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The Company of Friends
(Lance Parkin, Stephen Cole, Alan Barnes & Jonathan Morris) |
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 Name: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Format: Audio
Time of Origin: Earth, Switzerland, 1816
Time
Span: "The
Company of Friends - Mary’s Story" to
unknown; departed before the events of "Storm
Warning".
Doctor: Eighth
Doctor.
Fellow
Companions: None known
History: Mary is a particularly significant companion
for The Doctor as she is a prominent figure in history even without
coming in contact with him, known to the world for writing the famous
novel "Frankenstein", inspired by the circumstances under
which she originally met The Doctor.
Originally the daughter of political philosopher William
Godwin, Mary was convinced to leave home by the charismatic poet
Percy Shelley. Percy originally promised Mary a life of adventure,
abandoning his life and child to be with her, but Percy went on to
have an affair with Mary’s half-sister Claire while they were
staying in Geneva, lacking any real belief in fidelity - and despite
Claire’s own greater interest in fellow resident Lord Byron
-, and leaving Mary feeling fundamentally dejected about her life
and the direction it was currently taking.
During one night at Byron’s house on the shores
of Lake Geneva, just as they were planning to write ghost stories
to entertain themselves for the next few nights, Mary and her friends
were shocked to be visited by a disorientated, disfigured figure,
covered with various injuries and blisters, who appeared to introduce
himself as ‘Doctor Frankenstein’ before collapsing into
a death-like coma, forcing them to take him into the house to try
and treat him. Unable to do anything about the seemingly fatal injuries
beyond leaving him to relax in the study, his condition growing ever
more precarious as time went on, only recovering briefly to mention
that he required lightning to ‘resurrect’ himself and
make various vague claims that he knew Mary.
When their strange visitor apparently died of his injuries,
Percy - currently high on laudanum - suggested that they conduct
an experiment, using lightning from the storm that night to see what
effect large volts of electricity might have on a human corpse (Inspired
by a similar experiment on a frog’s legs), only for the lightning
to revive their visitor’s body in the form of a hideous monster
before he fled into the night. Tracking the ‘monster’ to
a strange blue box - refusing to be frightened of the figure’s
hideous appearance when he was clearly afraid himself -, Mary was
shocked to discover that the box - the TARDIS - was bigger inside
than it was outside, becoming even more confused when ‘Frankenstein’ claimed
that she had travelled with him for years despite her never having
met him before.
Although
he was able to briefly explain to her that he had been infected with
vitrius time as a result of a breach in the TARDIS’s internal
structure during a temporal storm, the injuries hindering his ability
to regenerate, the stranger was forced to send a signal to get help
before ordering Mary to run before he lost control of himself again...
only for Mary to encounter a younger version of the man - revealed
to be the Eighth Doctor - when the TARDIS materialised in the house
while the ‘monster’ attacked the outside. Realising that
the other creature was his future self, the newly-arrived Doctor
was able to calm his monstrous counterpart down with the TARDIS key,
concluding that the TARDIS had brought his future self here after
his injuries to receive the necessary treatment to trigger a renewal
through the methods that Percy had used earlier. Noting that his
future TARDIS was too damaged to restore itself and its Doctor to
health, the past Doctor used a power cell from his TARDIS to restore
its future self, allowing the future Doctor to recover his original
health and appearance before departing once again (Although The Doctor’s
description of the damage suggests that these events may have resulted
in the future Doctor regenerating into the Ninth
Doctor after he
left).
With
his future self having departed and her friends and family engaged
in another quarrel, The Doctor asked Mary to travel with him, offering
her a chance at the life of adventure she had failed to receive with
Percy, prompting Mary to remember the future Doctor’s comments
that she had travelled with him and thus concluding with a smile
that it was her inevitable destiny to do so. Although precise details
of her time in the TARDIS are unknown, comments made by the future
Doctor suggest that the two of them encountered such diverse enemies
as the Cybermen and
the Axons, as
well as meeting King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, before she
and The Doctor parted company
under as-yet-unspecified circumstances, Mary returning to her life
and place in history without anyone knowing of her absence (Although
some have speculated that her novel "The Last Man", looking
at the survivors of a plague on Earth in the future, may have been
inspired by something she experienced while travelling with The Doctor). |
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