Leela

Doctor Who universe character
Leela of the Sevateem
Leela
Affiliated with	Fourth Doctor
Species	Human
Home planet	Unspecified
Home era	Far future
First appearance	The Face of Evil
Last appearance	The Invasion of Time
Portrayed by	Louise Jameson

Leela is a fictional character played by Louise Jameson in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Leela was a companion of the Fourth Doctor and a regular in the programme from 1977 to 1978. Writer Chris Boucher named her after the Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled.^[1]

Conceptual history

The character of Leela was first conceived by producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes. They wanted a companion in the mould of George Bernard Shaw's Eliza Doolittle: a bright but unsophisticated primitive who would learn from the Doctor. Writer Chris Boucher had submitted a story proposal titled The Mentor Conspiracy which featured a character named Leela which fit Hinchcliffe's and Holmes's ideas.

Although The Mentor Conspiracy was not produced, Boucher reused the character of Leela for The Day God Went Mad (later renamed to The Face of Evil), seeing her as a mixture of Emma Peel from The Avengers and Leila Khaled.^[1][2] Boucher was asked to write two endings to Face, one in which Leela left with the Doctor, and one in which she stayed behind. The decision to have Leela become a companion was made soon after. An oft-repeated story (also stated in the DVD commentary to The Robots of Death) is that Leela's skimpy leather outfits were very popular with the "Dads", which kept them watching the programme.

Character history

Leela was the daughter of Sol. She first appears in the 1977 serial, The Face of Evil, where she was a warrior of the savage Sevateem tribe, who were amongst the descendants of the crew of an Earth ship from The Mordee Expedition that crash-landed on an unnamed planet in the far future. The name of her tribe, "Sevateem", was a corruption of "survey team". Although the Doctor at this point was content to travel alone, Leela barges into the TARDIS and continues to accompany the Doctor on his journeys.

Although Leela was a primitive, she was also highly intelligent, grasping advanced concepts easily and translating them into terms she could cope with. Despite the Doctor's attempts at "civilizing" her, however, Leela was strong-willed enough to continue in her savage ways. She usually dressed in animal skins, and was armed with a knife or a set of poisonous Janis thorns which she did not hesitate to use on people who threatened her, much to the Doctor's disapproval. Leela frequently demonstrated a highly accurate sense of danger.

Although Jameson's eyes are naturally blue, as Leela she initially wore red contact lenses to make them brown. However, the contact lenses severely limited her vision, and producer Graham Williams promised her she could stop wearing them. To explain the change in-story, writer Terrance Dicks wrote a scene in the 1977 serial Horror of Fang Rock in which Leela's eyes suffer "pigment dispersal" and turn blue after viewing the explosion of the Rutan ship.

In her travels with the Doctor, Leela faces killer robots, murderous homunculi, the Rutan Host, and the Sontaran invasion of the Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey. It is during this final adventure, The Invasion of Time, that she meets and falls in love with Andred, a native Gallifreyan, and decides to stay behind to be with him. The first K-9 remains with her.

Tom Baker disliked Leela's character concept because he felt that she was too violent.^[3] Jameson reports that he was cold to her for the first several stories they did together.^[4] Eventually, during the filming of Horror of Fang Rock, she insisted on multiple takes of a scene in which he repeatedly entered the scene early, thereby upstaging her. This incident appears to have increased Baker's respect for her, and their working relationship substantially improved thereafter.^[4]

Appearances in other media

Leela's subsequent life on Gallifrey is not explored by the television series, although the spin-off media have done so to an extent. In the Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt, Leela and Andred are expecting a child, the first naturally conceived baby on Gallifrey for millennia. Louise Jameson reprised the role of Leela for the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time, and has voiced the character in three series of audio plays for Big Finish Productions taking place on Gallifrey, alongside Lalla Ward as Romana and John Leeson as K-9. In the Gallifrey audio series, Leela acts as Romana's bodyguard, advisor and friend. During the course of the series, Leela and Andred divorce after Andred fakes his death to infiltrate the Celestial Intervention Agency- he killed a would-be assassin before regenerating himself and subsequently claimed that he was the assassin who had just killed Andred, never considering how his actions would affect Leela due to post-regenerative trauma until it was too late-, with Andred being subsequently killed and Leela blinded during a Gallifreyan civil war, as well as her version of K9 being destroyed. She is still blind at the end of the third and final series of Gallifrey plays.

