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The Eight Doctors
(Terrance
Dicks) |
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 Name: Samantha 'Sam' Jones.
Format:
Book and Audio.
Time of Origin: November 1997, Coal Hill
School.
Appearances:
"The
Eight Doctors -
Interference
Book One"
Doctor: Eighth
Doctor.
Fellow
Companions: Jo
Grant, Sarah
Jane Smith, Fitz Kreiner and Compassion.
History: Sam first joined The Doctor when she
was reporting some drug dealers to the police in her area. While
running away from the dealers in question, she ran into Foreman's
Yard, where the First
Doctor had stayed for a while, and met up with the amnesiac Eighth
Doctor, who fought off the dealers before leaving to reclaim
his memories. However, once he'd finished, he materialised there
almost instantly after he'd left, saved Sam once again, and then
left, but Sam dived into the TARDIS shortly
before it dematerialised, thus becoming The Doctor's new companion.
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Alien Bodies
(Lawrence
Miles) |
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Sam was
rather different from some other companions of The Doctor, not really
showing much
shock at the TARDIS interior like some earlier companions,
being more used to science-fiction shows than some. She was also
in excellent shape and, like Mel,
a vegetarian, but she didn't constantly try to force The
Doctor into it, possibly since he wasn't as overweight as the Sixth
Doctor had been. A clean-living individual, she didn’t drink
or take drugs, and was a supporter of Greenpeace - The Doctor once
leaving her at a Greenpeace rally for an hour but, for some reason,
only returning for her after three years, during which he travelled
with companions like Charley
Pollard - and gay rights; indeed, coming
from relatively liberal parents, she once commented that the only
thing that would have shocked her family was if she had ever taken
drugs, and it was even hinted at one point that she might be bisexual.
Her time with The Doctor was a rather interesting
point, since it featured the return of several old enemies,
such as the Vampires and the Zygons from the Fourth
Doctor's
era, along with battle against
the Daleks and even the return of the Third
Doctor's companion
Jo Grant when
history was almost changed in "Genocide".
One of the main enemies at this point however, was Faction
Paradox, a cult of time-travelling voodooists that worshiped
time paradoxes. In their first
appearance against The Doctor, in the book "Alien
Bodies", the Faction was attempting to buy the body of The Doctor's
future and final incarnation, killed in the Future War between
the Time Lords and the
Future Enemy, a faceless foe whose origins were revealed
in "The
Ancestor Cell". The Doctor defeated the Faction and managed to
bury himself, but in the process The Doctor discovered that
Sam wasn't the original Samantha Jones; there was a second,
dark-haired Sam in existence, but the original’s biodata had somehow
been rewritten to become the Sam that would travel with
The Doctor.
The most prominent incident during Sam’s
time with The Doctor was the ‘Missing Sam’ series, where Sam
fled The Doctor after she started passionately kissing him while originally
attempting CPR, unable to cope with both his apparent death and her own
feelings for him. Despite a brief reunion while dealing with ecological
protests on the Dreamstone
Moon - a living moon that was being cut up because
the rock that formed its brain allowed people to preserve their dreams,
- Sam ran again after she was forced to leave The Doctor in an exploding
ship. The Doctor’s attempts to find Sam were cut short when he tracked
her to the distant planet Ha’olam, where he was arrested and imprisoned
for espionage by the company INC, his prison virtually inescapable thanks
to the system planting an implant in his eye that created an artificial
intelligence based on The Doctor himself that could anticipate his every
move. After living on Ha’olam for three years, during which she worked
at charitable organisation Livingspace after a brief unsatisfactory stint
at INC which ended when she realised she would accomplish nothing there,
Sam discovered The Doctor's imprisonment while hacking into the computers
of INC in an attempt to expose their corrupt actions after they evicted
several people from their homes. Subsequently convincing her friends to
help her rescue The Doctor, Sam tracked down the TARDIS, leaving her former
lover Paul to operate the ship while she and her friends broke into the
prison, The Doctor subsequently directing Paul on how to pilot the ship
over the phone. With INC’s alien masters defeated - ironically with
the aid of DOCTOR, the artificial intelligence created by the aliens’ attempts
to keep The Doctor imprisoned, - Sam decided to return to travelling with
The Doctor, having come to terms with her old crush, proven to herself
that she could survive alone, and realising that she could do far more
good with The Doctor than she could there.
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Unnatural History
(Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman) |
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Even with her feelings for
The Doctor resolved, Sam’s time in the TARDIS continued to be difficult;
the most prominent example of this was during the events
of “The
Janus Conjunction”, where Sam actually died of radiation poisoning
at one point, but The Doctor managed to save her by putting
the TARDIS into a temporal orbit just before she died, subsequently
spending a month
analysing the radiation and developing a cure before returning
to normal time. Some time after this, the two of them were
joined on their travels
by Fitz Kriener, a young man from 1963 who made his way
by selling flowers at a garden centre and playing at a bar
at night. (''The
Taint'). He and
Sam occasionally had some difficulty getting on, Sam slightly
uncomfortable at the presence of another companion after
so long with just her and The
Doctor, but the two of them generally got along well enough
despite Fitz occasionally flirting with her.
