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Liz
Shaw
(1970) |
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Caroline
John |
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Caroline
John trained at the Central School of Speech and
Drama before working at repertory theatre. She received
much praise for her work with the National Theatre
Group in a number of productions. In the late Sixties
she understudied for the role of Minnie in D.H.
Lawrence's Daughter in Law which went on
tour to Yugoslavia, Romania and Italy. She also
appeared in a number of films an on television including
an episode of ITV's The Power Game. After Doctor
Who she continued to work in theatre and only
returned to television in the Eighties in various
programmes including BBC's The Hound of the Baskervilles with Tom
Baker in 1982 and The Harry Enfield Show. She
also made a brief return to the role of Liz in the
20th anniversary special "The
Five Doctors" in
1983 and also in the Children in Need charity special "Dimensions
in Time". She also co-stared in the BBV video
production Breech of the Peace in 1994 and
also, reprising the role of Liz, in the P.R.O.B.E.
series along with some of the actors who played
The Doctor.
Unfortunately Caroline John died in June 2012 at the
age of 71.
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|
 We
first see Liz Shaw, an intelligent Cambridge scientist, being
driven to a meeting at the Headquarters of the United Nations
Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT). She has been invited by Brigadier
Lethbridge-Stewart to be offered the post of scientific
adviser. Believing that the organisation is some kind of spy
group she is hardly flattered 'I am not interested in security
work. Producing invisible ink. That sort of thing' she declares.
It took a considerable while for the Brigadier to make her understand
that this was not what UNIT was about.
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| Spearhead From Space |
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Her
dislike of anything to do with secrecy and military-related
work was eventually overcome when she realised that the
Brigadier was neither joking nor insane and he really did
want her help regarding some meteorite showers that UNIT
were investigating. As the Brigadier reminds her that with
'An expert in meteorites, degrees in medicine, physics and
a dozen other subjects' she is the ideal person to be UNIT's
scientific adviser. However, she was finally hooked when
her curiosity became aroused when the Brigadier receives
a phone call about a police telephone box that has been
found in the middle of a wood and a strange man who has
been found collapsed outside.
This
stranger turns out to be the newly regenerated Doctor and
after he has recovered from his regeneration, an attempted
kidnap and then being shot he makes his way to UNIT HQ to
be reunited with the TARDIS.
As soon as they meet they strike up a partnership of investigation
and Liz, realising that The Doctor is more suited for the
task of scientific adviser, soon becomes relegated to being
his assistant.
Liz
felt in awe of The Doctor and his casual remarks and staggering knowledge
of science showed her that he had a far greater understanding of
the Universe than she could ever dream of having. She was a decent
and intelligent individual who found herself accepting new, and sometimes
out of this world, scientific facts. She was not however, entirely
certain that she believed all of The Doctor's wild tales of roaming
through time and space and the alien beings and cultures he claimed
to have met, showing scepticism about The Doctor’s claim that
they had travelled into the future - albeit only by a few seconds
- after a temporary malfunction in the TARDIS ("The
Ambassadors of Death").
Like
her predecessor Zoe,
Liz was an exceptionally bright young lady who added her own contribution
to the events in the stories. She had an air of warmth and was never
aloof despite her academic background. Even so she was a very sophisticated
and independent young woman, which suited the more adult-orientated
stories, as opposed to the previous young naive female companions
that had been mostly used in the past.
It
has been said that Liz was never really a 'companion' of
The Doctor and this is true insofar as she never actually
travelled in the TARDIS, although The Doctor did take her
and her ‘successor’ Jo Grant on
a trip after his time-travelling abilities were restored
as a ‘present’. Being a very independent person
she was never totally reliant on him. Also because they
shared a similar intellectual level she was not the sort
of companion who had to ask 'what do we do now?' and she
was also less likely to end up screaming at the slightest
horror. She was however shocked, like The Doctor, at some
of the Brigadier's actions, even if she showed more understanding
of such actions as the Brigadier’s decision to destroy
the Silurians rather
than try and negotiate.
