Sam Jones (Doctor Who)

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Doctor Who character
Samantha Angeline Jones
Sam
Affiliated with	Eighth Doctor
Race	Human
Home planet	Earth
Home era	1997
First appearance	The Eight Doctors
Last appearance	Interference, Book Two
Portrayed by	None

Samantha Angeline Jones, or simply Sam, is a fictional character in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels based upon the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. The Eighth Doctor first met her in the novel The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks, and she went on to become one of his companions. The canonicity of the novels with respect to the television series, like other Doctor Who spin-offs, is unclear.

Sam was born on April 15, 1980, making her 16 years old when she first met the Eighth Doctor in 1997. She attended Coal Hill School, the same school the First Doctor's granddaughter Susan attended in 1963. She was described as being thin and wiry, with blue eyes and close-cropped blonde hair. She was a clean-living person, not drinking or taking drugs, and a vegetarian. She was also a supporter of Greenpeace and gay rights. In The Eight Doctors the Doctor rescued her from drug dealers, after which she travelled with him for many adventures. The novel Seeing I is deliberately ambiguous as to the possibility that Sam is bisexual.

During discussions early in the run of the Eighth Doctor novels as to whether to place Sam on the cover of the novels, a BBC Worldwide employee named Kath was used as the visual model for the character.

Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles introduced the idea of "Dark Sam". It was revealed that Sam had two sets of biodata — the information that defines a person's personal history. One set, "Blonde Sam", was the one who travelled with the Doctor. The other, "Dark Sam", never travelled with the Doctor and became a drug user.

The four novels Longest Day by Michael Collier, Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel, Dreamstone Moon by Paul Leonard and Seeing I by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman form a story arc. Initially, Sam fled from the Doctor after she found herself kissing him passionately when giving him CPR and the two became separated. Although the Doctor eventually tracked her down, he was arrested and imprisoned for espionage. After three years, Sam discovered the Doctor's imprisonment and helped him to escape and realised her relationship with the Doctor would never be anything other than platonic.

In The Janus Conjunction by Trevor Baxendale, Sam died when she became poisoned by the radiation on the planet Janus Prime. The Doctor put the TARDIS into a temporal orbit, devised a serum, then returned to a time before she died and administered the serum. In The Taint by Michael Collier, Sam and the Doctor met Fitz Kreiner. In the same story, Sam also survived having an alien leech implanted in her head by a robot called Azoth, who noted Sam's special DNA, due to the Blonde Sam/Dark Sam duality. The Dark Sam storyline reached its conclusion in Unnatural History by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman.

When the Doctor, Sam and Fitz travelled to San Francisco in the year 2000, they found a dimensional scar, a remnant of the events in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie. When Sam was drawn into the rift, the Doctor sought out Dark Sam, whom he found living in a London bedsit. He brought her to San Francisco, but Dark Sam realised what the Doctor's plan was — if she were to fall into the rift, Blonde Sam could be restored.

When the Doctor was trapped by an extradimensional entity, Griffin the Unnaturalist, Dark Sam saved him by sacrificing herself to the rift, restoring Blonde Sam. One of Griffin's specimens, a Faction Paradox agent, revealed that Blonde Sam was created when Dark Sam touched the Doctor's biodata in the rift, causing a paradox and thus playing into the Faction's hands. During this novel, Dark Sam also had sex with Fitz, even though Blonde Sam had shown no interest in him. Dark Sam also flirted and kissed the Doctor, but without his interest.

Sam finally departed the TARDIS after the events in the two-novel story Interference by Lawrence Miles, staying in 1996 with the Doctor's former companion Sarah Jane Smith until her younger self first left with the Doctor. In a possible future glimpsed in Interference, Sam lives to a ripe old age, although the Doctor is evasive about her destiny in the novel The Bodysnatchers by Mark Morris.

Eventually, Sam became a political activist was shot and killed in 2002. This was during the events of a later story arc when a group called the Council of Eight was eliminating the Doctor's previous companions from the timeline (Sometime Never... by Justin Richards). Although the Council was defeated and several companions restored to history, the Doctor found what appeared to be Sam's grave in a London churchyard in 2005 during the last Eighth Doctor Adventures novel, The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin.

However, the grave was bait for a trap for the Doctor, and the name on the grave was "Samantha Lynn Jones", the name used by Dark Sam. Accordingly, the grave's authenticity, and Sam's ultimate fate, became open to question. Jonathan Blum theorised that perhaps the Council had undone the event that turned Dark Sam into Blonde Sam and then arranged for Dark Sam to die instead.^[1] However, although referencing Blum's theory in another forum post ^[2], Parkin notes in his Doctor Who chronology book AHistory that, despite the reversing of several of the Council's actions, it is "clear that Sam died in 2002 and 'stayed dead'."

[edit] Other appearances

In the Big Finish Productions audio play Minuet in Hell (2001), a litany of the Doctor's previous companions includes the name "Sam". At the time, fans believed that this was an intentional reference to Sam Jones and therefore placed the books and the audios in the same continuity. However, producer Gary Russell in the behind-the-scenes book Doctor Who - The New Audio Adventures later denied that "Sam" referred to Sam Jones.

The 2005 play Terror Firma introduced two previously unknown companions for the Eighth Doctor, a brother and sister pair named Samson and Gemma Griffin. This now provides the possibility that "Sam" was a reference to Samson.

The description of an unnamed character that appeared in the short story Repercussions by Gary Russell (in the Big Finish-published anthology Short Trips: Repercussions) resembled Sam. This character was a passenger on board an airship travelling through the time vortex that carried various people whom the Doctor had placed there to stop them from being a danger to the Web of Time. If this was Sam, it may indicate that, as far as the Big Finish continuity is concerned, she was written out of history.

[edit] References

• Pearson, Lars (1999). I, Who: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who Novels US: Mad Norwegian Press, ISBN 0-9673746-0-X
• Parkin, Lance with additional material by Lars Pearson (2006). AHistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe US: Mad Norwegian Press, ISBN 0-9725959-9-6

[edit] Footnotes