Characters / Eighth Doctor Adventures

Characters appearing in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels.

For tropes relating to Iris Wildthyme, see Iris Wildthyme. For tropes about Faction Paradox outside of this range of novels, see Faction Paradox.

(Portraits by Paul Hanley)

The Doctor

Has his own page.

Samantha "Sam" Angeline Jones

"I’ve got to do everything I can for what I believe in. It’s what I do... it’s what I try to do. It’s not hard to believe in saving so many people."

— Seeing I

The Eighth Doctor's first companion in the EDAs. She's 16 years old at the beginning of her run and comes from Coal Hill school in the 1990's — a cheerful social justice activist looking for adventure. Soon enough, however, it's revealed that her past is a little more complicated, and that the Doctor had an impact on her personal timeline in ways neither is aware of. Also appears in the BBC Audio prose stories "Bounty", "The People's Temple" and "Dead Time".

• Audience Surrogate: Young, idealistic, insecure and madly in love with the Doctor. She screws up more often and more realistically than companions had been allowed to do in the TV series up to that point.
• Big Damn Kiss: Her first kiss with the Doctor is when she thinks he's dead, and her desperate attempt at mouth-to-mouth turns into her trying to wedge her tongue into his unmoving face in a fit of panic and badly aimed lust. She ends up too embarrassed to even talk to him for the longest time afterwards, and still considers it the most embarrassing moment of her life years later, even when their friendship does start to incorporate random snogging.
• Boyish Short Hair: Starts out with it, lets it grow out a bit, and goes back to one-inch haircuts for practical reasons later on.
• Bus Crash: She ends up as a victim of the Council of Eight’s killing of the Doctor’s companions, and is later confirmed to still be dead after the Council’s actions are Ret-Gone.
• Character Development: A ton. She starts out as a sixteen-year-old wide-eyed idealist, too inexperienced to understand that life isn't morally black and white. Over the course of the books, she becomes a calm, determined, realistic twentysomething. Unnatural History adds layers upon layers of character to her after that.
• Characters as Device: She starts out as the perfect companion. Until, in Alien Bodies, it's revealed that she's literally the perfect companion — crafted from a much less wholesome girl, seemingly by the Doctor's subconscious Reality Warper moments). Unnatural History finally reveals that she crafted herself, retroactively.
• Deconstructed Trope: She's too young to fully understand that real life danger can have real life implications, and ends up in a hospital very quickly because of it.
  So of course, it was easy for her to run off with the Doctor and be a daring student radical cyberpunk traveller saving the universe. After all, there wasn't any way she would ever really get hurt.
• Granola Girl: Happily so, and she continues being an activist even when she grows out of her unrealistic teenaged idealism.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: She's very wholesome. And significantly, her hair is only blond because of some intensely complicated messing around with reality to change her appearance and personality to make her an ideal companion. The original version is dark-haired and much less kid-friendly.
• The McCoy: Behaving rationally isn't her strong suit at first. She gets much better.
• Mistaken for Gay: In Vampire Science, she's assumed to be a Butch Lesbian when she hangs out in a lesbian bar in order to catch a Lesbian Vampire. (She's actually bisexual.)
• Plucky Girl
• Replacement Goldfish: Her first boyfriend, Paul, is pretty much a human equivalent of the Doctor. The relationship actually makes her realise that that kind of aimless wandering through life is not what she's looking for, and she ends up breaking up with him.
• Smitten Teenage Girl: Towards the Doctor. He's Oblivious to Love and keeps getting naked in front of her without realising what it does to her. Much later, when travelling with dark-haired Sam, he catches on soon enough when she gets him out of his shirt and simply snogs him. (He returns the kiss before telling her to think really hard about whether or not she wants to shag a centuries-old mass murderer.)
• Soapbox Sadie: She's skipped school to go to gay pride marches, she's spray-painted anti-capitalist slogans onto things, she's a vegetarian, supports Amnesty International, etc.
• Token Wholesome: Not that the Doctor isn't rather wholesome himself, considering the fact he really only swears once in the whole series, is often impeccably polite (his version of a Dirty Harry impression in Seeing I, as described at Fruit of the Loon, is actually so wholesome and polite it makes you want to introduce him to your grandmother) and usually seems to be more or less a Chaste Hero. But Sam approaches being wholesome like it's a job. Being a modern girl, though, she defines wholesome as standing up for gay rights, protesting in Greenpeace marches, and trying her very best to promote social equality everywhere she goes. Fitz even feels required to sub in for her when she's not around to do it. She's introduced as a sixteen-year-old, so she's not really allowed to get involved in any sordidness at first, but she's basically wholesome in every sense of the word; she doesn't even drink soda. In Alien Bodies and later in Unnatural History, we're introduced to iterations of her who do hard drugs, and it's really quite shocking.
• Unrequited Love: With the Doctor, predictably enough.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: She gets better over time. In The Bodysnatchers, she starts lecturing George Litefoot (of all people) on woman's rights, and the Doctor just sort of gently shuts her down and tries to make her realise that it's neither the time nor the place for that. In War Of The Daleks, she lectures Thals on the evils of war; a few books later, she's deeply embarrassed by having done so. By the middle of Seeing I, she's an adult, still idealistic but with a solid understanding of how life works.

Fitzgerald "Fitz" Michael Kreiner

"This is Fitz," he said. "This is Fitz Kreiner's life encapsulated in an instant."

— Unnatural History, after being mugged in a San Francisco alleyway by a unicorn for his chocolate.

The Eighth Doctor's second companion and the one who stuck with him the longest, originally introduced in The Taint. Fitz was born in 1936 to a German father and an English mother in London. His entire life was a bit of a Trauma Conga Line, but he maintained a cheerful, laid-back attitude despite it. He met the Doctor in 1963, when he was 27, and promptly developed a crush on him. He's an easy-going but intensely loyal guitarist whose personal timeline got a bit confusing. He's possibly the longest-running companion in Doctor Who history. Also showed up in the Bernice Summerfield novel Dead Romance and in the Iris Wildthyme story "Only Living Girls", and had his own Big Finish episode, "Fitz's Story", in summer 2009 (voiced by Matt DiAngelo). He's Trope-tastic.

