Character Highlight: Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (Doctor Who)

Even though the Brigadier never traveled with the Doctor, he, like the rest of the UNIT guys, is still generally given companion status.  And while he was never as close to the Doctor as some other companions, he remains one of the most enduring in the show’s history (a few Brigadier-related spoilers.)

First introduced as a guest character in the Second Doctor’s era, the Brigadier really becomes a fixture of the show when the Third Doctor comes along.  The Time Lords having exiled the Doctor to Earth (most likely for BBC budget reasons,) England is in need of some regularly-occurring alien threats, so placing the Doctor at UNIT is a natural fit.  Plus, Liz is a brand-new companion for the Doctor and didn’t know him before his regeneration, so, without the Brigadier, there’d be no one the Doctor already knows who would need to try and reconcile Three with Two.

As such, the Brigadier becomes our “way in” on the new Doctor’s era in more ways than one.  He’s the one who comes running at the news of the TARDIS then pulls up short at the sight of this unfamiliar face, the one who needs to be convinced the Doctor is really still the Doctor.  He’s also the one to bring Liz into the UNIT fold, informing her that the whole “little green men” business isn’t the nonsense that she thinks.

As the UNIT years take off, though, the Brigadier’s role morphs somewhat, and he become more of a thorn in the Doctor’s side.  Basically, if the show needs a skeptic to shout, “Tommy-rot!” at the Doctor’s theories, a bureaucrat to gum up the Doctor’s works, or a stubborn soldier to show up guns blazing against the Doctor’s warnings to the contrary, the Brigadier is typically your man.  This, to me, is a shame.  I get the desire to have the usually-freewheeling Doctor meet with obstruction and frustrations, but, based on his earliest appearances, the Brigadier doesn’t really fit as that character.  I can buy him needing to rethink old strategies that are only effective on human enemies, or struggling against higher-ups to supply what the Doctor needs (he’s forever “getting on the line to Geneva” to plead his case,) but he himself being the authority figure who scoffs at the sci-fi goings-on doesn’t track for me.  In his stories with Two, he’s wonderfully pragmatic about the existence of aliens – sure, none of it makes sense, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s happening, so let’s roll up our sleeves and do something about it, eh, chaps?  If it were up to me, I’d have cast a different character as the skeptic, or at least not gone to that well so often with the Brigadier.  Because when he’s firing on all cylinders, the Brigadier can be a strong asset to our heroes, such as when he infiltrates Stangmoor Prison in “The Mind of Evil.”

UNIT starts to phase out of prominence as the Third Doctor era transitions to the Fourth, but although that’s the end of his regular appearances, that’s not the end of the Brigadier’s presence in the Whoniverse.  He pops up again in a couple Fifth Doctor stories, including the 20^th anniversary special “The Five Doctors,” and again in a Seventh Doctor serial in classic Who’s final season.  He also makes a nostalgic appearance on The Sarah Jane Adventures, and while he never appears on new Who, the show makes a few nice tributes to the character and the actor, the late Nicholas Courtney.  The Brigadier’s offscreen passing is revealed at a critical moment in series 6, and the following season introduces his daughter Kate as the new head of UNIT, following the guiding principle “science leads” that her father learned from an old friend.  Truly, gone but not forgotten.