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Zoe
(1968 - 1969) |
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| Wendy
Padbury |
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| Born in 1947 Wendy Padbury
won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School at
the age of 11. Her first television appearance was
on the BBC arts programme Monitor. More television
work followed including, at the age of 17, a regular
role in Crossroads. After Doctor Who she
worked in theatre and television including Southern
Television's children series Freewheelers (1971
- 1973). She also appeared in the 1974 film Blood
on Satan's Claw and also as one of The Doctor's
companions in the stage production of Doctor
Who and the Daleks in Seven Keys to Doomsday. In
the Eighties she appeared alongside Jon
Pertwee in the stage production of Super
Ted and the Comet of the Sparks. In 1983 she
returned to Doctor Who playing the part of
a holographic image of Zoe in "The
Five Doctors".
Since 1992 she has been working as an actors agent. |
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 Zoe
was a highly intelligent, dark haired, petite, no-nonsense companion.
A computer taught genius with a degree in pure mathematics she
was an astrophysicist from the 21st Century and had been trained
to function logically and without feeling in everything she
does.
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| The Wheel in Space |
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Working
as a librarian on the Space Wheel she is considered by her
colleagues as an asset, especially in the calculating the
probabilities of meteorite strikes, even though the information
she supplies does not contain any emotion or feelings. A
fact that she is made aware of on a number of occasions.
'Just like a robot, facts calculations. A proper little
brain child. All brain and no heart'. However, when
the Space Wheel is attacked by the Cybermen her mathematical
brain is put to the test and then her logical world is completely
shattered by the arrival of The Doctor and Jamie.
On meeting with The Doctor she is informed by him that 'Logic,
my dear Zoe, enables one to be wrong with authority'
("The
Wheel in Space").
As
this story progresses she becomes more aware of the feelings
towards her, recognising that her colleagues perceived her
as essentially a machine, possessing numerous facts and
figures in her mind that she could reel out on demand. With
this revelation inspiring her to feel things as well, after
helping in the defeat of the Cybermen, she decided to rebel
against her emotionless education and background and stowed
aboard the TARDIS,
in the hope of using the illogical Doctor and the much less
intelligent Jamie to broaden her horizons.
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| The Dominators |
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Despite trying
not to rely on logic alone she was able
to show The Doctor that logic can sometimes be of benefit
and during her time with The Doctor her great mathematical
abilities and photographic memory was often proved to
be invaluable in helping him defeat the many enemies that
they came across. This is well demonstrated when she mentally calculates, in a fraction of the time a computer would, the correct position to wipe out a entire Cybermen invasion fleet poised to attack Earth with a relatively limited number of missiles ("The
Invasion"), as well as using the trajectory of beacon segments to identify the planetary base of a group of space pirates ("The Space Pirates"). The Doctor did not hesitate to take advantage of Zoe’s intellect when the situation required it, though at times she proved that she was more brainy then even he was ("The
Kroton"), Zoe concluding on one occasion that she had a superior analytical mind while The Doctor’s mind was better suited for making intuitive leaps ("The
Colony of Lies") even if she respected him as a person, recognising that he was old, clever and kind ("The Five-Dimensional Man").
She
was never afraid to speak her mind and with her strange mixture of
innocence, intelligence, sharp tongue and wit, she liked to have
fun but was sometimes to serious for her own good. Demonstrating
a sharp analytical mind - to the extent that she managed to pilot
a shuttle merely after consulting the manual without any prior practical
experience ("The Colony of Lies"), she often outsmarted
The Doctor, but despite her evidently genius-level intellect, her
practical inexperience frequently got her into trouble. She would
usually have the last word, and, as a Mexican resistance leader informs
her 'For such a little woman, your mouth is too big'. ("The
War Games"). On occasion she also demonstrated a surprising
degree of martial arts ability, once successfully defeating the Karkus
- a character from cartoons in her era - in a fight with her martial
arts skills ("The
Mind Robber").
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| The Space Pirates |
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Jamie
and Zoe made another successful team despite her air of superiority
and greater intelligence. The two of them were eventually forced
to part company with The Doctor and each other when The Doctor was
put on trial by his own people, the Time Lords. As part of his punishment
Zoe is returned to the Space Wheel with all her memory and experiences
with The Doctor and Jamie, except for their original encounter, totally
erased ("The War Games"). It is this fact that alerted
the Second
Doctor when he was in the Dark Tower, in the Death Zone,
that it was not the real Zoe that he had encountered, but was instead
a phantom, intended to ward him off ("The
Five Doctors").