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| Doctor Who and the Silurians |
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Even though she was happy for The Doctor to take the post that was originally offered to her she soon realised that even though her own scientific experiences was vast it was generally not required. With The Doctor clearly on Earth to stay, Liz soon came to recognise that UNIT and The Brigadier did not really need her; more than once Liz recognised that she was out of her depth in her work with The Doctor, such as when she and The Doctor, along with a group of UNIT officers, accidentally changed history when The Doctor developed a time bridge while trying to solve the mystery of a crashed alien ship. Following the discovery of conspiracy at the heart of UNIT, resulting in Liz being nearly killed by an Auton-augmented agent ("The Scales of Injustice") and subsequently witnessing the Waro massacre ("The Devil Goblins From Neptune"), she resigned from UNIT, no longer able to cope with the death that she had witnessed, returning to a research post at Cambridge in the hope that she could continue to make a difference with her work based on what she had learnt from The Doctor.
Despite her departure, it was evident that The Doctor held her in high esteem, developing a certain tentative friendship even with her more militant alternate self when he accidentally travelled sideways in time in "Inferno" and arrived on an alternate Earth, reflecting when she resigned from UNIT that he regretted how they had failed to find the time to bond outside of work ("The Scales of Injustice"). After his ability to use the TARDIS was restored, The Doctor offered to take Liz on a trip to any location in history she wanted, but unfortunately the TARDIS materialised at the St Petersburg docks in 1916 rather than the Siberian explosion of 1908. During this trip, Jo
and Liz had particular difficulty getting along due to their
differing opinions of Rasputin, with Liz initially regarding
Rasputin as the monster history would portray him as while
Jo - after meeting with Rasputin himself - quickly recognised
that it was only Rasputin’s enemies who had written
him as such. Despite this disagreement, the two eventually
became friends, working together to track down the stolen
TARDIS and escape being framed for Rasputin’s murder,
although both regretted that they were unable to save him
from his destined fate. Even after this final goodbye, The
Doctor kept Liz’s old UNIT pass until at least his
seventh incarnation, as seen when the Seventh
Doctor gave
the pass to his current companion Ace in an attempt to bluff
their way onto a UNIT base in "Battlefield".
Liz
did make a reappearance in the 20th anniversary show "The
Five Doctors" in 1983, when Rassilon used her image to ward
off The Doctor in the Dark Tower, and again in the BBC Children
in Need charity special "Dimensions in Time" in
1993. The Seventh Doctor, accompanied by Ace and Benny, encountered
an alternate version of Liz during the events of "Blood
Heat", where the TARDIS was transferred to a universe
where the Third Doctor was killed during his confrontation with
the Silurians and humanity had thus been decimated by the Silurian
virus. Working with the alternate Liz to create a telepathic dampening
field to limit the effects of race-memory malaise - a dormant
human memory of Silurian oppression which caused all humans to
instinctively panic in the presence of Silurians - The Doctor
learned the history of this timeline, Liz’s compassion for
a dead Silurian child helping the embittered Brigadier to realise
what he had become after The Doctor risked everything to prevent
a nuclear holocaust.
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| Inferno |
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The
Seventh Doctor had another, final encounter with Liz during
the events of "Eternity
Weeps", when his old companion Bernice
Summerfield accidentally activated a transmat device that
sent herself and Captain Imrud Tammuz, an Iranian soldier
who assumed she was an American spy, to the moon, where they
discovered Liz serving as the leader of a UNIT team investigating
a dimensional anomaly on the moon that concealed an alien
facility. Unfortunately, the now-insane Tammuz accidentally
transmatted a chemical compound known as Agent Yellow back
to Earth along with Liz. As The Doctor discovered during his
subsequent research, Agent Yellow was designed to terraform
worlds to fit the environment of the alien species who had
built the facility... and, on a more personal note, the chemical
transformations being triggered turned the water in Liz’s
body into sulphuric acid before spreading out to infect the
environment. Although The Doctor, Benny and Chris were able
to prevent Agent Yellow from destroying Earth, The Doctor
was still forced to sacrifice a tenth of Earth’s population
by destroying the areas most contaminated by Agent Yellow,
Chris left feeling particularly guilty when he realized that
Liz had managed to pass the formula for the antidote on to
him before her death too late for it to be of any use.
The
deaths of the humans they were forced to sacrifice to
save humanity - and Liz’s death in particular
- left The Doctor and Chris deeply affected for some
time, leaving both of them doubting their roles in the
universe before they managed to avert a war in sixteenth
century Japan and forgive themselves for their past
failures. |
