Saturday 22 December 2012

Doctor Who - The Second Doctor.

Here we have the Second Doctor and a few companions.

Companions with the Second Doctor were - 

Polly
Ben Jackson
Jamie McCrimmon
Victoria Waterfield
Zoe Heriot

Still have to do Ben Jackson but here are the rest of the gang and a few evil aliens...

Zoe Heriot, The Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon.

Zoe first appears in the serial The Wheel in Space, where she is the librarian on board Space Station W3, also known as the Wheel. When the Cybermen attack, she aids the Doctor and Jamie in defeating them before stowing away aboard the TARDIS.

Zoe's age is not given in the series, but according to initial publicity she was fifteen when she joined the TARDIS crew. She holds a degree in pure mathematics and is a genius, with intelligence scores comparable to the Doctor's. Coupled with her photographic memory and the advanced learning techniques of her era, this makes her somewhat like a human calculator, able to perform complicated mathematics in her head. Part of the reason for her wanting to travel with the Doctor is her chafing at the restrictions and sterile surroundings of her station-bound existence. However, her real world experience is severely limited, and that gives her an ability to frequently get herself in trouble.

Together with the Doctor and Jamie, she meets the Cybermen again when they invade 20th century London, enters the surreal Land of Fiction, fights the Ice Warriors and survives the battlefields of the War Chief's war games. Her journeys with the Doctor come to an end in that serial, when the Time Lords finally catch up with the Doctor. As well as forcing a regeneration on him and exiling him to Earth, the Time Lords return Jamie and Zoe to their own times, wiping the memory of their experiences with the Doctor (save for their first encounters with him) in the process.

James Robert McCrimmon was the son of Donald McCrimmon - a piper, like his father and his father's father. Jamie first appears in The Highlanders, encountering the Doctor, Ben and Polly in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746. At the end of the story, Polly suggests that the Doctor take Jamie along with them. Jamie continues to travel with the Doctor even after Ben and Polly leave the TARDIS at the end of The Faceless Ones. He appears in all but the very first Second Doctor serial, The Power of the Daleks, and in more episodes than any other companion, although Tegan Jovanka served with the Doctor for the longest continuous period in terms of years on the series.

Zoe, Jamie and the Doctor.

Jamie shares a lively, bantering relationship with the Doctor, and during his time in the series sees the arrival and departure of first Victoria Waterfield and finally Zoe Heriot. Jamie, being a product of his time, is always solicitous and gentlemanly towards the women who travel with him. Jamie does not have the background to always understand the situations his adventures with the Doctor take him into, but is quick enough to translate high technology and concepts into equivalents he can understand and deal with. His relationship with the Doctor is not always smooth and in The Evil of the Daleks he comes close to leaving the Doctor whom he feels has been manipulating him and Victoria to discover the human factor for the Daleks, without thinking about the consequences. His battle cry "Creag an tuire", in Scottish Gaelic, translates to "The Boar's Rock." It is similar to Creag an tuirc, the motto of the MacLaren Clan of Scotland.

Together with the Doctor, Jamie encounters Cybermen, Daleks, the Yeti in the London Underground, the Ice Warriors, and many other dangers. Jamie is particularly fond and protective of Victoria, due in part to her being an elegant Victorian lady. For example, in The Ice Warriors Jamie's first priority is to rescue Victoria despite being injured to the point where he can't walk. Jamie is heartbroken when Victoria decides to stay with the Harris family at the end of Fury from the Deep, to the point of even being briefly angry with the Doctor for allowing her to leave (The Wheel in Space). Jamie initially finds Zoe's more modern attitudes and bossy nature irritating, but eventually adopts the same protective attitude disguised by the same bantering he engages in with the Doctor. Often Jamie's simple common sense beats Zoe's strict logic, such as in The Dominators where Jamie realises that the erupting volcano is going to threaten, while the Doctor and Zoe are still congratulating themselves.

Jamie's travels with the Doctor come to an end on the battlefields of The War Games, when the Time Lords finally put the Doctor on trial for interfering with the universe. For his offences, the Doctor is forced to regenerate and exiled to Earth. Jamie and Zoe are returned to their own time, their memories of the Doctor wiped, save for their first encounters with him. When last seen, Jamie is fighting an English redcoat back on the fields of Scotland.