• Action Survivor: He starts out this way — he didn't even really want to go with the Doctor that much, but he didn't really have any other choice. But eventually he embraced the whole adventurer thing. He still has almost all the additional traits mentioned under the trope, though: stubbly, non-actiony, uncommonly decent, etc.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: He ruffles the Doctor's hair at the end of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and does the same thing to Anji in The Book of the Still, making her angry. It seems like he might be more comfortable showing affection this way than by hugging, since he tends not to initiate hugs.
• Audience Surrogate: He's sort of a bookish geek with some kind of crush on the Doctor, and he thinks he's cool and sometimes is.
• Backstory: Fitz's backstory is elaborated on often throughout the series. Let's just take this from his birth to his introduction into the storyline:
  • But Not Too Foreign: Was born to a German man and an English woman...
  • Kids Are Cruel: ... during World War II, and had to deal with anti-German neighborhood kids and...
  • Book Dumb: ... equally bigoted teachers, meaning he didn't try too hard in school.
  • Parental Abandonment: His father died when he was young.
  • Children Raise You: His mother went crazy shortly afterward and he had to take care of her.
  • Foster Kid: He also spent some time in foster care.
  • Fauxreigner: To avoid being spotted for the "Kraut bastard" he is, he pretends to be French.
  • Burger Fool: When we meet him, he's working at a plant shop and surreptitiously harassing an old woman who tries to compare a lawn gnome to a hobbit and gets it wrong. He's too clever for the job, but can't get his act together enough for anything better.
• Body Backup Drive: Complicated. The Fitz who travels with the Doctor after Interference is the TARDIS' memories of him, imprinted on the vat-grown body of a clone of a clone of a clone while the real deal became a Faction Paradox Father / undying Remote horror.
• Brief Accent Imitation: German and French sometimes.
• British Rockstar: Usually he's approaching the trope but not quite there: he plays electric guitar and a few other instruments, sings, and writes some of his own songs; he has a rather active sex life; he smokes and drinks; he's got a less-than-posh London accent; and he meets the Doctor just before the start of The British Invasion era; but he misses it by being fundamentally mild-mannered and also not a star. Except when circumstances grant him some sort of temporary stardom, as in EarthWorld and The Slow Empire, and he turns into this trope. Particularly in the latter, where he turns into a subversive and uncharacteristically Jerkass-y Mad Artist before suffering a Heroic BSoD, since he's subconsciously aware it's virtual reality and it's driving him temporarily nuts. He's sort of themed around this trope in a toned-down sort of way.
• Broken Hero: If you were to simplify Fitz's character into a single trope, it would be this one. His history is fraught with more terrible and heart-breaking events than most companions you could name. And yet, he maintains a snarky but fun-loving attitude. ^note It may be significant that the first thing Fitz is ever shown doing is pretending to be someone else. It's very obviously a coping mechanism. Possibly, his cheerful happy demeanor is a bit Becoming the Mask, in that he seems so undamaged by his past because he's spent so long pretending not to be.
• Buffy Speak: The thing is he's actually quite clever and thoughtful, and has a surprisingly large vocabulary, but he has tendency toward peculiar slang, overly creative analogies, and haphazard syntax. In The Gallifrey Chronicles, he tries to give the Doctor some advice:
  "Even if some weird timestormy parallel paradoxy universy thing came along, and outer space went all wobbly and Gallifrey came back, just as it was... well, you’d still be the man who did what you did."
• Camp Bisexual: More than a bit. French accents, Greta Garbo impressions, male renditions of "(I Wanna Be) Bobbie's Girl", swordfighting in a wedding gown, "Ohmigod", "Oh. My. God", his terrible dated jokes when pretending to be Frank Sinatra, most of his acting in The Banquo Legacy, leather trousers, a purple velvet suit, a metallic gold suit...
• Can't Tie His Tie: In The Last Resort, he doesn't seem to be doing a good job tying a tie when he's forced to pass as a respectable businessman, so Anji helps.
• Casual Kink: In Mad Dogs and Englishmen. It's a little ambiguous whether he really has an unusual kink or he's just being flippant.
  ‘Fitz,’ Anji hissed. ‘Are you telling me you really don’t mind trotting around starkers in a collar and lead?’
  He grinned. ‘Are you kidding?’
• Character Development: He has a bit of an early-middle-age Coming of Age Story going on. Initially, he's a True Neutral Lovable Sex Maniac looking for the first chance to bunk off with the Girl of the Week despite being often impeded by his tendency to be a little sexist, although he obviously has a heart of gold deep down. By the end of the series, the iteration of Fitz still travelling with the Doctor is a Big Brother Mentor to all sorts of characters, can pull off a Bavarian Fire Drill just as well as the Doctor, has a knack for keeping a calm head in a crisis or failing that shows great courage in situations that make him shake like a leaf, occasionally functions as the Doctor's Morality Chain, puts others before himself, is loyal almost to a fault, and is generally competent, responsible, and heroic. (The original Fitz, meanwhile, has lost his Doctor and become a Blood Knight.)
• Character Name Alias: He's pretended to be called Frank Sinatra and James Bond, and there's probably more.
  • Based on his rant to Father Kreiner in "The Ancestor Cell", he's also used Simon Templar.
• Cheshire Cat Grin: He does this semi-habitually, but generally just in anticipation of a good time rather than anything you should really be worried about.
  Fitz became much more animated as the Doctor read from the guide. He circled the Doctor and Anji, eyeing the natives with a wicked twist to his mouth that showed far too many teeth.
  'A planet where the party never stops. I was born to land here.'
• The Load: He's clumsy and almost useless in a fight, and also more likely to cry than most of the other EDA companions.
• Chivalrous Pervert: He'll ogle almost anything female, in addition to fancying the Doctor and coming pretty close to betraying interest in quite a few other men. But he has a definite penchant for falling in love with people who are even more troubled than he is and trying to fix their problems. And he reserves a particular dislike for men who bully women.
• Combat Pragmatist: As he's skinny and clumsy, it's very pragmatic for him to go for the eyes when he gets into a fight.
• Cool Big Sis: Spear Counterpart. He often takes care of Innocent Bystanders who get pulled into the plot in pretty much this sort of way, especially if they're particularly confused, vulnerable, or young, and he's generally good with kids. And in accordance with this trope, he tends to indulge in more "mature" activities (eg., sleeping around, getting drunk) than the rest of the cast and serves as comic relief, but he's actually rather sensible and practical. And he's just in the series a long time and is therefore generally more experienced than a lot of other characters. Plus he's at least a bit older than any of the other EDA companions (not counting Compassion). He's more this trope than the Big Brother Mentor, who's generally more authoritative and not someone whose "younger siblings'" admiration is often mixed with amusement. Also, in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, he's seen chilling with some teenage prostitutes during their obligatory monthly time off.
