The Liz Shaw Chronicles

The Big Finish Companion Chronicles range has often been praised for delving further into the perspective of the Doctor’s companions than the series itself would allow; by telling stories from their viewpoints we got to see how they felt about their mysterious time traveller friend and the dangers that would follow them both as they explored time and space. The most intriguing tales hands down came from the Hartnell and Troughton eras as so many of their televised episodes were missing fresh material was welcome, but when it came to the Pertwee years there was just as much demand as the actor himself had passed away and would not be providing any further performances. Actresses Caroline John and Katy Manning dutifully stepped up and reprised their roles from that time as Liz Shaw and Jo Grant respectively, but unfortunately Caroline John herself passed away in 2012. Before passing, though, she returned to the role of Liz Shaw twice on screen at anniversary episodes, once in a spin off video, and five times with Big Finish. It is those five Companion Chronicles I want to look at next as a group.

Released first was The Blue Tooth, a story which saw Liz looking back at her time with the Doctor from some years after they parted ways. She remembers a time when she returned to Cambridge to visit a friend during her time at UNIT – an attempt to return to some semblance of a normal life or at least remind herself of one – only to find that her friend and colleagues of hers have vanished and some strange bits of metal have been found at the scenes of the disappearances. When the Doctor arrives to help her investigate he recognizes some small metallic insects as upgraded versions of Cybermats, and realizes that there are elements of Cyber technology at work left over from their previous invasion attempt.

As it was still early days for the range The Blue Tooth only has Caroline John as a storyteller with Nick Briggs providing Cyber voices, and the feel of it is pretty bare bones compared to later episodes as Big Finish honed their craft more. But it’s an important one to note as the third Doctor never met the Cybermen on screen during his original run, and here we get to hear it happen at last. Caroline John narrates but does drop into impressions of Jon Pertwee from time to time but not every actor is going to be able to ape “their” Doctor to the same level that Fraser Hines does for the second Doctor and this is one example of just that. Personally I feel it would have been better if she had not tried doing it at all. But however it is presented it is still Liz looking back, but not going so far as to be another exit scene replayed; she reflects on when she realized she was going to leave the Doctor but leaves it at that, which is a relief as we don’t need a third version of her departure laying around.

Shadow of the Past was the second release, with Liz returning to UNIT’s top secret Vault after decades of being away. There is something inside the Vault which only Liz is going to be able to deal with as everyone else – the Doctor, the Brigadier, Benton, Yates – are all gone. She encounters a UNIT solider already on the inside and tells him of what she remembers, of a monster from outer space which managed to assume the form of the Doctor and open the planet up for invasion and the bloody battle which followed, and what may still be lurking in the Vault.

Shadow is partly a flashback piece with Liz dropping into storytelling mode when she speaks with Corporal Marshall inside the Vault. A lot of time has passed and Liz knows that there have been several other Doctors by now, all with different faces, but none of them are around this time to help out. In her narrative Liz mentions Captain Mike Yates which would place her flashback moments as somewhere between The Scales of Injustice and Devil Goblins From Neptune (if one takes the latter as the real departure story for Liz). This time it’s Caroline John but with a second actor to take some of the dialogue on as well and loan an additional layer to the story as it unfolds. Both the flashback and the “present” stories move at the same pacing and both resolutions are reached at about the same time. It’s been done before and it’s effective, and it’s just very engaging to hear Liz returning to UNIT so far in the future; her affiliation obviously doesn’t just go away despite not really wanting to be there in the first place, and this would coincide with a reference to her being on UNIT payroll again, specifically on their Moonbase, in an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Exactly what would bring Liz back is not entirely revealed; it may be a grudging sense of duty, it may be that her work finally intersected with UNIT’s agenda at a level of her liking, or it may just be the chance to work without being in the shadow of the Doctor.

