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Nyssa (Doctor Who)

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Template:Doctorwhocharacter Nyssa of Traken is a fictional character played by Sarah Sutton in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Nyssa was created by writer Johnny Byrne for the Fourth Doctor serial The Keeper of Traken, but the production team subsequently decided that she should join the Doctor on his travels. Hence in the following serial Logopolis, Nyssa became a companion of the Fourth Doctor and subsequently the Fifth Doctor and was a regular in the programme from 1981 to 1983. Sutton was the youngest female actor to play a companion in the series.

Character history

Nyssa is an aristocratic native of Traken, the daughter of Tremas (a consul of the Traken Union) and stepdaughter of Kassia. She aids the Doctor and Adric when the Master wrests control of the Keepership by first manipulating and then murdering her stepmother, but is herself hypnotised and kidnapped by the Master after he takes control of her father's body. After being freed from his control, she is brought to Logopolis by the Watcher and discovers that Traken has been destroyed as a side effect of the Master's tampering with the Logopolitan's formulae. She subsequently joins Adric and Tegan Jovanka as a companion and member of the TARDIS crew, and witnesses the Fourth Doctor's regeneration into the Fifth.

During her journeys with Tegan and Adric aboard the TARDIS, Nyssa finds herself trapped in a mathematical equation by the Master – whom she hates as he is, of course, now using "that face" (her father's). She also encounters a race of androids and their insane ruler, helps foil the genocidal plans of a wounded Terileptil and incidentally start the Great Fire of London, and discovers her remarkable resemblance to Ann Talbot.

Adric's death while battling the Cybermen affects the TARDIS crew deeply. When confronted by an illusion of Adric created by the Master shortly afterwards, both Nyssa and Tegan are initially taken aback, until they see through the deception when Nyssa sees Adric is still wearing his now-destroyed badge. During this adventure, Nyssa also displays a previously unseen psychic ability when she is contacted by the Xeraphin.

Nyssa travels alone with the Doctor for an unspecified period of time when the Doctor leaves Tegan at Heathrow. Although no televised adventures take place in this period, several spin-offs including those by Big Finish Productions and BBC Books' Past Doctor Adventures are set in this gap.

Nyssa and the Doctor are reunited with Tegan while battling against Omega in Amsterdam and on Gallifrey, help Tegan battle her inner demons as personified by the Mara, and meet the Doctor's old friend and ally Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. It is during this adventure that she and the TARDIS crew meet Turlough, posing as a typical English schoolboy. When the TARDIS crew arrive on the derelict space station Terminus, Nyssa's adventures with the Doctor come to an end, as – to Tegan's horror – she elects to stay on board the Space Station in order to help free the enslaved guards and turn the station into a real hospital. The Doctor is moved by this noble gesture and parts saying that he thinks she is very brave.

An image of Nyssa is seen during the Fifth Doctor's regeneration scene in The Caves of Androzani, and the character appears in the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time.

Nyssa is mentioned in the new series in the 2007 Children in Need episode "Time Crash" by the Tenth Doctor.

Appearances in other media

Nyssa's fate after she leaves the TARDIS is not known, although the spin-off novel Asylum, by Peter Darvill-Evans, reveals that she eventually leaves Terminus and settles down as an academic in a university on an unspecified planet. In Asylum, Nyssa shares an adventure with the Fourth Doctor from a time before he met her, leaving the Doctor with the knowledge that he will have to be extremely careful dealing with Nyssa when they eventually meet to avoid changing history.

Since then, Sutton has also voiced Nyssa in several audio plays alongside Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, produced by Big Finish Productions. The audio play Primeval, which is set in Traken's past, provides an explanation for Nyssa's sudden collapse at the end of Four to Doomsday and her apparent development of psychic abilities in Time-Flight. The canonicity of the audio dramas, like other Doctor Who spin-off media, is unclear.

List of appearances

Television

Season 18
Season 19
Season 20
Season 21
30th anniversary special

Audio dramas

Novels

Virgin Missing Adventures
Past Doctor Adventures

Short stories

Comics

External links

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