Vicki Pallister Vicki Pallister was a young woman whom the First Doctor , Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright met at sixteen years of age at most , soon after the Doctor ' s granddaughter Susan Foreman was left behind on 22nd century Earth . Having lost both her parents in relatively quick succession , she decided to join the three time travel lers on their adventures . Once the two teacher s left the TARDIS , she travelled for a period with Steven Taylor , before leaving the Doctor ' s side to marry Troilus and to take the name Cressida , which was used during the Trojan War . Biography . Early life . Vicki was born on Earth ( TV : " The Rescue " ) in 2479 . ( PROSE : " Byzantium ! " ) Her father was Lieutenant Commander Pallister of the Merchant Space Marine . ( PROSE : " The Eleventh Tiger " ) Her mother wanted to name her Tanni , but her father preferred Vicki . As a girl , she lived in Liddell Towers on the South Circular Road in New London , where she enjoyed looking at the star s at night , though they were so faint they could hardly be seen . ( PROSE : " Byzantium ! " ) Her full name was simply Vicki as opposed to Victoria . ( AUDIO : " 1963 " ) As a student of a 25th century school system , she studied medicine one hour a week . By the age of ten , she had obtained certificates in medicine , physics , computer s , chemistry and other disciplines . ( TV : " The Web Planet " ) She also studied 20th century history ( AUDIO : " The Suffering " ) , astronomy ( AUDIO : " Starborn " ) and temporal paradox es ( PROSE : " The Schoolboy ' s Story " ) at school . She was skilled at cutting hair . ( TV : " Galaxy 4 " ) She once cut Steven ' s hair for him . ( AUDIO : " The Suffering " ) Her mother died when Vicki was eleven . ( PROSE : " Byzantium ! " ) Her father took a job in a new colony on the planet Astra and left Earth in 2493 . The ship carrying the colonists , the " UK - 201 " , crash - landed on Dido . Most of the passengers survived the crash , but one night , unbeknownst to Vicki , Bennett murder ed all the survivors other than her , as well as most of the native Dido people . ( TV : " The Rescue " ) Joining the TARDIS . When the TARDIS landed on Dido , Barbara Wright used a flare gun to kill Vicki ' s " pet " Didonian Sand Beast , Sandy , thinking it a threat to Vicki . It took effort on the part of Vicki to forgive Barbara for this . Bennett pretended he could not move his legs while Vicki took care of him . When the Doctor discovered the truth and the Dido people came to take revenge on Bennett , she was left with nobody . The Doctor asked Vicki to come with them . ( TV : " The Rescue " ) Travels . After relaxing at a Roman villa for several weeks in 64 , the Doctor joined Vicki to meet the Emperor Nero after the Doctor was mistaken for the lyre player Maximus Pettulian . At the Emperor ' s palace , Vicki unwittingly stopped Barbara from being poisoned by Nero ' s wife Poppaea without knowing it was Barbara who Poppaea was referring to , by switching her drink with Nero ' s . Nero was stopped by the Doctor from drinking his poisoned drink at the last minute . Vicki witnessed the Great Fire of Rome , for which the Doctor unwittingly gave Nero the idea . Vicki told the Doctor off for insisting that she shouldn ' t change history when she felt the Fire was his fault . ( TV : " The Romans " ) When they visited London in the early 20th century , she was warned by Violet not to enter the TARDIS as it would lead to her death . She found out from a her spirit that she was going to die . This spirit told her about a future adventure . ( AUDIO : " Starborn " ) Subsequently , she and her friends arrived on Vortis and encountered the Zarbi and their master , the Animus . ( TV : " The Web Planet " ) The Doctor , Ian , Barbara , and Vicki then travelled to 1868 , where they attended a lecture by Thomas Huxley . The four of them travelled into the London Underground to investigate a group of missing students and discovered that the Zarbi had populated themselves there . Travelling further into the sewers , they found the Animus , who had reformed itself and had moved to Earth to take revenge on the human race . Ian was able to kill it by driving a train into it . The Doctor and his companions prepared to leave , but the Doctor discovered that his companions were missing ; having been pulled out of time by an entity . ( COMIC : " Unnatural Selection " ) After visiting Earth during the Crusades and meeting Richard the Lionheart ( TV : " The Crusade " ) she and the rest of the TARDIS crew faced the Morok s on Xeros . ( TV : " The Space Museum " ) She didn ' t like the Market on Hisk as she said it was too neat and didn ' t make sense . She was the first to experience the shared dreaming of the people of Hisk and learn how they worked . She felt responsible for the suicide of a market trader as she took his place in a dreaming machine . In the dreams she saw Bennett and thought she was going to die . ( AUDIO : " The Sleeping City " ) On one planet , they stayed a while and she started to work in administration . She was having an appraisal with the computer when she noted that they were trying to find the TARDIS . She used her programming knowledge to undo the memory alteration program that was going on . ( AUDIO : " The