Character Highlight: Katarina (Doctor Who)

Katarina and Sara Kingdom’s official status as companions can be a bit fuzzy, but I tend to include them (granted, in more recent years, this opens the doors for all sorts of one-off characters to possibly be considered “companions,” from Nefertiti to Courtney Woods, and even to Missy, but I tend to make my companion rulings as I see fit.)  In general, I find Katarina to be an ambitious early experiment on the part of the show that may not have worked out but paved the way for good things to come (a few Katarina-related spoilers.)

The First Doctor era tests the companion waters quite a bit, and the idea of Katarina certainly has promise.  She’s a resident of Troy, one of Cassandra’s handmaidens, and when the Doctor’s arrival on the scene winds up leading to the destruction of Troy, she’s brought along onto the TARDIS to escape the fighting.  This makes her the first companion from the past, and that’s the way past – we’re talking more than 3,000 years ago.  She thinks that the Doctor is a god, and when the TARDIS takes them somewhere else, she serenely assumes that they’re dead and the Doctor is taking them to “the place of perfection.”

In a way, it actually helps that she’s devoutly religious and believes the Doctor to be a god, because it means she accepts everything that’s happening as supernatural.  Rather than peppering the Doctor and Steven with questions about all the frillions of things she doesn’t understand, she just kind of goes with it, figuring that it’s not for mortals to know and trusting that the Doctor knows what he’s doing.  Which isn’t to say that her lack of understanding is never an issue – even before you get into all the sci-fi/Dalek craziness, she doesn’t know what a key is, or medicine – but she isn’t really bothered by not knowing stuff.  That’s interesting to me.  Not the same religion, obviously, but she’s very Zen about the whole thing.

However, the show didn’t find this type of character sustainable, and they quickly scrapped her.  There’s sometimes an attitude that companions from the past don’t work because they’re hampered by their lack of knowledge, but I don’t agree.  Jamie and Victoria, who both show up in the years following Katarina’s (very) short-lived stint on the show, are fantastic, and even though Leela is from the future, she’s from a “primitive” tribe and knows little of modern devices, let alone sci-fi gear, but that doesn’t stop her from being awesome.  While a companion from ancient Troy might have been too far-reaching for a first attempt, I think Katarina probably could have worked too, given room to breathe and some thinking on the part of the writers.

But me, I enjoy companions from the past because they bring a different sensibility to the TARDIS and open things up for possibilities outside everything we take for granted.  That includes Katarina, and I’d have liked to see what else the show could have done with her.