Frazer Hines returned to Doctor Who as an illusory image of Jamie in the 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors. He also reprised the role in the 1985 serial The Two Doctors alongside Patrick Troughton and Colin Baker as the Second and Sixth Doctors respectively.

Victoria Waterfield and Polly.

Victoria first appears in the 1967 serial The Evil of the Daleks. She is the daughter of scientist Edward Waterfield who in 1866 is experimenting with time travel and has attracted the attention of the Daleks. In order to assure Waterfield's collaboration with their capture of the Doctor and their experiments with the Human and Dalek Factors, the Daleks with the help of Theodore Maxtable took Victoria as a prisoner. To measure his emotional responses, they then manipulated Jamie McCrimmon into rescuing her, although they ultimately re-captured her and took her to Skaro. At the conclusion of the adventure, Waterfield is killed saving the Doctor's life, and asks him to take care of Victoria. The Doctor and Jamie take her in as part of the TARDIS crew.

The Doctor, Victoria and Jamie.

On the outside, Victoria is a typically fragile lady of her era, frequently screaming when faced with the creatures the Doctor and his companions encounter in their travels, such as the Cybermen and theYeti, the latter which are automatons of the disembodied Great Intelligence. However, this exterior hides an inner strength that crops up when needed. Victoria may be young, but she has an instinct for when she is being lied to, and her sensibility is a contrast to the recklessness of Jamie and the curiosity of the Doctor. Jamie, in particular, is very protective towards and fond of Victoria, and is heartbroken when she chooses to leave.

Despite being a good match to her two companions, Victoria eventually finds herself unsuited to extended travel with the Doctor. At the conclusion of the serial Fury from the Deep, she decides to leave the TARDIS, settling with a family named Harris in the 20th century. Her subsequent life is not shown in the television series. She is mentioned, but not seen to be travelling with the Second Doctor in the 1985 serial The Two Doctors.

Polly and the Doctor.

Polly first appears in the First Doctor serial, The War Machines, where she is working as a secretary to Professor Brett. Brett develops the artificial intelligence known as WOTAN, and Polly meets the Doctor and Dodo when they come to investigate it. Polly befriends Dodo and takes her to a London nightclub called the Inferno, where they meet Ben Jackson and try to cheer up the merchant seaman. When Polly is accosted by another patron in the Inferno, Ben comes to her rescue. Eventually, Ben and Polly aid the Doctor in his fight against WOTAN when the computer tries to take over the world. They are the bearers of the news of Dodo's decision to stay in 1966 to the Doctor, and accidentally get carried away in the TARDIS when they try to return Dodo's key to the time machine.

Polly, in contrast to Dodo, is a more sophisticated and hip young woman of the 1960s — vivacious, attractive, and alternately shy and aggressive. She and Ben make an odd couple, but she is receptive to Ben's protective urges, and he in turn finds her elegant and posh, giving her the nickname "Duchess". Polly is present with Ben when the First Doctor regenerates into the Second, and continues to travel with the Second Doctor.

Eventually, the TARDIS finds its way back to 1966 London (in The Faceless Ones) on the very day Ben and Polly had left (although about a year had passed for them). They decide to remain behind to resume their lives without disruption as the Doctor and Jamie travel on.

What happens to Polly after her return to Earth is not certain. The Doctor seems to think that Ben will become an Admiral and that Polly will look after Ben, but it is unclear if this is a prediction or simply wishing them well. In The Sarah Jane Adventures story Death of the Doctor, Sarah Jane mentions that Polly is now working at an orphanage in India with Ben.

Ice Warriors. 
The Ice Warriors are a race of reptilian-like humanoids. The race originated on Mars, and first appeared in the 1967 serial The Ice Warriors where they encountered the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie and Victoria. The name Ice Warrior is not the name of their species, but was applied to them by an Earth scientific team in the Martians' first on-screen appearance.

Their first on-screen appearance was in the 1967 story The Ice Warriors, set at a time in the future when the world was in the grip of a new ice age. A scientific team sent to halt the advance of the glaciers discovered a spacecraft buried underneath the ice, where it had lain for thousands of years together with its Ice Warrior crew. The Martians revived and attempted to take over the scientific base, but were defeated by the Second Doctor and their ship destroyed as it tried to take off.

