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Bernice ("Benny") Surprise Summerfield was a 26th century archaeologist, a companion of the Doctor and an associate of Irving Braxiatel.
An adventurer in her own right, both before and after her years in the TARDIS, Bernice was destined to make choices that would decide the fate of the universe and to become worshiped, in some cultures, as a minor goddess of Inebriation.
Biography
Early life
- The dating of Bernice's early life is problematic. Some dates given for her birth would place it a century too early for her to have lived through her formative events (NA: Falls the Shadow) and others would mean that she was only three years old by the point at which she has been depicted as being seven (NA: Return of the Living Dad). It might be suspected that Irving Braxiatel's manipulations of her timeline could have something to do with this (BFBS: The End of the World (BFBS)):
Birth and childhood
Benny was born to Claire and Isaac Summerfield. A child of the Alliance's Second Dalek War (NA: Love and War), she moved from school to school too regularly to settle in anywhere. It was at a boarding school on Mal Oreille that she experienced her first recorded adventure when she discovered that the Matron there was a giant toad feeding on the pupils. She was duly expelled (BFBS: Missing Adventures: Biology Lesson on Mal Oreille).
By seven years of age (NA: Return of the Living Dad), Bernice was living with her mother in the town of Vandor Prime on the colony of Beta Caparsis in the Gamma Delphinus System. Despite her father's role as an Admiral in Spacefleet she saw him regularly, and he filled her head with pearls of military wisdom (BFBS: Missing Adventures: The Evacuation of Bernice Summerfield Considered as a Short Film by Terry Gilliam) as well as taking her fishing and reading her fairy stories (NA: The Pit). She recalls waving goodbye to his battleship (NA: Shadowmind), the Tisiphone as it departed to fight the Daleks in 2543's battle of Bellatrix (NA: Return of the Living Dad). The ship went missing and Bernice's father was thought dead (NA: Love and War).
Within six months of this (BFBS: Missing Adventures: The Evacuation of...), the Daleks attacked Beta Caparsis. Bernice was placed in a shelter by her mother, who was then exterminated while returning to retrieve her daughter's favourite doll (NA: Love and War). This at least is how Bernice recalls it, but it is possible that Claire Summerfield in fact met her end simply stumbling around dazed from the first wave of plasma fire (NA: Lucifer Rising). If the story of the favourite doll originated mostly from Bernice's survivor guilt that would explain her later inconsistency as to whether the doll was called 'Rebecca' or 'Molly' (NA: Love and War, Parasite).
With the other survivors, Bernice was evacuated to a space station aboard the Star of Lucknow where she had a bewildering encounter with the Pythia and her grotesque Circus of War. The Circus entertained the departing souls of the dead in exchange for passge through the cracks in reality and invited Benny, who they named 'The Girl with Nothing to Say', to join them. She declined (BFBS: Missing Adventures: The Evacuation of Bernice Summerfield Considered as a Short Film by Terry Gilliam).
Teenage life and young adulthood
She also declined the hospitality of her foster parents, running away (NA: Parasite) and by thirteen (BFBS: Missing Adventures: The Tunnels to Heaven) finding herself placed in a military academy (NA: Love and War). She showed much apptitude for soldiering, but treated the whole ethos with disdain. She was considered for Section Leader among the cadets but her disciplinary record prohibited this (BFBS: Missing Adventures: The Tunnels to Heaven).
By sixteen, Bernice had escaped from the Academy and lived in the nearby woods. She had become something of a guru-figure to the young girls who came to her for advice (NA: Love and War). It was they who first gave her the nickname "Professor" (NA: Blood Harvest). Benny was not alone in the woods, however, as Simon Kyle had constructed a shelter there for his illictly reconstituted Galapagos tortoises. He became her first lover, and betrayed her to the Academy when they were discovered by a patrol (NA: Love and War, Return of the Living Dad).
Re-enlisted, she escaped in an escape pod from a troop ship that was enroute to the planet Capella. Bernice faked her archaeological qualifications enough to get onto various digs. (BNA: Beyond the Sun) On one particular dig she was taught that there was a subtle difference between between a knife used for cutting cut and a spear or hunting knife. (NA: Just War)
Bernice had a particular interest in the culture of the Ice Warriors of the planet Mars. (NA: Transit, Legacy)
Travels with the Doctor
- This section alludes to a timeline in which Bernice Summerfield travelled with the Doctor. Due to the intervention of Irving Braxiatel, who she met later, this timeline may no longer exist.