• Cowardly Lion: It's surprising just how much time he spends shivering. Also, he once had to rescue the Doctor from the living personification of Future Me Scares Me, not to mention his own scary and almost Axe-Crazy future self and a bunch of other scary and menacing types, and expressed relief that the sprinklers had gone off and no one would notice that he might or might not have pissed himself with terror. But he's still constantly risking life and limb for others or a good cause, even though he thinks he's a coward.
• Cringe Comedy: Literally every time he tries to act cool.
• Crush Blush: He seems to blush very easily. Various causes of blushing: being unexpectedly kissed by the Doctor in Dominion, being unexpectedly kissed by Trix in The Gallifrey Chronicles, a girl in Vanishing Point calling him "very beautiful" (as she doesn't have much to compare him against), Iris Wildthyme calling him "a perfect little serving boy" in Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a girl he seems to have a passing crush on in The Sleep of Reason giving him a kiss on the cheek and making a flirty remark...
• Daydream Surprise: Who's this private eye all of a sudden? Fitzwilliam Fort? Do we know him? Oh, yes, we do!
• Deadpan Snarker: To say the least. Constantly making cynical wisecracks is such a central part of his personality that in The Blue Angel, in one of his first appearances after he was more or less cloned in the previous book, his attempt to reassert his identity manifests as being so constantly sarcastic that the Doctor gets cross with him.
• Death Is Cheap: He's "died" at least twice (three or more if you count Father Kreiner). Once, he only survived because the Doctor, Anji, and the TARDIS loved him very, very much and believed in him. He did the Tinkerbell Jesus routine first, without the Narm.
• Deceased Parents Are the Best: Double Subverted: his mother dies in his first book. However, she became psychotic after his father died, so she couldn't raise him, and once he was of age he had to take care of her. However, they were still apparently very close and he still misses her years later. The advice she gave him when he was younger is part of what made him such a good person.
• Drives Like Crazy: Almost every time he's behind the wheel of a car, he hits something with it. It's usually intentional, but sometimes it's not. Is there really any call to "crunch" the gearstick?
• Erudite Stoner: The personality without the pot. You can't make him angry without a serious effort, his thought processes are often not exactly normal, he eats like it's going out of style, and as the series goes on he becomes a bit of a Big Brother Mentor to Anji and then Trix, and the Doctor too in a way, not to mention all the One Shot Characters he tends to take under his wing. Also, he's been calm and philosophical about the end of the world. Suddenly becoming a tangled-up noodle person merely inspired in him dismay about how long it'd take to untangle himself. He once had a couple shots of liquor and fell fast asleep while right under Sabbath's nose — Sabbath being the guy who once ripped out the Doctor's heart bare-handed (well, glove-handed, but is that any less scary?). Sure, Fitz can be scared easily, but he's just as likely to be extremely calm about terrifying things.
• Five-Finger Discount: He knows how to pick pockets, although it's never revealed why. The rather boring explanation is that the Doctor taught him, but it'd be more interesting if he was a street urchin at some point in his childhood. He also carries a lockpick (possibly stolen) because he got tired of picking locks without one.
• Friendless Background: In Frontier Worlds, he mentions having only had one friend during primary school. By the time he's introduced, he doesn't actually seem to have any real friends. It's certainly not that he isn't likable — even before all the Character Development kicks in he's quite charming — it's just the half-German thing. It's quite possible that almost two decades after the war ended, plenty of people wouldn't have had a problem with it, but he was sufficiently embittered by a childhood of being physically attacked for his heritage that he was afraid to let anyone get too close.
• Geek Physiques: He's quite tall and almost comically scrawny, and a bit of a Lord of the Rings fanboy. He also seems to know from Star Trek, makes a reference to H. P. Lovecraft, and generally really likes to read. The Doctor probably out-geeks him, though, but doesn't really fit the trope, because he's slender but not awkwardly so.
• Girl of the Week: He has a girlfriend in about half of the novels. It basically never lasts.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: He's from the 1960s and halfway fits the "sexy", "cool", and "tough" criteria.
• Goofy Print Underwear: With one big carrot on the front.
• The Heart: He often calls the Doctor out for getting nasty, and serves as a reasonable, levelheaded presence.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Okay, it's just a jacket, and apparently a rather scruffy one, but still cool. He's had to replace his jacket once or twice, and makes a bit of a to-do about it. He also gets a kick out of wearing leather trousers, even playing with a band just for the excuse to wear them. In The Last Resort, he rides a motorcycle and wears silver leathers.
• Not-so-Heterosexual Life-Partners: With the Doctor. Apart from all the snogging and sexy dreams and such.
• Hidden Depths: Anji assumes he's only interested in things he can "drink, inhale, play, dance to or –", but she's only pointing this out because he suddenly seemed to have developed an interest in science while in Victorian Britain. He's also generally a bit of a bookworm, and enjoys reading Sartre.
• Iconic Outfit: Fitz often wears leather coats, which is probably mentioned more often in Fanon than in canon.
• The Klutz: Tends to fall over or into something at least once a book.
• Lazy Bum: Before he meets the Doctor, he's incredibly lazy. After he meets the Doctor, there's a lot of monsters chasing him most of the time. He regularly gets told off by the Doctor and others for being lazy, even though there is the chance that if something seems really fun and/or important he'll get off his lazy arse and do it.
• Loss of Identity: Long story. Basically, an alternate, heavily modded branched-off version of himself is puzzled back together to replace his usual self, and he's really not sure whether he's still the same person or what that even means, anyway. (His DNA looks a little too perfect; his memories are faulty; his body was grown in a vat.) The original became a member of Faction Paradox.
• Love Makes You Evil: Father Kreiner's obsession with the Doctor takes a turn for the murderous after the first millennium or so.
• Manchild: Well, sort of. He likes doing very childish things, but is actually fairly emotionally mature, probably less gullible than most people, and can be responsible when necessary. He's still childish enough that others (especially Anji) often comment on it, and he's referred to as a "boy" when he's in his thirties.
• The McCoy: Particularly by comparison with Compassion, or to a lesser extent Trix. (Not so much Sam, and he and Anji could both qualify for the role.) Even though he sometimes acts cynical and self-interested, he tends to do the right thing just because he cares about people.
• Messy Hair: His hair is described as "unkempt", "fluffy", "squiggly", "straggly", etc. Between his laziness and the fact he's the kind of musician for whom just-got-laid hair is de rigeur, it's to be expected.
