Charley Pollard

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Doctor Who character
Charlotte Elspeth "Charley" Pollard, modelled after India Fisher
Charley
Affiliated with	Eighth Doctor
Race	Human
Home planet	Earth
Home era	1930
First appearance	Storm Warning
Last appearance	Ongoing
Portrayed by	India Fisher (voice)

Charlotte Elspeth Pollard, or simply Charley, is a fictional character played by India Fisher in a series of audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. A young woman from 1930 in England, she was a companion of the Eighth Doctor. The canonicity of the audio dramas, like other Doctor Who spin-off media, is unclear.

Charley was born on April 15, 1912, the day the Titanic sank, and first appeared in the play Storm Warning (2001). Storm took place in 1930, making her 18 years old at the time.

She was born into a well-to-do family; her mother was Lady Louisa Pollard and two sisters, Margaret and Cecelia, are mentioned. Charley and her siblings grew up in a manor house in Hampshire, looked after by servants. However, Charley rebelled against this existence and, styling herself an Edwardian adventuress, ran away from home seeking excitement. Making an appointment to meet a young man in Singapore on New Year's Day 1931, she stowed away on board the Airship R101 disguised as a male member of the crew. There, she met the Doctor and together they discovered the secret mission the airship was on. At the conclusion of the story, she was rescued from the fated crash of the R101 by the Doctor and taken on board the TARDIS as his newest companion.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Charley's exuberant personality matched the Eighth Doctor's well. She embraced the wonders of the universe that travel with the Doctor showed her and helped the Doctor fight the evils he encountered with courage. She was not only loyal to the Doctor, but also developed romantic feelings for him and eventually confessed them. The Doctor was very fond of Charley, and admitted later that she was his friend and he loved her, but what that meant for a virtually immortal Time Lord was unclear, as the relationship between the two was not a physical one.

There were consequences to the Doctor taking Charley on board, however. According to history, Charley was supposed to die in the R101 crash and the Doctor's rescue of her caused a temporal paradox. After a while, the Web of Time began to break down as anachronisms seeped into history and "anti-time" started to infect the universe, with Charley as both focus and gateway. The Time Lords of Gallifrey took notice, and Lord President Romana gave orders to arrest Charley and the Doctor. Charley was willing to sacrifice herself to save the universe, but the Doctor was unable to sacrifice her, taking the forces of anti-time into himself instead. History was then altered so that the paradox of Charley's continued existence became part of established history — in other words, the paradox and the resulting consequences, including the change in the timeline, were supposed to happen.

However, having absorbed anti-time, the Doctor now was a danger to the universe, and so had to exile himself into a parallel universe where time did not exist. He intended to do so alone, but Charley stowed away aboard the TARDIS and followed him into exile. Eventually, the Doctor discovered he was free of the anti-time infection and he and Charley managed to find their way back, accompanied by C'rizz, a native of that other universe.

[edit] Other appearances

Charley has also appeared in the short story Repercussions... by Gary Russell in the anthology Short Trips: Repercussions, set a short time after she began travelling with the Doctor. As of this writing, the circumstances in which Charley parted company with the Doctor have not been revealed.

Members of Charley's family have also appeared in Doctor Who stories. Her mother, Lady Louisa (voiced by Anneke Wills) featured in Zagreus, The Next Life, and Memory Lane. Her sister, Cecilia, (also voiced by India Fisher) featured in Gallifrey: A Blind Eye. Her other sister, Margaret, appears — along with Lady Louisa and Charley's father — in the short story collection The Centenarian.

India Fisher first appeared in the Doctor Who audio plays as the voice of Peril Bellamy in the Fifth Doctor audio Winter for the Adept (2000).