When Bernice had just turned 30 when she went to the planet Heaven, doing work on the Heavenite arch that was there. She had made camp with a group of Travellers. Whilst she was there the Hoothi attacked Heaven and she met the Doctor and Ace. She saw both sides of the conflict between the Doctor and Ace and agrees to travel with the Doctor after Ace departs his company, but only travelling with the Doctor when he promises not to play games with her life. (NA: Love and War)
Benny travelled with the Doctor for some time. She was stuck in 1909 London for sometime and gets implanted with Charrl consciousness, but is later rescued by Muldwych. (NA: Birthright) She fronted the punk rock band Plasticine in 1976, writing its songs and singing lead vocals. (NA: No Future)
She later met Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Watson ended up having a crush on her. (NA: All-Consuming Fire)
Bernice fell in love with Guy de Carnac in 1242 France. (NA: Sanctuary)
She was captured and tortured by the Nazis in Guernsey in 1943, when they threatened to shave her scalp it nearly broke her resolve and spirit. (NA: Just War)
Bernice met her future husband, Jason Kane on the planet Moriel, but they didn't quite realise that they were attracted to each other until Shug pointed it out to them. According to Shug, Jason's bad childhood means he equated love with violence, and therefore only has encounters (mainly sexual ones) with no emotional involvement. Benny on the other hand has given her absent father god-like attributes which no person can measure up to; and manoeuvres men into betraying her (re-enacting her father's perceived betrayal of her). They fell in love because they're both trying to sabotage their relationship. (NA: Death and Diplomacy)
Marriage and divorce
Benny was married to Jason in the village of Cheldon Bonniface, England in the year 2010 with a host of guests from all space and time. (NA: Happy Endings)
Benny finally found her father, who had been pulled backwards through time and was running a bookshop/coffee shop in Little Caldwell, England, in 1983, but not just a book shop, it was also a front for helping stranded aliens. (NA: Return of the Living Dad)
Benny, not trusting Jason and his cheating and untrustworthy ways, divorced him when they were on the Moon. (NA: Eternity Weeps)
The Doctor dropped Bernice at his house in Kent in 1997. When he returned to pick her up she discovers (with some shock) that he had regenerated. Whilst in England in 1997 she witnessed the Ice Warriors' attempted invasion of Earth. She assisted UNIT and the Doctor, though when he is consumed by the Red Death she believed him dead, though together they did manage to defeat the Martians (NA: The Dying Days)
During her first encounter with the Eighth Doctor, the Doctor states that, as of that time, she was his longest-serving companion (although the exact length of her tenure is not yet known) (NA: The Dying Days).
- While during an adventure which took her inside the Seventh Doctor's mind, Bernice had already seen, and felt some attraction to, the Eighth Doctor, though they had not actually met. (BFA: The Shadow of the Scourge). The final chapter of The Dying Days has been interpreted as Bernice initiating a romantic encounter with the Eighth Doctor (NA: The Dying Days).
The St. Oscar's Years
The Martians defeated, whilst on Earth during the 1997 Martian Invasion, Bernice received an invitation to take up the Edward Watkinson Chair of Archaeology at St. Oscar's University on the planet Dellah, which she accepted. She was transported to Dellah from Earth by the Doctor, who also gave Wolsey to her. (NA: The Dying Days)
Whilst at St Oscar's she met Irving Braxiatel. It appeared that this meeting was thier first from Braxiatel's perspective, but subsequent to their earlier encounters from Bernice's. Later revelations regarding Braxiatel's long-term manipulation of Bernice (BFBS: The Dying Days,The Wake) suggest he was either lying on this point or that he was continuing to receive and make use of information from his future selves (BFA : Gallifrey: The Inquiry) as whether he had met her before or not, she was certianly known to him.
The Braxiatel Collection Years
Bernice decided to take up Irving Braxiatel's offer to come to the Braxiatel Collection following Dellah's destruction/removal from normal space. (BNA: Twilight of the Gods)
In the process of assisting in the set up of the collection she fell pregnant (when an ancient God possessed her body leader her to have sex with a Kiloran named Adrian Wall. (BFBS:The Squire's Crystal)
Alternate timeline Also Bennys
Partly due to her involvement with the constantly paradox-beset Eighth Doctor (CP: Fishy Business) and partly due to Irving Braxiatel's attempts to edit her timeline for his own sinister purposes (BFBS:The End of the World) Bernice's personal history contains some ambiguity.
Both contradictory accounts of her visit to Guernsey (NA:Just War, BFBS:Just War) appear to have taken place (CP: Fishy Business, Iris Explains, BFBS: A Life of Surprises: Paydirt) and Bernice is able to recall them both (BFBS: A Life of Suprises: Dear Friend...).
Furthermore, a timeline exists in which Bernice married the Doctor in his eighth incarnation and bore him thirteen 'half-immortal' children (CP: Fishy Business, CP: Iris Explains, BFBS: A Life of Surprises: Paydirt).
In general though, Bernice's timeline is not fundamentally unknowable or non-linear such as Iris Wildthyme's, but has rather been repeatedly diverted from what it should have been. Bernice and Jason's divorce was never meant to occur and by the time of the Mim-Draconian War, itself an alteration to history, they should have had two children together.
- Braxiatel's reasons for altering her past have yet to be fully revealed.
Bernice Summerfield's Published Works
- Down Among the Dead Men (2593) (BNA: Oh No It Isn't!)
- Devil Gate Drive: The Influence of The Descent of Inanna on Twentieth Century Popular Culture (2594)
- A Practical Guide to Archaeology for Beginners (2594)
- An Eye for Wisdom: Repetitive poems of the Early Ikkaban Period (2595) (NA: Sleepy)
- Dead Man Running (2600)
- Little Archeologists Primer: a story book (2605)
- The Doctor Who Makes Planet Calls (2606)
- 45 Second Piglet (Unknown)
- A comic book only commissioned as Bernice was passing through an American publishing house and had an English accent.
Behind the Scenes
Paul Cornell created the personality and biography of Bernice Summerfield with assistance of the then-editor of the Virgin New Adventures range of novels, Peter Darvill-Evans, with artist Lee Sullivan "designing" her visually. Initially, Cornell had visualized her as resembling a short-haired version of actor Emma Thompson.
Bernice first appeared in the Virgin New Adventures series, heralded by an illustrated two page introduction in Doctor Who Magazine. Later, she crossed over into comics in Doctor Who Magazine. Since her creation, she had a a series of books of her own, and would later appeared in audio dramas and new novels and short fiction from Big Finish. If the unproduced special The Dark Dimension had come to pass, she would have appeared on television, though, so far, she has yet to do so. Lisa Bowerman acts as both Benny's voice in audio plays as well as having posed for publicity photos as Bernice.
In terms of continuity, early novels placed Bernice Summerfield as living in the 25th century when she first met the Doctor. Later books changed this to the 26th century, to better fit in with previous continuity established in the Doctor Who television story Frontier in Space, which took place in the year 2540.
