Lady Serena

The Lady Serena, or more completely, the Lady Serenadellatrovella, was the companion of the Second Doctor for the duration of the Past Doctor Adventures novel World Game.

Serena was a member of an eminent but uninfluential Time Lord family who had ambitions to some day become President of the High Council of Time Lords, spending her days working in the Capitol Library, studying records of the presidential election as a means of learning more about Time Lord politics. She is assigned to accompany the Second Doctor (after his conviction by the Time Lords in The War Games) on a mission for the Celestial Intervention Agency to improve her own political credentials (see also: Season 6B).

Unlike the later Fourth Doctor's relationship with Romana, Serena is effectively the Doctor's parole officer, the two of them using, for the duration of the mission, a newer Type 97 TARDIS that only she knows how to operate (Allegedly because the CIA felt that the Doctor's TARDIS was too obsolete for such work). Because of the terms of the Doctor's reprieve from execution, she also has the authority to give him orders. There was thus a certain hostility between the Doctor and Serena from the moment they met; the Doctor objected to having a companion forced on him like this, resenting Serena's claims that she would be his supervisor, while Serena was opposed to The Doctor calling her his assistant, and insisted that The Doctor was merely a convict on parole.

However, during the course of the mission, they gradually begin to appreciate each other's talents. Even before meeting The Doctor face-to-face, Serena felt that he'd been treated unfairly; upon learning that he'd only been captured because he wished to save the humans involved in the War Games, she commented that his original sentence of execution seemed an unfair reward for his altruism. As they continued to work together, Serena came to understand more about The Doctor's reasons for leaving Gallifrey, and began to see that, for all the charges put against him at his trial, he had only interfered because he believed it to be right, not because he simply felt like it, and had left Gallifrey mainly because there was no place on it for someone with his principles. She even seemed to come to care for The Doctor in her own way, apparently exhibiting jealousy of the fondness that the Countess- a member of the race known as the Players whom the Doctor had encountered in the past- had for the Time Lord.

Serena's time with The Doctor was cut tragically short after only one adventure with him. Having learned that the Countess intended to assassinate the Duke of Wellington at a ball held on the eve of Waterloo, The Doctor and Serena attended the ball to find out what had happened, and Serena took the shot intended for Wellington herself; the musket ball, fired at her from practically point-blank range, destroyed both her hearts, thus preventing her from regenerating. She was buried in a simple grave, the only thing on her gravestone being SERENA, and, after the battle of Waterloo, it was visited by the Doctor and Wellington, who assured the Doctor that he would always remember the role he and Serena had played in the battle. Once back on Gallifrey, having unmasked a Time Lord who'd been collaborating with the Players, the Doctor refused to go on any more missions for the Agency until certain conditions were met, including an order that Serena's name be placed on the Gallifreyian Honour Roll and that he be allowed to tell her family how she had died.