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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

6 Comments

  1. Spikeimar
    April 13, 2011 @ 9:00 am

    Poor Steven, he seems to be the forgotten companion, never trotted out in those top ten lists so beloved of fandom but he always seemed to me to be the most believable of the male companions. Much as I love Ian Chesterton, he was the heroic leading man and behaved as such. (I refute the idea that he was wooden but there was sometimes the hint of balsa about him) Steven's character as a space pilot seemed to be forgotten as quickly as his second story and he became almost a contemporary companion, seeing the universe as a man from the 1960's would.

    The idea that he was kept on because the character was useful to cover the Doctor's erratic nature may also mirror real life as in interviews with Peter Purves you feel he was also kept on as someone who could calm down William Hartnell's erratic nature too.

    Reply

  2. Elizabeth Sandifer
    April 13, 2011 @ 10:20 am

    Well, Ian has almost two seasons to Steven's one, and has only three stories that are missing any episodes, and even then only one that's completely missing. With 66 of Ian's 77 episodes in the archive versus 17 of Steven's 45, it's tough for Steven to make it out of the archives as a favorite.

    In some ways I'm more surprised that Vicki, who has 26 of 38 episodes available and was a very solid female companion, is so poorly remembered. Especially because she's worse remembered than Susan (42 of 51 existent), who is well-remembered more because of the continuity issues she poses than because of any merits demonstrated in the actual episodes.

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  3. Aaron
    April 13, 2011 @ 2:24 pm

    Still, Steven rules. It's one of the big injustices of the missing episodes that Steven is mainly forgotten while Ian, who's a worse character with much poorer episodes, is remembered in such a good light. If season three had survived instead of seasons one and two, our fan-memory of the Hartnell era would be so completely different. We'd think of Hartnell as the excitable quirky character of Season Three and remember Steven as well as Jamie. At the same time, everybody would talk about the amazing speech at the end of the Massacre, but wonder how Hartnell acted the his farewell to Susan.

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  4. Spikeimar
    April 14, 2011 @ 9:45 am

    I think Ian and Barbara will always get the lion's share of the fan interest because they were the first companions and set the template for most of those following. That shouldn't take away from the fact that Jaqueline Hill was superb as Barbara and for my money so was William Russell (though he did occasionally let his annoyance at some of the scripts show through as in part 6 of The Web Planet) I much prefer both the acting style and character that Maureen O'Brien brought to Vicki, over the, for me, unrealistic style of Carol Ann Ford. Perhaps it was the scripts but I never believed in Susan
    as a real person.

    Reply

  5. John Binns
    November 1, 2016 @ 4:07 pm

    Most of the Hartnell ‘future’ stories have a ‘monster’ in the sense of something that at least briefly appears to be an aggressive non-human (unless you count The Edge of Destruction, Planet of Giants or The Time Meddler, which I think are more ‘sideways’ stories, the only counter-examples are this and The Space Museum), although it’s true that often (more often than not) that gets subverted, in a way that doesn’t often happen post-Hartnell (until 2005 anyway). And I think the other example of people accurately predicting when and where the TARDIS will arrive is Logopolis.

    Reply

  6. ladysugarquill
    June 28, 2017 @ 3:26 am

    “Innes Lloyd has been angling to remove Hartnell since The Celestial Toymaker”

    Actually, they were trying to sack poor Bill since The Massacre, which is why he plays a different character there. He also fuck them all over when he played it PERFECTLY, all fascinating evil and without a single fluff – because it was technobabble that gave him trouble. Outside of that, he was fine.

    Reply

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