naval officer who was also
a very good medical doctor he did give the impression that
he was like an old fashioned boy's adventure story type
hero. He always meant well but he did have a tendency to
stumble into danger. He would end up diving into situations
without stopping to think which would occasionally land
him into trouble. On one such incident he was branded by
The Doctor as an imbecile.
He was very protective towards Sarah, and
though it was well meant, he was found by the liberated
Sarah to be chauvinistic and sexist. Most of the time he
ended up infuriating her especially as he often tended to
refer to her as 'Old Thing' much to her annoyance. Despite
this, it has been speculated that Harry was half in love
with Sarah without consciously registering it, his feelings
pushed aside by the knowledge that Sarah mainly saw him
as a slightly irritating faithful family friend rather than
a potential partner. He was though respected especially
by The Doctor who appreciated his medical and practical
abilities; indeed, when he was briefly separated from the
TARDIS crew due to a malfunction in the Time Ring and landed
in the middle of an alien war, Harry won the respect of
both sides when he attempted to treat combatants regardless
of their allegiance.
 |
| The Ark in Space |
|
Despite being well educated he remained a somewhat confused
companion and he never fully understood the workings of
the TARDIS and its potential. This lack of understanding
could be because he only ever travelled in the TARDIS twice.
Once to Nerva Beacon, a space station which was also known
as the Ark, and then back to Earth again. The remainder
of his trips in time and space were carried out by the use
of a time ring given to The Doctor by the Time Lords and
Nerva Beacon's own transmat system. (Although he did spend
a brief period in another TARDIS that the Time Lords provided
for the three of them when the Time Ring malfunctioned,
before the new TARDIS’s link to The Doctor nearly
caused it to suffer a breakdown and forced the Time Lords
to reclaim it).
Despite
his time with The Doctor and Sarah being very brief it did
however, include a visit to the planet Skaro where he witnessed
the creation of the Daleks,
an encounter with the Cybermen,
a Sontaran the
Wirrn and
the Zygons.
His character was originally brought in to handle all the
physical action as it was unclear at the time who would
be the Fourth
Doctor and if they would be able to carry out the more
demanding aspects of this role. As Tom Baker proved that
he was fully capable to take on the more physical parts
it was inevitable that Harry's time would be short lived.
However, he did play a vital role in the events of "Wolfsbane",
when he was briefly separated from The Doctor and Sarah
when the TARDIS landed in 1936 and he was unintentionally
left behind. During his time in 1936, Harry unknowingly
befriended the Eighth
Doctor during the latter’s century-long amnesic
exile on Earth, helping The Doctor overcome an attempted
conquest of Earth by a woman who believed herself to be
the reincarnation of Morgan Le Fay with the use of the Holy
Grail. Since the Grail caused significant discomfort and
pain to any evil or unnatural being within its presence,
allowing Harry - The Doctor’s ‘sin’ of
destroying Gallifrey, albeit to save the universe, caused
the Grail to knock him out - to use the Grail to disrupt
Morgan’s spells and send her tumbling into a chasm,
Harry subsequently being rescued by the Fourth Doctor and
Sarah (Who had spent some time a month in the future dealing
with the aftermath of the current crisis).
It was
after the Zygon's failed attempt to invade Earth that he
decided to stay behind now that he was back in present day
Earth. The Doctor though did offer him a lift back to London
in the TARDIS but he declined much preferring to make his
own way there. However, The Doctor and Sarah caught up with
him again during the Kraals invasion of Earth . It was also
during this story The Doctor and Sarah also encountered
an android replica of Harry created by the Kraals.
 |
| The Sontaran Experiment |
|
However,
it was not until a much later story that the Brigadier revealed,
to the Fifth
Doctor, that Harry had eventually been transferred from
UNIT to work for NATO ("Mawdryn
Undead"). He has
also appeared in the novels "System
Shock" and "Millennium
Shock", set in 1997 and the last days of 1999 respectively,
where he has become a member of MI5, collaborating with
the Fourth Doctor and Sarah in "System Shock" and
The Doctor on his own in "Millennium Shock" to
defeat the Voracians, a race of artificial life forms seeking
to turn humanity’s machines against the people of
Earth and create a new digital age. On both occasions, Harry
proved himself to still be a capable companion despite his
current age being in his mid-fifties, managing to escape
attacking Voracians despite their superior physical strength
and participating in various escapes and break-ins in The
Doctor’s company.
Harry's status in the modern series is unknown, but a brief reference was made to him in The Sarah Jane Adventures, when Sarah Jane Smith briefly contemplated naming her newly-adopted son after him or The Brigadier (She eventually decided to call her son Luke), a later episode of the series including Sarah mentioning that Harry had saved thousands of lives with his work on vaccines (Suggesting that he either returned to medicine full-time or continued his research in his spare time while working at MI5). During a new Zygon attack after the UNIT/Zygon peace treaty began to break down ("The Day of The Doctor"), Kate Stewart - the Brigadier's daughter - revealed that a naval surgeon working for UNIT had developed an anti-Zygon nerve gas after their initial invasion left various Zygon corpses (Although this gas was taken by 'someone with a TARDIS') ("The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion"); although Kate didn't identify the surgeon by name at first, the fact that this weapon was known as 'Sullivan's Gas' makes it obvious that Harry was the one responsible. |
|
|
