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Love and War
(Paul
Cornell) |
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 Name: Professor Bernice 'Benny'
Summerfield.
Format: Book and Audio.
Time of
Origin: 26th Century.
Appearances: "Love
and War" -"Birthright", "Blood
Heat" - "Happy
Endings", "Return
of the Living Dad", "Eternity
Weeps", "The
Dying Days" and "The
Shadow of the Scourge".
Doctor: Seventh
Doctor and Eighth
Doctor.
Fellow Companions:
The
Brigadier,
Liz Shaw,
Jo Grant,
Sergeant
Benton, 2nd
Romana, Melanie
Bush, Ace, Roslyn Forrester and Chris
Cwej
History: Benny originally met up with the Seventh
Doctor and Ace when he visited the planet Heaven, quite literally that for
humans and Draconians, while The Doctor was 'apparently' getting a book out of
the local library. However, it was revealed that he was actually attempting to
stop a race called the Hoothi, who killed several people and used their bodies
as soldiers, even Ace's boyfriend Jan. The Doctor defeated them, but Ace
decided to leave him, angry that he only tried to take Jan away from her
because he was jealous. Benny, although angry at what The Doctor did, knows he
could have done nothing else, and agrees to travel with him for a time.
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All-Consuming Fire
(Andy
Lane) |
|
Benny, although not actually a professor,
was an archaeologist, and did a very good job of it as well. However,
like The Doctor's future companion, Fitz Kreiner, she had a bad habit - Fitz
smoked, Benny drank. The Doctor was known to try to get her off the
booze, but eventually gave up. Of course, The Doctor still cared
for
Benny, just as much as he did for all his other companions. Benny
never really went in for hugging much, as she mentioned a few times,
but she always enjoyed a good laugh. She and The Doctor did get on,
but the whole thing was partly helped along when Ace rejoined The
Doctor after she'd been away for three years - The Doctor influenced
Ace to leave him so she could eventually return and help him drive
out an infection that had gotten into the TARDIS
in "Cats
Cradle: Witch Mark". Benny had some of the most interesting
meetings with people in her time with The Doctor, including Sherlock
Holmes
and Doctor Watson in "All-Consuming
Fire", a book that, although written by Arthur Conan Doyle
in that Universe, was only written for Watson's benefit, and thus
never
saw print officially. She also returned to Peladon, a planet visited
twice by the Third
Doctor in "The
Curse of Peladon" and "The
Monster of Peladon". She also had a battle with a new version of The
Master, created when a race called The Tzun gave him new
nanites that restored to him his ability to regenerate. These
probably weren't
as effective as had been previously thought, given that he attempted
to lengthen his life again in his later appearances, but they
did
work for a brief while. She was also one of the first companions
to deal with a situation without aid from The Doctor, being
only helped
by Ace while The Doctor battled the Cybermen
in another time when the TARDIS's Time Vector Generator was removed,
thus reverting the TARDIS interior to a simple Police Box, and Ace
and Benny tried to recover the TVG from a man attempting to unleash
an alien race called the Charrl from Earth's far future ("Birthright"),
while The Doctor, in the TARDIS escape pod, battled the Cybermen
in
2006.("Iceberg").
Some time after this, Ace left for the second time, and once again,
it was just The Doctor and Benny.
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Happy Endings
(Paul
Cornell) |
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Some rather interesting events occurred in
this second period with just The Doctor and Benny, on of
the most interest being
when The Doctor, in order to help Benny grieve for the death
of a friend, briefly turned himself into a human called Dr John
Smith. ("Human
Nature"). However, this wasn't as successful as it could have
been, since the resulting situation had an alien race attempt
to acquire The Doctor's
biodata, in order so that they could defeat the Time Lords.
You see, each of the aliens could only reproduce eight times
in any life. However, each time
they regenerated, they could breed again, each of the resulting
children would also be able to regenerate, and Gallifrey
would eventually be overpowered by
sheer force of numbers. Smith, when he got involved in the
conflict, he was tempted to leave them and marry his fiancé, (Yes,
his fiancé!)
but an aspect of the TARDIS locked away in his mind taught
him a vital lesson - whether Dr John Smith or The Doctor,
he is never cruel nor cowardly, and is a
man of peace even in a time of war. He thus turned himself
back into The Doctor, and defeated the aliens. It was in
the next story, "Original
Sin", that The Doctor and Benny met up with two new companions,
Chris Cwej and Roslyn 'Roz' Forrester.
