Doctor Who: 7 Times The Doctor Was Betrayed By Their Companions

4. Dodo Attempts To Brainwash The Doctor

Doctor Who The War Machines Dodo Chaplet brainwashed
BBC

First Doctor companion Dodo Chaplet got a rather unceremonious sendoff in the 1966 serial The War Machines, with the character being written out offscreen.

The in-universe reason for this was that Dodo had been taken to a remote country house to recover from her encounter with WOTAN, a sinister machine that brainwashed her and tried to get her to recruit the Doctor for its villainous scheme.

WOTAN is so advanced that it manages to hypnotise Dodo within minutes of meeting her, and her ordinary human mind is powerless to resist. The machine then tells her that "Doctor Who is required", and sends her off to bring him in - a task that she comes dangerously close to completing before her mind is freed from WOTAN's grip.

Since she was acting against her will, Dodo obviously didn't mean to work against the Doctor here, but her actions were a betrayal nonetheless.

And funnily enough, Dodo isn't the only companion who's been brainwashed into betraying the Doctor. This is something that happens quite a lot throughout the show, from Sarah Jane Smith in The Hand Of Fear, to River Song in Let's Kill Hitler.

The Doctor is a tough nut to crack, so often, it's best to try and get to them through their more vulnerable companions!

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!