O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! My miserable three weeks spent with Wesley Crusher Adric as a companion are at an end! It truly is a Christmas miracle! 

So let's talk about it!

Earthshock - Parts 3 & 4

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

The gist of the back half of the story is that the Doctor and Adric are initially suspected of being responsible for the recent crew deaths, until the army of Cybermen come stomping up through the cargo deck and start killing everyone. Soon enough the Cybermen take control of the flight deck and reprogram the freighter to be on an un-alterable collision course with Earth. At one point the Doctor mentions how gold is deadly to the Cybermen, at which point Adric completely telegraphs the fact that his much-vaunted badge for Mathematical Excellence is actually made of gold. Nice going, slick.

Ultimately the CyberLeader and a couple silver lackeys drag the Doctor and Tegan back down to the TARDIS to use it as a lifeboat, while Adric stays behind on the ship's control deck trying to override the computer controls. This, despite the fact that he is given ample opportunity to escape. This, despite the fact that (unbeknownst to him) the Doctor has already deduced that the ship is being shunted back in time by sixty five million years, and will not be altering Earth's history at all because it is going to be the Extinction Level Event that wiped out the dinosaurs. But if Adric is anything, he is blindingly stupid about being smart. He thinks he can disable the controls and save the planet. He is wrong.

Meanwhile back on the TARDIS, the Doctor overpowers the CyberLeader by using Adric's badge. it turns out the badge is as much of a piece of crap as its owner, it just immediately starts bending and breaking into pieces as the Doctor rubs it into the CyberLeader's chest unit. All of the bad guys are destroyed just in time for the Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa to watch in stunned silence as the freighter blows up with Adric on board. Just before he dies, Adric complains to himself, "Now I'll never know if I was right..."  (HINT: he wasn't)

And then, for the first time in the history of the show, we get silent closing credits. On top of that, they are rolling credits for the first time since The War Games, and instead of the normal time tunnel or star field it is a static shot of Adric's crappy broken badge. It would be a truly shocking moment, if it weren't for the fact that Adric was such an awful companion. I once saw a fan edit of the closing credits, where the silence was replaced with a laugh track. Really.

This was the first time in series history that a long-running companion actually died. Sure, Katarina was thrown out that airlock in her second story, but she was there so briefly she barely qualifies as a companion. Ditto with Sara Kingdom, who died just a few episodes later. She didn't even make it through a complete story. So Adric is truly unique in the classic series. And the modern series, for that matter, which has a real problem with killing off companions and then promptly un-killing them, but I'll get to that in a few months.

I feel kind of bad that I have derived so much enjoyment out of the death of this fictional character. Matthew Waterhouse, if you are for some unimaginable reason actually reading this, please don't take it personally. It's not your fault you were saddled with an awful character, and I am sure you did the best you could with it. But there it is, Adric is gone and I am overjoyed that I never have to see him again.

Wait, what? He shows up in episode two of Time Flight tomorrow, strictly as a ploy so that he would be listed in the cast in the Radio Times issue that came out the day before the last episode of Earthshock aired and not give away his departure? Damn it!!!

STATS:

Doctor(s): Fifth
Companion(s): Adric, Tegan, Nyssa
Episode(s): Earthshock - Parts 3 & 4
Steps Walked: 7,684 today, 2,011,247 total
Distance Walked: 4.31 miles today, 1,026.54 miles total
Weight: 247.10 lbs (five day moving average), net change -60.20 lbs