Steven Taylor

Steven Taylor was a spaceship pilot who became a companion of the First Doctor. Though human, he did not join the TARDIS' crew on the planet Earth. Instead, he stowed away on their vessel at the planet Mechanus, shortly after Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright left the Doctor's company. He remained with the Doctor until a relatively short time before the Time Lord's first regeneration. He travelled with Vicki Pallister, Oliver Harper, Katarina, Sara Kingdom and Dodo Chaplet, though he also briefly met Ian and Barbara as well. He left the Doctor's side to help govern the planet of the savages.

Steven was notable for being the first known male companion to travel alone with the Doctor (TV: The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve) — something that would not happen again until Jamie McCrimmon had a brief solo stint with the Second Doctor. (COMIC: Invasion of the Quarks, et al) He was also the first of a rare breed of companion: one that neither joined nor departed the TARDIS at the planet on which they were born.

Prior to meeting the Doctor
Steven was born on 10 February long enough after the 22nd century for the Dalek invasion of Earth to be a dim and distant memory, but long enough before the year 4000 for Sara Kingdom to think his technology primitive. (AUDIO: Return of the Rocket Men; TV: The Daleks' Master Plan)

Steven grew up during a war (TV: The Chase) on a Hiveblock on Earth. (PROSE: The Empire of Glass) As children, he and his classmates built a 5D representation of East Berlin. (AUDIO: The Anachronauts)

He was a Protestant. (TV: The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve)

On his 21st birthday, Steven was flying a cargo ship when he attacked by the Rocket Men. Beaten and shot in the legs by their captain, Van Cleef, Steven was saved by his future self disguised as deceased Rocket Man Ramirez. Steven lost consciousness in his ship and was meanwhile recovered by the Protectorate arm of the Galactic Heritage and taken to a field hospital. (AUDIO: Return of the Rocket Men)

After visiting the ruins of New York City (a legacy of the 22nd century Dalek invasion), he enlisted in the military. He served as helmsman on a battleship and later as a solo combat pilot, going from one spaceship or space station to another. He held the latter post as a form of reprisal for reporting the killing of a homeless person on Roylus Prime, which he visited on shore leave. (PROSE: Salvation, AUDIO: Return of the Rocket Men)

He studied basic anatomy as part of his pilot training. (AUDIO: The Suffering)

By the time Steven met the Doctor, the war with the Krayt had stretched on for fifty years. (PROSE: The Empire of Glass)

On a mission, Steven crashed on the planet Mechanus in the jungle. He wandered around for days, trying to avoid the hostile plant life. He was captured by the Mechanoids and taken to their city. There, he spent two years as a prisoner, alone but for a toy panda mascot he called HiFi. (TV: The Chase) He spent a great deal of time in solitary confinement on Mechanus. (AUDIO: The Anachronauts)

Adventures with the Doctor
While a prisoner, Steven built a wooden construction rather like a climbing frame to keep himself active. It let him climb up to the roof for fresh air. It was in his room in the Mechanoid City that Steven met the Doctor and his companions and soon after, the Daleks. He asked, "Who won the war?" and introduced himself as "Steven Taylor, Flight Red Fifty". He helped the others escape from the city, though he returned to retrieve HiFi. Steven fell from a great height when the Daleks destroyed the Mechanoid City. He stumbled through the jungle and found the Doctor's TARDIS and entered it as the Doctor and Vicki Pallister were saying goodbye to their former companions, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. Before the Doctor and Vicki returned to the TARDIS, Steven passed out in a dead faint. (TV: The Chase) The Doctor and Vicki found Steven inside the TARDIS, and explained the time machine's functions. They found the Monk, a man from the same place as the Doctor who had his own TARDIS, in 1066 Northumbria trying to meddle with history and change the course of the Battle of Hastings. Although the Monk had tied up the three travellers and prepared to fire an atomic cannon at a fleet of Vikings, this plan was stopped when a group of Saxons attacked the Monk's monastery and drove the Monk out, while the Doctor removed the dimensional control of the Monk's TARDIS, trapping him there. As there was no direct route home for Steven via TARDIS, he continued travelling with the Doctor and Vicki. (TV: The Time Meddler)

