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Vicki
(1965) |
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Maureen
O'Brien |
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| After studying
for a teaching diploma Maureen O'Brien became a
founder member of the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool.
3 months later she was asked to audition for the
part of Vicki. This was here first television role.
After leaving Doctor Who she spent sometime
working in a girls school before spending 3 years
in Canada. After returning to the UK in the mid
seventies various theatre, film, television and
radio work followed. In 1979 she won the Best Radio
Actress Award. She also became a writer of crime
fiction. |
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 Vicki
only met The Doctor as a teenage girl, but she had endured a difficult life even before she began to travel with him. Born in the twenty-fifth century, Vicki had an excellent education, possessing several degrees when only in her teens, but her mother had died a few years before she met The Doctor. Seeking to get away from her painful memories, Vicki and her father Newton left Earth and relocate to the planet Astra, but during their travels on the UK-201, escaped prisoner Bennett caused the ship to crash on the planet Dido, subsequently killing the rest of the crew and most of the planet's native population ("The Rescue"). Bennett feigned paralysis from the explosion and accused the natives of the attack, doubling as the masked 'Koquillion' to reinforce the deception, intending to use Vicki as a 'witness' to deflect suspicion from himself, but this plan was interrupted when the TARDIS arrived on Dido, as the First Doctor had visited the planet before and knew that the natives weren't that ruthless. While Barbara
Wright and Ian
Chesterton befriended Vicki, The Doctor confronted Bennett and exposed his deception, leaving him to be killed by the last Didonians while The Doctor invited Vicki to join them on the TARDIS (partially as a 'replacement' for the recently-departed Susan).
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| The Web Planet |
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Despite being well educated - to the extent that Ian
and Barbara’s teaching skills would have been more appropriate
for a nursery class rather than for teenagers in her time of origin
- Vicki was nevertheless essentially a regular teenaged girl, and
relied constantly on her companions for help and support. Despite
this, she was not without her own sense of determination and grew
increasingly capable of standing up for herself. From their first
meeting, Vicki needed The Doctor for reassurance but The Doctor,
in his fondness for her, tended to be overprotective, sometimes taking it for granted that Vicki would accept his authority when he was indulging his own whims, such as when he infiltrated the court of King James VI with Vicki posing as his ward 'Victor' ("The Plotters"). Vicki's relationship
with Ian and Barbara though took a bit longer to become established.
This was not helped by the fact that her knowledge was obviously
superior to that of Barbara and Ian's and this led, on a number
of occasions, to a few misunderstandings which she took full advantage
of. This is well demonstrated in "The
Space Museum" where she was
positively smug when she demonstrated that she understood time dimensions,
and Ian didn't. However, her knowledge of the fine details of Earth’s
history was comparatively limited; during a visit to China in the
later 1800s she was uncertain if pandas were still in existence
at this time and had to subtly ask Ian if aeroplanes had been invented yet, Ian confirming that they were around forty years early for flight to be an option ("The Eleventh Tiger").
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The Plotters
(Gareth Roberts) |
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Being
from the future Vicki brought to the programme a different
point of view to the events and places visited. The character
of Vicki was based very much on Susan but without the grandfather/granddaughter
relationship. She was a very lively, high spirited and inquisitive
companion and was always keen in questioning and seeking
information from The Doctor. She was also keen to enjoy
herself and took every opportunity to have fun. She was
quick in announcing her opinions and was never afraid to
let others know what she felt. Despite Ian and Barbara's
overshadowing presence, and her tendency to rely on the
others to make decisions for her, such as her disguise as Victor in 1605 resulting in her having to fend off the
advances of the homosexual James VI ("The
Plotters").
Vicki did have her moments to show initiative. This was
mainly when the group had become separated from each other,
such as when she encouraged the native Xerons to revolt
against the ruling Moroks, even managing to outwit the controlling
computer of the Morok armoury and provoke a revolution ("The
Space Museum").