• Metaphorgotten: "Pleased with his metaphor, Fitz tried to extend it."
• Nice Guy: The only way you can really make him lose his temper is by being cruel or insulting his friends. He had a good relationship with his mum while she was alive and still remembers the advice she used to give him. Sure, he drinks and smokes and swears, and there's that time he was seeing three girls at once, and he thinks of himself as a selfish coward, but he actually seems to develop almost a reflex to stick his neck out for others, especially those who can't fend for themselves. And he's generally more sympathetic and tactful than the Doctor, despite occasional forays into the land of total immature unhelpfulness.
• Nobody Poops: For some reason, he's the only character in the series who's ever mentioned to occasionally have to take a leak, which kind of creates the impression he has the world's smallest bladder. It seems to mostly come up in situations where it makes the reader sympathize with him even more, ie., he's in a stressful situation which is made worse by there being no loos for miles, or all that beer he had earlier is conflicting with his attempt to keep a vigil at the injured Doctor's bedside. The Slow Empire has a scene where everyone gets put in a virtual reality machine with some undignified practical details which are only mentioned regarding Fitz waking up in it, which seems to prove a point about him being the most likely to have his dignity sacrificed to such things. And that's all I'm going to say, because a Lotus-Eater Machine where your physical body is just sat on a toilet is a bit gross.
• Non-Action Snarker: He once fell down what seemed to be a Pit Trap and clapped sarcastically when the Doctor fell in after him while trying to rescue him.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: He seems to be of more or less average intelligence and has occasional moments of impressive cleverness, but he'd be the first to proclaim how stupid he is. And the Doctor would probably be the second. Anji sees through it, though:
  [...] she was starting to see there was more to him than the idiot persona he so often hid behind. (Vanishing Point)
• Pet the Dog: Not only does he like children, he seems to care a lot about animals, and not just the cute, cuddly ones: robot canaries that bite him, evil monkeys with guns, worms, etc.
• Replacement Goldfish: Fitz is in about fifty books. In the eighth, he apparently dies (he's actually brainwashed by a cult and becomes Father Kreiner, but we'll ignore that bit for now) and the Doctor implants his memories into a clone of a clone of a clone (etc.) of the original Fitz. It's this duplicate who remains the Doctor's companion for the rest of the EDAs.
• Sarcastic Devotee: Less so as his relationship with the Doctor improves, although it never quite lets up, as he has at least a modicum of common sense and the Doctor basically doesn't.
• Serial Romeo: He generally falls head over heels with each new love interest, but he'd almost always still rather keep traveling with the Doctor, and if he starts getting any ideas about settling down catastrophe generally strikes, so it never lasts long.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Apparently, the fact Fitz is very much this trope is a bit of a bad influence on the Doctor. On the other hand, his good upbringing comes out in the fact that he seems to distinctly prefer minced oaths, and would rather use "shag" as a swear word than drop the f-bomb.
• Sleepy Head: Occasionally. In both Interference and Camera Obscura, he naps during rather important meetings.
• Smoking Is Cool: No, it's not; Fitz is cool in his own way, and he smokes, but he makes smoking look kind of dorky. In Demontage there's a very awkward scene where he realizes too late that he's not allowed to smoke, gets very apologetic, and ends up putting out his cigarette on his hand. Ouch. He's constantly annoyed and frustrated by how hard it is to smoke after the late 20th century. And in pretty much every other book he's shown to be less physically capable than most other characters because of his smoking, and his friends don't hesitate to give him a hard time about it. So, don't smoke, because it's not allowed in the future, you'll end up wheezing and red-faced all the time, and also all your friends will constantly nag you to quit.
• Stepford Snarker: He's a lot more broken, and also a lot sweeter, than he wants to let on, so he hides it by being almost constantly sarcastic.
• Street Smart: He has a fairly decent amount of common sense to begin with, but eventually develops an ability to handle strange and dangerous situations almost as well as the Doctor does, which sometimes surprises people. He's book-smart too, but not in a way that tends to prove useful.
• Surrounded by Smart People: Compared to the Doctor and Anji, he's not remarkably intelligent. Although Trix seems to be more cunning than intellectual, Fitz describes himself as the "resident thicko" in Sometime Never when she's keeping up with the Doctor's Techno Babble much more ably than him and he's forced to request a simpler explanation.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: Literally, but he doesn't really tick all the boxes. He seems to aspire to the aloof, superior aspects occasionally at first^note 'People,' sighed Fitz lazily, watching her go. 'They're all so... stupid!', but his naturally friendly, awkward personality betrays him. Appearance-wise, he's apparently not bad, and according to his official bio he has a "quiet intensity [...] which both sexes find attractive".
• Unfazed Every Man: When he finally meets the Doctor, his mother really snaps, tries to strangle him, and is finally killed by the Doctor. He's also wanted by the police due to a misunderstanding, leading him to join the TARDIS crew. Instead of having a Heroic BSoD about his new status as an orphan and wanted man, he's pretty sanguine about the whole thing. Then again, he's canonically a fountain of denial. Traveling with the Doctor eventually grants him rather spectacular powers of only minimally freaking out about things:
  Either the Doctor, as Fitz sometimes suspected, projected a kind of aura which helped people deal with any and all manner of utterly horrendous situations – or his time with the Doctor had simply blown half of the fuses in the parts of him that would react to such things.
• Unfortunate Names: In recently-post-WWII England, having a German surname is apparently enough to make him worry about getting his head kicked in, so he goes by Fitz Fortune when first introduced. It's mentioned that, since "Fritz" is such a stereotypical German name that it's used to refer to all Germans, the other kids used to call him "Fitz the Fritz".
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Since he's an Artificial Human, he can impress computers with his brain, generate anagrams, play guitar and do crossword puzzles better than he used to, and maybe some other things not even worth mentioning. Apparently, his thoughts have a "deeper structural underpinning" which computers really dig, or something. Considering the fact he's the closest thing you can get to being an Erudite Stoner without ever being implied to be on any illegal substances, this is kind of funny.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: When he was a child, he was stung all over by wasps and is thus scared of basically all bugs. Subverted in that he pretty much keeps his composure in Eater of Wasps which, as you may guess, is about evil wasps.
• Wife-Basher Basher: If you bully women in front of him, he's likely to hurt his fist on your face.

