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Patient Zero
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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 Name: Mila; posed as Charlotte 'Charley' Pollard
when travelling with The Doctor.
Format:
Audio.
Time of Origin: Unknown; she was subject to Dalek
experiments that apparently erased her memory.
Time
Span: Apparently
escaped the Daleks during the events of "The
Chase" to hide in
the TARDIS; her unique condition meant that her presence was unknown to
The Doctor or his companions until the events of "Patient
Zero";
subsequently travelled with him in disguise until "Blue
Forgotten Planet".
Doctor: Apparently
lived in the TARDIS without The Doctor’s knowledge from the
events of "The Chase" until the Sixth
Doctor’s era;
never officially met the previous five Doctors but witnessed all
of them in action.
Companions:
Co-habited the TARDIS with all of The Doctor’s companions from "The
Chase" to the events of "Patient Zero" without anyone knowing;
only officially met Charley
Pollard when assuming her identity.
History: Of all The Doctor’s companions,
Mila is unquestionably the longest-serving- despite the
fact that The Doctor spent five lifetimes without being aware of her presence
-, as well as
the most mysterious. Originally a victim of Dalek research
into various viruses that the Daleks had discovered at multiple locations
across time
and space, Mila was the test subject of a virus that could
turn any other patient into a duplicate of the original host, the Daleks’ intentions
being to develop a virus that could turn everyone infected
with it into a Dalek. Having failed to develop a Dalek version of the virus,
they managed
to perfect its development by using Mila as a test subject,
but when attempts to transfer the virus into a Dalek simply resulted in
the deaths of all
Daleks infected with the virus, the Daleks bombarded Mila
with all kinds of radiation. This ‘treatment’ resulted in Mila
being shifted into another dimension that rendered her invisible and intangible
to all other life forms around her, while also apparently
rendering her functionally
immortal given that she survived for centuries in the TARDIS without anyone knowing of her existence or any apparent
means of gaining sustenance.
The radiation having destroyed her memory of her past
life apart from her name, Mila escaped in a Dalek time ship that had been
sent to track The Doctor (Most likely during "The
Chase"), subsequently
escaping the Daleks to hide in the TARDIS, where she remained for several
centuries. Although The Doctor was never aware of her presence, various
companions came and went while Mila remained in the ship, watching The
Doctor throughout his first five regenerations - the available evidence
suggests that she rarely left the TARDIS, most likely out of fear that
she would become separated from The Doctor and be left behind when he
departed -, growing ever more desperate to become his true companion.
This chance eventually came when Charley
Pollard - the future companion
of the Eighth
Doctor, who had unintentionally rescued her from the events
which would have resulted in her death and taken her as his companion
until they were separated during a fight with the Cybermen ("The
Girl Who Never Was") - was picked up by the Sixth
Doctor when he
responded to her distress call, Charley having been trying and failing
to make contact with ‘her’ Doctor. Apparently aware of the
potential temporal paradoxes caused by Charley’s existence - including
her survival of the events that should have killed her and her currently
travelling with a younger version of The Doctor she’d originally
met -, the TARDIS ‘refused’ to protect Charley from Mila’s
viruses the way it had protected The Doctor’s previous companions,
allowing Mila to take on Charley’s physical appearance - while ‘shifting’ Charley
out of phase with reality like Mila had been -, and thus giving Mila the
chance to travel with The Doctor.
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Paper Cuts
(Marc Platt) |
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The extent to which Mila could be considered
a true companion is somewhat ambiguous, given that her relationship
with The Doctor could be regarded as more of an obsession
than a genuine friendship. Although she often talked about
her admiration of him, having read Dalek reports of their
previous encounters with him and subsequently witnessing
many of his adventures while hiding in the TARDIS, Mila’s
willingness to condemn Charley to her fate as an intangible ‘ghost’ simply
so that she could travel with The Doctor herself demonstrated
a selfishness that The Doctor himself would never condone.
