Kate Stewart
Kate Stewart, born Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and nicknamed "Tiger" by her father, was the daughter of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and his first wife Fiona, and was the mother of Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. (TV The Power of Three; PROSE: The Scales of Injustice; HOMEVID: Downtime)
Biography
Childhood
Fiona and Alistair had Kate three years into their marriage, circa 1973. Their marriage lasted eight years. As a child, Kate was never told of her father's work at UNIT with aliens and was only told that he was a military man. She would often pretend that he was off to have an amazing adventure when really she knew he was off to do boring military operations. (HOMEVID: Downtime)
At the time of the Wenley Moor Silurian incident, Kate was five. It was during this mission that Alistair realised that he was an inadequate father for her. The secretive nature of his work with UNIT prevented him from being consistently present in her life. His long absences from home caused Fiona to leave him. Alistair guessed that she and Kate went off to at least initially live somewhere close to Chichester, the home of Kate's maternal grandparents. (PROSE: The Scales of Injustice)
Later life
Eventually Kate grew estranged from her father. (HOMEVID: Downtime)
By the early 1990s, Kate had a son named Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart with a man who chose not to help raise their child. Kate and her son made their home aboard a houseboat moored on an English river.
Because the cult based at New World University believed she might be able to lead them to the Brigadier, whom they thought possessed a locus vital to the Great Intelligence, she and Gordon were harassed by students who staked out her houseboat. Frightened, she reconnected with her father in 1995 and briefly fought alongside him and Sarah Jane Smith against the New World group. After the Great Intelligence was again defeated, she entered into a friendlier relationship with her dad, and ensured that Alistair could have a relationship with the grandson he had not previously known existed. (HOMEVID: Downtime)
In 2004, Kate encountered Mastho, one of the last Daemons. (HOMEVID: Dæmos Rising)
Kate dropped the name "Lethbridge" when she joined UNIT so as to be judged on her own merits and not be the beneficiary of favouritism. Her father mentored her until his death. He instilled in her the position that "science leads", something he learned from "an old friend" (i.e., the Doctor). Kate eventually rose to the post of Head of Scientific Research, and established UNIT as a military organisation led by its scientists. In this capacity, she summoned the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond to the Tower of London to investigate the mystery of the Shakri cubes. Kate attempted to warn the governments of the world of the cubes when they started their countdown. (TV: The Power of Three)
Behind the scenes
- The character of Kate Stewart was created by Marc Platt for the 1995 direct-to-video story, Downtime. Beverley Cressman portrayed the character. A younger version of Kate appeared in the 1996 Virgin Missing Adventures novel The Scales of Injustice by Gary Russell. She would reappear, again played by Cressman in Dæmos Rising. In 2012 she appeared in the television Doctor Who story The Power of Three, almost twenty years after the character was created. Kate's appearance in The Power of Three marks the first time that a character created for an independent spin-off production has appeared in the main series. Although characters created for independent spin-off stories have previously been depicted on the series, such as Professor Candy whom Steven Moffat created in the 1996 short story Continuity Errors was depicted in Let's Kill Hitler.
- In The Power of Three, actress Jemma Redgrave, who has naturally brunette hair, appears as a blonde, which matches Beverley Cressman's hair colour in the home videos.