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| Galaxy 4 |
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Although the TARDIS crew remained fond of each other, there was never the same bond between Vicki with Ian and Barbara, as there was with Susan. Ironically, this lack of a bond proved an advantage when the alien Jospa attempted to infiltrate the TARDIS by manipulating the crew's memories so that they would believe he was a fifth companion ("The Fifth Traveller"), as while he could influence The Doctor's desire for better control and Ian and Barbara's wish to go home, Vicki just wanted to keep travelling. Eventually, Ian and Barbara used a Dalek time machine to return home to sixties London, leaving The Doctor and Vicki briefly alone until they realised that they had been joined by astronaut Steven Taylor. While Steven had stumbled into the TARDIS by relative chance, Vicki was able to show herself as an experienced time traveller, leading to her establishing a friendly rivalry with Steven based on his greater age versus her superior experience with life in the TARDIS. During this time Vicki was also able to develop her experience with history, such as winning over Pope Leo X when she was accused of planning an assassination by reciting poetry to win his favour, although she then had to walk a careful balance between becoming the Pope's consort and retrieving the TARDIS key from him ("The Ravelli Conspiracy").
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The Crash of the UK-201
(Jonathan Morris) |
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While Vicki enjoyed her time in the TARDIS, she experienced a particularly difficult event when a temporal anomaly caused her to be sent back along her personal timeline, allowing her to 'relive' the crash of the UK-201 ("The Crash of the UK-201"). Despite Steven warning her against changing history when The Doctor managed to project him after Vicki, Vicki was able to prevent the crash, allowing her to make a new life on Astra with her father, eventually marrying a doctor and having two daughters after her father died in a meteor shower. However, when one of her daughters died in a revolution, Vicki attempted to change history to save her child as she became aware that she was being hunted by strange creatures throughout her life, but this change resulted in her other daughter never pursuing a political career and the revolution escalating into all-out war, and Vicki's attempt to save her father led to her having two different children with her husband. When Steven helped her realise that her actions were endangering his own existence, as the TARDIS wouldn't have come to Mechanus in time to stop him killing himself without her influence, Vicki resigned herself to the fact that she had lost her original life, and went back to the beginning to 're-do' the original crash. While The Doctor assured her that her family with live on in her memory if she wished to remember them after she returned, this event likely contributed to Vicki's later decision to move on from the TARDIS. After it landed in the city of Troy, circumstances led to Vicki adopting the name Cressida, and she eventually decided to stay behind and start a new life with Prince Troilus, as she had fallen in love with him. In doing so Vicki manages to resume her life on Earth some three thousand years before she was born ("The Myth Makers").
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| Short Trips: Companions |
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Although she had chosen this life, Vicki sometimes found herself troubled by the fact that so few people in her new time could relate to her experiences. When she realised that she had become a 'host' to the entity known as the phoenix when it possessed her during a confrontation in 1814, she released the fragment of the phoenix into the form of a weak Cinder that she could talk with about her future, knowing that the Cinder would become the phoenix she had defeated in 1814 and leave it trapped in a time loop. At one point, Vicki was briefly reunited with The Doctor when the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard landed in her new home of Asia Minor while The Doctor was taking a temporally-displaced young Will Shakespeare back to his own time ("Apocrypha Bipedium") after Shakespeare was abducted as part of a complex plot by the Daleks ("The Time of the Daleks"). Although this meeting was initially complicated by Vicki's lack of knowledge of regeneration causing her to conclude that the Eighth Doctor was a younger version of the First Doctor - even briefly thinking that he was a Dalek duplicate due to his strange behaviour as he attempted to maintain that illusion - The Doctor eventually explained the truth to her, suggesting that she and Troilus move to Cornwall due to historical rumours that the Trojans were the first Britons in order to give them an opportunity for a long and happy life together (with Shakespeare explicitly musing that he wouldn't let this knowledge affect the play he would write in his future). Reference of Vicki's life at this time revealed that she had two children that she referred to as 'young heroes' showing that she had found a new family despite her challenges, and resolving to find happiness in her chosen destiny. |
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