Molly O'Sullivan

Molly O'Sullivan
Main aliases:	Molly O'Sullivan II, Mary Carter, Dark Eyes
Species:	Human
Place of origin:	Ireland
Grandparents:	Grandfather, Grandmother
Mother:	Cathy O'Sullivan
Father:	Patrick O'Sullivan
Brothers:	Liam O'Sullivan, Patrick O'Sullivan
First appearance:	The Great War
Appearances:	see list
Main voice actor:	Ruth Bradley
Other voice actors:	Sorcha Cusack

Mary O'Sullivan (later Carter), also known as Molly, was a companion of the Eighth Doctor.

She was an Irish Voluntary Aid Detachment nursing assistant who was stationed in France during World War I. When the Eighth Doctor regenerated, Molly was the last companion that he remembered.

Biography

Childhood

Molly was born in 1891 as the daughter of Patrick and Cathy O'Sullivan (AUDIO: Tangled Web) and had seven siblings, all of whom she outlived. (AUDIO: Fugitives, X and the Daleks) Two of her brothers and her three sisters died before their fifth birthdays. She had two other brothers, Patrick and Liam. Patrick joined the British Army in World War I and was killed on his first day in France while Liam remained in Ireland but was killed by an English sentry. (AUDIO: X and the Daleks)

On her second birthday in 1893, Molly became "lost in a storm", and fell into the clutches of Kotris. Kotris took Molly to his TARDIS and infused her with retro-genitor particles, then returned her home to her parents. (AUDIO: Tangled Web) The effect of the retro-genitor particles gave Molly unusually dark eyes. She was teased for her dark eyes when she was a child and when she first entered domestic service. However, this teasing ended when she began to punch the people who mocked her. (AUDIO: X and the Daleks)

Meeting the Doctor

Molly during World War I. (AUDIO: The Great War)

Before the outbreak of World War I, she worked as a chambermaid for the Donaldson family in Eaton Place in London. She became friends with the Donaldsons' daughter Kitty, who viewed her as being the sister that she never had. When Kitty became a VAD in France, Molly did likewise as she knew that her mistress needed someone to protect her. After several months serving in France, Kitty contracted an infection from one of the soldiers whom she was treating. She was eventually killed by the renegade Time Lord Kotris and the Daleks. Molly met the Eighth Doctor in France, with whom she began to travel after they were chased across No Man's Land by the Daleks. (AUDIO: The Great War)

The first place the Doctor took Molly was Dunkirk in 1940. They were not there long before the Daleks appeared once more, chasing them across the town. They were also chased to London in 1972, and the planet Halalka. (AUDIO: Fugitives)

Shortly after leaving Halalka, Molly and the Doctor seemingly arrived on Skaro, where they discovered that the Daleks had become peaceful, after they caused the extinction of the Time Lords. However, it was later revealed that this was a simulation generated on their behalf. (AUDIO: Tangled Web)

The Doctor and Molly were directed to Srangor by the Time Lords, where Molly discovered that she had been implanted with retro-genitor particles. The effects of this were erased when Straxus — a younger version of Kotris — was killed, thus erasing Kotris and everything he accomplished from history.

She departed the TARDIS after it materialised in France during World War I. Molly realised that with Kotris having been erased from history, Kitty would still be alive and that she had to continue taking care of her as she promised. (AUDIO: X and the Daleks)

Molly returned to London and stayed at 107 Baker Street. In 1918 she met the Doctor again, and had an encounter with the Viyrans. (AUDIO: The White Room)

Molly and the Doctor in the TARDIS (COMIC: Firelight)

At one point, the Doctor told Molly that the Pyromeths kidnap people and make them tell stories "like Scheherazade". (COMIC: Firelight)

The Doctor and Molly travelled to the Orpheus, where Molly met Liv Chenka for the first time. Shortly after, the ship came under attack by the Eminence, and it began to possess the crew. After defeating the Eminence, Molly and the Doctor were joined on their travels by Liv. (AUDIO: Time's Horizon)

Molly, Liv and the Doctor's next stop was London in the 1970s, where Molly helped the Doctor to defeat the Reborn Master and the Eminence. After they were defeated, Molly stayed behind in 107 Baker Street and awaited the Doctor's return from Nixyce VII. One night she heard a knock at the door, and was kidnapped by Sally Armstrong and the Master. (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master)

The Master edited Molly's memories, replacing the Doctor with the Master, creating a sense of trust between them. (AUDIO: Rule of the Eminence) The Master took Molly to Heron's World, where she became part of the Master's experiment to pass some of her retro-genitor particles onto other humans. (AUDIO: The Death of Hope) The Master place her in her initial teleportation capsule hoping that he could get the Eminence under his control. (AUDIO: Masterplan)

The Master used her to create the grand administrator Walter Vincent based on her father. Her singing annoyed the Master. Molly parted company from the Doctor after it was deemed she would be unsafe travelling with him, they parted ways as she was to be returned to her proper place in time by Narvin. (AUDIO: Rule of the Eminence)

In an alternate timeline, she was in Moscow in 1961 where she was known as "Mary Carter". Rastel ordered her to look after the Eighth Doctor. She didn't recognise him at first, but this was a deception. The Master wanted her to stabilise the timeline. She knew that something was wrong with time when the Daleks invaded Earth as she had known the future. (AUDIO: Master of the Daleks)

After the Dalek Time Controller took Liv and Molly to the Eye of Orion, she started to become ill. When the Doctor met up with her she started to feel better, and wanted the Doctor to stop the Daleks. She also tried to stop Anya. Her eyes turned dark for the last time, which allowed her to control the TARDIS. Because of the retro-genitor particles, she was still linked with the Time Controller and if either of them died, they would both die. She sacrificed her own life so that the Time Controller could die, and she became part of the Eminence. She used the Time Controller's link with the Time Vortex and sent the Eminence to the end of the universe.

