Paul Gadzikowski
scarfman@iglou.com

This wasn't the first appearance I wrote for Saavik's third regeneration (where regeneration in Time Lord idiom is a synonym for incarnation). That was The Night Visitors, in prose not cartoons, set some months later than this. After the Doctor had gone the last part of his seventh regeneration and all his eighth to date unusually without a traveling companion (for reasons shown in Angels and Aces), the ice was broken with Buffy spending the summer of '98 in the TARDIS (as shown in What I Did On My Summer Vacation). When Buffy left I felt compelled to allow the Doctor to return to his characteristic tendency to keep someone around to talk at to. Of course, in the contemporary DOCTOR WHO tie-in novels the eighth Doctor had had a companion named Samantha "Sam" Jones, but with rare exceptions I decline to incorporate tie-in continuities into my fanfiction. However I also resist inventing new characters for it, particularly for regular or recurring roles. In The Night Visitors I described Saavik's new self as blonde before I named her, as a trick to maybe make my readers who were novel readers think for half a paragraph that maybe I was going to start using Sam after all. But that was Christmas 1998, and 1999 was the year I was converting my weekly online fanfiction efforts from prose to cartoons. I realized I was going to need to know what Saavik Three looked like. But then ... well, that comes into the commentary on later cartoons.

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