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| The War Games |
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Despite
Zoe’s loss of memory, The Doctor has been reunited with her
on two separate occasions in his third and sixth incarnations (Although
the evidence suggests that Zoe encountered the Sixth
Doctor before she met the Third
Doctor). Having
been captured by the Cybermen - after deducing that she had been
travelling with The Doctor when a medical
exam revealed that she had aged two years in a matter of hours -
during a later attack on the Wheel, the Cybermen attempted to convert
Zoe into a Cyber-Planner, but the process resulted in her memories
of her time with The Doctor being restored. Having gained access
to the ship’s control systems, she sent a feedback wave into
the propulsion systems and opened a rift in space-time to send the
Cyber-ship outside of Time into the Land of Fiction, concluding that
the Land was somewhere where the Cybermen could do no harm, only
to realise when she arrived there that the Cybermen could use the
Land’s master computer to destroy human imagination by reversing
the polarity to suppress imagination rather than enhance it, making
all sentient races easy prey for the Cyber-conversion process. Although
now experiencing reality on a different level as she operated as
the Mistress of the Land of Fiction - to the extent that she referred
to The Doctor’s adventures as ‘a tale for children
which adults enjoy’ -, Zoe nevertheless dedicated herself to the
task of leading her fictional army against the Cybermen, but eventually
had to accept that she needed help when most of her forces were destroyed
or converted. Unable
to create a fictional version of The Doctor herself, she opened
a small hole in space-time and sent a stream of data through
to the TARDIS navigational circuits, bringing the Sixth Doctor
into the outskirts of the Land, Zoe providing him with a fictional
duplicate of Jamie - albeit older than the Jamie she had known
as he had to create his own heroic backstory in the absence
of The Doctor - in order to keep The Doctor safe until he could
reach her. Using the Cybermens’ ‘datamats’ -
data-based Cybermats that functioned in a similar manner to
computer viruses -, The Doctor was able to rewrite the datamats’ programming
so that they could rewrite notional reality, releasing the reprogrammed
datamats into the Cybermen computer systems and disrupting the
Cybermens’ grasp of reality, causing the Cybership to
wink out of existence and restoring the Land to normal, although
Zoe’s memories of The Doctor were once again lost as the
Time Lord conditioning reasserted itself when The Doctor took
Zoe back to the Wheel ("Legend
of the Cybermen").
However,
the evidence suggests that Zoe did not completely forget about
her time with The Doctor on this occasion, later beginning to
experience dreams and brief flashes of her time with The Doctor
as her eidetic memory retained some awareness of her travels with
him even as her conscious mind refused to allow her to access
it. During this period of her life, the Third Doctor found himself
sent to space station XZ49 - Zoe’s current post - by the
Time Lords during his exile, his discovery of Zoe’s current
mental state causing him to conclude that the Time Lords - possibly
in gratitude for his recent actions against The Master ("Terror
of the Autons" and "Colony
in Space") but too embarrassed to clear his name publicly
- had sent him to help Zoe and to recover the TARDIS dematerialisation
codes from her mind.
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| The Five Doctors |
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Unfortunately,
Zoe’s jealous supervisor brought Zoe directly to the TARDIS
to confront The Doctor about his attempt to ‘poach’ a
member of her research team, the sight of the ship causing Zoe’s
memories to return in a rush before the mental blocks reinforced
themselves, leaving Zoe condemned to never achieve her full
potential and The Doctor to depart, fuming at the Time Lords
for using him to protect themselves by damaging his friend’s
mind ("Short
Trips: Companions - The Tip of the Mind").
Despite her breakdown, Zoe continued to have dreams of travels with The Doctor, submitting to psychiatric counselling to try and understand them ("Fear of the Daleks"), resulting in her falling victim to various unscrupulous scientists who had her arrested on trumped-up charges to try and force her to give them the secret of time-travel after Zoe met a young woman called Ali who had just encountered her younger self during her travels with The Doctor ("Echoes of Grey"). Although a company psychiatrist called Jen was able to devise a machine to help Zoe regain some memories during their sessions, she was never able to recall them in depth later ("The Memory Cheats" and "The Uncertainty Principle"), until she heard reports of a crisis on a space station that she realised was an event that she had visited while travelling with The Doctor. Travelling to the space station to destroy a dangerous alien virus that she had previously failed to stop, the virus being capable of moving from computer systems to human tissue, Zoe not only saved the life of her younger self by giving her an air mask before she was sucked into space, but was able to use the virus to destroy the computers of the company that was holding her prisoner. With the virus destroyed and the company defeated, Zoe and Jen continued to try and unlock Zoe's lost memories, creating the hope that Zoe would be who she once was someday ("Second Chances").
Zoe
was the first companion who could not only take on villains
and monsters, without screaming while rooted to the spot waiting
to be rescued, but could beat them as well. |
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