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Katarina was a Trojan servant who became a companion to the First Doctor for a very short time immediately after the departure of Vicki Pallister. She worshiped the Doctor as the god Zeus and sacrificed herself to save his life.
Biography
The Seventh Doctor first met Katarina when she was a little girl living near Troy. She spoke to him of her ambition to serve as handmaid to a priestess because her poor family could not afford to feed her any longer. The Doctor gave them a gold coin to alleviate their poverty but, on learning Katarina's name, he realised that she would die young (as he had already witnessed it in his personal timeline). (PROSE: An Unfulfilled Dream, TV: The Daleks' Master Plan)
As a young woman, Katarina served Cassandra, princess of Troy. She was little more than a slave. In circa 1200 BC, Cassandra sent her to spy on the First Doctor and his friends, particularly Vicki Pallister, known to her as Cressida, to gather evidence she was a Greek spy. To this end, Katarina befriended Vicki, who sent her to help the Doctor get Steven Taylor back to the TARDIS after a spear thrust had badly injured him. Katarina tended to Steven's wounds. She joined Steven and the Doctor on their travels. (TV: The Myth Makers)
Katarina came from a simple time and never truly understood where she was or what was happening to her. She mistook the TARDIS for the Palace of Perfection and the Doctor for the god Zeus, come to take her on a journey in his temple to the real Palace of Perfection. Despite the Doctor's protestations to the contrary, she remained set in this belief.
When the criminal Kirksen held Katarina hostage in an airlock to blackmail the Doctor into returning Mavic Chen's ship, the Spar, to the planet Kembel and the Daleks, she deliberately activated the airlock door and expelled herself and Kirksen into space, causing their deaths in the vacuum. She was certain her death had been foretold and that she was doomed to die. (TV: The Daleks' Master Plan)
Aftermath
After the Doctor had defeated the Daleks, Steven Taylor said that he had seen too much death lately; the sacrifice of Katarina weighed on his mind, among others. (TV: The Daleks' Master Plan, The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve) In the afterlife, Katarina found herself without a coin and unable to cross the River Styx. Due to the intervention of the Doctor (or her idea of him) she found her way not only to Asphodel, where all souls who had done neither good nor evil would go, but to the Elysian Fields, the abode of the blessed. (PROSE: Katarina in the Underworld)
Much later, on the ruined world of Adeki, the Seventh Doctor found one of several Gwanzulums, beings who used their shapeshifting powers to pass themselves off as some of the Doctor's past companions, including Katarina. Before he realised the ruse, the false Katarina tried to have him take her off the planet. (COMIC: Planet of the Dead) Later, inside the inner landscape of the Doctor's mind in a hell haunted by his guilt, Ace came across the ghost of Katarina in the form of an eternally frozen girl of ice. (PROSE: Revelation)
While in the Divergent Universe, the Eighth Doctor was shown an illusion of Katarina by the Kro'ka. He stated that he regretted taking Katarina from her own time and giving her hope, only for her to be killed shortly afterwards. (AUDIO: The Last)
Behind the scenes
Doctor Who producer John Wiles and his production team decided to write out Katarina as soon as possible to get around the writing challenges of a character so very unused to modern concepts, and to whom the Doctor would have had to explain everything — for example, Katarina did not even know what a key was. They decided to do so in the most dramatic way possible.