Their next appearance was in the 1969 serial The Seeds of Death,which took place in the mid-21st century. In that story, the world had grown dependent on the matter transmission system T-Mat. An Ice Warrior strike force seized control of the T-Mat relay on the Moon, using it to send the titular seeds to Earth, which were designed to alter the planet's atmosphere to be hospitable to Martian life, by reducing the atmosphere's oxygen content to one-twentieth, exactly like Mars. The plan was foiled by the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie and Zoe, and the invading Martian fleet was sent into an orbit around the Sun.

Ice Warriors.

By the time of 1972's The Curse of Peladon, the Ice Warriors had renounced violence (except in self-defence) and become respected members of a Galactic Federation that included Earth, Mars, Alpha Centauri and Arcturus. When the Third Doctor encountered them on a diplomatic mission to decide the admission of the planet Peladon to the Federation, he was initially distrustful, believing them to be behind an attempted sabotage of the proceedings. However, the culprit turned out to be someone else.

In the 1974 serial The Monster of Peladon (which took place 50 years after Curse), the Ice Warriors returned to Peladon as Federation peacekeeping troops. The leader of the Martian troops, Azaxyr, was working with Galaxy 5, which was at war with the Federation. Seeking a return to the race's warrior past, he tried to impose martial law and take over Peladon, but was stopped by the Peladonians, who were aided by the Third Doctor.

A possible unseen adventure involving the Ice Warriors is alluded to in Castrovalva. The newly-regenerated and still unstable Fifth Doctor regresses to an earlier personality and memory, saying, "Not far now, Brigadier, unless the Ice Warriors get there first!". The final New Adventures novel, The Dying Days by Lance Parkin, features a 1997 invasion of Earth by the Ice Warriors, and also states that the Brigadier had not encountered them before.

In the 2009 episode, "The Waters of Mars", the Doctor mentions the legend of the Ice Warriors, calling them "a fine and noble race who built an empire out of snow." He also theorises that the alien entity that seems to be sentient water pursuing them in the episode was known to the Ice Warriors, who froze it in an underground glacier on Mars to prevent its escape.

Jamie and The Doctor face off against some fearsome 'Yeti'.
The Yeti,  although resembling the cryptozoological creatures also called the Yeti, are in actuality alien robots. Their external appearance, that of a huge hairy biped, disguises a small spherical mechanism that provides its motive power.

Yeti having a shindig.

The Yeti serve the Great Intelligence, a disembodied entity from another dimension, which tried to form a physical body in order to conquer the Earth. The Yeti are initially a ruse to scare off curiosity seekers, and later form an army serving the Great Intelligence.

Rago the Dominator.
The Dominators were a race of near-humans who controlled much of the Ten Galaxies. They were intensely utilitarian, and hesitant to misuse any amount of energy for matters that did not directly benefit them and their mission. This was especially the case in energy management of their robotic laborers, Quarks.

Toba. Grumpy.

Quarks were cuboid in shape with a sphere on top. Two spikes came from opposite sides of this sphere, with one on top. They had rectangular compartments on their chests into which their cuboid arms folded. Their arms were equipped with weaponry and manipulating appendages. The spore spikes were red along with the rim attaching them all. The rest of the sphere was black and the body was grey. The Quarks' feet were large pieces of metal in the shape of a block; poles attached these to the body.

Quarks and Krotons, with a 'Chumbley' and the first Doctor.

The TARDIS arrives on the unnamed planet of the Gonds, who are ruled and taught in a form of self-perpetuating slavery by the alien Krotons — crystalline beings whose ship, the Dynatrope, crash-landed there thousands of years earlier after being damaged in a space battle.

The Krotons are in suspended animation, in a crystalline slurry form, awaiting a time when they can be reconstituted by absorption of mental energy. Periodically, the two most brilliant Gond students are received into the Dynatrope, nominally to become "companions of the Krotons" but in truth to have their mental energy drained, after which they are killed.

Krotons - not very scary.

When the Doctor and Zoe take the students' test, their mental power is sufficient to reanimate the Krotons. The Doctor discovers that their life system is based on tellurium. With help from the Gond scientist Beta, he destroys them and their ship with an impure form of sulphuric acid.



Figures are Black Tree Design / Harlequin. Victoria and Polly have been painted for me by Matt Slade.

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