Day 94: The Traitors

We should probably talk about the Doctor's latest companion, Katarina. She's a handmaiden from Troy, has been hastily introduced, and is quite obviously a massive mistake. For a start, being from ancient times, she needs everything explained to her. Not just the futuristic stuff, but more mundane things like keys. It's annoying, and what makes it worse is that she just airs about the place thinking of the gods, and showing the audience just how much of a wonderful character Vicki was, because she was able to take situations and make them fun, lighten them up, and provide a wonderful viewpoint for the audience. Honestly, Katarina is an awful, awful mistake.

And within 5 minutes of this episode, she is ejected into space. It's a shock, because we assume that she is a companion, we assume that we will get to know her better over the course of the series. But suddenly, she dies. It's the first time that we see a companion, someone explicitly in the Doctor's care, die. And so we realise the true horror of this serial. Because we now know that this is unlike anything that has ever come before, because we always knew that the people in the TARDIS were safe. We didn't know how they would survive, but we knew that they would. And so to see a character die so suddenly, it goes to show that things are different now, this is what the Daleks bring. They don't have to be directly involved, but they lead to death and destruction, and we have just learnt that here is nothing that they will stop at for complete power.