Leela

Leela was a warrior of the savage Sevateem, a tribe of regressed humans. She joined the Fourth Doctor on his travels and with him fought for good causes. Although quite clever, she knew little of technology, and was continually amazed by her surroundings and the tasks she faced. Leela never lost her primitive edge, and remained quick to take up arms throughout her time with the Doctor.

She left the Doctor after she chose to live on Gallifrey with Andred, a member of the Chancellery Guard with whom she had fallen in love. K9 decided to remain with her.

Meeting with the Doctor
Leela, daughter of Sole and friend to Tomas, was one of the Sevateem (the name was a corruption of "survey team") descended from the Mordee expedition. For weapons, Leela favoured janis thorns, which caused paralysis and death, and a knife.

Leela profaned the Sevateem's supposed god, Xoanon. Her father died undertaking the ritual test of the Horda on her behalf. She faced exile when she met the Fourth Doctor, who resembled the Sevateem's mythic figure, the Evil One. He had earlier visited Leela's world, repaired the Mordee expedition's computer, Xoanon, and neglected to remove his own personality from it. The conflict between Xoanon and the Doctor's personality drove Xoanon mad, splitting it in two. It conducted a long-term eugenics experiment that resulted in two tribes: the Sevateem and their enemies, the Tesh. The Doctor restored Xoanon's sanity. As he prepared to leave the planet, Leela asked to travel with him. He refused, but she darted into the TARDIS and they set off together after Leela triggered the TARDIS' dematerialisation by accident. (DW: The Face of Evil)

Travels
Leela was primitive, but very smart. Despite the Doctor's efforts to "civilise" and educate her, she kept her savage ways. She translated advanced ideas into terms she could understand. She usually dressed in animal skins, and armed herself with a knife and Janis thorns. She did not hesitate to use them, despite the Doctor's disapproval. With the Doctor, she fought Taren Capel. (DW: The Robots of Death) As part of the Doctor's efforts to teach Leela about her ancestors, he brought her to Victorian London. There, they encountered and defeated the 51st century villain Magnus Greel. (DW: The Talons of Weng-Chiang)

In 5000, the Swarm brought the Doctor to the Bi-Al Foundation, which they took over. As the Doctor fell into a self-induced coma to fight off the influence of the Nucleus, he sent a shrunken clone of Leela and himself inside his brain to fight the infection. Absorbing Leela's clone unleashed her antibodies into the Doctor's system, saving him.

With the help of K9, Leela killed some of the Titan Base who were infected with the Swarm. She urged the Doctor to blow up the hatchling Swarm, which the Doctor finally agreed to. Leela begged him to accept Professor Marius' offer of K9 as a gift. K9 entered the TARDIS of his own accord, joining them on their journeys. (DW: The Invisible Enemy)

On Pluto, Leela was rescued from the steamer moments from death and took part in the Citizens' Revolution that overthrew the Company. (DW: The Sun Makers)

When they visited the home of the Doctor's former companion Joshua Douglas and his family, Leela met the imprisoned emperor of the Z'nai, whom the Doctor had contained long before. He hoped to find an antidote for the plague which Douglas had released to destroy his people. Douglas' daughter freed the emperor, sparking a resurgence of the Z'nai empire. For an unknown reason, Leela became the virus' vector, infecting the Z'nai with it. She wiped out the Z'nai except for the emperor, whom the Doctor imprisoned again. (CC: The Catalyst)

The Doctor, now seemingly power-mad, returned to Gallifrey and claimed his right to become Lord President of the High Council of Time Lords. Banished from the Capitol, Leela joined the Outsiders, outcast Gallifreyans led by Nesbin. She helped in the Doctor's plan to repel invading Sontarans. She also fell in love with Andred of the Chancellory Guard. She stayed on Gallifrey with K9. The Doctor had a second K9 to take with him. (DW: The Invasion of Time)

Life on Gallifrey
She spent the next decades in the Capitol. Andred and Leela conceived a child, the first born on Gallifrey for millennia. (Pythia had long ago made the Gallifreyans a sterile race.) (NA: Lungbarrow) There were hints that the Doctor was really her son; this was covered up by family, politics and paradox-avoiding paranoia.

Andred vanished, and Leela served as bodyguard and confidante to President Romana, another former companion of the Doctor. (BFG: Weapon of Choice) She was drawn into Time Lord politics and conspiracies while working on Presidential missions with Celestial Intervention Agency operatives Torvald and Coordinator Narvin. (BFG: Square One, A Blind Eye) She discovered that Torvald had caused Andred's death, but later that Torvald was really a regenerated Andred. (BFG: A Blind Eye) Leela had not forgiven Andred for his deceit when he died soon afterwards. During the troubled time that followed, Leela's most trusted friend, K9, was destroyed in an explosion aimed at off-world students of the Time Lord Academy. Bitter at the loss of her last link with the Doctor, Leela refused a replacement. (BFG: Imperiatrix) In the Time Lord civil war, Leela fought on Romana's side and was temporarily blinded by a bomb. (BFG: Fractures)

Life after Gallifrey
After her sight returned, Leela survived the destruction of Gallifrey in the Last Great Time War. She ended up a prisoner of the Z'Nai, who had returned to power. While Leela lived on Gallifrey, the Time Lords had allowed her to retain her youth for a greatly extended time. This was no longer so. While the Z'nai tortured Leela for information about Gallifrey and the Time Lords, she aged physically, one year for each day.

