Samantha Angeline Jones was a companion of the Eighth Doctor.
Biography
Sam Jones was a unique individual; her biodata/timeline had been directly affected by a future event which was related to her time travelling (PROSE: Unnatural History), making her life before 2002 something of a paradox.
Timeline 1
Samantha Jones had a very troubled childhood. In her teenage years, she was a drug user and had the needle scars on her arms to prove it. She lived in a bedsit in King's Cross, London. She wrote letters to Amnesty while in high school and thought about spray painting a billboard. She left home in 1997, and worked in a video shop up to 2002. She smoked Benson & Hedges cigarettes, and had used ecstasy more than once. She saw the Lord of the Rings movie, but didn't think much of it.
Then she met the Eighth Doctor. He had come searching for his friend. He explained to her about the dimensional scar in San Francisco that his TARDIS had become a part of.
He convinced her to accompany him back to San Francisco after her parents showed her a series of postcards they had been receiving from a Samantha Jones, including one showing a blonde Samantha Jones and the Doctor from a photobooth on Paphos.
Whilst in San Francisco she attempted to seduce the Doctor, was captured by Griffin, an unnaturalist, and had sex several times with Fitz Kreiner. (PROSE: Unnatural History)
After several days of getting to know the Doctor and Fitz's worlds, and encountering effects of the Wild Hunt (an energy pulse washing out in a reverse ripple from the scar that made her experience her alternate timelines and also altered her biodata), she ran into the scar, altering her timeline greatly, so that she encountered the Doctor (for the first time) in Totter's Yard. (PROSE: Unnatural History, The Eight Doctors)
Timeline 2
Samantha Jones was a vegetarian. She hated drugs and didn't even drink Coca-Cola.
She met the Eighth Doctor in 1997 whilst running from a group of drug dealers. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors)
Sam spent three years on the planet Ha'olam, making her about twenty-one when she re-encountered the Doctor and began travelling with him again. (PROSE: Seeing I)
Whilst on the planet Hyspero she met (and got along brilliantly with) Iris Wildthyme. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) She died from radiation on Janus Prime, melting into a puddle on Menda. The Doctor later saved her by using a temporal orbit. (PROSE: The Janus Conjunction)
In San Francisco, she encountered a dimensional scar that altered her timeline, reworking it and creating the established timeline she experienced with the Doctor. (PROSE: Unnatural History)
Sam chose to leave the Doctor while on 1996 Earth, about a year before her younger self first left Earth with the Doctor. To preserve the timeline, Sam planned to stay with and assist Sarah Jane Smith for that year and then go home to her parents the day after her younger self left despite being six years older than the last time they'd have seen her. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)
Erasure
Sam was implied to have been removed from the timeline by the Doctor to preserve the Web of Time. (PROSE: Repercussions...)
Characteristics
Born on 15 April 1980, she was sixteen when she first met the the Eighth Doctor in Totter's Yard. She attended Coal Hill School. She thought herself a pacifist, but had killed people: a Tractite and a human, the second when she was being controlled. (PROSE: Genocide, Kursaal) She was still shocked by extreme forms of violence and believed that such direct action should be beneath the Doctor. (PROSE: Revolution Man)
Appearance
In her original timeline, Sam Jones had dark hair, needle scars along her arms and not a lot of muscle tone in her legs. (PROSE: Unnatural History)
In her second timeline, she had short blonde hair. She ran a few kilometres every day, either through the TARDIS or around wherever she and the Doctor landed. (PROSE: Option Lock)
She was sixteen when she began travelling with the Doctor, but she spent three years on Ha'olam, making her twenty-one (or thereabouts) when she finished travelling with the Doctor. (PROSE: Seeing I, Interference - Book Two)
Personality
Sam Jones came from liberal parents. She once said that the only thing that would really shock her parents was if she did drugs.
She was a vegetarian and a supporter of Greenpeace and gay rights. The Doctor took her to a Greenpeace rally. (PROSE: Vampire Science)
During her travels with the Doctor, Sam fell in love with him. (PROSE: Longest Day)
Despite believing herself to be a pacifist and anti-war, she found herself grabbing a gun following an encounter on Skaro against the Daleks. (PROSE: War of the Daleks)
Habits and quirks
Sam liked to run a few kilometres each day.
She and the Doctor came up with a list of codes (numbers) to apply to different situations they might encounter (so they didn't have to come up with a plan, just say a number). (PROSE: The Janus Conjunction, Unnatural History)
Behind the scenes
After Freema Agyeman was cast in The Carrie Diaries, which featured a character called Samantha Jones, Torchwood script editor Gary Russell mentioned in a tweet that the alias used by Agyeman's character, Martha Jones, in the television story Reset, was a deliberate reference to the Eighth Doctor companion. [1] [2]
Footnotes
- ↑ @twilightstreets. Twitter (23 July 2013). Retrieved on 4 August 2013. “Ahhhh but, Freema, do you know *why* we used the name Samantha Jones?”
- ↑ @twilightstreets. Twitter (23 July 2013). Retrieved on 4 August 2013. “All those followers of yours who said it was cos of Sam Jones the book companion to the 8th Doctor get a gold star :-)”
