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| India Fisher |
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 Name: Charlotte 'Charley' E. Pollard; altered
the Sixth
Doctor’s memories after her departure so that he remembered
anything he experienced with her as being with Mila.
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Earth, 1931
Appearances:
"Storm
Warning" to "The
Girl Who Never Was" (Eighth
Doctor), "The
Condemned" to "Patient
Zero"; subsequently
impersonated by the deranged Mila until her reunion and ‘official’ departure
from The Doctor in "Blue
Forgotten Planet" (Sixth Doctor).
Doctor: Eighth
Doctor and Sixth
Doctor (Confusingly enough, in that order); once encountered holograms based
on the Fifth,
Sixth and Seventh Doctors.
Fellow
Companions: The
Brigadier, Vicki, Leela, K9, 2nd
Romana, C'rizz,
Mila (Mila transformed herself into a duplicate of Charley using
the Dalek viruses
that she had been exposed to previously).
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Storm
Warning
(Alan Barnes) |
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History: Charley marked one of The Doctor's most
complex companions, even though she hadn't any real mystery about
her. She was a young girl from the Edwardian era of Earth from a
fairly upper-class family, known for befriending gypsies in her youth
and with an Uncle Jacques who lost his arm in the First World War.
Her interest in adventure lead to her sneaking on board the doomed
airship the R101 to meet a young American trader in Singapore on
New Year's Eve, as she'd impulsively told him she would when they
met, seeking to travel in a manner that she’d never managed
to do when she was younger due to her over-protective father. However,
once on board the R101 - having replaced one of the crew by getting
him drunk and taking his place - she met up with none other than
the Eighth
Doctor, just in time to witness the R101 rendezvous with
a flying saucer whose crew had made contact with the R101’s
designers. However, misunderstandings between the two sides resulted
in the destruction of the R101 - although the saucer was able to
depart without consequence thanks to the R101’s captain replacing
a dead crewmember -, leaving The Doctor with a dilemma; although
he had saved Charley from the crash, this meant that one less person
had died on the R101 than in recorded history, meaning that, at
some point, The Doctor would have to go back to the R101 before it
crashed, send Charley off the TARDIS,
and let her die to preserve the Web of Time…
Despite the fact that he would eventually have to kill
her, The Doctor quickly formed a strong friendship with Charley.
Charley was one of the small group of companions who didn't know
about a lot about technology but still had a fairly basic knowledge
of it, (The others being Jamie and Victoria),
but she still managed to cope fairly well during her time with The
Doctor. She even learnt
how to operate the TARDIS to a certain degree, picking up how to
activate the console data screen through simply observing The Doctor
("Embrace
the Darkness") and later being taught how to
work the Fast Return Switch during their fight with the Nimon ("Seasons
of Fear"). Despite being not too far removed from Victoria
in terms of her time of origin, she was far from a 'shrinking violet',
helping The Doctor with such varied dangers as breaking a curse on
the family of an old Italian Count ("The
Stones of Venice"),
standing against the Nimons’ attempted conquest of Earth ("Seasons
of Fear"), and was even prepared to sacrifice her life to
save all of reality from collapse. Like The Doctor himself, she was
able
to gain trust very easily; even a ruthless android gave its life
to save hers on only her first trip in the TARDIS ("Sword
of Orion"), and she later managed to appeal to Edith - the
same cook who had always served Charley plum pudding on Christmas
Eve
back home - and convince her that life could still be worth living,
telling Edith that Charley would always remember her on all the alien
worlds she visited, even if Edith would never see her again ("The
Chimes of Midnight").
