Adric

Doctor Who character
Adric
Affiliated with	Fourth Doctor Fifth Doctor
Species	Alzarian
Home planet	Alzarius
Home era	Unspecified
First appearance	Full Circle
Last appearance	Earthshock
Portrayed by	Matthew Waterhouse Andrew Sachs (one Big Finish production)

Adric was a fictional character played by Matthew Waterhouse in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. He was a young native of the planet Alzarius, which exists in the parallel universe of E-Space. A companion of the Fourth and Fifth Doctors, he was a regular in the programme from 1980 to 1982. The name Adric is an anagram derived from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac. Waterhouse is the youngest male actor to play a companion so far in the series.

Character history

Adric first appears in the Fourth Doctor serial, Full Circle. Attempting to escape from the mysterious Mistfall threatening his community, he stumbles across and finds refuge in the TARDIS, which has been drawn into E-Space via a wormhole-like phenomenon known as a Charged Vacuum Emboitment. He stowed away when the Doctor and Romana and K-9 Mark II left Alzarius and becomes a companion in the following serial, State of Decay, accompanying them on the rest of their adventures in E-Space. He remains with the Doctor when Romana and K-9 Mark II leave and the TARDIS finds its way back into its own universe.

With a brilliant mathematical mind and sporting a star-shaped badge (blue enamel with gold backing) for mathematical excellence, Adric is also very well aware of his own intelligence. This, coupled with his relative immaturity, leads to a personality that is abrasive and occasionally crosses over into arrogance. As a result, Adric is one of the least popular companions among fans of the programme. However, it is obvious that Adric also desperately seeks validation from the Doctor as well as those around him, and is often hurt and resentful if he feels he is being sidelined or unable to contribute. As an Alzarian, Adric is a member of a species of extremely adaptable creatures, theoretically capable of genetically evolving to suit any environment, though it is unknown if his particular substrain is capable of this. It is known that he possesses an inhumanly rapid rate of healing, though not to the extent he can regenerate amputated body parts.

Adric is present when, during the events of Logopolis, the Fourth Doctor falls from the Pharos Project radio telescope and regenerates into his fifth incarnation. He continues to travel in the TARDIS along with new companions Nyssa and Tegan, but his travels come to an end in Earthshock when he tries to stop a Cyberman-controlled freighter from crashing into prehistoric Earth. The navigational controls had been locked by logic codes, and Adric is entering the solution to the last code when the computer is destroyed by a dying Cyberman. He dies in the crash, while his fellow crewmates watch in horror on the TARDIS viewscreen. His last words before the explosion kills him are "Now I'll never know if I was right." Adric also dies not knowing that the freighter he was trying to stop was actually destined to be the "meteor" that would wipe out the dinosaurs (see Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event and Alvarez hypothesis).

Adric's death affects his companions deeply. In Time-Flight, Tegan tries to persuade the Doctor to go back in time and save him, but the Doctor refuses to break the Laws of Time, even though it obviously pains him. The Xeraphin try to use an illusion of Adric pleading that if they traveled any further they would kill him, an effort by Xeraphin to stop Nyssa and Tegan from travelling further in the same story, but they see through the deception when they realise Adric is still wearing his badge (which the Doctor had destroyed in order to kill a Cyberman) and travel forth giving Adric another illusory death scene. Adric also appears as a hallucination at the end of The Caves of Androzani, and his name is the last word that the Fifth Doctor says as he "dies", regenerating into the Sixth Doctor.

Appearances in other media

An image of Adric appears as a manifestation of the Doctor's guilt in the Virgin New Adventures novel Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell. A ghost of Adric also features in the plot of the Past Doctor Adventures novel Empire of Death by David Bishop.

Adric appears in the Big Finish Productions audio drama The Boy That Time Forgot, and is portrayed by Andrew Sachs, where he was unintentionally saved by Block Transfer Computations subconsciously sent to him by the Doctor during a 'seance', causing him to be sent into a pocket dimension based on an Aztec jungle, populated primarily by giant scorpions and insects. Kept alive for centuries by the computations, Adric was eventually reunited with the Doctor and Nyssa when they sought the TARDIS after its theft by Thomas Brewster ("The Haunting of Thomas Brewster"). Driven insane by centuries of isolation and bitterness, Adric refused to accept The Doctor’s attempts to make him realise that he was now essentially just an elderly teenager, complaining when he didn’t get his way and believing that the world should jump to his every whim, attempting to force Nyssa to become his bride and Empress while making the Doctor admit that he permitted Adric to die, only for Adric to finally forgive the Doctor, using the last of his strength to send his friends home and recover the TARDIS before dying himself.

Other mentions

A vision of Adric is seen along with every other companion aside from Leela on the scanner screen in Resurrection of the Daleks.

List of appearances

Television

Season 18

• Full Circle
• State of Decay
• Warriors' Gate
• The Keeper of Traken
• Logopolis

Season 19

• Castrovalva
• Four to Doomsday
• Kinda
• The Visitation
• Black Orchid
• Earthshock
• Time-Flight (illusion)

Season 21

• The Caves of Androzani (quoted/Doctor's regeneration)

Novels

Virgin Missing Adventures

• Cold Fusion by Lance Parkin

Past Doctor Adventures

• Divided Loyalties by Gary Russell

Short stories

• "A Boy's Tale" by Gary Russell (Short Trips: Companions)
• "Hearts of Stone" by Steve Lyons (Short Trips: Companions)
• "The Immortals" by Simon Guerrier (Short Trips: Past Tense)
• "Mauritz" by Jonathan Morris (Short Trips: A Universe of Terrors)
• "O, Darkness" by John Binns (Short Trips: Steel Skies)
• "In the TARDIS: Christmas Day" by Val Douglas (Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)
• "Indigenous Species" by Steve Hatcher (Shelf Life)

Audios

• The Boy That Time Forgot (played by Andrew Sachs)
• The Darkening Eye (adventure related by the character Nyssa)

Comics

• "Plague World" by Mel Powell (Doctor Who Annual 1982)
• "On The Planet Isopterus" by Glenn Rix (Doctor Who Annual 1983)
• "Planet of the Dead" by Lee Sullivan and John Freeman (Doctor Who Magazine 141-142) - although technically that is not Adric, but someone pretending to be him.

External links

• Adric on TARDIS Index File, an external wiki
• Adric on the BBC's Doctor Who website
• Adric, Matthew Waterhouse, and the Fannish Gestalt (Opinion Piece)