Unwinding World " ) When Vicki and her friends were visiting Sonning Palace she met the Queen Isabella . Vicki and Isabella soon became frends and she stayed with her when the Doctor and Barbara , and later Ian , went to London . Isabella later ran away and Vicki followed her . With Tom Chaucer ' s help she pleaded for the Doctor and Ian ' s release . ( AUDIO : " The Doctor ' s Tale " ) Vicki and her cohorts were chased through many locations in time and space by the Dalek s . They finally ended up on Mechanus , and Ian and Barbara departed for their own time . ( TV : " The Chase " ) When Vicki and the Doctor returned to the TARDIS , they found stowaway Steven Taylor aboard , who joined them on their continued travels . They found the Monk , a man from the same place as the Doctor who had his own TARDIS , in 1066 Northumbria trying to meddle with history and change the course of the Battle of Hastings . Although the Monk had tied up the three travellers and prepared to fire an atomic cannon at a fleet of Viking s , this plan was stopped when a group of Saxon s attacked the Monk ' s monastery and drove the Monk out , while the Doctor removed the dimensional control of the Monk ' s TARDIS , trapping him there . ( TV : " The Time Meddler " ) They visited London in 1912 , where Vicki witnessed a suffragette rally and fell under the influence of a misandristic alien . The travellers managed to persuade the alien to leave . Vicki and Steven later made an audio recording of their account of these events . ( AUDIO : " The Suffering " ) They landed in London in 1762 where they were locked out of the TARDIS . She became concerned when the Doctor went missing . ( AUDIO : " The Founding Fathers " ) The TARDIS materialised in a hangar where a few aliens were assembling a space cannon . Assuming they needed it for protection from their enemies , Vicki and Steven attempted to help them . In truth , the cannon had been ordered from the aliens by humans , and as a human spaceship arrived on the planet , the travellers hurriedly departed in the TARDIS . ( PROSE : " Corridors of Power " ) They arrived in London again in 1814 ; this time they met Jane Austen and prevented a Phoenix from absorbing all the heat on Earth . Although the Phoenix was extinguished , a tiny cinder from its fire caught in Vicki ' s eye , a fact which remained unknown to Vicki at the time . ( AUDIO : " Frostfire " ) She helped the Doctor to explore the ship after he increased its habitable space , but was caught up when it malfunctioned and had to leave the ship . She became concerned when the Doctor became ill . She didn ' t like the plan that Thorn and Qureshi was talking about when the oxygen in base base was running low . She used her statistic knowledge to find any correlation between hull breaches and eruptions on Ceres . ( AUDIO : " The Bounty of Ceres " ) The TARDIS materialised in the attic of 10 Downing Street in July 1900 , where Vicki , Steven and the Doctor discovered a time fungus and a conspiracy of servants around it . The Doctor failed to convince the servants to abandon their schemes , so he sabotaged the time fungus ' growth by contaminating the building with another fungus , and the travellers escaped in their ship . ( AUDIO : " Upstairs " ) They found themselves on a doomed planet , involved in a confrontation between the Drahvin s and the Rill s . The Drahvins , desperate to find an escape route , attempted to present the Rills as merciless killers . Vicki was the first to establish that the Rills were peaceful explorers . The travellers helped the Rills power their ship and leave the planet before it exploded . ( TV : " Galaxy 4 " ) They visited New York City in the late December 2007 , where they tracked down a toy snowman that had become animated due to contact with alien bacteria . Helped by a local department store manager , Vicki , Steven and the Doctor defeated the malevolent snowman . ( PROSE : " Snowman in Manhattan " ) The TARDIS crew helped a stranded Lapino , a member of a species that fed on emotions , gather enough emotional energy to send a message to his home planet . To produce emotions , the Lapino threatened to kill Vicki and Steven . The Doctor instead arranged for them to fall under the illusion that they were Cinderella and her prince . Vicki and Steven later remembered little of the event . ( PROSE : " Planet of the Bunnoids " ) The travellers arrived in Prague in 2348 , where they participated in the celebration of the 1000th anniversary of the Charles University and prevented a scientist named Jane Childress from erasing human evolution . Vicki and Steven were turned into monkeys but soon were restored to their human form . ( PROSE : " The Long Step Backward " ) The TARDIS materialised on the lunar station on Phobos , a moon of Mars . Steven and a Jarnian named Hazam crashed onto the planet ' s surface , the oxygen in their spacesuits running out . Vicki with the Doctor and members of the station staff boarded a rescue ship that picked up Steven and Hazam despite a dangerous sandstorm . ( PROSE : " Mars " ) Leaving the Doctor . Most of Vicki ' s skills and knowledge were based in science , but she also knew some history . When the travellers materialised on Earth during the Trojan War in circa 1200 BC , she displayed her knowledge