Laura "Compassion" Tobin

First mentioned in the Bernice Summerfield novel Ship Of Fools and later introduced in Interference. Compassion is a former member of a Faction Paradox paramility group known as the Remote: a big exercise in playing with Aliens Steal Cable. She likes uncomplicated people, fighting, and snarking. She was born on Earth in the 26th Century, and got re-iterated in the Remote remembrance tanks after dying three times over, rebuilt from raw biomass and the other people's memories. Meaning that the version of her who ends up travelling with the Doctor is a culmination of the Remote's perception of her. Her life gets... weird.

For the many, many tropes following her departure from the Eighth Doctor Adventures, see Faction Paradox. The Faction Paradox Protocols audios produced by BBV Productions see her voiced by Jackie Skarvellis (albeit only in a temporary host body). Branching out from her arc in the Faction Paradox novels published by Mad Norwegian Press, she got her own series of spinoff novels published by Obverse, called The City Of The Saved.

• Catchphrase: "Obviously."
• Emotionless Girl: Generally, her emotional repertoire runs from "smug" to "irritated".
• Icy Gray Eyes: Unlike Fitz's, hers are symbolic. She's steely, and all brains and no heart.
• Ironic Nickname: The original Laura Tobin liked the joke that "Compassion" was her middle name. It stuck when she was remembered.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: The Doctor tries to shape her into a nicer person, with little success. In Frontier Worlds, she has a touching heart-to-heart with Fitz that causes him to get all choked up... only for her to later reveal she'd just figured it was necessary to keep him motivated.
• Pet the Dog: It's quite touching when she demonstrates the ability to feel happiness that doesn't come from schadenfreude. When she becomes a TARDIS and gains a Randomiser, she ends up "on a damp grassy hillside, having her face licked by a giant singing butterfly. Nice, for a while." By her standards, that's a big deal.
• Rape as Drama: Well... sort of. In a very obvious metaphorical way that one of the characters points out.
• Spaceship Girl: And how — she eventually turns into a walking, talking TARDIS!
• The Spock: Very cold and logical. By comparison, the Doctor is The Kirk and Fitz is The McCoy.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Subverted. She sometimes seems to show her softer side, but if it's ever genuine, she does an amazing job of denying it afterward.
• Token Evil Teammate: Her family sent her to Ordifica just to get rid of her, and becoming part of the Remote didn't improve her demeanor. Having been fed nothing but Faction Paradox lore and Remote media for her past couple of iterations, she has no concept whatsoever of morality or principles until she meets Sam.

Anji Kapoor

What I learned in Outer Space by Anji Kapoor — impressive pause — They have bigger cows.

Vanishing Point

A twentysomething-ish futures trader who joins the Eighth Doctor in the 21st century. The first companion of Asian descent in the franchise, and the only one for over a decade until Cindy Wu in the Titan comics. Her first book is Escape Velocity.