During the events of "Unnatural
History",
The Doctor had landed in San Francisco in 2002, investigating
a scar in time and space that had been created as a result
of the Master’s
attempt to destroy Earth by opening the TARDIS’s Eye of Harmony shortly
after The Doctor had regenerated into his current incarnation.
When blonde Sam and the TARDIS fell into the scar, the dark-haired
Sam was restored
to existence, forcing The Doctor and Fitz to contact her
to try and solve the mystery. While trying to stabilise
the scar before time ran out, The
Doctor determined that a naturalist from the higher dimensions
was experimenting with his biodata, traces of which were
now spread throughout the city as
a result of the scar. Although The Doctor was able to recover
the TARDIS, the scar remained, leaving dark Sam with no
other option but to enter the
scar herself when The Doctor was in danger and she herself
had no idea how to help him, subsequently merging with The
Doctor’s
biodata and turning into blonde Sam in order to restore
a companion who knew how to
help The Doctor. In essence, blonde Sam’s entire existence was a
paradox; blonde Sam was created when dark Sam threw herself
in amongst The Doctor’s biodata in the scar, but she was only able
to do so because The Doctor brought her to the scar he’d created,
and he only brought her there because he’d already met blonde Sam
(The Doctor’s
creation of such a paradox foreshadowing his eventual infection
by the Paradox Virus as a result of his altered third regeneration).
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Interference Book One
(Lawrence
Miles) |
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It was shortly after this that Sam decided to leave
The Doctor, resolving to leave him the next time the TARDIS landed on 20th
century Earth. The Doctor tried to stay away from 20th century Earth for
a long time after that, until he was finally summoned to 1996 to help with
a UN conference regarding the possibility of negotiating with aliens called
the Remote who were offering Earth advanced technology. While The Doctor
followed up a lead on the Remote, Sam encountered The Doctor’s old
companion Sarah
Jane Smith while monitoring Guest, the leader of the Remote, but was
subsequently captured by the Remote using this weapon called the Cold that
apparently totally destroyed the target but really simply moved them out
of time and space until they were recalled. While captured by the Remote
- who relied on picking up broadcast signals to understand and interpret
the world around them, much like humans base their personalities on ‘signals’ from
their parents, - Sam was used to provide the Remote with examples of the
principles of sacrifice and duty by playing her in BBC-drama style scenarios
involving her and The Doctor fighting an alien invasion and her being forced
to save the day by such actions as sacrificing herself, sacrificing The
Doctor, destroying the planet, or even killing the baby who would grow
up to betray the planet. Although the Remote managed to track down a Time
Lord warship from the future war that had been hidden near Earth, nearly
releasing the true form of the Cold - a validium-based weapon that tapped
into a rift in time, - Sam was able to broadcast a message that relayed
the true nature of the Cold, and the Remote thus abandoned their mission.
Still resolved to remain behind despite the fact that her younger self
wouldn’t even leave with The Doctor until next year, Sam thus stayed
with Sarah for a while, until the other her had left with The Doctor, and
then rejoined her parents, although it may have been some while before
they got used to her having apparently aged almost five years in a couple
of days. Before his departure, however, The Doctor visited the present
version of Sam while she was suffering from a drug high - having taken
drugs to see how far her parents could be pushed - and encouraged her to
start a cultural revolution rather than a political one, as the present
political system was simply based on the old philosophy of the ‘top
ape’ making all the rules.
Sam’s final fate is uncertain. In "Sometime
Never...", the Council
of Eight - mysterious crystal beings who
fought The Doctor with the aid of the ruthless time traveller known as
Sabbath - mentioned that they had killed many of The Doctor’s past
companions to prevent their continued effect on history, with one of the
dead companions being described as “a political activist shot while
making a speech”. While this description would appear to fit Sam,
the Council’s final defeat restored all the companions they had previously
killed, suggesting that Sam’s death may have been restored. However,
in "The
Gallifrey Chronicles", The Doctor, Fitz Kreiner and new companion Trix MacMillan discovered Sam’s grave during a visit to 2005, stating that she had
died in 2002, but the fact that the grave in question stated that Sam’s
middle name was Lynne - the name of her dark-haired other self, - combined
with the fact that The Doctor was subsequently captured by the Time Lord
Marnal in response to his discovery of Gallifrey’s destruction makes
it uncertain whether this was the real Sam’s grave. However, The
Doctor and Trix nevertheless assured Fitz that, even if the grave was Sam’s,
in her time with The Doctor she would have experienced more wonders in
a week than most people ever experience in a lifetime, and she would still
reappear in the future even if her grave confined her to between 1980 and
2002. |
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