Her fundamentally selfish attitude was further reflected
in her dealings with Gomori, a Draconian fisherman whom ‘Charley’ had
befriended while The Doctor attended the funeral rites of
his old friend the Fifteenth Emperor of Draconia ("Paper
Cuts"); despite the fact that his time with them would
only be brief, she actively discouraged Gomori from joining
them in the TARDIS, for no other apparent reason than that
she wanted The Doctor all to herself. This obsession was
further demonstrated when Mila refused to allow The Doctor
to sacrifice himself to destroy Amethyst station to stop
the Daleks gaining access to the viruses simply because she
didn’t want to lose him, as well as her later attempt
to claim that the original Charley was a clone created by
the mysterious Viyrans to stop the truth about her being
exposed, thinking only about what would benefit her without
giving any thought to the wider concerns involved in the
current situation (Without The Doctor to control the explosion
the viruses stored on Amethyst were scattered across the
universe, and the belief that the Viyrans were creating clones
triggered a riot among the already-temperamental humans).
Despite the lies surrounding Mila’s relationship
with The Doctor, she nevertheless appeared to bond very well with The Doctor
over the course of their time together, apparently sharing several unrecorded
adventures with The Doctor between “Paper Cuts” and their next
recorded appearance in "Blue
Forgotten Planet", including a visit
to the holiday planet Grallista Social. Finally arriving on Earth after
various detours to other worlds - The Doctor’s target date was the
1930s, but given that the TARDIS’s systems were disrupted by interference
it’s unclear whether he achieved this goal or arrived at another
point in history -, The Doctor and ‘Charley’ discovered that
all humanity had degenerated to a feral mentality as a result of the Viyrans’ attempts
to eliminate a virus that existed in the form of a single particle in the
bodies of every human on Earth (Despite the fact that there was only a
one in five billion chance that the virus would manifest, and even then
the virus would only activate seven hundred millennia in the future)...
as well as being reunited with the real Charley Pollard - who had been
discovered and treated by the Viyrans on Amethyst, subsequently working
for them to provide assistance in tracking the viruses when required in
exchange for their aid in helping her find The Doctor -, who finally told
The Doctor the truth about her past and her time with his future self.
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Blue Forgotten Planet
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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Although
the two Charleys - now genetically indistinguishable from
each other - initially found themselves unable to agree about anything,
when The Doctor
ordered them to depart the TARDIS while he used a temporal
sphere powered by the Viyran dissemination device to take the entire human
population
of Earth back in time after discovering that the virus could
be erased when exposed to chronal energy generated during time travel -
the Viyran
technology allowing him to use the TARDIS to turn time on
Earth back to the moment before the Viyrans detected the virus and thus
undoing the damage
they had done -, they began to form a tentative bond when
Mila reminded Charley that her sociopathic tendencies were the result of
her time being
tortured by the Daleks, Mila subsequently offering Charley
an attempt at comfort when Charley admitted that the future Doctor she
originally travelled
with had died before she encountered the Sixth Doctor. Unfortunately,
this tentative potential friendship was cut short when Mila sacrificed
herself
to disable the Viyran disseminator, currently channelling
so much power that it would be lethal to touch it, but knowing that it
had to be deactivated
in order to stop the TARDIS dragging Earth so far back in
time that mankind’s evolution would be erased.
Recognising
that she had to depart from The Doctor’s company in order to protect
the Web of Time - as well as fulfilling the Viyrans’ primary rule
of erasing the memories of all who had contact with the
viruses to prevent knowledge of them being revealed to the
rest of the universe -, Charley
convinced The Doctor to allow the Viyrans to alter his memories
of their time together, telling him that he had to forget
about his time with her
so that he would be unaware that his ‘death’ was approaching
him when he met her for the ‘first’ time in his eighth incarnation
(In reality the Eighth Doctor had simply entered a healing
coma after falling victim to a Cyberman implant that was
used to control him, the implant
leaving his memories of the last few hours too confused
for him to remember precisely what had happened to Charley
after the HADS took the TARDIS away
from a disintegrating ship ("The Girl Who Never Was")). As a
result, the Viyrans edited the Sixth Doctor’s memories of his time
with Charley to replace her name and face with Mila’s true appearance,
including a non-Viyran-related departure in which Mila simply
left The Doctor to make her own life on the grounds that
travelling with him had
begun to feel more like running away from life rather than
having a true life of her own. As a result, Mila got her
wish of being a true companion
to The Doctor - even if The Doctor would never learn the
full extent of her time with him -, while Charley was able
to preserve the timeline. |
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