• Badass Bookworm: Not to the same extent as the Doctor, but she's better in a fight than you'd expect, and neither alien monsters nor evil geniuses scares her very much.
• Berserk Button: "Berserk" may not be the correct term, but she instantly becomes severely annoyed if anyone mentions her Indian heritage in any way. Offensive remarks, of course, make her angry, but since she doesn't like her cultural background much (especially early on — she chills out about it on and off, especially as time goes by), she just doesn't want to be reminded about it at all.
• Bollywood Nerd: She's a bit of a geek about economics; she's been known to watch documentaries on the subject.
• Brainy Brunette: It turns out that she's such a whiz at her job that trying to take advantage of Time Travel for Fun and Profit just slows her down. She also has enough common sense to fairly well cover for Fitz and the Doctor's lack thereof.
• Children Raise You: In a strange way. Suddenly this Creepy Child is thrown at her! Geez! She doesn't even really want it!
• Like Brother and Sister: With the Doctor. Her relationship with him is so chaste that she can acknowledge he's attractive without actually being at all attracted to him. She doesn't mind changing her shirt in front of him, because "he seemed to count in her head as another girl", so they're almost just like sisters. The Doctor seems more inclined to discuss his feelings with her than with Fitz, even though he and Fitz are practically married.
• The Napoleon: At least in the opinion of tall, laid-back Fitz.
  It must be a bummer to be short. Maybe that was why Anji shouted so much.
• Not So Above It All: She tends to disapprove of Fitz and the Doctor's childish antics, but on rare (and funny) occasions, she comes across as a little bit of a Cloud Cuckoolander herself.
• Platonic Life-Partners: With Fitz. They're basically each other's Not Love Interests; they have relationship drama and occasionally act irrationally because of their feelings for each other, but the only flicker of attraction between them is wholly on his side. She seems to get a little possessive of him, perhaps actually in a wholly non-romantic way, when Trix flirts with him.
• Sarcastic Devotee: Towards the Doctor, setting off Fitz's tendency to hero-worship the Doctor more in inverse proportion to how highly everyone else seems to think of him. She gets a bit fed up of Fitz's relentless optimism about the Doctor's ability to save the day no matter how powerless, clueless, injured, missing, or dead he may be.
• The Team Normal: Anji's the closest thing to a normal companion the Doctor has in this series. See below.
• Token Human: In a cast consisting of an immortal time-traveling alien, a Mirror Universe counterpart, two clones and whatever the hell Trix is, the entirely human Anji stands out, rather than blends in.
• Unusual Dysphemism: Once addressed the Doctor as "You useless otterfu-" To be fair, he was being quite useless.^note But definitely not doing that other thing.
• Waif-Fu: In Timeless, it becomes a bit of a running gag that she keeps being obliged to kick people's asses.
• White Collar Worker: She's a futures trader, and so good at it that when she tries to cheat by taking notes from the Financial Times of the future, she finds it's just unnecessary because she could've predicted all that anyway.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Because the Doctor just sucks at navigating. No wonder she has some choice expletives for him.

Sabbath

A recurring villain starting from The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. He was born in the 18th Century, and wants to clean up the space-time continuum, which tends to make him a bad guy as it's doing just fine the way it is.

For his audio appearances in which someone who may be him is voiced by Keith Drinkel, as well as tropes for his character outside of the Eighth Doctor Adventures range, see Faction Paradox.