The Z'nai had abandoned their ancient custom of leaving their chests bare. Just before the Z'nai interrogating her was to kill her, she gave him a choice - stop the killing or be killed. He laughed, but she infected him with the plague that had wiped out the Z'nai originally. The entire race died, leaving Leela and the other prisoners at first joyful, then terrified as they realised they were trapped and abandoned. Leela remained bound, without the strength to free herself, reminiscing about her days with the Doctor as she waited to die. (CC: The Catalyst)

Other information

 * When a Rutan ship exploded above Fang Rock, pigmentation dispersal caused Leela's eye colour to change permanently from brown to blue. (DW: Horror of Fang Rock) This was a cover-up for the removal of contact lenses - due to discomfort - that made Louise Jameson's blue eyes brown.
 * Leela wrote with her left hand, but threw her knife and performed other actions with her right, suggesting some degree of ambidexterity (DW: The Invisible Enemy).
 * The Doctor commented on the fact that Leela's child would be half-Gallifreyan and half-human. He told Leela to name the child after him. (NA: Lungbarrow) This raises the possibility that Leela's child actually became the Other (although it is not known the Other was half-human), making Leela, in a way, the Doctor's mother.
 * Leela never used contractions when speaking — for example, she always said "do not" instead of "don't".

Alternative timelines

 * In an alternative timeline in which it was standard policy for the Time Lords to sell their temporal technology in the highest bidder and regenerations could be extracted and sold, Leela and K9 Mark I accompanied the Doctor on his search for the Key to Time. She was the only human to hold the Key to Time in her hands. Consequently, when her counterpart from the proper timeline visited this alternative Gallifrey, she was appointed Lady President. (BFG: Reborn)
 * In another timeline in which the Time Lords regularly altered history through the Temporal Intervention Agency, Leela was brought to Gallifrey to amuse the then Lord President. She subsequently murdered Interrogator General Narvin and assumed his position under Lady President Romana. When her blind counterpart from the proper timeline visited this alternative Gallifrey, she took great pleasure in torturing her. (BFG: Disassembled)

Creation of the character
Leela was first conceived by producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes. They wanted someone in the mould of Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion: a bright but unsophisticated primitive who would learn from the Doctor. Writer Chris Boucher had submitted a story proposal entitled The Mentor Conspiracy. It featured a character named Leela which fit Hinchcliffe and Holmes's ideas.

Although The Mentor Conspiracy was not produced, Boucher reused the character of Leela for The Day God Went Mad (later renamed The Face of Evil), seeing her as a mixture of Emma Peel from The Avengers and Leila Khaled. Boucher was asked to write two endings to the story, in one, Leela left with the Doctor and in the other she stayed behind. The decision to have Leela become a companion was made soon after.

Initially, Leela was to have only appeared in three stories. It was decided later she would stay for the remainder of Season 15. One consequence of this decision was a plot contrivance added to Horror of Fang Rock to allow the character's eye colour to change, so actress Louise Jameson would not have to wear uncomfortable coloured contact lenses.

Jameson felt that Doctor Who's writers sometimes neglected to write for Leela as an individual, instead writing her as a stereotypical "Doctor Who girl." For example, in Underworld, the script originally had Leela screaming when overwhelmed by poisonous gas. Jameson declined to do this, pointing out that it was not in character for the warrior Leela. (INFO: Underworld) In fact, Leela screamed in only one television story, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, when her leg was being gnawed by the giant rat — a scream which Jameson felt was justified. (DCOM: The Talons of Weng-Chiang)

Leela ranks as one of the most violent companions, regularly threatening or using deadly force against other humanoids (often to the Doctor's disgust as in DW: The Invisible Enemy, but occasionally not as in DW: Underworld). Although other companions sometimes killed (for example, Romana I shot a guard in DW: The Pirate Planet), others have killed in spin-off productions (most notably Jack Harkness in Torchwood) and Ace racked up body counts in the New Adventures novels, Leela remains, to date, the only TV companion to be shown killing on a frequent basis.

Along with Irving Braxiatel, she is one of only two characters to play a major role in two audio spin-off series: Gallifrey and Jago and Litefoot. Leela and Braxiatel have both also appeared in the main range of Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories as a result of their guest roles in BFA: Zagreus.