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| Maggie Stables |
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 Name: Evelyn Smythe.
Format:
Audio and Book.
Time of Origin: Earth 2000.
Appearances: "The Marian
Conspiracy" – "Thicker
Than Water" (Flashback), "Instruments
of Darkness", "Thicker Than Water" and "A
Death in the Family".
Doctor: Sixth
Doctor, briefly spent some time with the Seventh
Doctor.
Fellow
Companions:
The
Brigadier, 2nd
Romana, Thomas Brewster, Melanie
Bush; brief meetings with Ace and
Hex; confronted Jeremy
Fitzoliver while he was The Doctor’s enemy
John Doe.
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The Marian Conspiracy
(Jacqueline
Rayner) |
|
History: Evelyn started off her time in the TARDIS in a rather unique way. A history lecturer from 2000 whose focus
on her research into the Tudor period had resulted in her marriage
breaking down when she attended a conference on the date of her wedding
anniversary, Evelyn met The Doctor when he was tracking a temporal
anomaly that was traceable to her, and was caused by an ancestor
of hers - according to the TARDIS databanks, her ancestor John Whiteside-Smith
had never actually existed. Despite believing The Doctor was someone
hired by the faculty to make her believe she was crazy and retire,
she went along with him to the TARDIS (Dispelling those beliefs,
naturally) and went back to the era of Queen Mary of England, where
The Doctor ended up in the Queen's room trying to help her through
her phantom pregnancy while dealing with her lovesick lady-in-waiting
Sarah Whiteside while Evelyn’s mistake about the date - toasting
Elizabeth while Mary was still Queen - resulted in her being forcibly
recruited by a secret conspiracy trying to depose Mary. Although
evidence briefly suggested that The Doctor would be John Whiteside
-Smith’s father with Sarah as the mother - and thus making
The Doctor Evelyn’s ancestor -, the father was later confirmed
to be Reverend Thomas Smith, who was killed after his attempt to
kill the Queen (Ironically aided by Evelyn’s own actions in
the past) was foiled. With the situation resolved, Evelyn thus joined
The Doctor as his new companion, unable to turn down the chance to
really see history.
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| Maggie Stables with Colin Baker and Bill
Oddie |
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Evelyn was radically different from the other female
companions The Doctor has ever had, most notably in the fact that she was
about in her early fifties while typical companions were normally in their
twenties. For another, she was a far cry from the average female companion
that stuck by The Doctor and screamed at the first sign of trouble, The
Doctor referring to Evelyn as one of the few companions who could hold
her own against the monsters he faced without his help ("Instruments
of Darkness"), describing her as the most well-prepared and useful
companion he’d ever had early on in her travels with him ("The Marian
Conspiracy"). Her strength of character came with a personal
warmth that allowed her to form fast friendships with a diverse range of
people and survive a variety of dangers, including two of The Doctor’s
most difficult confrontations with the Daleks as his greatest enemies invaded
his home planet ("The
Apocalypse Element"), followed by the two
of them arriving in an alternate timeline where the British Empire conquered
Earth with Dalek technology after they thwarted an invasion in their future
(Jubilee"). Despite the scale of both problems, Evelyn not only
survived, but thrived, playing an important role in the Time Lords’ victory
over the Daleks after The Doctor locked all of Gallifrey’s retinal
security systems to respond only to her eyes, - and she actually befriended
a Dalek in the alternate history, the Dalek having been disarmed and helpless
for the past hundred years and thus grateful for someone to talk to who
didn’t just want it to act like how they believed it should act.
She has met her fair share of famous people in
her time, including witnessing Charles Darwin develop his theory of evolution
("Bloodtide"), as well as spending time with Daft Jamie, one
of the last victims of William Burke and William Hare ("Medicinal
Purposes"), saddened when the adventure concluded with Daft Jamie
infected with a virus that prevented her from simply being able to give
him a farewell hug. During a brief return to her original time, Evelyn
even paid a visit to Sally, one of her students, who was contemplating
suicide as she blamed herself for the death of her lover in a car accident,
telling Sally about a recent adventure to help Sally see that even the
darkest night could seem better in the morning ("Doctor
Who and the Pirates"). Whether dealing with historical persons or common men,
Evelyn also had a knack for seeing the true colours of the people she met,
which came in particularly useful when she met a vampire called Cassie;
she had looked into Cassie's eyes, and knew she was no killer at heart,
even if she did now need blood to survive ("Project:
Twilight").
Despite her age, she even formed a potentially romantic attachment with
a few men she encountered in her travels, most notably Rossiter on the
planet Vilag ("Arrangements
for War"), although her friendship
with The Doctor proved to be too important to her for her to abandon him.
Her strength of character was reflected most keenly by the fact that, before
she met The Doctor, Evelyn’s fellow staff members were trying to
convince her to retire because of a combination of her husband having left
her (Not a major deterrent in wandering around Time) and a heart attack
(A far more obvious problem), and yet she continued to travel, unable to
resist the temptations offered by the TARDIS, although she concealed her
true health from The Doctor. While Evelyn understood the dangers of changing
history herself, she was not above allowing historical changes to remain
if they had already happened, as seen most obviously when she assumed that
she and The Doctor had accidentally altered the circumstances of Julius
Caesar’s conception so that he was born a girl instead, Evelyn willing
to allow the new timeline to play out while The Doctor tried to convince
her that they had to change it back (Although it was later established
that The Doctor and Evelyn had actually witnessed the birth of Caesar’s
unknown older sister as The Doctor had set the coordinates incorrectly)
("100").
