Katarina (Doctor Who)

Katarina first met the Seventh Doctor when she was a little girl.[3] As the Doctors looked different, she was unaware that they were the same person. She spoke to him of her ambition to serve as a handmaid to a priestess because her poor family could not afford to feed her any longer. The Doctor gave her family a gold coin, which would feed them for a year. However, on learning Katarina's name, the Doctor realized that she would die young as he has already witnessed it in his personal timeline.

Much later, on the ruined world of Adeki, the Seventh Doctor found one of several Gwanzulums, beings who used their shapeshifting powers to pass themselves off as some of the Doctor's past companions, including Katarina.[4] Before he realized the ruse, the false Katarina tried to have him take her off the planet. Later, Ace comes across the ghost of Katarina in the form of an eternally frozen girl of ice, in the Doctor's guilty mind. In Katarina's afterlife, she finds herself without a coin and unable to cross the River Styx. However, due to the intervention of the Doctor (or her idea of him), she found her way not only to Asphodel where all souls who had done neither good nor evil would go, but to the Elysian Fields, the abode of the blessed.

In the novel Timewyrm: Genesys the TARDIS projects her likeness on a screen along with a number of other dead companions to help the Seventh Doctor work out where he needs to go.

Katarina has made a return in Big Finish Productions, portrayed by Ajjaz Awad. In the series Ravenous story "Companion Piece", the kleptomaniac Time Lord known as the Nine attempts to retrieve Katarina's corpse to complete his latest 'collection' of the Doctor's companions, but when he attempts to read Katarina's mind to confirm her identity, the residual artron energy in her body leaves her consciousness 'active' enough for Katarina to distract the Nine so that other companions can defeat him. It is also revealed that Katarina's body had previously been retrieved by River Song, the Doctor's 'wife', who felt that Katarina deserved better than to be left behind like that even if River recognised that the Doctor had no choice.

Katarina plays a more significant return in the audio Daughter of the Gods,[5] when a piloting mistake caused by later companions Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot causes the Second Doctor's TARDIS to crash into the First's, causing the First Doctor, Steven and Katarina to crash-land on the planet Urbania before they get to Kembel. As a result, the trio spend three months on Kembel while the Doctor constructs a new dematerialisation circuit to repair the damaged TARDIS, with the Doctor giving Katarina some lessons, but when the Second Doctor arrives on Urbania as the Daleks attack the planet, the older Doctor reveals what should have happened before his interference. The First Doctor resolves to find another way, but once the Second explains the situation to Katarina and expresses his regrets, Katarina accepts that there is no other choice and joins him and his companions as they use the First Doctor's repaired dematerialisation circuit to reactivate the Second's TARDIS so that he can undo the earlier mistake. The audio ends with the implication that, while the events have been erased from history with the restoration of the original timeline, the Second Doctor at least retains some memory of what just took place, as he reflects that he will never forget Katarina.