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Charlotte Elspeth Pollard — known to her friends as Charley — was a female human companion of the eighth incarnation of the Doctor who later became a companion of Doctor's sixth self.
Biography
Charlotte Pollard was born on 15th April 1912 into a well-to-do family; her mother was Lady Louisa Pollard and she had two sisters, Margaret and Cecelia. Charley and her siblings grew up in a manor house in Hampshire, looked after by servants. Charley rebelled against this existence and, styling herself an Edwardian adventuress, ran away from home seeking excitement. Making an appointment to meet a young man in Singapore on New Year's Day 1931, she stowed away on board the R101 disguised as a male member of the crew. There, she met the Doctor and together they discovered the secret mission the airship was on. She was rescued from the fated crash of the R101 by the Doctor and taken on board his TARDIS as his newest companion. (BFA: Storm Warning)
Following the death of C'rizz (BFA: Absolution), Charley requested that the Eighth Doctor take her home. However, after a battle with the Cybermen, Charley was stranded on a desert island in 500,002 (BFA: The Girl Who Never Was). Though she had seen the doctor (apparently) die, she held out hope that he would regenerate and rescue her. However, when the TARDIS did arrive for her, she found the Doctor, but in an earlier incarnation (BFA: The Condemned). Because of her travels with the Doctor's future she knew not to let the Doctor find out any thing about her past, but the Doctor started to grow suspicious of her mysteriousness.
Eventually, the Doctor demanded to know Charley's secret, but before she could attempt to answer him, she became infected with a virus that had somehow managed to slip through the TARDIS' defenses. Eventually, Charley discovered that the virus had come from an entity called Mila, who had been a human guinea pig in experiments by the Daleks to create a virus capable of transforming all other lifeforms into Daleks. When the experiments failed, the Daleks attacked her, causing her to phase into another dimension. She had slipped aboard the TARDIS during the Doctor's first incarnation and had remained there ever since, invisible to everyone. Unbeknownst to the Doctor, Mila was successful in using the virus in transforming Charley into herself and herself into Charley, thus leaving Charley out of phase with reality and allowing her to take Charley's place at the doctor's side. (BFA: Patient Zero)
Charley was found and cured by the Viyrans, whom she helped for several millenia in their quest to expunge all the viruses which had escaped from the Amethyst station. Eventually, she and the Viyrans crossed paths with the Doctor and Charley/Mila in an alternate timeline created by the Viyrans' attempt to remove a virus from Earth's population. After Mila sacrificed herself to save the Doctor and the entire Earth, Charley revealed her identity to the Doctor. In an attempt to make him want to forget his travels with her, she told him that when he met her, he would die (still mistakenly believing that the Eighth Doctor had not regenerated). She then used the Viyrans' memory-altering technology to replace herself with Mila in the Doctor's memories of their travels together. (BFA: Blue Forgotten Planet) What became of Charley following these events is unclear, though presumably she continued to travel with the Viyrans.
A later incarnation of the Doctor, put on trial by the Shadow Proclamation, cited the saving of Charley Pollard as an example of his saving the life of someone who had been declared a "fixed point in time" and destined to die. (IDW: Fugitive)
Like Adelaide Brooke, she was a woman the Doctor had violated the Laws of Time to save. (BFA: Storm Warning) The fact that she should not have been alive was something that hung over her otherwise spirited adventures with the Doctor. Ironically, when she became a companion of the Doctor's earlier incarnation, she herself had to try to apply the Laws of Time in order to shield the Doctor from knowledge of his personal future. (BFA: The Condemned, et al) Like Rose Tyler, she was in love with the Doctor, at least in his eighth persona. (BFA: Scherzo)
Behind the scenes
- The reference to Charley in IDW Publishing's Doctor Who Ongoing series marked the first time a character created for the Big Finish Productions audio drama line had been referenced in a comic book.
- Nicholas Briggs has revealed that Big Finish are planning a Doctor-less Charley Pollard spin-off series. [1]