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Surgeon Lieutenant Harry Sullivan was a Royal Navy surgeon in the employ of UNIT. He was also for a time the companion of the Fourth Doctor. He later worked for NATO and MI5.
He had a younger stepbrother named Will. (AUDIO: Buried Secrets)
Biography
Career with UNIT
Harry first encountered UNIT while he worked in the Royal Navy, at the same time the Third Doctor had briefly left Earth in his TARDIS for Peladon. (PROSE: The Face of the Enemy).
After he had joined UNIT and the Third Doctor was apparently in a coma, the Brigadier summoned "Dr Sullivan" to help see him through the process. When Sergeant Benton woke the Doctor by offering him a cup of coffee, the Brigadier cancelled the call for Dr Sullivan's assistance. (TV: Planet of the Spiders)
After confronting the Great One on the planet Metebelis III, the Doctor disappeared. Sarah Jane believed he had died. Three weeks later, the Doctor's TARDIS re-appeared in his laboratory at UNIT HQ. The Doctor had received a near-fatal dose of radiation, forcing him to regenerate or die. (TV: Planet of the Spiders) Harry Sullivan arrived on the scene just moments after the Doctor regenerated into a new form. (TV: Robot)
Adventures with the Doctor
Harry, at very first much confused by the Doctor, trailed him and his companion Sarah Jane Smith. After the defeat of the robot K1, Harry found himself in the Doctor's TARDIS with them. (TV: Robot) The three went to Space Station Nerva and were pitted against Wirrn, (TV: The Ark in Space) and then by transmat from the space station travelled to an uninhabited far future Earth in the same time period, where they faced the Sontaran Styre. (TV: The Sontaran Experiment) The transmat next took them to Skaro at the time of the creation of the Daleks. This was for a mission from the Time Lords. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) Via time ring, they travelled back to Nerva, but to a much earlier year. (TV: Revenge of the Cybermen)
Back in the late 20th century, Harry rejoined UNIT to defeat the shape-changing Zygons and their giant, dinosaur-like beast, the Skarasen, in Scotland. The Zygons captured Harry and one assumed his form. He decided to go home to London by train rather than by TARDIS. (TV: Terror of the Zygons)
A short time later, Harry helped the Doctor against the Kraals. (TV: The Android Invasion)
Post-UNIT career
In the early 1980s, Harry worked at NATO. (TV: Mawdryn Undead, PROSE: Harry Sullivan's War)
By 1997, he was Deputy Director at MI5. At that time, via the agency of time travel, he met up once again with a familiar version of the Doctor, as well as a much younger Sarah Jane Smith, for whom little time had passed. (PROSE: System Shock) He still worked for MI5 in 1999. (PROSE: Millennium Shock) By 2005, he was back at NATO, having achieved the rank of Commodore. The Brigadier asked him for a favour at the time. (AUDIO: The Wasting)
Sarah Jane Smith recalled in 2010 that Harry had worked in developing vaccines that had saved thousands of lives. (TV: Death of the Doctor)
Possible fates
One account says that in the early-2000s, to commemorate an anniversary date, Sarah Jane would have meetings with Harry Sullivan. For at least one, Harry was absent, though Sarah 'talked' to him and raised a toast to him wherever he was. (AUDIO: Buried Secrets)
Another version of events says Harry passed away some time before 2009. (PROSE: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, TV: Death of the Doctor)
In one timeline, Harry Sullivan was still alive in 2015, and discovered a possible cure for HIV in blood taken from David Daniels. (PROSE: Damaged Goods)
Alternative timelines
A parallel Earth version of Harry served on a nuclear submarine in a world taken over by the Silurians after the death of the Third Doctor. He saved the life of the Seventh Doctor's companion Bernice Summerfield. (PROSE: Blood Heat)
Another adventure showed Harry turned into a werewolf after being bitten in the 1930s. (PROSE: Wolfsbane)
Personality
Harry was rather old-fashioned and stereotypically English in his attitudes. He often employed slightly archaic language, referring to Sarah affectionately as "old girl" or "old thing". (TV: The Sontaran Experiment, PROSE: Doctor Who and the Ark in Space) He was brave, one time saving the Fourth Doctor's life from a landmine on Skaro. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) He had a "can-do" attitude, adapting well to the many strange situations in which he found himself. He could, however, be quite clumsy and unsubtle. This lead the Doctor to declare in a moment of frustration, that "Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!", before passing out from the effects of a rockfall on Voga – caused by Harry! (TV: Revenge of the Cybermen) He flirted a bit with Sarah. Despite an outward annoyance at that attitude, once when thinking him dead, Sarah admitted she found it endearing. (PROSE: Wolfsbane)
He was good at throwing a cricket ball over at least a metre. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Ark in Space)
Relatives
Harry had a brother named Will, whom Sarah Jane Smith met. (AUDIO: Buried Secrets) Will died some time after meeting her. (AUDIO: Fatal Consequences)
Behind the scenes
- Harry was written in as a companion when it was thought that the Fourth Doctor would be played by an older actor who would not be able to handle the physical side of the series. This would necessitate Harry handling physical "two-fisted" action as the plot required. This was not a concern when Tom Baker was cast in the role, as he was younger than the previous actors and capable of physical action on his own. Harry was thus deemed redundant and ultimately written out of the show, despite his popularity.
- Ian Marter reappeared as Harry in The Android Invasion. Sadly, there were to be no further guest appearances, as the Doctor Who production team had by this time decided to phase out UNIT and sever the Doctor's links with Earth.
- It was hoped Ian Marter would reprise the role of Harry for the 20th Anniversary story The Five Doctors in 1983, but Marter had to turn down the offer, as he was committed workwise at the time.
- Although various spin-off media have depicted Harry living into the 21st century, in real life the actor who portrayed him, Ian Marter, died in 1986. A reference to the character is made in TV: Invasion of the Bane, when Sarah Jane considers Harry as a possible name for her adopted son, Luke Smith. Perhaps going along with this fact, it has been implied that Harry has indeed already passed away in the present-day continuity of the Doctor Who universe, as in TV: Death of the Doctor, when recounting the current endeavours of some of the Doctor's past companions, Sarah Jane refers to him in past tense.
- After leaving the cast of Doctor Who, Ian Marter wrote several Target Books novelisations. He also wrote Harry Sullivan's War for them in 1985. In Harry Sullivan's War, the character has become an MI5 operative. Marter was believed to have been planning a sequel at the time of his death from a diabetic coma the following year.
- Marter also wrote the novelisations Doctor Who and the Ark in Space and Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment, putting him in the unique position of adapting two stories in which he himself had acted.
- There is an apocryphal account presented in Doctor Who and the Rebel's Gamble suggesting that at some point Harry Sullivan shared an adventure with the Sixth Doctor.
