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.