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The Chimes of Midnight
(Robert Shearman) |
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Despite her obvious strength, Charley nevertheless also
fulfilled the required companion role of getting captured and needing
to be saved by The Doctor, most notably when she lost her memory
after an accident in the TARDIS and was forced to work for the notorious
Hellfire Club, where she was captured by Charles Brigham Dashwood
III, the governor of the new fifty-first state of America ("Minuet
in Hell"). Dashwood almost sacrificed her to a demonic life-form
that lived in the dust of comets and fed off negative emotions so
that it could use her body as a host, but The Doctor was able to
recover his memory in time thanks to the intervention of his old
friend The
Brigadier, who'd been visiting the new state as an observer
for the United Nations. Charley has also suffered from deliberate
brainwashing more than once, briefly being caught up in a time loop
that caused a sentient house to repeatedly kill a different resident
over and over ("The Chimes of Midnight"), while on another
occasion she was trapped in a nanite-controlled prison based on the
memories of her past ("Memory
Lane"), although on both
occasions The Doctor managed to reach her and help her regain her
true memory. She also demonstrated a strong loyalty and affection
for The Doctor, once accompanying him on a dangerous attempt to help
the mysterious Cimmerian race after The Doctor made a mistake that
could have destroyed them simply because she refused to let him feel
guilty for something he hadn’t intended to do ("Embrace
the Darkness"). Charley was also unintentionally involved in
a trap created for The Doctor when his apparent success at getting
her to her appointment at Singapore was revealed to be an alternate
timeline created so that The Doctor’s future foe Sebastian
Grayle could gloat at a past Doctor after he killed his enemy ("Seasons
of Fear"). However, taking advantage of the fact that Grayle’s
actions suspended the usual laws of Time, The Doctor was able to
prevent this timeline by manipulating events so that Grayle was killed
by his own past self - having discovered that his enemy was being
used by the Nimon ("The
Horns of Nimon") - and his future
existence erased, although The Doctor was left increasingly aware
of the long-term consequences of Charley’s paradoxical survival
despite his continued reluctance to actually kill Charley.
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Neverland
(Alan Barnes) |
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The issue of Charley’s survival was finally resolved
when the Time Lords captured Charley on the grounds that her survival
was causing ripples in the fabric of reality that were permitting
aspects of ‘anti-time’ - a force as destructive to causality
as anti-matter is to positive matter - to seep into the universe.
Travelling into the anti-time reality to investigate in more detail,
The Doctor, Charley, and Romana - now Gallifrey’s President
- realised that the anti-time reality was populated by people who
had been erased from Time - including a former co-ordinator of the
Celestial Intervention Agency - and that they sought to detonate
a ‘bomb’ of anti-time in Gallifrey that would plunge
the universe into chaos. With the only apparent option being to kill
Charley to erase the breach, The Doctor instead used the TARDIS to
contain the explosion, thus making the breach - and Charley’s
survival - a fact of the timeline ("Neverland"). Unfortunately,
The Doctor was contaminated by the Anti-Time released in the explosion,
transforming him into Zagreus, a being of pure anti-time that Rassilon,
the founder of Time Lord society, wished to use as an assassin against
the Divergents, the race that would evolved to replace the Time Lords
before Rassilon took them out of history and sent them to a pocket
universe with no Time. With the aid of ex-companions Romana, Leela and K9 - as well as holograms based on the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors generated by the TARDIS to provide the companions access
to The Doctor’s knowledge in the absence of the original -,
Charley was able to help The Doctor fight off the Zagreus part of
himself long enough to dispose of Rassilon in the Divergence's pocket
universe, before a sample of pure zero matter stabilised The Doctor's
mental state and submerged the Zagreus part of him. However, unable
to get rid of the anti-time infection itself, The Doctor was forced
to enter the Divergents' pocket universe himself, as simply stepping
into our universe would annihilate it completely, initially unaware
that Charley had followed him to ensure that he wouldn’t be
alone in this new universe ("Zagreus").
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Zagreus
(Alan Barnes and
Gary Russell) |
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Their
time in the Divergence Universe was never easy; early on in their
new universe, the TARDIS was taken from them by an unknown force,
and all the evidence around The Doctor and Charley seemed to suggest
that they were in some sort of laboratory complex, being forced to
go through tests of some kind in their search for the TARDIS. During
their travels, they were joined by C'rizz, a chameleon-like alien
- capable of changing his skin tones, some members of his species
being able to achieve true invisibility -, who was forced to murder
the woman he loved when she began to mutate into a hideous hybrid,
Charley only narrowly being saved from a similar fate thanks to The
Doctor’s efforts ("The
Creed of the Kromon"). Realising
that they were on a planet that was separated into zones without
the inhabitants' knowledge, The Doctor was able to convince the zone
guardian - a mysterious intelligence known as the Kro'ka - to let
them pass through the zones to search for the TARDIS, although it
was constantly hinted at that it possessed an ulterior motive for
its actions beyond interest in The Doctor’s ship. Eventually,
the TARDIS was discovered when The Doctor was split into three different
people after passing through a barrier; the TARDIS had been unable
to send The Doctor a complete message when he was a single entity,
so it had manipulated the barrier to split The Doctor up so he could
be in three places at once and receive the entire message. This also
(apparently) revealed the purpose of the experiments; to give the
Divergents access to the secrets of the TARDIS ("Caerdroia").
