Doctor Who: Remembering The First Doctor's Companions

3. Sara Kingdom (1965-1966)

There can be some reasonable discussion about whether or not Sara Kingdom "counts" as a companion. Observant readers will notice that this list doesn't include Katarina, for example, who appeared in only one story and then was almost immediately written out. So should Sara be on this list? For a long time, the only appearance by Sara Kingdom was in The Daleks' Master Plan. But she was in eight episodes of that twelve part story, which is a fairly decent amount of screen time. The novelization of the story also makes it clear that several months of time passed during the story, thus giving Sara plenty of room for adventures with the Doctor and Steven. Finally, Big Finish brought back the character (voiced by Jean Marsh) and has made extensive use of her since. None of this has happened with Katarina (or any of the one off companions introduced in the new series) and so, at this point, Sara can realistically be considered an "official" companion. Sara was a Space Security Agent. That€™s right. She was a space cop. She met the Doctor and Steven in the aforementioned 12-part epic The Daleks' Master Plan, of which eight parts are, sadly, missing. It was in this story that viewers met her and her brother, Bret Vyon, played by Nicholas Courtney, who went onto bigger and better things within the series. Sara was told by Mavic Chen, the so-called Guardian of the Solar System, that her brother and the Doctor and Steven were a threat. She killed her brother and was about to kill the other two when all three were transported elsewhere. Phew! From there, the team went on a little series of adventures as they tried to stop a "master plan€ by the "Daleks", so you can kind of see where the title came from, can't you? The story ended with her character being aged to death which doesn't sound very fun but, to be fair, it's a fate that eventually befalls most of humanity anyway.