Liz Shaw
| INDIVIDUAL | |
| Prof. Elizabeth "Liz" Shaw | |
| |
| Race | Human |
| Home Planet | Earth |
| Home Era | 20th Century Humanian Era |
| Appearances | Full List of Appearances |
| Actor | Caroline John |
Liz Shaw, full name Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, is a fictional character played by Caroline John in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. A civilian member of UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), an international organisation that defends the Earth from alien threats, she was a companion of the Third Doctor and a regular in the programme in the 1970 season.
Liz first appeared in Spearhead from Space, where she was drafted from the University of Cambridge by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart as a scientific advisor to UNIT. Skeptical at first of UNIT's ambit to defend against alien invasion, she changed her mind when she encountered the newly-regenerated Third Doctor and became involved in defeating the plans of the Nestene Consciousness and its animated plastic Autons.
Liz was an accomplished scientist, an expert on meteorites with degrees in several disciplines, including physics and medicine. Her extensive training, however, still paled in comparison to the Doctor's own knowledge of the universe and scientific principles far beyond that of Earth's.
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Liz continued to work with the Doctor and UNIT through encounters with the Silurians, the so-called Ambassadors of Death and the Inferno project. She eventually resigned from UNIT and returned to Cambridge, but there was no "farewell scene" on screen for Liz, her departure simply being announced by the Brigadier at the beginning of Terror of the Autons. She reportedly told the Brigadier that all the Doctor really needed was someone to pass him his test tubes and tell him how wonderful he was, this feeling probably contributing to her decision to return to her own research. The spin-off novel The Scales of Injustice by Gary Russell explored the events surrounding Liz's resignation from UNIT.
Uniquely of all the companions, she is never seen to actually travel in the TARDIS, as her time with the Doctor coincided with his exile to Earth imposed by the Time Lords and the removal of his knowledge of time travel. She does, however, travel in the TARDIS in the Past Doctor Adventures novel The Wages of Sin by David A. McIntee, which takes place after the Doctor regains his knowledge and freedom.
Liz's life after leaving UNIT was not explored in the series. Caroline John appeared as an illusory image of Liz in the 20th Anniversary television movie The Five Doctors, and as Liz herself in the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time. John also played Liz Shaw in a series of straight-to-video stories produced by Reeltime Pictures under the umbrella title of P.R.O.B.E., where she was working with a paranormal investigation organization not unlike UNIT, called the "Preternatural Research Bureau". John has also appeared in an audio play from Big Finish Productions, Dust Breeding, together with the Seventh Doctor, but voicing a different character, Madame Salvadori.
According to the 1997 New Adventures novel Eternity Weeps by Jim Mortimore, Liz died in 2003, the victim of an extraterrestrial terraforming virus contracted while she was part of a UNIT team investigating an alien artifact on the Moon. The canonicity of the novels, like other spin-off media, is uncertain.