Leela does not appear in any of the Virgin Missing Adventures, but has appeared in several of the Past Doctor Adventures including four novels by Chris Boucher pairing her with the Fourth Doctor.

Leela presumably survives the Timewar and features in the Companion Chronicles audio The Catalyst. This story, which is primarily a flashback to an adventure before Horror of Fang Rock, features Leela as an old woman being interrogated by the warrior Z'Nai (a race encountered by an earlier Doctor), and ageing a year per day as the powers of the Time Lords no longer keep her from death. This story strongly implies that, for Leela, this is not only after the third series of Gallifrey but after the Time War of the New Series, as Leela reveals that her adopted homeworld is gone. It is also almost certain that Leela's sight has returned, as she can describe her interrogator's armour. Whether or not Leela survives this story is unknown, but this adventure may be seen as Leela's final moments, both from age and injury, as she is poised to destroy the Z'Nai for good at the end of the story, with a later tale seeing her having slain her interrogator and now merely waiting for death. How Leela ends up in the custody of the Z'Nai from her condition at the end of Gallifrey series 3, remains to be seen.

Other mentions

A vision of Leela was to have appeared along with every other companion on the scanner screen in Resurrection of the Daleks, but the clip was accidentally removed during editing. Leela is, however, seen calling out to the Doctor just before his regeneration in Logopolis.

List of appearances

Television

Season 14

• The Face of Evil
• The Robots of Death
• The Talons of Weng-Chiang

Season 15

• Horror of Fang Rock
• The Invisible Enemy
• Image of the Fendahl
• The Sun Makers
• Underworld
• The Invasion of Time

30th anniversary special

• Dimensions in Time

Novels

Virgin New Adventures

• Lungbarrow by Marc Platt

Past Doctor Adventures

• Eye of Heaven by Jim Mortimore
• Last Man Running by Chris Boucher
• Corpse Marker by Chris Boucher
• Psi-ence Fiction by Chris Boucher
• Drift by Simon A. Forward
• Match of the Day by Chris Boucher

Short stories

• "Crimson Dawn" by Tim Robins (Decalog 2: Lost Property)
• "People of the Trees" by Pam Baddeley (Decalog 2: Lost Property)
• "One Bad Apple" by Simon A. Forward (More Short Trips)
• "The Brain of Socrates" by Gareth Roberts (Short Trips: The Muses)
• "The Destroyers" by Steve Lyons (Short Trips: Life Science)
• "The Bushranger's Story" by Sarah Groenewegen (Short Trips: Repercussions)
• "It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow" by Martin Day (Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)
• "The Sooner the Better" by Ian Farrington ("Short Trips: A Day in the Life)
• "The Prodigal Sun" by Matthew Griffiths (Short Trips: The History of Christmas)
• "The Dogs of War" by Brian Keene (Short Trips: Destination Prague)
• "Dear Great Uncle Peter" by Neil Corry (Short Trips: The Ghosts of Christmas)
• "Stanley" by Lizzie Hopley (Short Trips: Defining Patterns)

Comics

• "The Orb" by John Canning (Mighty TV Comic 1334-1340)
• "The Mutants" by John Canning (Mighty TV Comic 1341-1347)
• "The Devil's Mouth" by John Canning (Mighty TV Comic 1348-1352)
• "The Aqua-City" by John Canning (TV Comic 1353-1360)
• "The Power" by Paul Crompton (Doctor Who Annual 1979)
• "Emsone's Castle" by Paul Crompton (Doctor Who Annual 1979)
• "Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time" by Sean Longcroft (Doctor Who Magazine 243)
• "Rest and Re-Creation" by Warwick Gray and Charlie Adlard (Doctor Who Magazine Yearbook 1994)

Audio dramas

• Zagreus
• Gallifrey: Weapon of Choice
• Gallifrey: Square One
• Gallifrey: The Inquiry
• Gallifrey: A Blind Eye
• Gallifrey: Lies
• Gallifrey: Spirit
• Gallifrey: Pandora
• Gallifrey: Insurgency
• Gallifrey: Imperiatrix
• Gallifrey: Fractures
• Gallifrey: Warfare
• Gallifrey: Appropriation
• Gallifrey: Mindbomb
• Gallifrey: Panacea
• The Catalyst
• Empathy Games
• The Time Vampire

References

External links

• Leela on TARDIS Index File, an external wiki
• Leela on the BBC's Doctor Who website