Companion - Jo Grant
Josephine "Jo" Grant (also known as Jo Jones) is a fictional character played by Katy Manning in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Jo was introduced by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks in the first episode of Doctor Who's eighth season (1971) as a new companion of series protagonist the Doctor, in his third incarnation (Jon Pertwee). After the Doctor's previous companion Liz Shaw (Caroline John), a scientist and intellectual, the production team looked to introduce a less experienced companion to act as an audience surrogate.
Within the series narrative, Jo is a junior civilian operative for United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, an international organization that defends the Earth from alien threats, assigned as an assistant to the Doctor, who is initially stranded on earth. Once he regains use of his time machine, the TARDIS she accompanies him in travels across time and space. Jo departs the Doctor's company in the 1973 television serial The Green Death having fallen in love with a human professor. On television, she next encounters the Doctor over thirty years later in the 2010 Sarah Jane Adventures serial Death of the Doctor.
Manning and Pertwee enjoyed a close working relationship; Manning felt this added to the success of the partnership between Jo and the Third Doctor. Though her character was criticized for not being a progressive interpretation of a woman, Manning felt both that feminism was not a contemporary concern and Jo had her virtues aside from her intelligence, such as her loyalty. The character's exit is generally considered one of the emotional high points of Doctor Who's 1963-89 run; Russell T Davies felt pressure to remain true to this exit when re-introducing the character in 2010.
Jo first appears in the 1971 serial Terror of the Autons, having been assigned to the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) as a replacement for Liz Shaw (Caroline John). Apparently, she gained the assignment to UNIT because her uncle, a high ranking civil servant, had "pulled some strings". Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) assigns her to the Doctor, who is initially dismayed when he finds out that she is not a scientist, but accepts her because he does not have the heart to tell her otherwise. An enthusiastic, bubbly and sometimes scatter-brained blonde, Jo soon endears herself to the other members of UNIT, especially Captain Mike Yates (Richard Franklin) and Sergeant Benton (John Levene). The Third Doctor is also particularly attached to her, and she is devoted to him, refusing to leave his side even where mortal danger was involved.
There is plenty of danger to go around as well, especially after the Time Lords restore the Third Doctor's ability to travel through time and space. Jo faces the hazards and wonders of travel with the Doctor with courage and plucky determination. Together with the Doctor and UNIT, she encounters such perils as killer daffodils, time-eating monsters, and renegade Time Lord the Master (Roger Delgado). She is miniaturized, hypnotized, flung through time, nearly aged to death, and menaced by giant maggots and ancient demons. Over time, Jo also grows more confident and mature, until she is independent enough to stand up to the Doctor, which she does in her last serial, The Green Death in May–June 1973. During the events of that story, Jo falls in love with Professor Clifford Jones (Stewart Bevan), a young, Nobel Prize-winning scientist leading an environmentalist group. At the end, she agrees to marry Jones and go with him to the Amazon to study its vegetation, the news of which the Doctor greets with a mixture of pride and sadness.
Jo Grant (now Jo Jones) returned in two episodes of the fourth series of The Sarah Jane Adventures in Death of the Doctor (2010), meeting her replacement companion Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) for the first time, and subsequently the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith). The two attend a memorial service for the Doctor, but later learn aliens faked his death in order to steal the TARDIS using Jo and Sarah Jane's memories. Jo is still married, and travels with her grandson Santiago (Finn Jones); she is envious of Sarah Jane for having had several Doctor encounters since her departure, but has herself led a fulfilling life travelling the world promoting humanitarian and ecological causes. After returning her to London, the Doctor discloses to Jo that he secretly visited her at a time he thought he might be dying.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