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The Next Life
(Alan Barnes and Gary Russell) |
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However,
in their final struggle in the universe, The Doctor learned the truth
about the anti-time universe; there was no Time in it because it
was locked in an endless cycle, going back to the beginning after
a certain amount of 'time' had elapsed, and there were no temporal
coordinates due to the fact that every moment had happened before.
The experiments had been carried out because the Divergents wanted
to see how a random element would affect the process of evolution
and change, wishing to confirm their belief that The Doctor alone
could break the cycle they'd been trapped in since the beginning.
Facing off against Keep - a creature that was a combination of both
himself and Charley, created during their time in an evolution-accelerating
chamber at the start of their travels in the universe; Keep represented
what they could have become if they hadn’t left the chamber
-, The Doctor deduced that Perfection, Keep's 'wife', selected to
help him recreate life in the universe, was in fact Zagreus; Rassilon
had filtered the anti-time energy in The Doctor’s body out
of him the second he'd entered the Divergent's universe, leaving
Zagreus’s energies disembodied and forced to possess Perfection
as a host. With time running out until the universe ‘reset’,
The Doctor, Charley and C'rizz returned to our universe, leaving
Zagreus and Keep to sort out their differences... and leaving Rassilon
trapped in the evolution chamber with the Kro'ka, unable to escape
and with nobody there to hear him scream as he was broken down once
more ("The
Next Life").
Having
returned to her universe, Charley was grateful to be back on more
familiar territory, despite some initial tension between her and
C’rizz due to his past as an assassin and the fact that he
changed the original status quo of just her and The Doctor. As time
progressed, however, the two became good friends, Charley recognising
that morality could be more complicated than her initial perceptions
after such experiences as an encounter with serial killer Eunis Flood
who was about to be killed as part of an experiment to research the
nature of evil, Charley concluding that Flood didn’t deserve
such treatment no matter what he’d done in the past or would
do in the future ("Scaredy
Cat"). Charley also experienced
an interesting historical encounter when she met the Duke of Wellington
during a trip to the Great Exhibition in 1851, assuring him that
he personally would be remembered as a great hero even if Britain
itself still had problems in the future while posing as a French
ambassador after the originals were briefly trapped in the TARDIS
("Other
Lives").
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The Girl Who Never Was
(Alan Barnes) |
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In
the end, however, C’rizz was killed when the TARDIS was trapped
on a planet resembling Hell and was forced to serve as a spiritual
storage facility for the souls of the entire planet - a purpose that
The Doctor speculated C’rizz had been intended to serve for
the Foundation -, only for C’rizz to burn himself out when
he acted to restore the planet to normal, his last words being to
describe Charley as his sister before he died ("Absolution").
Angry at The Doctor’s apparent lack of concern for the loss
- although he Doctor tried to assure her that he did care and had
just grown used to moving on after so long travelling and seeing
his companions leave -, Charley ordered The Doctor to take her to
Singapore once and for all. However, although Charley changed her
mind after she arrived in Singapore, a subsequent confrontation with
the Cybermen during their latest attempt to harness time travel resulted
in The Doctor and Charley being separated as the Cybermens’ ship
collapsed, Charley being left in the year 500 000 on an abandoned
Earth, believing that The Doctor had been killed by the Cybermen
- in reality he had entered a healing coma after a failed conversion
-, while The Doctor returned to Singapore in 2008 after the TARDIS’s
HADS activated when the ship they were on disintegrated, his recent
memories so scrambled by the attempted conversion that he was unable
to precisely recall what had happened to Charley ("The
Girl Who Never Was"). Using Cyber-equipment to transmit a distress
signal from a deserted island, Charley was finally rescued by the
TARDIS... only to learn that it was the Sixth Doctor’s TARDIS
("The
Condemned").