After this, things began to get even more
interesting for The Doctor and friends, particularly an
occasion when they battled The Doctor's fictional counterpart,
Dr Who, freed from the Land of Fiction. It was some time after this that Benny left The
Doctor, when a young man she'd met, Jason Kane, proposed
to her, and she accepted, in "Death
and Diplomacy". Their wedding was the main focus in the following
story
"Happy
Endings", although other minor problems included The Master having
stolen the sacred Loom of Rassilon's Mouse, causing several
Fortean flickers, temporal
anomalies which displace events and objects from their proper
positions in space and time, including The Doctor's original
Type Forty TARDIS, thought to
have been destroyed when The Doctor destroyed an alternate
timeline created by The
Meddling Monk,
and had since been going around in that timeline's Third
Doctor's TARDIS, since that Doctor was dead. The Doctor,
Chris, Roz and Benny dealt with it with some
help from Chris' new girlfriend, Ishtar, the former Timewyrm,
and
The
Brigadier.
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Eternity Weeps
(Jim
Mortimore) |
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Benny later appeared in the novel "Return
of the Living Dad", when Benny discovered that her father,
thought to have been killed by the Daleks,
but actually trapped in 1983 helping aliens that were stranded
on Earth, some of them trapped by The Doctor. In the process,
the TARDIS and Jason were captured by a fifties greaser
called Albinex, who was attempting to acquire the nuclear
codes of the missiles that the Fourth Doctor
disabled in "Robot",
and used a woman out of phase with time to try to make The
Doctor say the destructor codes, but she couldn't read them
in his past, because the ghost of
the Sixth
Doctor was still angry at the Seventh for cutting
his life short and would let nobody go to a point before
The Doctor's last regeneration, and
couldn't make him tell her by showing him his next regeneration,
until she increased his greatest moment of pleasure a million
times, and he gave her the
codes. The Doctor discovered, to his horror, that Issac
was intending to move Earth into a military era so that
the Dalek attack in the 22nd century ("The
Dalek Invasion of Earth") could be fought off. Or so he thought.
Actually, Albinex was helping the Daleks, and trying to damage Earth
so badly that they could invade two whole centuries ahead
of schedule! However, The Doctor managed
to fight off Albinex and, although a missile was fired,
they diverted it to hit the Dalek satellite placed to monitor
Albinex's plan.
Benny
returned again in the story "Eternity
Weeps", when she and Jason, in 2003, were attempting to find what was
thought to be Noah's Ark, although Benny was on the team
that would be using just scientific methods to find the Ark, and Jason's
team would be using both
religious and scientific methods to find it. They did well
at first, but when both expeditions were attacked, they were forced to
summon The Doctor and
Chris. In the process the four of them, along with The Doctor's
old friend
Liz Shaw,
discovered that an alien terraforming virus had been unleashed
into the atmosphere, and, worst of all for them personally, a virus was
replacing the
water in Liz's body with sulphuric acid, which killed her,
and the entire thing was caused by Jason going back in time to try to stop
the situation!
Eventually, The Doctor managed to save the world, but in
doing so he was forced to kill off a tenth of Earth's population. Benny
and Jason, no longer able to
live with each other, divorced, and The Doctor and Chris
took her back home.
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Love and War
(Paul Cornell, adapted by Jacqueline Rayner) |
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In Benny's
last meeting with The Doctor, she'd been sent back in time
by Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart to The Doctor's house in Allen Road. However,
not only was
The Doctor a week late, but he'd regenerated into the Eighth
Doctor, and had
probably recently left
Sam
at the Greenpeace rally I mentioned in my guide on her. Also, as if that wasn't
bad enough, an attack from The Doctor's old enemies, the Ice
Warriors, because
humanity had landed on the tombs of the Martian warlords. In the battle against
the Ice Warriors, aided by the Brigadier, The Doctor was apparently killed by a
deadly intelligent gas cloud, and Benny and the Brigadier were forced to face
off with the Martians alone. However, The Doctor had survived the Red Death by
shutting down his body briefly, and later managed to trick the Martians into
putting themselves into a position where they could be destroyed. He then took
Benny back to the 26th century, and gave her Wolsey for company. It can only be
hoped that Benny did well back in her own time. |
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