• Always a Bigger Fish: He manages to save the Doctor at one point in an unintentional and rather unconventional way.
• Antiquated Linguistics: Occasionally, and combined with Sophisticated as Hell to fairly odd effect. He picks up the phrase "been there, done that" from Anji, but his speech patterns are almost always quite formal, and he sometimes uses idioms which are very obviously Older Than Radio.
• Anti-Villain: A little more intentionally nasty than most, though.
• Author Avatar: There are certain similarities between him and Lawrence Miles, the author who came up with him, in terms of appearance and personality. Not that Miles is an amoral destroyer of universes... but they are both clever, introverted, and cynical.
• Badass Normal: He is somehow capable of ripping a heart out of his chest, then doing nothing about the big hole in his chest before he makes a dramatic exit while carrying a fully-grown woman. Also, he can throw off the effects of a Tranquilizer Dart through sheer willpower. And he once threatened to break someone's hand just by squeezing it very hard. He didn't go through with it, but there's no reason to believe he couldn't have done so if he'd wanted to.
• Bald of Evil: Well, okay, more like Extremely Close-Cropped Hair Of Evil.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Most of the people he allies himself with tend to turn on him first, although one must consider who's the common denominator in all these situations.
• "Day of the Week" Name: Interesting in that he chose it because a major event in his life occurred on a Saturday; he's quite interested in Jewish mysticism.
• Enemy Mine: He works together with the Doctor about as often as they work against each other.
• Enigmatic Minion: Heavily lampshaded when Fitz, Trix, and Anji make a short film about the plot developments so far. Trix, playing Sabbath, declares:
  "Working as I am for unspecified higher powers, the nature of my misguided plans remains frustratingly obscure, ha ha!"
• Evil Is Bigger: He's initially described as big but not especially tall, but eventually is mentioned to be huge and looming and unable to fit comfortably in small attics and so on. Maybe villainy (although not exactly evil, since he believes his intentions are good) allows middle-aged men to grow taller? Contrasts significantly with the Doctor, who's always fairly slight, but more than usual during the Sabbath arc, due to being rather poorly. His timeship is also bigger than the Doctor's, at least on the outside.
• Expy: Of the Master. He's far from the same character with the Serial Numbers Filed Off, but they have a lot of similar personality traits, such as pedantry, a fondness for elegant dark clothes, snarkiness, etc. They both function as a recurring villain who often collaborates with the Doctor against a more immediate menace, occasionally of their own making. In general, their relationships with the Doctor are quite similar: they often get along civilly, are Mirror Characters, and have a ton of Foe Romance Subtext, despite the fact they're, you know, arch-enemies. Also, Sabbath was originally supposed to have been working for the Daleks, something the Master's done once or twice. Where the Master had Ogrons (ape-like aliens) as henchmen, Sabbath just has regular old apes. Interestingly, Lawrence Miles, who came up with Sabbath, objected to Sabbath's gradual drift into Suspiciously Similar Substitutehood, as he intended the character as more of a Darker and Edgier version of the Doctor.
  • Larry intended for Sabbath to regenerate into a New Doctor. The Doctor would die because of his body decaying after his second heart had been stolen, and Sabbath’s DNA would get corrupted by The Doctor’s Second Heart, which Sabbath had stolen, leading to effectively a body swap and Sabbath regenerating. Thankfully, that didn't happen.
  • Also, he was originally based on Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
• A Glass of Chianti: Anji earns his respect by knowing the right way to drink brandy.
• Heel–Face Turn: Finally realises that his 'masters' are actually using him for their own agenda and joins the Doctor in opposing them.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Put in a position where he will apparently fulfil his former masters' goals if he essentially kills their leader but will save the universe by 'killing' the Doctor (actually banishing them to the Time Vortex to exist in eternal agony), Sabbath, reasoning that killing the Doctor instead could still be what the other party wants and would be a victory even if it isn't, chooses to inflict such a fate on himself as the one thing nobody could have predicted he'd do.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Sabbath often falls victim to this; while intelligent enough to be a Manipulative Bastard who initially gets the Doctor to eliminate his enemies for him, his ‘business associates’ have manipulated him- actually, two different versions of Sabbath were manipulated by two different parties in two different timelines, no less- into developing flawed ideas about how Time works so that he will manipulate the space/time continuum on their behalf. As a result, while Sabbath believed he was ensuring the safety of the universe and the creation of a timeline where humanity would become the new Lords of Time, he instead created a universe that his masters could more easily manipulate according to their own agenda.
• Ignore the Fanservice: His sidekick du jour in Camera Obscura Shows Some Leg to convince him to help her get out of the Bedlam House where she's locked up, but he doesn't even look. She has a fairly low opinion of men and considers it strange that he's nice to her without showing any sexual interest in her. So, on the one hand, he claims to be amoral; on the other, he does have some standards.
• Kavorka Man: His kavorka powers seem to work on narrators just as well as on attractive women, considering the poor narrator's three-paragraph tortured attempts to make him sound good-looking upon his introduction:
  His face was pale and fleshy, but not at all unattractive as he entered early middle age. In his youth he was, allegedly, a master of seduction...
• Kick the Dog: He wastes basically no time doing this. He starts out The Adventuress of Henrietta Street giving the impression he's going to be hardly antagonistic enough to count as a Friendly Enemy. And then he rips out the Doctor's heart. Also, since he considers himself Above Good and Evil, he doesn't hesitate to kill if doing so has sufficient utility. In The Last Resort, Fitz has to talk him out of stabbing a nursing mother who wanted to kill him for seemingly having killed her husband but probably wouldn't have been able to anyway.^note Although generally when he does gratuitously vicious things like that, it's implied that it's part of some Batman Gambit that tends to come very close to paying off by the end. For example, he probably hadn't actually killed the woman's husband, but he wanted Fitz to think he had, and coming across as Ax-Crazy would play into that. And in The Domino Effect, an alternate version of him even goes ahead and shoots a particularly innocent and woobieish barrier person. Who went to his own alma mater, too! It's really quite satisfying when it has the direct result of getting him shredded by an extradimensional Creepy Child.
• Klingons Love Shakespeare: Considering the fact he's from the 18th century, it comes across this way when he makes a reference to The Wizard of Oz in The Infinity Race. He also uses a pseudonym that's a clear reference to G. K. Chesterton during Camera Obscura.
• Large Ham: In sort of a quiet, mysterious way, anyway.
  Anji: [...] a posturing ham like Sabbath. If he pulls that sinister, mysterious act on me again –
• Made of Iron: After deciding that the whole transplant-the-Doctor's-heart-to-himself plan wasn't such a good idea after all, he rips the Doctor's heart back out of his chest while standing up, then makes a dramatic exit while carrying his deceased Morality Pet.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: He's often very well-dressed (i.e., "a beautifully tailored dark suit"), although he sometimes wears a military-style coat which is big even on him and which he feels the need to justify by saying he wears it "in a spirit of irony".
• Mirror Character: The main difference between them, morality-wise, is that the Doctor feels more remorse when he has to Shoot the Dog or do anything else dubiously moral, and when he doesn't it's because of his Blue-and-Orange Morality tendencies. But Sabbath is only slightly more likely to think the ends justify the manipulative or murderous means.
• Mysterious Past: Justified by his short-lived career as a secret agent.
• Not So Above It All: Apparently, he's seen The Wizard of Oz. Well, it's clearly relevant to his interests, what with the monkey henchmen.
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: Hand Waved: he's not wealthy, but he's resourceful. And his bosses probably pay him. He also might be using Time Travel for Fun and Profit. Anyway, he somehow manages to get a Big Fancy House in the Victorian era (while the protagonists have to settle for subletting Sherlock Holmes' flat), apparently just because a classy villain has to have his creature comforts.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: There are a lot of these, aren't there?
• Pet the Dog: In both The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and Camera Obscura, he has a Little Miss Badass as a sidekick, and seems to care about them quite a bit. Also, he becomes more likable as he and the Doctor become more like Friendly Enemies, and his civility towards Anji demonstrates that he has good taste.
• The Quiet One: Relative to the Doctor, at least, and the Doctor tends to get kind of grabby to get his attention when he seems to have decided to let the Doctor's Motor Mouth run out of fuel on its own:
  "What the wraiths were warning you about," Anji chipped in when it became apparent Sabbath still wasn’t speaking. The Doctor waved a hand in front of Sabbath’s eyes as if to break a trance.
• Redemption Equals Death: When he finally renounces working against the Doctor for once and for all, he ends up effectively killing himself within a few chapters.
• Staying Alive: Once or twice, just enough to elicit grumblings from the audience about how much of a Master-expy he is.
• Steampunk: He built a time-traveling boat sort of thing in the 18th century. It's about as good at clanking and steaming as it is at time-traveling.
• Sue Donym: Close enough, anyway: almost all his aliases are terrible, obvious, and related to his usual pseudonym, such as Holiday, Mistletoe, and Mr. G.K. Thursday (the Genius Bonus just makes it worse^note although it's rather interesting how well it all fits, if you think about it.).
• Surrounded by Idiots: Justified: they're not idiots, they're apes, and it wasn't his idea to hire them.
• Übermensch: He certainly seems to be aiming for this trope, in a less mindlessly destructive way than the typical villainous Nietzsche Wannabe. He's surprisingly charismatic, considers himself Above Good and Evil, and thinks the Doctor is old-fashioned for having a strong moral code. In The Domino Effect, an alternate version of Sabbath gives quite a lecture about how the Doctor's values and the Doctor himself are hopelessly outdated:
  ‘You think of yourself as Time’s Champion, Doctor. You believe everyone should subscribe to your cosy, libertarian values. [...] The universe would be a nice, safe place if only everyone followed your proper, civilised code of conduct. [...] You couldn’t be more wrong. Everything you believe is a lie. You’re an anachronism, a leftover from a previous reality – I see that now[...] You don’t hold the solution to anything any more – you’re part of the problem. The sooner you step aside, the better for all concerned. A new history is coming!’
• The Unfettered: Yeah, we've kind of gone over this already. He's pretty clearly against taking pointless immoral actions, but morality isn't going to stop him achieving his goals. His morality contrasts with his conduct; he's much more straitlaced than the Doctor, who likes bothering him with immature humor.
• Wild Card:
  Anji: So, Sabbath will be up to another of his dopy schemes, desperate to ally himself with the next nasty to come slinking out of the vortex with a bunch of hollow promises. ^note Does This Remind You of Anything?? You suspect that Anji wants to explain to him that no one buys the evil cow when they can get the evil milk for free. They're just going to break your heart again! Villainous dating advice from Anji Kapoor...

