Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-4028641-20170530022314/@comment-188432-20170530170710

I've never heard any of this before, though that doesn't make it untrue. Without proof, I'm gonna say, though, that it wasn't that she was a "bothersome" teenager that caused the age-up. It was merely the unseemliness of it. She was super young -- like in secondary school, so 16-ish -- so they probably just wanted to get her up to a more "comfortable" age.

As for her being written out of "most of the scenes in Dogs of Doom", I don't think you can credibly make that case. She's certainly in what I would call her fair share of panels, particularly given K9's presence makes it a two-companion story. And let's not forget that she prominently made the cover of DWM 30, during the run of Dogs.

It's an 8-part story, and she's in 6 of them. Yes, she's left behind in DWM 31, and doesn't appear in DWM 32 or 33, but this is also when the Daleks show up and the so-called "space truckers" in the story come to the fore. I've always read that as a move to give the Daleks and K9 their fair share of panels. In fact, it's a completely TV-based story-telling format. It's like those Robert Holmes-era six-parters that are really a four-parter and a two-parter smashed together.

So if there were some move to actively supress her appearance in Dogs, it doesn't appear jarringly obvious to me. As the Doctor senses things are about to become really dangerous, he tells his companion to stay behind in a relatively safe environment. Happens so much in Doctor Who that it's a trope.

Now, none of that is to say that she was a great character. The writers clearly didn't know what to do with her. Sharon is no Izzy, by any stretch of the imagination. But in Dogs is she treated poorly? Not really. No more poorly than any other companion in the JNT era on TV, certainly.