Despite facing
the obvious problems of travelling with a previous version of her
Doctor, haunted by the apparent ‘death’ of The Doctor
she knew, Charley nevertheless decided to remain with the Sixth Doctor,
while simultaneously taking care to avoid revealing that she knew
him in the future due to both the Web of Time and her belief that
she had seen his death. Unfortunately, Charley’s attempt was
dangerously flawed from the beginning, with her attempts to conceal
information regarding such details as her knowledge about the Web
of Time or previous encounters with alien life-forms such as the
Daleks ("Brotherhood
of the Daleks") made The Doctor increasingly
suspicious of her. Although he appeared to be willing to accept her
presence in the TARDIS, the various minor mysteries she presented,
such as talking about how The Doctor didn’t care about C’rizz’s
death when she was temporarily suffering from oxygen deprivation
("Return
of the Krotons"), or her detailed knowledge of
the Daleks, left the Sixth Doctor increasingly suspicious of her
true history, to the point where he finally confronted her about
her true past.
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Blue Forgotten Planet
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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Although The
Doctor was unable to get any kind of answer from Charley before she
collapsed for initially unknown reasons, he subsequently spent some
time trying to find out what was wrong with her, eventually realising
that she had somehow succumbed to several mysterious viruses despite
the TARDIS being programmed to protect her from such things. While
The Doctor tracked the viruses to their source, Charley was confronted
by the mysterious Mila, who revealed that she had been the victim
of Dalek viral experiments long ago, using Charley’s ability
to be infected with her viruses (Apparently because the TARDIS had
no interest in protecting her due to her paradoxical nature) to transfer
her condition - including being permanently invisible and intangible
to all around her - to Charley, simply so that she could take Charley’s
place as The Doctor’s companion ("Patient
Zero").
Fortunately, although The Doctor departed with no knowledge that
Mila wasn’t the original Charley, Charley herself was recovered
and treated by the Viyrans, a mysterious race who had been charged
with disposing of various viruses, Charley going on to serve as their
agent when tracking the viruses in exchange for them helping her
find The Doctor again. Although their attempts to eliminate a microscopic
viral particle on Earth nearly destroyed the planet ("Blue
Forgotten Planet"), Charley was reunited with The Doctor and Mila, explaining
the truth about her past and helping The Doctor figure out a means
of restoring Earth to normal, although Mila died in the process.
Seeing no other way to preserve the Web of Time, Charley convinced
The Doctor to allow the Viyrans to alter his memories of his time
with her and Mila, the Viyrans editing his memories so that his memories
of Charley now featured Mila’s true name and appearance in
her place, as well as giving her a peaceful departure rather than
a painful death.
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Charlotte Pollard
(Jonathan Barnes and Matt Fitton) |
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With no better options for what to do with herself at this time, Charley remained with the Viyrans, being left in stasis and occasionally taken out when the Viyrans needed her perspective to deal with new possible infections. While investigating a potential virus victim around the temporal anomaly known as the Ever-and-Ever Prolixity ("The Lamentation Cipher"), Charley seized an opportunity to escape through the Prolixity when a time virus outbreak caused the Viyrans to glitch, and managed to return to Earth in 1936. Unfortunately, although she was able to visit her parents ("The Fall of the House of Pollard"), the Viyrans caught up with her once again, and not only took Charley back into custody but erased her parents’ memories that she had ever existed in the first place. Realising that the Viyrans intended to use the Prolixity to erase all life in the galaxy as evidence had emerged that one of the viruses they were tracking had gone back in time and jump-started the evolution of life in the first place ("The Viyran Solution"), Charley was used by a rogue Viyran to infect the rest of the Viyrans with a virus that reset them to ‘factory settings’, erasing the memory of their plan to wipe out the universe. She escaped the Viyrans with Robert Buchan, their new human operative, but their ship fell into the Prolixity once again. Arriving in 21st century London, Charley, Robert and the rogue Viyran discovered a new Viyran attempt to ‘improve’ life by releasing a code that compromised human empathy, intending to release it on a large scale so people would be less concerned about others. When last seen, Charley had fallen back into the Prolixity as her former Viyran ally watched the Prime Minister prepare to order the destruction of London to stop the Viyrans’ plan. While London’s continued existence suggests this plan was ultimately undone in some way, as of now Charley’s final fate is unclear. |
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