Faction Paradox

Essentially a cult of renegade Time Lords and their followers, devoted to causing temporal paradoxes through voodoo. Aside from their encounters with the Eighth Doctor, they exist in their own webs of timelines consisting of spinoff books, comics and audios: see Faction Paradox.

• Cult: Albeit one powerful enough to eventually invade Gallifrey. Successfully.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Compare the Faction Paradox of the earlier Eighth Doctor and stand-alone novels to the Gallifrey- and time-destroying villains in The Ancestor Cell. They barely seem like the same organisation.
• Malevolent Masked Men: If they're not in the full armor, they usually still wear a mask carved from the skull of a creature that never existed.
• Mind Screw: They were created by, and largely written by, Lawrence Miles, so this is only to be expected.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Did we mention they wear black robes and the skulls of creatures that never existed?
• Paradox Person: They revere temporal paradoxes and strive to become one themselves.
• Powers as Programs: A strange sort-of-inversion in that the Faction makes extensive use of biodata (the importance of which was established in The Deadly Assassin) in the "rituals" that fuel their technology.
• Skeletons in the Coat Closet: Their armor is carved from the bones of impossible creatures, as seen here.◊

The Enemy

A force that in the future will engage in a war against the Time Lords and start winning. First seen in Alien Bodies. They are not the Daleks or Krotons, and apart from their penchant for fancy robes, that's all we get to find out.

• The Dreaded: The Time Lords are terrified that the Enemy will overwrite their version of history.
• Hidden Villain: For most of their appearances. "The Ancestor Cell" claims they evolved from cells exposed to energy from a leaking bottle universe and developing in a universe damaged by the Time Lords time travelling. However it still seems unclear who exactly they are.
• Sinister Silhouettes: Someone who they turn into the Shift sees them like this. They are wearing Time Lord robes but have contempt for the Time Lords.

Beatrice "Trix" MacMillan

A rather mysterious young woman who comes from sometime after the 21st Century and used to work for the villain. (It doesn't stop her making fun of him, though.) Talented at disguising herself and had a rather entertaining habit of appearing in disguise before she was officially introduced. Her first book is Time Zero.

• A-Cup Angst: It's not a very prominent trait, but she does on occasion bemoan her lack of anything resembling cleavage.
• Ambiguously Human: She claims to much older than she looks and from a reality without humans, and it sounds almost plausible. Then she adds that her kind ate all the humans and she's had her flesh-devouring jaws surgically reduced, and it starts to sound like she's just lying her head off.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: She has a notoriously short attention span, and the Doctor becomes resigned to the uselessness of telling her to not wander off. She once ate most of a box of chocolates because she said chocolate helps her concentrate, and after eating them said she couldn't concentrate because of all the caffeine.
• Character Name Alias: The name she goes by is almost certainly not her real name, and it's surprisingly close to Tricia McMillan.
• Color-Coded Eyes: Her green eyes are often described as "catlike", and she's a rather untrustworthy Tsundere.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Paul Hanley (provider of our page illustration) noted that many fans online had "cast" her as Kelly Adams from Hustle, so he used her as the basis for his illustration. Which was funny because Matt "Fitz" di Angelo played her brother in the same programme.
• Femme Fatale: Not as much as some examples, but she's sort of mildly antagonistic when first introduced, she's far from trustworthy, her alignment can generally be best described as Chaotic Selfish, and she gets Fitz wrapped around her little finger (although she scares him on occasion). ^note He probably finds it unusual that in this list, he gets to top for once! And she enjoys dressing glamourously (often in black) as often as possible.
• Heel–Face Turn: Goes from a minion of the villain to the Doctor's companion.
• The Hedonist: For her, saving the universe is almost as important as money, clothes, and chocolate.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Trix might be a con woman who uses time travel to make a killing in investments, but she is genuinely hurt at one point when the Doctor (his mood being affected by a psychic entity) accuses her of only helping when there's profit in it for her.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She's a cute, quirky, mysterious, larcenous young woman who falls in love with Fitz because he's dependable. But despite being a bit of an Everyman, he's also already quirky and adventurous and, unlike her, has his life together about as well as can be expected. In short, it looks like the normal guy is going to be fixing up the weird girl's life, and they try to settle down together and use Time Travel for Fun and Profit to be rich yuppies.
• Mysterious Past / Multiple-Choice Past: Because she lies her head off about it all the time.
• Pet the Dog: She's a little greedy and, shall we say, acquisitive, but uses Time Travel for Fun and Profit to send money to an orphan.
• Replacement Flat Character: For Fitz. After he became more trustworthy, responsible, and emotionally stable, and stopped hiding behind literal and metaphorical disguises, Trix eventually showed up to be sketchy, feckless, moody, and constantly in disguise. (But even though this means he's clearly more mature than she is, he still tends to defer to her.)

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