Nyssa (Doctor Who)

Doctor Who character
Promotional image of Nyssa for Mawdryn Undead
Nyssa
Affiliated	Fourth Doctor Fifth Doctor
Species	Trakenite
Home planet	Traken
Home era	1981
First appearance	The Keeper of Traken
Last appearance	Terminus The Caves of Androzani (cameo) Dimensions in Time (charity special)
Portrayed by	Sarah Sutton

Nyssa is a fictional character played by Sarah Sutton in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who originating from the planet Traken. 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. She returned in the following serial Logopolis, in which the Fourth Doctor regenerated, and remained as a companion of the Fifth Doctor. She 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.

Nyssa and the Doctor are reunited with Tegan while battling against Omega in Amsterdam and on Gallifrey. They 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. Nyssa's deep affection for the Doctor is demonstrated at this point when she kisses the Doctor goodbye.

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 when he is asking his fifth incarnation where he is in his own relative timeline.

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, the Doctor having been tracking a change in history which has somehow led him to Nyssa's futuristic Home. This adventure leaves Doctor with the knowledge that he will have to be extremely careful dealing with Nyssa when they eventually meet to avoid changing history while ensuring she survives to meet him in his past.

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 'Winter' segment of Circular Time, by Paul Cornell and Mike Maddox is set some years after Asylum and shows her with a husband, Lasarti and a baby daughter, Nica. She encounters the regenerating Fifth Doctor in her dreams. She believes that this will probably be the last time she sees him, but knows that he is still traveling and having adventures somewhere. However, fifty years after leaving them, Nyssa encounters The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough (from their perspective, they just left her a few days ago) in the audio play Cobwebs. She begins travelling with them again for an unspecified amount of time. In Heroes of Sontar, Nyssa tells Tegan that she has two children named Adric and Tegan. The canonicity of the audio dramas, like other Doctor Who spin-off media, is unclear.

Other mentions

A vision of Nyssa is seen along with every other companion aside from Leela on the scanner screen in Resurrection of the Daleks.

List of appearances

Television

Season 18

• The Keeper of Traken
• Logopolis (Parts 2-4)

Season 19

• Castrovalva
• Four to Doomsday
• Kinda (Parts 1 & 4)
• The Visitation
• Black Orchid
• Earthshock
• Time-Flight

Season 20

• Arc of Infinity
• Snakedance
• Mawdryn Undead
• Terminus

Season 21

• The Caves of Androzani (cameo in part 4)

30th anniversary special

• Dimensions in Time

Audio dramas

• The Land of the Dead
• Winter for the Adept
• The Mutant Phase
• Primeval
• Spare Parts
• Creatures of Beauty
• The Game
• Circular Time
• Renaissance of the Daleks
• Return to the Web Planet
• The Haunting of Thomas Brewster
• The Boy That Time Forgot
• Time Reef & A Perfect World
• The Darkening Eye
• Castle of Fear
• The Eternal Summer
• Plague of the Daleks
• Cobwebs
• The Whispering Forest
• The Cradle of the Snake
• The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories
• Heroes of Sontar
• Kiss of Death
• Rat Trap
• The Elite
• Hexagora
• The Children of Seth
• The Five Companions
• The Emerald Tiger

Short Trips audios

• The Deep
• Seven to One
• The Lions of Trafalgar

Novels

Virgin Missing Adventures

• Goth Opera by Paul Cornell
• The Sands of Time by Justin Richards
• Cold Fusion by Lance Parkin

Past Doctor Adventures

• Zeta Major by Simon Messingham
• Divided Loyalties by Gary Russell
• Asylum by Peter Darvill-Evans
• Fear of the Dark by Trevor Baxendale
• Empire of Death by David Bishop

Short stories

• "Lackaday Express" by Paul Cornell (Decalog)
• "Lonely Days" by Daniel Blythe (Decalog 2: Lost Property)
• "Past Reckoning" by Jackie Marshall (Decalog 3: Consequences)
• "The Parliament of Rats" by Daniel O'Mahony (Short Trips)
• "The Eternity Contract" by Steve Lyons (More Short Trips)
• "Hearts of Stone" by Steve Lyons (Short Trips: Companions)
• "Soul Mate" by David Bailey (Short Trips: A Universe of Terrors)
• "Confabula" by Ian Potter (Short Trips: The Muses)
• "No Exit" by Kate Orman (Short Trips: Steel Skies)
• "The Immortals" by Simon Guerrier (Short Trips: Past Tense)
• "Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life" by Anthony Keetch (Short Trips: Monsters)
• "In the TARDIS: Christmas Day" by Val Douglas (Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)
• "The 57th" by John Binns (Short Trips: Seven Deadly Sins)
• "Saturn" by Alison Lawson (Short Trips: The Solar System)
• "The Church of Saint Sebastian" by Robert Smith (Short Trips: The History of Christmas)
• "Goths and Robbers" by Diane Duane (Short Trips: The Quality of Leadership)
• "God Send Me Well to Keep" by Linnea Dodson (Short Trips: The Quality of Leadership)
• "Tweaker" by Dan Abnett (Short Trips: Transmissions)

Comics

• "On The Planet Isopterus" by Glenn Rix (Doctor Who Annual 1983)
• "Blood Invocation" by Paul Cornell and John Ridgway (Doctor Who Magazine Yearbook 1995)

External links

• Nyssa on TARDIS Index File, an external wiki
• Nyssa on the BBC's Doctor Who website