Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants (33 page)

He has little understanding of such things as quantum physics and matter transmitters. Very much a man of his time, he is often out of his depth when visiting future times, but doesn’t find 2002 all that different, and is disappointed that it is a far cry from the future promised in the ‘60s – no flying cars or moving pavements in the sky. Nothing like
The Jetsons
at all, just more of the same. This disappointment eventually turns into a blasé attitude, as he starts to consider himself a seasoned time traveller, a fact he likes to lord over Anji Kapoor, after she joins him and the Doctor in
Escape Velocity
.

He leaves the Doctor’s company for two years in
The Revolution Man
, and is brainwashed into becoming an agent for the Chinese Communist Army from 1967 to 1969. Although he overcomes this eventually, he faces a bigger problem in
Interference
when he is stored in The Cold in 1966 and removed from it on the colony world, Ordifica in 2593. With little choice, being so far from the Doctor, he and the survivors of Ordifica join the Faction Paradox. He becomes one of their agents, the Remote, after an attempted suicide at the age of thirty-three fails. He eventually teams up with a woman called Laura Tobin, who he nicknames Compassion, while he is given the name Code-Boy due to his affinity with computer systems. Before leaving Anathema, a planet-sized warship, he places his memories in a Remembrance Tank which eventually creates a replica of him called Kode. Fitz eventually becomes a Father in the Faction Paradox, and lives to become the oldest of the Remote. Father Kreiner, twisted and distorted after hundreds of years, hunts down and kills many Time Lords, and even tries to kill the Third Doctor on Dust. He is eventually trapped in IM Foreman’s universe-in-a-bottle. After he is freed in
The Ancestor Cell,
he is convinced to help the Doctor. The Doctor explains that he did not mean to abandon Father Kreiner, he truly believed Fitz had died. He asks the Doctor to change time and stop Fitz from meeting him in 1963, but the Doctor (now travelling with a ‘remembered’ Fitz) refuses. Father Kreiner is brutally killed by Grandfather Paradox, the ultimate Faction-induced corruption of the Doctor.

Kode, one of the Remote, is recognised by the Doctor as a copy of Fitz, and with a mixture of persuasion and a link to the TARDIS, is ‘remembered’ back to his Fitz identity, who is just shy of thirty at this point (again). He retains much of Fitz’s old memories, but there are gaps. He doesn’t always trust his memories, as a result. He finds it difficult to talk to Compassion, his old Remote co-agent, and misses both versions of Sam. He becomes good at anagrams and puzzles, though he never used to be and often wakes up uncertain of his identity. As a result of the TARDIS’ part in ‘remembering’ Fitz, he has a great affinity with the time ship, and often finds himself talking to her – she in turn talks to him through vibrations. He is understandably shocked when the TARDIS is destroyed in
The Shadows of Avalon
, and finds it somewhat awkward when Compassion later becomes the first fully sentient TARDIS. The prospect of travelling
inside
her takes a while to process. Sometime later in
The Ancestor Cell
, when they discover the Edifice – in truth the TARDIS which has rebuilt itself – Fitz finds himself confronted with Father Kreiner, his real self. Kreiner lets Fitz live, to see the truth of the Doctor for himself. To stop the Faction Paradox, and indeed his twisted self, Grandfather Paradox, the Doctor destroys Gallifrey – both he and Fitz are rescued by Compassion. The Doctor, now with no memory of who is or what he has done, is taken to the late nineteenth century to recover for a hundred years. Compassion takes Fitz to 2001, where he has to wait for the Doctor to find him again. He only has to wait a week, while the Doctor lives through over a hundred years of history. When Fitz is reunited with the Doctor he is somewhat unsettled by the fact that the Doctor still has no memory of what he has done. Until his memory is restored, Fitz finds himself in the unusual position of knowing more about the Doctor than he does, and so goes to great lengths to protect him.

