Leela

Leela is a fictional character played by Louise Jameson in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Leela was a companion of the Fourth Doctor and a regular in the programme from 1977 to 1978. Writer Chris Boucher named her after the Palestinian militant Leila Khaled, although this fact was not publicised at the time.

Character history

Leela first appears in the 1977 serial, The Face of Evil, where she was a warrior of the savage Sevateem tribe, who were the descendants of the crew of an Earth ship that crash landed on an unnamed planet in the far future. The name of her tribe, "Sevateem", was a corruption of "survey team". Although the Doctor at this point was content to travel alone, Leela forces her way into the TARDIS and continues to accompany the Doctor on his journeys.

Although Leela is a primitive, she was also highly intelligent, grasping advanced concepts easily and translating them into terms she could cope with. Despite the Doctor's attempts at "civilizing" her, however, Leela is strong-willed enough to continue in her savage ways. She usually dresses in animal skins, armed with a knife or a set of poisonous Janis thorns which she does not hesitate to use on people who threatened her, much to the Doctor's disapproval.

Although Jameson's eyes are naturally blue, as Leela she initially wore red contact lenses to make them brown. However, the contact lenses severely limited her vision, and producer Graham Williams promised her she could stop wearing them. To explain the change in-story, writer Terrance Dicks wrote a scene in the 1977 serial Horror of Fang Rock where Leela's eyes suffer "pigment dispersal" and turn blue after viewing the explosion of the Rutan ship.

In her travels with the Doctor, Leela faces killer robots, murderous homunculi, the Rutan Host, and the Sontaran invasion of the Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey. It is during this final adventure, The Invasion of Time, that she met and fell in love with Andred, a native Gallifreyan, and decides to stay behind to be with him. The first K-9 remains with her.

The 2005 series of Doctor Who reveals that Gallifrey was destroyed in a Time War against the Daleks. Since Leela was last known to be living on Gallifrey, it is possible she died during the war.