The Many Deaths of Jo Grant

Life with the Doctor has been an emotional rollercoaster for Jo Grant to say the very least; she’s travelled further than she ever expected to, met all sorts of people and monsters who she will never forget, and she has experienced the joy of life on the edge. But there is also the experience of death, and Jo is dying. A lot. The Doctor has been injured while away from Earth and as he returns so does an alien spaceship. Purple fungus is growing everywhere and anyone touching it becomes infected. And Jo dies. And dies again. And again.

The Many Deaths of Jo Grant is one of the later Companion Chronicles which lacks the whole retrospect angle; the story is told as if it were plunked right there sometime between Planet of the Daleks and The Green Death with the Doctor off somewhere in the TARDIS. Jo unwaveringly believes that the Doctor will always come back because Earth is his home, but the Brigadier is more realistic and knows that one day he is going to have to cope without his alien friend there to save him. I’ve previously decried the preoccupation some Big Finish / Virgin / BBC Books writers have with trying to be all heavy about foreshadowing things that we know are going to happen, but this feels like a more genuine approach with it being dialogue between two characters rather than some internal musings. It also has some poignant notes of what conversations are eventually going to be like once the Doctor has actually left.

Jo is being tortured. There’s really no other way to put it. There’s a guy named Rowe who is there every time Jo dies – he’s obviously part of whatever is going on but every time Jo gets close to figuring it out she dies again. And again. And every time she dies it’s during a selfless act where she is saving the Doctor from his own death. The series back then didn’t dwell on the relationships between the Doctor and his companions to the same extent it does now – indeed there were never any awkward moments where the companion got all doe-eyed and fell for the Doctor and had to leave because she wasn’t going to get that love returned – but it’s perfectly obvious that there was more to the third Doctor and Jo than just co-workers. I doubt anyone is ever going to try and suggest that they were getting it on when nobody was looking but there’s no denying the genuine affection each had for the other. The Doctor’s sudden cold departure from Jo’s engagement party at the end of The Green Death spoke volumes even if there were no words, and here we have Jo repeatedly dying to keep the Doctor alive (and we’ve seen her willing to do this already in The Daemons). It’s the sort of story that wouldn’t really be made into a TV script back in the day not because it’s not good, but because it might just be a bit too much for the audience to take.

Canadian singer Jann Arden has a song called “I Would Die For You” which could easily be on the soundtrack for this one. But as I told her once, be careful who you say that to, just in case they show up to collect.

NEXT EPISODE: THE SCORCHIES