Evelyn Smythe, later Evelyn Rossiter, (born 1945) was an accomplished academic, rather closer to the end of her long career than the beginning. Depending on her audience, she was known as Professor Smythe, Doctor Smythe or just plain Evelyn. As a professor of history, she was very interested in the TARDIS' time travel capabilities. Like Barbara Wright before her, she occasionally found that theories to which she had devoted much of her career were invalidated by examining events first-hand.
Her history with the Doctor was complicated. It involved a period of time where she was the Sixth Doctor's active companion and several visits long after she had departed. Accounts of her life, especially after her initial journeys in the TARDIS, occasionally conflicted, suggesting some meddling with her time stream.
Biography
In childhood, she was nicknamed "Evey" by her family. She had a sister named Mary who was her mother's favourite. Both of them, as well as her father, had died by 2000. (BFA: Arrangements for War)
When Evelyn met the Sixth Doctor, she was a history lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University with a particular interest in Tudor politics. Most of her life before this point had been focused almost totally on academic research, so much so her marriage had broken down following a row with her spouse about her attending an academic conference on their wedding anniversary. Part of her work included extensive investigation of her family tree and the life of one of her ancestors, John Whiteside-Smith, an adviser at the court of Elizabeth I.
It was the sudden disappearance of her family from history - including her Elizabethan relative - that led the Doctor to identify her as a temporal nexus point that threatened the stability of the time stream. Arriving in Sheffield in 2000, he took her to January 1555 to try to save her life by correcting the interference. This turned out to be a paradoxical result of her own actions in encouraging an attempt on the life of Elizabeth's half-sister and predecessor, Mary I. With this averted, she insisted on joining the Doctor on his travels as she could not pass up the opportunity to travel through time and explore history firsthand. (BFA: The Marian Conspiracy)
Travelling with the Doctor, she met the Brigadier, Charles Darwin and the Silurians. (BFA: The Spectre of Lanyon Moor, BFA: Bloodtide) She was present during the Etra Prime Incident and the Dalek invasion of Gallifrey, where she had her eye print scanned into the Eye of Harmony. (BFA: The Apocalypse Element)
In London in 1999, she befriended Cassie, a young waitress turned into a vampire by Nimrod. The Doctor and she set out to find a cure. (BFA: Project: Twilight) By the time they returned in 2004, Cassie had been brainwashed by the Forge and it was only through persuasion by Evelyn that she could be returned to her original personality. Before she could escape in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Evelyn, Nimrod killed her. This devastated Evelyn. (BFA: Project: Lazarus)
Cassie's death and the Doctor's inability to save her put great strain on Evelyn's relationship with him. She needed some time away. During this time, on the planet Világ, Evelyn grew close to a man named Rossiter. but felt that she could not leave the Doctor for him. (BFA: Arrangements for War)
Evelyn was suffering from a heart condition when she met the Doctor, something which she never told him in case he refused to let her travel with him. (BFA: Project: Lazarus)
At some point during her travels with the Doctor, they visited the court of Elizabeth I. (BFA: Thicker than Water)
On a return trip to Világ, Evelyn decided to leave the Doctor and marry Rossiter. The Doctor reacted badly and refused to say goodbye properly. She had hoped the Doctor would attend her wedding and give her away, but he never turned up. She had surgery to cure her heart condition, but the surgery used Killoran blood to disguise the problem. This caused headaches and short temper.
Two years later, the Doctor arrived with his companion Melanie Bush to visit Evelyn, who was having problems with her stepdaughter Sofia's ideologies. Evelyn and Mel were kidnapped soon after, to become political prisoners. The activists, who had injected Evelyn with Killoran DNA, knew Sofia, but she was not involved with their plot. The Doctor and Sofia worked together to save Evelyn's life and although her heart condition was not cured, Evelyn was happy. The Doctor and she made their peace at the renewing of Evelyn and Rossiter's vows. While Evelyn was being treated for the damage done by the Killoran DNA, the Seventh Doctor secretly visited her to tell her that Hex, Cassie's son, had joined him as a travelling companion. (BFA: Thicker than Water)
Ten years after Rossiter's death, Evelyn was accidentally transported from Világ to the planet Pelicham billions of years in the past by a temporal stabiliser which she had discovered in an archaeological dig on Világ. Further investigation revealed the stabiliser was from a timeship called the Pelican. It had crashed on the planet Pelicham in the distant past (hence the similar names). Evelyn lived on Pelicham for two years before suffering a fatal heart attack. It was during this time that she met Hex, who had been sent to Pelicham by the Doctor. The Seventh Doctor arrived just before her death, asking her to help him defeat the Word Lord Nobody No-One in a complex plan involving trapping him in the Hand of All, a pocket universe composed entirely of words, sustained only by Evelyn's "narration". When Evelyn died, Nobody No-One died with her. The Doctor delivered the eulogy at her funeral. (BFA: A Death in the Family)
An Alternative View
According to another account, Evelyn may not have ended her initial travels with the Sixth Doctor on Világ, but on Earth. In this timeline, she was returned to Earth a decade before she left, forcing her to live her life in isolation from her relations, her career and her home. She feared she would run into her younger self and suffer the cruel end afforded by the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. She was rescued from this paradox by the Sixth Doctor and Mel, whom she had never previously met. Upon the conclusion of an adventure with the pair, she asked to be taken home via the Eye of Orion. (PDA: Instruments of Darkness)
Behind the scenes
- Evelyn is a particularly tricky character for the casual fan of Big Finish productions to follow, because her stories were released more-or-less chronologically only prior to Thicker than Water.
- After this story, however, additional adventures have been told which are set much closer to The Marian Conspiracy than Thicker than Water. Moreover, her appearance in the Past Doctor Adventures was part of a plan to make her a regular companion in the PDAs and predates the way her character was written out of the audio series. However, Instruments of Darkness proved to be her only appearance in the PDAs.
- However, the novel range was cancelled before additional Evelyn stories could be penned, leaving her exit and subsequent first meeting with Mel at odds with the way both events were depicted in audio. Nevertheless, it is curious that Gary Russell, who wrote Instruments of Darkness, allowed this contradiction, since he was the producer of Thicker than Water. Russell later somewhat addressed the issue in PDA: Spiral Scratch, in which it is suggested, though not clearly delineated, that the novel range and the audio range occur in two separate realities.
- Along with Charley Pollard and Thomas Brewster, Evelyn is one of only three companions created by Big Finish who have been depicted meeting two incarnations of the Doctor, namely the Sixth Doctor and the Seventh Doctor. After serving as the former's companion for several years, she met the latter in BFA: Thicker than Water and BFA: A Death in the Family. Prior to these encounters, she had observed the Seventh Doctor from afar. The same is also true with respect to the Fifth and the Eighth Doctors. On that occasion, she described the Fifth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors as "lovely," seeming like "a rather jolly man" and "charming" respectively. (BFA: The 100 Days of the Doctor)
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