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Dark Eyes
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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 Name: Molly O’Sullivan
Format: Audio
Time of Origin: Met The Doctor on Earth in 1918
Appearances: "Dark Eyes"
Doctor: Eighth Doctor
Fellow
Companion: Liv Chenka
History: While The Doctor has had experience with companions such as Adam Mitchell who quickly left because they couldn’t cut it, Molly is basically the opposite of Adam, as a companion with great potential who never had the chance to really explore it. While she and The Doctor had some tension in their initial relationship, they soon formed a strong bond, but circumstances outside their control forced them to part company, and The Doctor has never dared to go back for Molly after witnessing the death of an alternate version of her.
The Doctor was initially ‘directed’ to Molly by Straxus, a Time Lord agent who had provided some assistance to him in past dealings with The Master ("The Light at the End") and Morbius ("Sisters of the Flame/The Vengeance of Morbius"), with The Doctor feeling in a particularly bitter mood after the deaths of his companions Lucie Miller and Tamsin Drewe and his great-grandson Alex Campbell in a Dalek invasion orchestrated by the Meddling Monk ("Lucie Miller/To the Death"). Offering to give The Doctor hope, Straxus directed the TARDIS to the trenches in the First World War, where The Doctor met Molly, a volunteer nurse who the Time Lords had predicted would be targeted by unknown parties as part of some terrible scheme.
When The Doctor arrived on Earth, Molly was trying to treat the victims of an apparent gas attack in the trenches, The Doctor being caught in the same attack when the TARDIS landed in the middle of No Man’s Land. Working as a volunteer nurse after accompanying her friend and mistress Kitty Donaldson to the front lines where she had previously been Kitty’s chambermaid, Molly had become increasingly bitter after Kitty contracted an infection from one of the soldiers she was treating. The Doctor attempted to protect Molly’s train from a Dalek attack, but after Kitty was killed by the renegade Time Lord Kotris, the situation escalated to such a level that he was forced to take Molly to the TARDIS to escape.
While Molly was not an only child, she outlived all seven of her siblings; two brothers and three sisters died before their fifth birthdays, and her last two brothers died during the War. She developed a short temper due to constant teasing over her dark eyes, although by the time she was an adult she had learned a degree of self-control. Molly denied that Kitty had been more than her employer to avoid the pain of her loss, and was often frustrated with The Doctor for dragging her away from the front, but nevertheless eventually came to consider him a friend. Although The Doctor’s initial priority was to find why others were interested in Molly, he did his best to make the experience pleasant for her, such as taking her to the planet Halalka where the water had anti-gravity waves ("Fugitives"). When The Doctor and Molly were trapped in an illusion where the Daleks had become peaceful, Molly expressed a willingness to believe that the Daleks could change even after they had pursued her for the duration of her time in the TARDIS, The Doctor only rejecting that idea because he was fully aware that it was impossible for Daleks to change ("Tangled Web").
During his travels with Molly, The Doctor eventually learned that Molly had been briefly abducted by the mysterious Kotris when she was a child, with that abduction leaving her contaminated with retro-genitor particles. A rare form of radiation found on only a few planets in the universe, retro-genitor particles were most notable for the ability to inhibit a Time Lord’s ability to regenerate, while Molly’s contamination with the particles was the reason for her unusually dark eyes. Straxus was able to direct The Doctor and Molly to Srangor, a planet contaminated by the same particles that had been used on Molly, which led to a confrontation with the Dalek Time Controller. With Kotris’s aid, the Time Controller had constructed a space-time projector that allowed it to map the time vortex and theoretically contaminate the entire Time Lord race with the retro-genitor particles. Straxus attempted to alter the particles in Molly so that they would destroy the Daleks rather than the Time Lords, but since Molly would die either way, a Srangor native sacrificed himself to save Molly. When Kotris appeared on Srangor and revealed himself to be Straxus’s next incarnation, The Doctor and Molly were able to escape while Straxus was exterminated by the Dalek Time Controller, erasing Kotris’s alliance with the Daleks even as the Time Controller still remembered the details of the scheme ("X and the Daleks").
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Dark Eyes 2
(Nicholas Briggs, Alan Barnes and Matt Fitton) |
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When the TARDIS materialised back in No Man’s Land, The Doctor observed that Molly’s eyes had shifted to a more normal appearance, confirming that the retro-genitor particles were no longer part of her. Although she had come to appreciate The Doctor, Molly departed, reasoning that the erasure of Kotris’s scheme meant that Kitty would still be alive, choosing to return to her previous duty to look after her friend. Molly subsequently returned to London, setting up a basic clinic at 107 Baker Street - a house owned by The Doctor - to look after soldiers suffering from shellshock. She was reunited with The Doctor when a Viyran was discovered in London infecting patients with a temporally active virus ("The White Room"), The Doctor eventually determining that the Viyran had travelled back in time from the future after it was infected with a variation of this virus. Once The Doctor convinced the Viyran that it had to destroy itself to stop this outbreak, Molly accepted The Doctor’s offer to travel with him again.
