Free Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants by Andy Frankham-Allen Page B

she finds herself in an alternative version of the Gallifreyan Death Zone, coming into contact with several past companions and the Fifth Doctor. She admits to the Doctor that she feels like a useless companion, but he reminds her of how she stood up to the Cyberleader in 1986. She parts company with the Doctor once more, certain she will never see him again, but not before she tells him that she and Ben are, indeed, married.
     
    Other than finding out that Jamie is twenty-two in the 2013 audio book Shadow of Death we learn very little that is new about him, save that he knows all about the Doctor’s regeneration from Ben & Polly, as revealed in the 1997 novel The Dark Path . The more interesting stuff comes after he is returned to Scotland following The War Games .
    Before we get to that, however, we need to consider his solo adventures with the Doctor in the pages of TV Comic from 1968 to 1969. Trying to place these adventures has been a bone of contention among Doctor Who scholars for decades, but Jamie does appear to be older than he is on television, which does muddy the waters somewhat. For some unknown reason he is initially living in 1960s Scotland and working at a tracking station in issue #872 . His final appearance is in issue #898 , and nothing is said about where he goes; he is just not there from the following issue and never returns.
    To explain away the obvious age difference of Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines in the 1986 adventure The Two Doctors , Season 6B was created by the authors of The Discontinuity Guide (first published in 1995 by Virgin Publishing). It suggests that before the Doctor was regenerated and exiled by the Time Lords he was, in fact, used as an agent. This is never confirmed beyond the guide until the 2005 novel World Game by Terrance Dicks, in which the Time Lords do indeed set him up as an agent – the alternative is his execution (a change from the television series, wherein he is merely threatened with exile). At the end of the novel the Doctor demands to have assistance on his missions. Consequently the Time Lords agree to return an older Jamie to him – albeit with his memory altered to include an awareness of their mission and the ‘knowledge’ that Victoria is absent studying graphology (as established in The Two Doctors ). Various short stories have been written, seemingly set during this Season 6B, but mostly they see the Doctor travelling alone, with the exception of the 2007 audio book Helicon Prime . It is, in fact, distinctly possible that this older Jamie is the one seen in the pages of TV Comic.
    An older version of Jamie continues to appear in other Expanded Universe material including a Jamie some forty-two years after he left the Doctor. He appears in The Glorious Revolution in 2009 visited by an agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency of Gallifrey, who removes the memory block placed on Jamie by the Time Lords. At this point Jamie is happily married to Kirsty McLaren (who appears in the television story The Highlanders ) with at least eight children and an unmentioned number of grandchildren. Once the Time Lord agent solves the problem of Jamie’s past, Jamie asks for his memory block to be restored since he doesn’t want the knowledge of his travels with the Doctor to threaten his happy life.
    In another possibly contradictory story, the Sixth Doctor and Peri reunite with a man the locals call ‘Mad Jamie’, who claims to have travelled to the moon and beyond. In The World Shapers ( Doctor Who Magazine issues #127-129 , published in 1987) it is revealed that Jamie, some forty years after he left the Doctor, remembers his adventures. Following an adventure against the Voord, Jamie sacrifices himself to stop the Worldshaper from evolving the Voord into Cybermen.
    The most recent appearance of Jamie, post-TARDIS travels, is in the audio play trilogy produced by Big Finish in 2012 City of Spires , The Wreck of the Titan and Legend of the Cybermen . The Sixth