The Doctor and Liv then took her body back to Ireland. (AUDIO: Eye of Darkness)

Legacy

When the Eighth Doctor was about to regenerate, he remembered Molly last among his past companions. (TV: The Night of the Doctor)

The Twelfth Doctor saw Molly, among other companions, when Bernice Summerfield was hit by temporal energy in the Pyramid Eternia. (PROSE: Big Bang Generation)

Personality

Molly was confident, boisterous, and exceedingly combative. Hardened by bullying over her eyes, mistreatment from the families who she served as a maid, and the trauma accrued by nursing on the frontline of a bloody war, she had become a dour woman who bossed around her fellow VADs by the time the Doctor met her.

Molly got angry whenever people called her names which embarrassed and annoyed her. She insisted on being called "VAD" instead of "Nurse" or "Sister" (AUDIO: The Great War; The Death of Hope), reminded David to say "Nurse Molly" and not "Miss Molly" (AUDIO: The White Room), and made good on her threats to punch the Doctor for calling her "Dark Eyes" when he used the epithet in the Daleks' Srangor facility. (AUDIO: X and the Daleks)

Underneath her hostile shell, Molly was warm, compassionate, and playful. She prayed every night with a deathly ill Kitty, (AUDIO: The Great War) loudly sang to annoy the Master, (AUDIO: Rule of the Eminence), asked David for a kiss goodbye, (AUDIO: The White Room) and consoled David after telling him that he had again gone blind. (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) She enjoyed teasing the Doctor, who she continued to call "the Doctor" well after he told her not to. Shocked by the technological advances of 1972 London, she peppered the increasingly annoyed Doctor with questions about what had been electrified. After she and the Doctor escaped the Daleks' raid on the Ides Scientific Institute, she made him laugh by manipulating his TARDIS's controls despite his objections. (AUDIO: Fugitives) In the alternate timeline, she mocked him for being "high and mighty" and "always in charge". Even as she died, she ridiculed him for "ranting and raving" at an outcome that he could for once not control. (AUDIO: Eye of Darkness)

Molly had a strong moral compass. She was disgusted by the possibilities of biological warfare, telling Herbert Goring that even Satan would "pause for reflection". (AUDIO: The White Room) She believed that everyone had shades of grey, even her enemies like the soldiers of the German Empire. Inside the Mezcoranis's simulation of a utopian Skaro, she was convinced that the Daleks had genuinely reformed and urged the Doctor to abandon what she saw as his prejudices; only to learn eventually she'd been deceived by the Mazcoranis. (AUDIO: Tangled Web)

Befitting a nurse, Molly often put others' lives over her own. She was prepared to jump into the Time Vortex to stop Kotris's plans before the Doctor, resolute to not lose someone else, overruled her. She was more successful in entering the Eminence to stop it and Anya's bomb. Both times, she told the Doctor that she had had a good life. (AUDIO: X and the Daleks, Eye of Darkness)

Molly was a Christian, regularly referring to "the Lord" and the Bible. She was also rather modest, chiding Isabel Stanford for leaving a button of her VAD uniform undone (AUDIO: The Great War) and worrying about the indecency of ripping her skirt to free it and enter a B.E.2c spotter plane. (AUDIO: Fugitives)

For all their bickering and teasing, Molly and the Doctor cared for each other. When they parted ways after overthrowing the Master, she thanked him for showing her the wonders of space and time and vowed to make her life as worthwhile. Already struggling to walk away, he responded that he would miss her and called her Dark Eyes one last time. (AUDIO: Rule of the Eminence)

Liv believed that Molly had a big and open heart. (AUDIO: The World Beyond the Trees) She told a sedated Molly that she missed her and refused to abandon her at Walter Vincent's seaside hideout. (AUDIO: Rule of the Eminence) Molly cared similarly for Liv, empathising with her experiences under the Dalek occupation, believing that she had done nothing to warrant being called "The Traitor", and reassured her that she was not a coward for fleeing. She pushed Liv to seek treatment for her theta ray poisoning and rallied Liv to break the Randall Verand copy's control by stating her desire to become friends. (AUDIO: Time's Horizon) She was grateful to Liv for looking after her during the Master's rule, stopping her from saying goodbye by expressing her desire to watch the sunset with her friend. (AUDIO: Rule of the Eminence) In the alternate timeline, she easily forgave Liv for outing her as Molly O'Sullivan (AUDIO: Master of the Daleks) and begged Liv to stay with her when she became ill. (AUDIO: Eye of Darkness)

Skills

Thanks to the manipulations of Kotris and the Daleks, Molly was among the few non-Time Lords who could pilot a TARDIS, or as she called it, a "tardy box". She unconsciously fiddled with the console of the Doctor's TARDIS after entering it for the first time, knew which control opened the doors, and with minimal study of how he controlled it, was able to dematerialise it and fly it through the Time Vortex. Per the shocked Doctor, she should have been unable to perform the thousand constantly shifting calculations required to dematerialise. (AUDIO: Fugitives; Tangled Web) She retained her skills decades later in the alternate timeline, easily bringing the Doctor's TARDIS across the Daleks' Eye of Orion facility. (AUDIO: Eye of Darkness)

Molly was unable to swim. She needed the Doctor to save her when they fell into the English Channel, and was reluctant to enter the anti-gravity waterfall on Halalka until he reassured her that she would float to the surface. (AUDIO: Fugitives)

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Behind the scenes

Molly is the first Irish companion that the Doctor has had in any medium.