Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants by Andy Frankham-Allen Read Free Book Online Page A

try to add a little something. We are told that Cassandra chose Katarina as her handmaiden because she had predicated Katarina’s death. We also learn that, although she likes Steven, Katarina finds him arrogant.
    Something interesting happens in the 2003 short story, Katarina in the Underworld . We follow Katarina as she journeys to the Elysian fields of the afterlife. She does not have the coins to pay her way across the River Styx, and so an old woman summons the Doctor to help her. Before Hades she explains how she sacrificed her life to save millions. Persephone vouches for Katarina and she is allowed into the Elysian fields. Even as she enters she ponders that this may have been just be a dream, but even so she is convinced that the Doctor inspired her to achieve her destiny.
     
    Poor Dodo!
    On television she had a pretty rum deal – joining the Doctor without preamble or an introductory story, and then cast aside by the Doctor for no real good reason, and thus denied a final adventure. She fares little better in the Expanded Universe prose.
    Salvation , a novel published in 1999, attempts to give her a good introductory story, but only succeeds in messing up things even more. On television it is clearly stated that she ran into the TARDIS because she witnessed an accident on Wimbledon Common, but Salvation tells us otherwise. She is fleeing an increasingly insane alien metamorph called Joseph, who is one of six extra-dimensional beings who came into light as a result of the beliefs of those they encountered. This book also goes to great lengths to explain why Dodo’s accent changes so drastically between scenes at the opening of The Celestial Toymaker .
    ‘Dodo’ starts out a horrible nickname in school, because of her inferior North London accent; she later takes the nickname on to spite her peers, and uses one accent as Dodo in everyday life, and the other as the ‘proper schoolgirl’ Dorothea. We also learn that her mother died in 1962, while her father was institutionalised shortly after, which led to Dodo living with her Aunt Margaret, a tyrannical woman if ever there was one. These background details are contradicted in The Man in the Velvet Mask , in which we are told that she grew up in one of the poorer parts of London, and her parents died when she was young. She then moved in with her aunt, who was a wealthy social climber. Dodo had trouble marrying her previously poor existence with this new life, and found herself reinventing herself depending on each situation, thus explaining that her accent was ‘situational’ at best.
    Just to make her life a little bit worse, the Doctor implies in Bunker Soldiers that her remark to Dmitri in Kiev, 1240, may have been the inspiration for the Black Death over a hundred years later. After Dmitri orders his food is thrown to the pigs, Dodo tells him, ‘You can’t just throw something away because you don’t like it,’ which leads the half-mad Dmitri to order the plague-ridden bodies hurled over the walls of Kiev at the Mongol horde. A tactic that would be later remembered and passed on.
    Still, the Expanded Universe authors are not finished with her. In the 1996 novel, The Man in the Velvet Mask , Dodo loses her virginity to Dalville, an actor in an alternative Paris in 1804, and is infected by a virus created by mad dwarf Minksi – a virus that infects all her future lovers and possible children. In that novel we also learn that she spent most of her French lessons learning how to kiss behind the gym.
    The worst, however, is saved for when she leaves the Doctor. The novel Who Killed Kennedy? details Dodo’s life after the Doctor palms her off to recover in the country. It is revealed that she spends several months in the country, then returns to London to get a job. It does not work out too well for her as she starts experiencing blackouts and memory loss, a result of the conditioning from WOTAN. She goes to a series of psychiatric hospitals, and even