Sometime before she rejoins UNIT, though, Liz has a colleague who is working on a time travel device in The Sentinels of the New Dawn, the third release. Liz has not been away from UNIT very long at this point and she feels reluctant to contact the Doctor after she has left him, but she needs his help to determine what is going on. The time experiments are more advanced than expected and they are both flung forward in time from the 70s to 2014 where a radical political movement called New Dawn is attempting to use time travel technology to alter the past and capitalize on the future. New Dawn’s forays into science have not only taken them into the realm of time travel but also into genetics, and they have spawned a hideous winged beast as their guard dog in their future.

Liz hasn’t been away from the Doctor very long at this point and has reservations about asking for his help given that she walked out on him, but her relief at his agreement is palpable. The Doctor has a new assistant at this time who is taking a bit of getting used to as she is not a scientist, and in UNIT affairs the Brigadier is working on security arrangements for the world peace conference which actually places this story between Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil. There is no animosity between them at all as they deal with New Dawn as a team once more and the adventure works to provide them with a bit of closure which not every companion gets depending on the nature of their departure. It’s good for Liz, allowing her to move on properly without regrets, and the Doctor returns to his life at UNIT with more purpose in getting the TARDIS fixed; if the humans can create time travel devices he should be able to repair his.

Binary was released next, and takes place before Liz leaves UNIT. She’s thinking about leaving, though; she’s stressed and doesn’t feel like she is living up to her full potential. But there is a problem to work on first; there is a supercomputer in UNIT’s possession which requires investigation. The computer is surrounded by a force field though and when Liz gets too close she is miniaturized and pulled inside the computer along with two UNIT soldiers who also got too close. The computer is capable of communicating with Liz and is sending her messages to help her repair its failing systems, but there are other forces at work urging her to destroy the computer from the inside. The Doctor is on the outside talking her through the experience, but Liz is effectively alone and cut off and must solve this mystery by herself.

Liz on her own is something we never really go to see a lot; even when the Doctor was stranded away from her in Inferno we didn’t get much sense of her being able to do things without him around, scientist or no. Here Liz is resourceful and intuitive and at the start of the story she is pretty bitter about her role at UNIT passing test tube to the Doctor and telling him how brilliant he is. One gets the sense that this is somewhere after Inferno and before Eye of the Giant with Liz saying she is going to leave the Doctor, but as she works on her own and sorts out the computer herself she has some second thoughts.

The final Liz Shaw adventure produced is ironically The Last Post, wherein Liz seeks help from her mother to look into some mysterious deaths. Behind the goings on of the Auton Invasion, the Silurian discovery and the drama of Mars Probe 7 Liz has noticed that prominent people who have died were sent letters accurately telling them the exact time of their death. Everyone who has died was on a committee that Liz’s mother heads but her mother isn’t quick to offer any explanations. The Doctor doesn’t seem particularly engaged either but once a letter arrives for Liz’s mum things make a dramatic switch.

Placement first: this would go before Inferno as there are numerous references to the first three stories of Pertwee’s debut series but only vague forebodings about Inferno . Liz isn’t harbouring any of the resentment of Binary yet as she is still getting to know the Doctor and is constantly impressed by what he can do. This would suggest that it takes some time before Liz really starts to resent her secondary role at UNIT although Giant and Scales try to make a point to saying Liz was only a companion of 8 months before she left. The past of the Last Post does make the first season seem as if everything comes at UNIT fast and furious which makes for a bit of a fan-wank really.

At the conclusion of The Scales of Injustice the Doctor remarks that he never really go to know Liz very well, and I think that is true of the fans as well. Liz was just not there long enough to make enough of an impression to make her a household name in fandom. Big Finish have a way of bringing new life to companions we thought we knew, so their Liz adventures have certainly done that along with the three novels; we’ve gotten to see more of her with the Doctor and more importantly more of her without him so we can get to know her ourselves. Knowing that Caroline John isn’t with us anymore to bring Liz back to life is just plain sad and with the BBC Books range not having much in line for past Doctors these days its hard to say if we will see her in any capacity for a while.

One day, though.

NEXT EPISODE: TERROR OF THE AUTONS