They later travelled to England in 1912 where they came into contact which an alien skull. This skull managed to get to possess Vicki which made Steven very concerned. The Doctor and Steven investigated the skull and found out that it came from an alien woman who wanted to make all men suffer the treatment she got on her planet. He also had to find the ingredients the Doctor need to forge the skull as its discovery was important in the history of humanity. (AUDIO: The Suffering)

The TARDIS crew helped a stranded Lapino, a member of a species that fed on emotions, gather enough emotional energy to send a message to his home planet. To produce emotions, the Lapino threatened to kill Vicki and Steven. The Doctor instead arranged for them to fall under the illusion that they were Cinderella and her prince. Vicki and Steven later remembered little of the event. (PROSE: Planet of the Bunnoids)

The travellers arrived in Prague in 2348, where they participated in the celebration of the 1000th anniversary of the Charles University and prevented a scientist named Jane Childress from erasing the human evolution. Steven and Vicki were turned into monkeys but soon were restored to their human form. (PROSE: The Long Step Backward)

The TARDIS materialised on the lunar station on Phobos, a moon of Mars. Steven commandeered a rescue ship and saved a Jarnian named Hazam from his exploding spacecraft. They crashed onto the planet's surface and were stranded in a sandstorm, the oxygen in their spacesuits running out. They were picked up by another rescue ship sent from the station. (PROSE: Mars)

In the city of Troy, Steven temporarily adopted the name "Diomede". He was wounded in the shoulder by a sword thrust and suffered blood poisoning. A temple handmaiden called Katarina, whom the travellers had met earlier, nursed him back to health and helped him return to the TARDIS. (TV: The Myth Makers) Once he had recovered, Steven faced some of the worst experiences of his life. Katarina and two new allies, siblings Bret Vyon and Sara Kingdom, all died violently in the midst of a complicated series of events which ranged from the planet Kembel in 4000 through time and space. Minutes after the death of Sara Kingdom, Steven asked the Doctor, in the waste that the Time Destructor had made of Kembel, if he considered the loss of so many lives worthwhile to defeat the Daleks. (TV: The Daleks' Master Plan)

After the Daleks and Mavic Chen had been defeated, the TARDIS materialised in London in 1966. There they encounter the Fulgurites, who were involved in the trafficking of humans across the galaxy for slave labour with the full knowledge of the British government. The Doctor and Steven put an end to the Fulgurites' activities with the assistance of a young city trader named Oliver Harper, who joined the TARDIS crew. (AUDIO: The Perpetual Bond) He got worried when he saw a wreckage field near the satellite they had landed. He met the Calleons, a trader race. He used his knowledge of space flight and calculating the orbit of the section of the broken satellite in order to try to get back to the TARDIS. He didn't save himself but saved the Doctor. (AUDIO: The Cold Equations) Oliver travelled with the Doctor and Steven briefly. He met his death at the hands of the Vardans on the asteroid Grace Alone while saving his companions' lives. (AUDIO: The First Wave)

When the travellers arrived in Paris in August 1572, Steven was disgusted by the Doctor's abandonment of his Huguenot friends, in particular the young Anne Chaplet. He was so disillusioned that he left the TARDIS when it had returned to London in 1966, but returned to warn the Doctor that two policemen were approaching and was swept up in the adventures of the Doctor once again. He met Dodo Chaplet, who was possibly, he thought, a descendant of Anne Chaplet, proving she had lived. (TV: The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve) When Dodo Chaplet joined the Doctor and Steven, he picked up her cold virus, as he had no immunity to it. (TV: The Ark)

Leaving the Doctor
Shortly after leaving America he, the Doctor and Dodo landed in Russia in 1812, where he spent time relaxing after his adventures, fishing and exploring the country. When a spaceship crashed in the the mountains he went to investigate it. He was knocked unconscious by the Shape thief. He later thought something was wrong when the Doctor forgot how to fly the ship. (AUDIO: Mother Russia)

He travelled to Africa during the Boer Wars to find a crashed spaceship which was carrying a dangerous criminal. The Doctor and Steven were taken to Kali Carash the prisoner in the ship who wanted to leave the planet using the Doctor and his TARDIS. (AUDIO: Tales from the Vault)

Steven ended up disguising himself to save a younger version of himself from being killed at the hands of the Rocket Men, as well as saving Dodo and the pioneering colonists on Ulysses 519. After this he began to wonder if his time with the Doctor was nearing its end. (AUDIO:  Return of the Rocket Men)