He is nervous around strong women, and is not interested in new companion, Anji. He is often looked down on by Anji, because he is from the 1960s and she is from 2001, and so he plays up the role of ‘seasoned traveller’, which comes across as more patronising than the parting of wisdom. Fitz develops a very deep love for the Doctor over the course of their journeys, becoming very like brothers, something Anji notes on many occasions. Such is the length of time that he spends with the Doctor, that by
Eater of Wasps
, Fitz no longer considers Earth his home, but rather thinks of himself as a ‘citizen of the universe’, echoing a description the First Doctor once used for himself in
The Daleks’ Masterplan
.

He turns thirty-three in
History 101
, the age his original self decided to join the Faction Paradox, and doesn’t believe he will make it to forty because of his dangerous life with the Doctor. But he is OK with this. He is, at least, near thirty-five when we last see him in
The Gallifrey Chronicles
by which point Anji has left and Trix MacMillan has joined. While travelling through various alternative realities and watching them be destroyed, Fitz makes a documentary in an effort to try and cope. We later learn that he is actively blocking out many of his pre-remembered memories.

Unfortunately the
Eighth Doctor Adventures
in prose comes to an abrupt end in June 2005, when the final book is published, due to the revived series on television and an upcoming series of ongoing novels featuring the Ninth Doctor. As a result of this, we never reach the end of Fitz’s story. We are left with him, now in a relationship with Trix (the first proper couple to live in the TARDIS – foreshadowing Amy & Rory in 2010), and they are both thinking of leaving the Doctor after he has defeated the Vore. Do they leave, do they die? Does Fitz make it to forty? Questions to which we may never know the answer. Although Fitz does return for a one-off audio adventure in 2009, it is set during his travels with Anji, and so tells us nothing that we did not already know. But one thing we do know is that Fitz’s influence on the Doctor is far reaching, the first proper male companion since Turlough, and the longest serving companion in any medium – seven years! That alone assures his place in the annals of
Doctor Who
lore, and he ought never be forgotten.

Compassion
(
Interference, Book One
to
The Ancestor Cell
, and
Halflife
)

Never destined to be a straightforward companion, Compassion’s influence on the future lore of
Doctor Who
is unmistakable. In many ways she becomes the prototype for what we discover in
The Doctor’s Wife
in 2010. Although the idea of fully sentient TARDISes is first introduced in
Alien Bodies
(1997), it is not until Compassion comes along that we discover the origin of these enigmatic machines…

Originally a woman called Laura Tobin, from the human colony on Ordifica, Compassion is the result of Laura’s personality and biodata being copied into the Faction Paradox’s Remembrance Tanks. She joins the Doctor and Fitz because of her previous connection to Fitz, when he had been her partner in the Remote as Kode. She is very resistant to the Doctor, and refuses to allow him to change her, believing that people can do without his interference. She doesn’t believe the Doctor understands the concept of having friends, thinking he treats his companions as pets. Ironic, really, since it is the Doctor who suggests she spends three months on Earth to learn more about humanity.

As a member of the Remote, Compassion always wears an earpiece through which she receives various signals and media. Upon joining the Doctor, she is told she no longer needs it, but despite the Doctor’s advice she continues to wear it. This works out very badly for her, since over a short period of time the connection between her earpiece and the TARDIS has unforeseen effects on her biodata. And in
The Shadows of Avalon
(2000) it is warped along Block Transfer Computations, which turns her into the first sentient TARDIS – a type 102. The President of Gallifrey, Romana, wants Compassion so that the Time Lords can breed a new race of sentient TARDISes for the forthcoming war, but the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion go on the run. The Doctor fits Compassion with a Randomiser in
The Fall of Yquatine
(2000), without telling her, which causes her a great deal of pain initially. She eventually forgives him, and gets used to not being able to control her travels through the time vortex. Due to her chameleon circuit she can take on the form of any species she wishes, however more often than not she appears in her ‘default’ form, the body of Laura Tobin. Although she is now, technically, immortal, she feels she is dead since becoming a TARDIS. She only sticks with the Doctor and Fitz because she doesn’t want to run alone, but that changes when the Doctor destroys Gallifrey and she is no longer hunted by the Time Lords.