Although the Caesar crisis was a particularly
turbulent experience, their mutual personal strength meant that The Doctor
and Evelyn had more than the usual Doctor/Companion debates, ranging from
minor details like The Doctor arguing that historical research based on
records was flawed as all records were based on the views of their writers
("Jubilee") to more emotionally intense ones like The Doctor’s
apparently casual attitude towards Cassie Schofield’s death at the
hands of the ruthless vampire Nimrod ("Project:
Lazarus"). Despite
this, Evelyn nevertheless valued her friendship with The Doctor when it
truly counted, refusing to believe the claims that The Doctor was the monstrous ‘Sandman’ who
terrorised the Galyari ‘Clutch’ even when The Doctor himself
confirmed that the tales were true ("The
Sandman"), encouraging
her friend to take action when he felt depressed ("Pier
Pressure"),
and vocally defending The Doctor to the ruthless egotistical time-traveller
Doctor Robert Knox when he claimed to be on a humanitarian mission in the
past. ("Medicinal
Purposes"). Although close to The Doctor, Evelyn
never lost sight of the fact that he was an alien, noting once that his
ability to relate to others was still defined by an alien perspective no
matter how much others might want to see him as being more different from
his fellow Time Lords ("Instruments of Darkness").
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| Maggie Stables with Nicholas
Courtney |
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Her
close but sometimes difficult relationship with The Doctor extended to
her interaction with her fellow companions. While she initially bonded
with Melanie
Bush - her ‘successor’ as The Doctor’s companion
- in their first meeting, the two still had the occasional argument due
to their feeling that the other was closer to The Doctor, to the point
that Mel assumed at first that Evelyn had been The Doctor’s wife
("Instruments of Darkness"). Her interaction with Victorian thief
Thomas Brewster - who had briefly travelled with the Fifth
Doctor ("The
Boy That Time Forgot") - was more strained due to her natural distrust
of his motives and actions; when they met he had been providing a sentient
planet with hosts for another alien race by helping it abduct passengers
from the London Underground, culminating in him forcing his way into the
TARDIS to try and make The Doctor take him home at gunpoint ("The
Crimes of Thomas Brewster"), and he later showed a remarkable willingness
to betray The Doctor to the powerful Axos for his own benefit ("The
Feast of Axos"), although Brewster’s later attempts to help
workers in his time helped improve his standing in Evelyn’s eyes
("Industrial
Evolution"). However, Evelyn had an easier time
relating to past companions The
Brigadier ("The Spectre of Lanyon Moor") and Romana ("The Apocalypse Element"), each of them
respecting her current friendship with The Doctor while she appreciated
the chance to learn more about her friend while meeting them.
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Instruments of Darkness
(Gary
Russell) |
|
Evelyn
left The Doctor after only around a year of travelling with him, deciding
she’d seen enough, although they parted on relatively good terms
despite her disagreement with some of his actions, The Doctor remembering
Evelyn with great affection and describing her as a steadying influence
on his initially blunt sixth personality due to her willingness to challenge
him. However, since The Doctor needed someone to keep an eye on Earth history
for a while due to some unfinished business - he felt that he couldn’t
afford to focus on Earth when so many other worlds needed his help -, he
dropped her off in 1988 rather than 2000, Evelyn keeping an eye on certain
problems for The Doctor until he met her again in the last few days of
1993, now accompanied by Melanie Bush, Mel convincing The Doctor to take
Evelyn home after they had defeated a duo of powerful psychic aliens called
the Cylox who were using the Third Doctor’s amnesic ex-companion
Jeremy Fitzoliver - now called John Doe - as one of their agents, Evelyn
requesting that they go back to 2000 via ‘the scenic route’ ("Instruments
of Darkness"). Although the precise details are unknown, it would
appear that the TARDIS returned to the planet Vilag during this trip, Evelyn
deciding to stay on Vilag and make a new life with Principal Triumviur
Rossitier, The Doctor simply leaving Evelyn behind after she told him of
her intentions, while a later, unrecorded adventure resulted in Mel losing
her memory of her meeting with Evelyn. During a brief return visit ("Thicker
Than Water"), The Doctor was able to treat Evelyn’s health problems
after learning she had been the subject of illegal DNA-splicing experiments,
subsequently attending Evelyn and Rossitier’s second wedding, standing
in as Evelyn’s ‘father’. Most significantly, The Doctor’s
seventh incarnation paid Evelyn a brief visit while she was in hospital
to tell her that he now travelled with Cassie’s son, medical student
Thomas Hector ‘Hex’ Schofield ("The
Harvest"), assuring
Evelyn that Cassie’s legacy would continue.
Evelyn
was reunited with the Seventh
Doctor for a final time, ten years after
Rossiter's death, when she was accidentally transported from Világ
to the planet Pelicham, billions of years in the past, by a temporal stabiliser
that she had discovered in a timeship that had recently been uncovered
in an archaeological dig on Világ. Evelyn lived on Pelicham for
two years before finally suffering a fatal heart attack, being contacted
by Hex - now aware of his heritage - and the Seventh Doctor shortly before
her demise. With no other way to defeat his new, powerful foe the Word Lord - a being from a universe composed entirely of language and communication
rather than matter and energy -, The Doctor was forced to use Evelyn as
part of a complex plan which involved trapping the Word Lord in the Handovale,
a pocket universe composed entirely of words, sustained only by Evelyn's ‘narration’.
As a result, when Evelyn died, the Word Lord died with her ("A
Death in the Family"). Despite this loss, Evelyn died content with her life,
assuring The Doctor that he had given her new experiences that she had
never dreamed possible at a time when she believed her life was over, and
she would always love him for that, appreciative of the wonders she’d
seen in her time with him and the chances she’d had to help so many
people. |
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