Charlotte Pollard

Charlotte Elspeth Pollard — known to her friends as Charley — was a female human companion of the Eighth Doctor. Later, she came to travel with the Sixth Doctor.

Her existence was always legally problematic for the Doctor. When he met her in his eighth life, he saved her from what should have been her natural death in the crash of the R101 dirigible, thus destabilising the Web of Time. Ultimately this act of compassion was a violation of the Laws of Time that forced him into exile in the Divergent Universe. Later, when she accidentally met the Sixth Doctor, her very presence with him again threatened to break Time Lord law by exposing him to foreknowledge about his own personal future.

Biography
Charlotte Pollard was born on 15 April 1912 into a well-to-do family; her mother was Lady Louisa Pollard and her father was Richard Pollard. (BFA: Memory Lane) She had two sisters, Margaret and Cecelia. The three sisters grew up in a manor house in Hampshire, looked after by servants. (BFA: The Chimes of Midnight, BFA: Zagreus) Her grandmother was named Saviltride and gave her a copy of Alice in Wonderland for Christmas 1919. (BFA: Zagreus)

She rebelled against her upper class upbringing. Styling herself an Edwardian adventuress, she ran away, seeking excitement. Making an appointment to meet a young man in Singapore on New Year's Day 1931, she stowed away on the R101 disguised as a male crew member. She met the Doctor and they discovered the secret mission the airship was on. She was rescued from the fated crash of the R101 by the Doctor and taken on board his TARDIS as his newest companion. (BFA: Storm Warning)

Following the death of C'rizz (BFA: Absolution), Charley asked the Eighth Doctor to take her home. However, after a battle with the Cybermen, she was stranded on a desert island in 500,002. (BFA: The Girl Who Never Was) Though she had seen the Doctor (apparently) die, she held out hope that he would regenerate and rescue her. When the TARDIS arrived for her, she found the Doctor, but in an earlier incarnation. (BFA: The Condemned) Because of her travels with the future Doctor she knew not to let him find out anything about her past, but he grew suspicious of her mysteriousness.

Eventually, the Doctor demanded to know Charley's secret, but before she could answer him, she was infected with a virus that had slipped through the TARDIS' defences. Charley discovered the virus had come from an entity called Mila, who had been a human guinea pig in experiments by the Daleks to create a virus to transform all lifeforms into Daleks. When the experiments failed, the Daleks attacked her, making her phase into another dimension. She had slipped aboard the TARDIS in the Doctor's first incarnation and had remained there since, invisible to everyone. Unbeknownst to the Doctor, Mila had used the virus to transform Charley into herself and herself into Charley, leaving Charley out of phase with reality and allowing her to take Charley's place at the Doctor's side. (BFA: Patient Zero)

Charley was found and cured by the Viyrans, whom she helped for several millenia in their quest to expunge all the viruses which had escaped from the Amethyst station. Finally they crossed paths with the Doctor and Charley/Mila in an alternate timeline created by the Viyrans' attempt to remove a virus from Earth's population. After Mila sacrificed herself to save the Doctor and the entire Earth, Charley revealed her identity to the Doctor. To make him want to forget his travels with her, she told him that when he met her, he would die (still believing that the Eighth Doctor had not regenerated). She used the Viyrans' memory-altering technology to replace Mila with herself in the Doctor's memories of their travels together. (BFA: Blue Forgotten Planet)

The Tenth Doctor, put on trial by the Shadow Proclamation, cited the saving of Charley Pollard as an example of his saving the life of someone who had been declared a "fixed point in time" and destined to die. (IDW: Fugitive)

Behind the scenes

 * The reference to Charley in IDW Publishing's Doctor Who Ongoing series marked the first time a character created for the Big Finish Productions audio drama line had been referenced in a comic book.
 * Nicholas Briggs has revealed that Big Finish are planning a Doctor-less Charley Pollard spin-off series.
 * Along with Thomas Brewster, Charley is one of only two companions created by Big Finish to be depicted travelling with two incarnations of the Doctor, namely the Eighth Doctor and the Sixth Doctor. The only other Big Finish created companion to have met two Doctors is Evelyn Smythe, who served as a companion of the Sixth Doctor for several years and encountered the Seventh Doctor in BFA: Thicker than Water and BFA: A Death in the Family.