However, Molly’s first trip with The Doctor was destined not to be a peaceful one when they arrived on the Orpheus, a ship on an expedition to the very edge of known space ("Time’s Horizon"), where The Doctor was surprised to find Liv Chenka, a med-tech he had met in his previous incarnation ("Robophobia") who expressed familiarity with his current self. However, these questions had to be postponed when the ship was attacked by the Eminence, a powerful non-corporeal entity that had previously waged a war against the human empire and fought the Fourth and Sixth Doctors ("Destroy the Infinite" and "The Seeds of War"). Joined by Liv after the rest of the crew were killed by the Eminence, The Doctor took the TARDIS to London in the 1970s to investigate the origin of the group that had sponsored Liv’s expedition, which led to a confrontation with The Doctor’s old foe The Master, who had set himself up as an optometrist to find a means of harnessing retro-genitor particles like Molly’s as part of a wider scheme to take control of the Eminence ("Eyes of The Master"). The Master was driven off Earth when The Doctor used his own link to the Eminence to instruct it how to control The Master’s TARDIS, forcing The Master off Earth.
With The Master seemingly defeated, The Doctor departed for Mixyce VII, having established that he would meet Liv’s past self there to help save a Dalek fleet so that they could destroy an Eminence fleet that The Master would otherwise use as part of his plan ("The Traitor"). The Doctor left Molly and Liv in London in the hope that they would be safe, but while he was away The Master returned to abduct Molly after identifying her as the best source of retro-genitor particles, hypnotising her to essentially take The Doctor’s place in her memories to create a sense of trust between them. Acting as The Master’s nurse, Molly unwittingly assisted his plans to pass on her retro-genitor particles to other humans ("The Death of Hope"). When The Doctor was alerted to The Master’s plan and tracked Molly down, he learned that The Master’s goal was to use the retro-genitor particles to essentially create a link between himself, those contaminated with the particles, and the Eminence. The Master believed that by using the particles in other humans, once the Eminence took one of these humans as an Infinite Warrior, The Master would be able to essentially take control of the Eminence itself.
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Dark Eyes 3
(Matt Fitton) |
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Determined to keep Molly as his prisoner, The Master was able to capture Liv and use her to monitor Molly’s condition, even as he attempted to infiltrate the work of Doctor Markus Schriver, the scientist who would eventually be responsible for creating the Eminence in the first place ("Masterplan"). This part of The Master’s scheme failed, but he was able to escape and return to Earth, having contaminated so many humans with Molly’s retro-genitor particles that he was able to simultaneously help the Eminence take control of humanity and give himself a degree of control over the Eminence’s slaves at the same time ("Rule of the Eminence"). However, he still required Molly to properly exert his influence through the particles, which also led to Liv being taken prisoner so that she could ensure Molly stayed healthy despite The Master’s conditioning. Part of this plan included The Master operating through the disguise of grand administrator Walter Vincent, modelled after Molly’s memories of her father to encourage her to trust him. The Doctor was eventually able to rally a human resistance, drive The Master off the planet and defeat the Eminence, but it was decided by the Time Lords that Molly should be returned to her proper place in time, as it was felt that her retro-genitor particles made her too dangerous to be allowed to remain with The Doctor ("Rule of the Eminence").
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Dark Eyes 4
(Matt Fitton and John Dorney) |
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Although Molly apparently remained in her own time, when The Doctor and Liv tried to visit her to say a proper goodbye they became caught up in a new scheme by The Master to conquer Earth. On this occasion, The Master had formed an alliance with the Dalek Time Controller, now considered a renegade and deviant by its own people, The Master helping the Time Controller to augment humans into a new wave of Daleks. This led to The Doctor and Liv visiting Earth in 1961 in a reality where the Daleks had occupied the planet for the last few decades. During their time there, The Doctor discovered Molly in Moscow, now going by the name Mary Carter - her legal first name and her married name - to avoid being caught by The Master. Molly’s glimpses of the future in her time with The Doctor assured her that this future was wrong, but even she was unaware that The Master intended to use her retro-genitor particles to properly stabilise the timeline he was trying to create. Molly and Liv were captured by the Dalek Time Controller and taken off Earth, but when The Doctor realised that The Master had stolen a Sontaran cloning facility to create more raw material for new Daleks, he was able to reconfigure the cloning vats to create a new wave of Sontarans, leaving The Master trapped between the Daleks and Sontarans while The Doctor stole The Master’s TARDIS. Tracking the Time Controller, Liv and Molly to a research facility on the Eye of Orion ("The Five Doctors"), The Doctor realised that this marked the final moment before the Eminence was created, as Markus Schriver’s experiments brought the Dalek Time Controller and his own mind together as a single consciousness ("Eye of Darkness"). The retro-genitor particles gave Molly a link to the Dalek Time Controller from their previous association in the original timeline, which allowed Molly to sacrifice herself to destroy the Dalek Time Controller, banishing the newborn Eminence to the end of the universe where she, Liv and the Eighth Doctor had originally confronted it.
With the death of this alternate version of Molly, Earth’s history was restored and The Master and the Time Controller’s domination of the planet was erased. The Doctor and Liv took Molly’s body back to Earth for burial, and apparently decided not to look for Molly in the new timeline, choosing to accept the Time Lords’ assurance that she was safe. Despite the relative brevity and difficulty of their time together, The Doctor remembered Molly for the rest of his eighth life, toasting her memory along with the memory of his other dead companions before he regenerated ("The Night of The Doctor").
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