10 Major Unanswered Questions From Classic Doctor Who

7. Did Ben And Polly Ditch Dodo Somewhere?

Once upon a time there was a companion named Dodo, as played by Jackie Lane, and nobody liked her. (Dodo, that is. One assumes that Jackie herself was pleasant enough, but who can say?). The character suffers from a number of issues. The first appears to be that the production team decided on having a girl companion from either the distant past or far future, but then chickened out, killed both of those off and just phoned one of the girls who'd originally auditioned to play Susan and asked her to play a girl from present day Manchester. Then they were told not to use Manchester out of a fear of regional accents, but not until some filming had already taken place, resulting in a Mancunian accent that comes and goes like the wind. Additionally, she doesn't have a beginning or an end. The character is shoehorned in at the end of an almost completely unrelated story (to show that a different, more interesting character might have lived through The Massacre) and just vanishes halfway through her final story (because Innes Lloyd hated both the character and the actress, and wasn't a particularly good producer in any case). So, what were fans left with? Halfway through The War Machines, Dodo has been revealed to be under the control of the computers and working against the Doctor. She's sent to "the country" to recover and two episodes later Ben and Polly bring the Doctor a message that she's "all better and staying there, see you later". It's much, much more gratifying that Ben and Polly just clubbed her with a lead pipe, threw her body in a ditch and headed back to the TARDIS to take her place. But that's how rumours start and lives get ruined...