Bessie

Bessie
Type:	Car
Appearances:	See below

Bessie was the Doctor's main mode of transport, during his exile on Earth.

Profile

Bessie was a canary-yellow roadster, acquired by the Brigadier for the Doctor's use as part of the exiled Time Lord's agreement to assist UNIT in its efforts to protect Earth. The Doctor made several modifications to Bessie during his time at UNIT. These included an anti-theft force field (DW: The Ambassadors of Death), which magnetically trapped anyone attempting to steal Bessie; a remote control (DW: The Dæmons), with which the Doctor could steer the car from a distance; and a minimum inertia hyperdrive which allowed him to drive at breakneck speed and still come to a sudden stop without him or his passengers being sent through the windshield by inertia, which the brakes absorbed. (DW: The Time Monster)

Bessie proved instrumental in capturing the Master. When he to steal the Doctor's car and make good his escape following the events at Devil's End, the Doctor used his remote control to steer the Master back to the waiting UNIT soldiers, who took him into custody. (DW: The Dæmons) Bessie was briefly pulled into Omega's universe during his attempt to capture the Doctor. (DW: The Three Doctors) The car was also abducted along with the Doctor into the Death Zone, where it was heavily damaged by one of the thunderbolts that periodically rained down upon the place. (DW: The Five Doctors)

Presumably it was Rassilon who returned the car to Earth at the conclusion of this adventure.

With a newly-regenerated Doctor's relative lack of interest in affairs in UNIT and Earth, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart had it "put into mothballs". It was brought out briefly in the 1990s as the Brigadier and UNIT worked together with the Doctor's seventh incarnation to battle Morgaine. (DW: Battlefield).

Licence plate

Initially, Bessie carried the registration licence plate "WHO 1". Whether this is intentional - possibly chosen by the Doctor as a reference to the question often asked of his name - or a coincidence is not known. Similarly by coincidence, at the time of the Doctor's later encounter with Morgaine, the plate had been changed to WHO 7.

Other appearances

The Fifth Doctor travels in Bessie in the novel Deep Blue, when he,Tegan, and Turlough arrive in circa Summer 1974 and help UNIT thwart a Xaranti invasion. This adventure, which takes place for UNIT some six months after The Green Death, occurs while the Third Doctor is away from Earth in the TARDIS.

The Sixth Doctor is briefly re-united with Bessie in the novel Time's Champion, which occurs in early January 2008. The car is now in the care of John Benton. Chris McKeon, the co-author of the novel, indicates that Benton was given charge of the vehicle due to his experience as a used-car salesman and the internal politics of such sinister departments as C-19 and ICIS.

The Ninth Doctor drives with Bessie in Chris McKeon's short story "Personal Correspondence," set in March 2006, which features that incarnation also meeting the Brigadier, Benton and Mike Yates as they pursue a surviving Slitheen from the wreckage of 10 Downing Street (destroyed in the episodes Aliens of London/World War Three). The Doctor, obliquely referencing Time's Champion, knows that Benton has possession of Bessie.

Behind the Scenes

Appearances

Doctor Who

• Doctor Who and the Silurians
• The Ambassadors of Death
• Inferno
• Terror of the Autons
• The Mind of Evil
• The Claws of Axos
• The Dæmons
• The Time Monster
• The Three Doctors
• The Green Death
• Planet of the Spiders
• Robot
• The Five Doctors
• Battlefield

Doctor Who mini-episode

• Dimensions in Time