she doesn't even know she has been robbed of anything though. Harder for ten/Wilf than Donna herself. And Ten acted out of his platonic love for Donna in saving her life, and later ensured she was set for life.

As I said Jack was the one who was quite deliberately and coldly treated badly by The Doctor, and that I think marks him out from anyone else on that list.

to be fair that wasn't really the doctor's fault, he had been captured by the time lords and couldn't really do anything about it.

Maybe then this thread should be split into two:-

1. The companion worst treated by the Doctor.

2. The companion worst treated by the scriptwriters.

Jack did get a raw deal,mainly because it wasn't his fault he became immortal. The Doctor's reaction to him never sat well with me. Martha had a tough time on the show and with fans, it kinda makes her my favourite.

Ace is interesting, didn't one of the novels suggest that she became a Timelord?

In Death Comes to Time, which was an audio made for the bbc website, Ace was a timelord, and if there had been a season 27 in 1990 it's likely Ace would have become a Timelord on screen. Big Finish are adapting possible season 27 stories for audio later this year, so it's likely to happen there as well.

Cool I'll have to watch that again. i liked Ace and she is the most unlikely companion to become a Timelord. That why it works

Adric probably. Although he did deserve it as he was an annoying scrote.

SJS left of her own accord.

Jo left of her own accord.

The details of Peri are sketchy but didn't she also fall in love and leave of her own accord?




I Wasn't familiar with this Dodo character but after reading up on her, she gets my vote. But with a name like that she was doomed from the start.

We saw her

Sorry I just cannot remember names very well. I think Donna was treated badly. Sarah Jane was not leaving on her own account, the doctor had to return to Gallifrey and couldn't take her with him. She definitely was waiting for him to return.

Seriously: do you blame him? I'd have chucked her out of an airlock long before...


Nope-she was left on Thoros Beta in dire peril (and, at first, it seemed actually killed) when the Time Lords yanked the Doctor off to stand trial. We later found out she'd survived and supposedly married a barbarian warlord, presumably because she didn't have many other options.



It was a bit unfortunate...

BF won't be recording the scripts as they were written - the story you refer to (the Season 27 opener; original title "Earth Aid") now features a new companion. So, no Time Lord Ace!


Mel was killed in the BBC PDA "Heritage".

I'm really sorry to hear that, Ace was one of my favourites, and I don't think Mel deserved to die either.

Hand off. Mine!



Sorry. I get possessive

Yes, but her death-like the apparent death of Sarah Jane in 'Bullet Time'-was almost certainly erased from the timeline later. These events, and others in the PDA's, were all tied in to the parallel universe arc in the EDA's, and undone when the eighth Doctor defeated the Council of Eight.

It's got to be Dodo.


http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...highlight=dodo
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...highlight=dodo

By the scriptwriters? Martha Jones- nuff said, they made her story so predictable in the third series. I do also have a soft spot for Donna though. I love the fact that they dared to be more ambitious with the companions exit this time around, but Donna was awesome!!!!

As for worst treated companion by the Doctor, I would say Jack at the end of The Parting of the Ways and in Utopia. Still, it bit the Doctor on the bottom, as running away from Jack in Utopia is exactly what led him to The Master....

And this then set of the year that never was, where Martha had to save the world. Again with the Martha unkindness

I voted Martha (Someone else). Her whole family turned upside down, lived through a year of hell, the Doctor never saw her in the way she wanted him too...poor Martha!

Yes, interesting that. If the Doctor wasn't running away from Jack, he would never have come across Professor Yana, the events which led to the latter's regeneration into John Simm's Master would not have occurred and present day Earth would not have suffered (prior to reset) the events of the Series 3 finale. So, as well as being Earth's defender the Doctor was indirectly its persecutor.

Another such example where the Doctor is indirectly the persecutor is Human Nature/Family of Blood. Had the Doctor not chosen to hide as the human John Smith in England in 1913, then that school and the nearby village would not have suffered at the hands of the Family of Blood.

The was another thing which was so good about those episodes. When Joan pointed this out to the Doctor it really illustrated how 'not human' he really is sometime. He had asked her onto the TARDIS as if he and her beloved John Smith were one and the same person.

And I think because of this lack of empathy sometimes he does treat companions rather unkindly. Of the new ones I think Martha had it worst. Although I don't think her story arc helped, I still don't think that the Doctor comes away with much credit from the way he treated her and I was never quite sure how the viewers were meant to feel about that.

Still I suppose it does add more intrigue into a show which is never boring. Anyway, I liked Martha and loved series 3.

I think Peri should be top. Not only was her departure unclear, whether she had that alien's brain put in her body or became that warrior queen with Brian Blessed, but she had to deal with the Doctor's most difficult regeneration by herself, despite only just joining him the story before. Plus she was called evil by the Doctor and strangled to the ground by him. lol
He became more pleasant to her as time went on, but the 6th Doctor was definitely the most volatile and she was his companion for almost his entire time.

Martha - Poor cow.

I don't think whatever gripes Martha had are comparable to:

Katarina, Sara Kingdom, Adric (dead)
Dodo chaplet (brainwashed, abandoned, dead)
Jamie & Zoe (forced to forget several years of their lives and, in Jamie's case, dumped back into the middle of a war)
Peri (abandoned on an alien planet after narrowly escaping a fate worse than death)
or Donna (also mindwiped)

As I recall, Martha chose to leave and ended up doing something heroic with her new husband. She hasn't got a lot to moan about in comparison to the others.

I'm trying to think of other companions, not already mentioned, who may have not been treated very well. I've thought of two:-

1. Vicki (a First Doctor companion) left at the end of Myth Makers. In that story she had been renamed Cressida by the locals and had fallen in love with a character named Troilus. She decided to stay behind in order to marry the said Troilus. Well, this may sound like a "happy ever after" situation, but wasn't Trolius and Cressida a Shakespeare tragedy?

2. Victoria (a Second Doctor companion), who left at the end of Fury From The Deep. Didn't the Doctor just dump her, one hundred years after her time, with the rather boring Harris family? Did she actually want to stay with them? Did they actually want to look after her?

Just to throw my 2p worth in rather late in the day, I agree with this, because surely the vital criterion for a character being termed a companion is that they should have actually lived with the Doctor in the TARDIS.
Others (like Liz Shaw) are assistants (although I don't particularly like that term either!)