Soon afterwards, they arrived on a planet called Comfort where the Doctor caused the people of the planet to end its artificial war created by the planet main computer by trapping the computer in a loop so that people could look after themselves. Immediately left the planet during the victory celebration, Steven thought that they couldn't just leave the planet like that, when they were unsure how the new society would have evolved. Steven decided the next place they landed he wanted to make a lasting impression. (AUDIO: The War To End All Wars)

Eventually, the experiences that Steven had on his travels led him to decide to use his skills and training to help rebuild a civilisation. When Chal invited him to help the Elders and the Savages live together, he accepted the challenge and left the TARDIS. (TV: The Savages)

Later life
On the planet that he chose as his new home, Steven became king and had three daughters. His youngest, Dodo, was his favourite. The copy of the Doctor's mind was placed in a jar and Steven saw the copy didn't have the morality of the original and insisted that it was not the Doctor. (AUDIO: The War To End All Wars)

Many years after he had left the TARDIS, he was transported to an alternative version of the Death Zone on Gallifrey by Borusa. Once there, he was soon reunited with not only the Doctor, by then in his fifth incarnation, but Ian and Sara, whom he learned had been essentially brought back from the dead. He also met the Doctor's later companions Polly Wright and Nyssa. Steven and his fellow former companions assisted the Doctor in defeating the Daleks and the Sontarans, who had likewise been brought to the alternative Death Zone using a Time Scoop. As a Sontaran scout ship had landed on the Elders' planet several years earlier, Steven was aware that a Sontaran could be incapacitated by striking their probic vent. Before the Doctor was transported to the Capitol with a transmat recall device supplied by, he promised his former companions that he would check up on them soon. Once the Doctor had gone, Steven was the first to acknowledge that, in spite of his best intentions, they would most likely never see him again.

As the Doctor told his former companions that their memories could be hazy after being returned to their respective native eras by the Time Lords, it is unclear how much of his experiences in the alternative Death Zone that Steven remembered. (AUDIO: The Five Companions)

Later in his life, Dodo was killed by assassins and two other daughters wanted parts of his kingdom. After Dodo was killed, Steven gave up the throne, so people could govern themselves. He exiled himself to a dark cabin in the mountains. He shunned himself from the outside world. He had a granddaughter named Sida. He told Sida about his travels with the Doctor. As Sida got older, she asked Steven why he gave up the throne. Steven told Sida about his experience on the planet Comfort and his experience that taught him that people should govern themselves. Sida told her grandfather that the copy of the Doctor was running to becoming the new ruler of the planet. (AUDIO: The War To End All Wars)

Undated events
At some point, Steven was taken to the Black Archive by UNIT to have his record as a companion of the Doctor taken. His memories of the visit were subsequently erased and he was sent on his way. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)

Other information
The Doctor did not give Steven his own TARDIS key until late in his travels. (PROSE: The Empire of Glass) Steven was unaware that the Doctor was a Time Lord and was unfamiliar with the concept of regeneration until reunited with the Doctor in the alternative Death Zone on Gallifrey. (AUDIO: The Five Companions)

The Doctor took pains to ensure that Steven did not draw undue attention to himself during their travels together. When the TARDIS materialised in the American Wild West (specifically Tombstone, Arizona in October 1881), Steven wore a flashy, inaccurate recreation of Western dress which he had procured from the TARDIS wardrobe. He fancied himself "Dead-eye Steve, the fastest, meanest gun in the West". The Doctor introduced him as "Steven Regret, tenor." Actually, Steven could sing and play the piano or this cover would have been almost as eye-catching as Steven's own idea. (TV: The Gunfighters)

Vicki once described Steven as a "handsome space pilot." (AUDIO: The Suffering) She viewed Steven as being like a "big brother," one whom she could boss about. (AUDIO: Frostfire, Upstairs)

Sara considered him to be a good ally and a good man to have around in a crisis. (AUDIO: The Guardian of the Solar System) Steven later commented that he and Sara were fast becoming friends over the course of their travels and that their relationship might have developed further if Sara had survived. (AUDIO: The Anachronauts)

When they met him in February 1814, Jane Austen confided in Vicki that she believed that Steven was handsome enough to set all the hearts of London aflutter. (AUDIO: Frostfire)

Steven considered football to be "an idiotic sport for idiotic people." (AUDIO: This Sporting Life)



 סטיבן טיילור Steven Taylor