She meets Nivet in
The Ancestor Cell
(2000), a technician from Gallifrey, and after he repairs her she decides to travel with him, since she will need an engineer. She returns the Doctor to Earth, with his TARDIS, and deposits Fitz a hundred years in the future.

She continues on her travels with Nivet, and both reappear in
Halflife
(2004). Compassion goes under the guise of Madame Xing and restores a portion of the Doctor’s memory; giving him a device that will do the rest of the job should he wish to. She is last seen just before she leaves Espero, disappointed and hoping for another chance to restore the Doctor’s memories. Perhaps so she can tell him what he did to her. Either way, as with Fitz, Compassion’s story is never finished due to the termination of the
Eighth Doctor Adventures
in 2005.

Other prose-exclusive companions include the aforementioned Anji Kapoor, Trix MacMillan and, in only two short stories, Bazima.

Anji appears in twenty-six novels (
Escape Velocity
[2001] to
Timeless
[2003], returning briefly in the 2005 novel,
The Gallifrey Chronicles
), and one short story,
Notre Dame du Temps
(2003). She is a stockbroker, and a third generation British-Asian. She joins the Doctor after her boyfriend, Dave, is killed during a Kulan invasion of Earth, and leaves when she becomes the legal guardian of the young time-sensitive (and ex-Time Lord, now trapped in the body of a young girl), Chloe. Anji gets engaged to a man called Greg, and keeps in contact with her replacement-companion, Trix, who feeds Anji stock tips.

Trix appears in fifteen novels (
Time Zero
[2002] to
The Gallifrey Chronicles
[2005]). She is a con artist working for the Doctor’s rival, Sabbath. The Doctor refuses to allow her into the TARDIS, but she stows away and remains undetected for some time. She is still with the Doctor and Fitz when the Doctor restores Gallifrey, and she and Fitz agree that after the Doctor defeats the Vore they will leave him. Whatever happens to Trix is unknown, since no further novels feature her.

Bazima appears in two short stories,
Nettles
and
Transmission Ends
(both 2008). She is a fashion genegineer and travels with the Doctor on a few adventures, before returning home. She works on a plan to alter the DNA of her own people so they can defeat the Gati, who occupy her planet.

On Audio

Big Finish have been producing audio plays based on
Doctor Who
since 1999, but it isn’t until 2001 that Paul McGann makes his first appearance as the Eighth Doctor, for the first time since the 1996
Television Movie
. For a long period his main travelling companion is Charley Pollard, who stays with him until December 2007. In 2006, however, Big Finish made a new series of Eighth Doctor plays for BBC Radio 7, and for this they needed a new companion. Enter Lucie Miller…

In many respects, because she appears in a co-production with the BBC and is featured in adventures broadcast by the BBC, Lucie carries with her a degree of ‘canonicity’. She is as close as the Eighth Doctor gets to having an officially recognised companion (although, like every other companion created for the Expanded Universe she hasn’t been referenced on television), and as such it is to her we turn the spotlight next.

Lucie Miller
–
Sheridan Smith
(
Blood of the Daleks
to
To the Death
)

Both Lucie’s arrival and first scene are not too dissimilar to those of Donna Noble in the television stories
Doomsday
and
The Runaway Bride
. (An unintentional coincidence it turns out, as told by author Steve Lyons, who knew nothing of Donna’s first scene until he saw
The Runaway Bride
, which was transmitted barely a week before episode one of
Blood of the Daleks
in December 2006.) Lucie appears suddenly in the TARDIS, with no idea how she got there. She thinks the Doctor has kidnapped her, although he claims himself innocent. As it turns out, she does know why she is there. She makes a slip by calling the Doctor a Time Lord before he reveals this fact to her, at which point the Doctor recognises a perception filter placed around her, to block out some of her memories (a trick Time Lords often use). She tells him that the Time Lords sent her to him for protection, because she saw ‘something’ that she can’t remember. It takes a while for Lucie to warm to the Doctor, who she thinks is a ‘patronising git’, and only stays with him because she has no choice. But she does promise him that she will leave at the earliest opportunity, something the Doctor looks forward to.