The Official Evelyn Smythe Appreciation Thread

she had a great story arc, and a proper end.......

she made Colin's doctor great

Dr Smythe is one of those characters who I can't help but refer to as dear Evelyn whenever she turns up. I think she might've been my first Big Finish companion, wholly original to audio, on one of those very first stories. The interplay between Colin Baker and Maggie Stables is such that The Marian Conspiracy goes for something like fifteen minutes, in the contemporary day, before we actually depart for the past. You become so engrossed in it that you don't notice it. She was something rather inspired for the time. An older history teacher set to complement a softer, but nonetheless irascible Sixth Doctor and smooth out his rougher edges.

Her initial stories, I'll call it her "first season" for convenience, ended up being a sort of metatextual redress of the themes on Season 22/23 on television. Everything from The Marian Conspiracy up to The Sandman. The Apocalypse Element, for instance, bears a lot of similarities to the structure of Attack of the Cybermen. A returning popular adversary (Daleks/Cybermen), a character from the Doctor's past (Romana/Lytton), two settings split between the novel and the unfamiliar (Archetryx and Gallifrey/London and Telos). Bloodtide gives us an adventure with Charles Darwin that riffs on The Mark of the Rani's old adversaries turned sideways (the Rani/the Silurians) and new historical figures (Stevenson/Darwin). But there are two stories, especially, which I think tackled some of those lingering wounds. Project: Twilight and The Sandman, respectively.

Project: Twilight's watchword is very much one of gore and tragedy. It's what the series was trying to push with something like Revelation of the Daleks. Only, here, we have a Doctor and companion team that -- due to the dynamic they've developed over Marian, The Spectre of Lanyon Moor, Apocalypse and Bloodtide -- directly confronts the inherent violence of the setting. The cliffhanger I'll always remember is the Doctor slamming his hand against the locked door calling for Evelyn, before slumping with a tired and horrified whisper: "What have I done...?" His moral outrage is on display in a way that we don't really get to see from him up until this point. It fits him like a glove. The alienness of his character comes not from being unfeeling, but the relationship he has with the villains of the piece, Amelia and her brood.

Let's talk about Evelyn, though. She's the one who provides the emotional throughline with Cassie. Trapped in a situation with literal monsters and it's through her, her ingenuity and her compassion, that the story really resonates. It harks back to that initial set up of the companion being just an ordinary human being, but "ordinary" being actually rather clever, despite their mundanity. This becomes a really important aspect for The Sandman. Something of a hitching post for his characterisation. The story treads similar ground to Mindwarp with a Doctor turned bad (or, in this case, apparently lapsing), except that we know from Evelyn -- whose perspective we've grown to trust at this point -- that there's something awfully off about the Doctor here.

That made the change ironclad, I think. Because it showed that a rogue Doctor was the exception, rather than the rule and provided a narrative reason why it occurred. The Sandman is one of my favourites for that reason. When you consider the subject matter, the modus operandi of the Sandman (consider the mother, Nrosha's, reasons for wanting him dead), it's dark. The kind of story you could only really tell among the alienness of the Clutch in which Evelyn finds herself adrift. Her reactions, a refusal to accept the apparently untethered Doctor, make the story work. They show that not only have we made progress with the characterisation, but if it should slide backwards... That's not really our Sixth Doctor. Not anymore.

From those stories, there's a quite genuinely lovely sense of authors fabricating a single (and rather special) characterisation from all the aspects of what came before. Taking what could have been weaknesses and transforming them into strengths. So, if you were to ask me what my favourite Evelyn story was... It's tough. Really tough. There is so much in that journey (and I'm deliberately avoiding talking about the second "season" for the mountain of development there) which became invaluable in shaping the Sixth Doctor, Evelyn and Doctor/companion teams from Big Finish, as a whole, today.