of Greek heroes and the Trojan Horse . While in Troy , Vicki was given the name " Cressida " by King Priam and met his son Troilus . They fell in love and Vicki left the Doctor to be with him . ( TV : " The Myth Makers " ) The Doctor had previously been aware that she would leave the TARDIS and become Cressida . ( PROSE : " Byzantium ! " ) Their tale was later written as a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer and as a play by William Shakespeare . Several years later , Vicki encountered the Eighth Doctor , Charley Pollard and Shakespeare , after defeating the Dalek s in the 2050s . Vicki believed this Doctor to be a younger version of the Doctor whom she knew . However , she eventually learned his true identity , and Shakespeare used this encounter to inspire the poem which he later wrote . ( PROSE : " Apocrypha Bipedium " ) Vicki didn ' t immediately get accustomed to her new life . The ancient era appeared primitive to her , and the people seemed hostile , to the point where she thought that the Trojans considered her either possessed or curse d and wanted to abandon her on a rock in the middle of the sea . Troilus stood by her in this situation , which eventually led to the couple settling down in Carthage . Vicki sometimes wept , because she felt lonely and out of place . On one such occasion , she found among her tears the cinder of Phoenix fire that had remained in her eye since her adventure in London . Vicki kept the cinder in a burning oil lamp in the basement of a temple . She discovered that it was sentient and had a telepathic connection with her . Vicki often visited the creature in its basement , as she felt that they were both alone and needed someone to talk to . When she was older , Vicki decided to write memoirs of her travels with the Doctor . Since the scribes in Carthage had a monopoly on papyrus , Vicki had to pay them to write down her stories instead of doing that herself . She was displeased with the monopoly practice and thought it should be abandoned . Sometimes Vicki read her drafts aloud to the Cinder , as it remembered the Doctor and could understand concepts which were familiar to her as a time traveller born in the far future , but incomprehensible to the people surrounding her in the ancient era . The tale of how Vicki met the Cinder in 1814 was also among those she recorded and read to the creature . At some point before Vicki began working on her memoirs , she and Troilus had had two children , who lived with them in Carthage . In one conversation with the Cinder , Vicki referred to them as " young heroes " , showing her fondness for them . ( AUDIO : " Frostfire " ) Undated events . A photo of Vicki exists in the Black Archive ( TV : " The Day of the Doctor " ) Personality . Vicki considered herself to be a happy person generally . ( AUDIO : " The Suffering " ) She was keen for adventure . She was often bored on the journeys to their destinations and the less exciting moments of their lives . When the travellers were staying at a villa near Rome , she was disappointed that there was no action . Her love of thrills was complemented by awe and wonder , and these never diminished . She was bursting with excitement when she glimpsed Nero . The sight of Rome burning excited her . ( TV : " The Romans " ) Whether teasing , or merely undiplomatic , Vicki had a knack of saying the wrong thing to Barbara , despite their close relationship . Right off , she said that Barbara Wright must be " about five hundred and fifty years old " as she came from 1963 . ( TV : " The Rescue " ) On Vortis , Vicki said aspirin tablets were old fashioned – until she saw some in the Doctor ' s first aid kit , she had never heard of them . She also offended Barbara by responding to her statement that the main subjects taught at her school were the 3 R ' s by asking if Barbara ' s school had been a nursery . ( TV : " The Web Planet " ) Despite her education and interest in history , some of Vicki ' s knowledge about the fine details of Earth ' s past could be inaccurate or uncertain . She didn ' t know the Beatles played " classical music " , and called 1960s New York City " ancient " . ( TV : " The Chase " ) She was also unaware of the nature and location of the Battle of Trafalgar ( PROSE : " The Plotters " ) , or whether pandas and airplanes existed in China in 1863 ( PROSE : " The Eleventh Tiger " ) . Vicki ' s youth and willingness to try anything enabled her to save the travellers from danger by inciting the Xeron rebels to action at the Space Museum . Using her considerable analytical and technical skills , Vicki reprogrammed the Morok armoury ' s computer to allow the rebels access to the weaponry stored there , enabling them to fight . ( TV : " The Space Museum " ) Despite her bravado , Vicki was terrified of heights . While they escaped from the Mechanoid City , the Doctor had to blindfold her . The travellers , with Steven Taylor ' s assistance , then had to lower her the fifteen hundred feet by rope . ( TV : " The Chase " ) She once described herself as a " plucky orphan . " ( AUDIO : " The Suffering " ) She viewed Steven as being like a " big brother , " one whom she could boss about . ( AUDIO : " Frostfire " ) The Doctor considered her to be " rather willful " . ( AUDIO : " The Doctor ' s Tale " )