Over the years with
“Doctor Who”, there have been quite a few guest characters that
make such an impression that you fervently wish they would go with
the Doctor at the end of the story and become fully-fledged
companions. In Classic Who, the one character who, for me, stood head
and shoulders above everyone else was Professor Rumford from “The
Stones of Blood”. She was a fantastically eccentric old lady who
took everything in her stride and was not just a perfect foil for Tom
Baker’s Doctor but also formed quite a touching relationship with
K9 – her very concerned “are you alright, dear” to K9 was
simply adorable.
Since the return of the
show in 2005, nobody really stood out until recently. A lot of this
has to do with the format – one x 45 minute episode doesn’t
really give the writer much of a chance to build a character in the
way 4 x 25 minute episodes could. The odd character DOES sneak
through – Wilf, for instance, or maybe Brian Williams but they’re
mostly in multiple episodes. For me though, the one character I SO
wanted to go with the Doctor – even though it would have been
completely the wrong time and thrown the following episode into total
confusion – was Kate Stewart.
(Beverley Cressman in "Downtime" - courtesy tardis.wikia.com)
The character of Kate
Stewart was known in Who fandom prior to her first televised
appearance in “The Power of Three” – she was originally created
by Marc Platt for the spin-off video “Downtime” where she was
played by Beverley Cressman. In “Downtime”, Kate was estranged
from her father and lived on a houseboat with her son, Gordon
Lethbridge-Stewart. Interestingly, in “Downtime”, the villain of
the piece was the Great Intelligence who tried to use Kate via a cult
at a university to lead them to the Brigadier – who, it was
thought, had something the Great Intelligence needed. This led to a
reconciliation between Kate and her father. Kate was mentioned in two
books – “Scales of Injustice” and “The Dying Days” and then
reappeared in a second spin-off video called “Daemos Rising”. In
this spin-off she joined forces with an ex UNIT agent to defeat one
of the Daemons – maybe this gave her the greater insight she needed
in order to really understand what her father did and the sacrifices
he had to make.
