 |
Interference Book One
(Lawrence
Miles) |
|
 Name: Compassion (Formerly Laura
Tobin).
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: 1996 (In a rather roundabout
way).
Time Span:
Interference
Book One -
The
Ancestor Cell
Doctor: Eighth
Doctor.
Fellow
Companions: The
Brigadier, Sarah
Jane Smith, 3rd
Romana, Samantha
Jones, and Fitz Kreiner.
 |
The Blue Angel
(Paul Magrs &
Jeremy Hoad) |
|
History: Compassion remains unique among all The
Doctor's companions in that she was the only one who definitely wanted
to kill him when they first met, unlike Chris and Roz,
who only attempted to get the Seventh
Doctor and Benny due
to faked evidence, although her final fate unquestionably marks her
as a unique companion by
any definition.
Compassion’s
full history began as a woman from an Earth colony in the future
called Laura Tobin, Tobin being captured and forcibly recruited by
The Doctor’s time-manipulating foes Faction
Paradox at about
the same time as Fitz was, the two of them subsequently being trapped
in the past as members of the Remote on Anathema. As the Remote are
sterile due to the time-travel biodata they were programmed with,
they ‘reproduce’ via a unique form of biomass which is
shaped according to peoples’ memories of the deceased person,
resulting in them gradually changing and shifting over time to literally
become what others perceive them as rather than what they were originally.
Compassion is a version of Laura - she came to be called ‘Compassion’ due
to Tobin’s comments that compassion was her middle name, an
ironic comment on her caustic personality -, her people basing all
of their decisions upon the signals they receive from local media
via their implanted receivers, located behind their ears.
Compassion, Kode and Guest - another member of the Remote
- were sent to Earth by the Faction in 1996, attempting to interfere in
Earth’s history to draw the Time Lord’s attention to gain access
to a TARDIS to activate an artefact called the Cold - the Remote believed
that it was one of the ‘spirits’ they worshipped but was really
a Time Lord weapon -, they were met by the Eighth
Doctor, subsequently
using his companion Samantha Jones to provide them with a better understanding
of Earth’s culture (Another agent of the Remote going on to capture
Fitz so that he could go back and become Kode). Although the plan failed
after The Doctor and Sam revealed the true nature of the Cold, the principles
that Compassion and Kode gained from observing Sam’s thoughts left
them with too much new information for them to fit into Anathmea. With
nowhere else for them to go, The Doctor allowed them to travel with him,
using the TARDIS’s knowledge of Fitz to ‘recreate’ Kode
as a slight variation on the original Fitz, although he was unable to restore
any degree of Laura to Compassion due to his lack of contact with the original.
With Compassion now a companion, The Doctor resolved to help her explore
and develop her humanity like he had aided other beings to accomplish in
the past, doing what he could to encourage her to be more human.
 |
The Taking Of Planet 5
(Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham) |
|
Compassion's basic outlook on life could be
best described as a little bit of a combination of a child and a homicidal
maniac; when she originally met Sam, she was unable to fully understand
why Sam was angry at their creation of a weapon called the Cold, which
killed only a few dozen people at any one time, when cars killed thousands
of people every year and she wasn't angry at them. Even with her new
principles of sacrifice and resolve added to her personality - although
she was originally unwilling to take action where her own life would
be at risk -, she retained this partly simplistic attitude for some
time after joining The Doctor, such as when she couldn't understand
why Fitz and The Doctor didn't burn The Doctor's books to keep warm
while they were in a cold hut in "The
Blue Angel". She was
also rather cynical about life on several occasions, often expressing
doubt or disdain that The Doctor’s intervention in situations
actually accomplished anything that couldn’t have been sorted
out on its own (A fact that wasn’t helped when they spent time
investigating a corrupt company on a distant colony when even The Doctor
was uncertain if they’d made any positive impact on the situation
in the end ("Frontier
Worlds")).
The Doctor eventually worked out what appeared
to be an ideal solution to the problem of Compassion’s receiver,
attaching a filter to the receiver that, due to its link with the
TARDIS, would block out any random impulses that might affect Compassion’s
behaviour in ways that would impact her own development (Although
Iris Wildthyme, an old flame of The Doctor’s, attempted to
remove the filter for reasons that weren’t explained at the
time) ("The Blue Angel"). After this, Compassion’s
personality ceased being influenced by random impulses from the world
around her, although she was still capable of receiving - and sometimes
even manipulating - media signals, as shown when she used her sensitivity
to radio waves to turn the defences of a base against her enemies
in "The
Taking of Planet 5" or was able to hack into a
damaged alien network in "Parallel
59". Her connection
to the TARDIS also resulted in her beginning to absorb some aspects
of The Doctor’s morality and personality due to his long connection
to the TARDIS telepathic circuits, giving her a greater interest
in the problems they encountered even if she still remained emotionally
detached.
 |
The Shadows of Avalon
(Paul Cornell) |
|
However, it wasn't until "The
Shadows of Avalon" that Iris's reasons for attempting to remove the
filter were revealed, her actions being connected to Marie, a ‘living’ TARDIS
from the Time Lords’ personal future that The Doctor had encountered
during his prior dealings with the ‘Future War’, a war
between the Time Lords and an initially-unidentified Enemy. When
The Doctor, Fitz, Compassion, and The Doctor's old friend The
Brigadier were trapped in the reality known as Avalon when the TARDIS was apparently
torn apart when caught in the reality barriers between this world
and Avalon, the four of them became caught in a war between the Celtic
tribe and the Fair Folk - altered Silurians who had travelled to
Avalon centuries ago - that was being escalated by two Time Lord
agents sent by the current Time Lord President - the third incarnation
of The Doctor’s old companion Romana - to trigger the creation
of a new element that would be of assistance to the Time Lords in
the Future War.
Although The Doctor, The Brigadier and his companions
were able to avert the war in Avalon, the agents achieved their goal by
shooting Compassion off a tall tower, triggering her transformation into
the Type 102 TARDIS; the filter that The Doctor had added to Compassion’s
receiver had been detecting signals from the TARDIS, transforming those
signals into block transfer computations - seen in "Logopolis" and "Castrovalva" -
that would alter Compassion's very being into the Type 102 TARDIS, a living
TARDIS whose chameleon circuit allowed her to disguise herself as other
people rather than objects. Although Romana attempted to take Compassion
back to Gallifrey to use her as breeding stock for the War, The Doctor
refused to allow this to happen, he and Fitz subsequently fleeing Avalon
in Compassion as the rift between the two realities was sealed once again.
Acknowledging his responsibility for Compassion’s new state, The
Doctor resolved to keep her out of the Time Lords’ hands until Romana
recognised that the future had multiple possibilities, in the meantime
accepting his fate to be on the run from his own people, destination unknown,
in a TARDIS that he could barely control, much like when he originally
began his travels ("The Shadows of Avalon").
 |
The Fall of Yquatine
(Nick Walters) |
|
In terms of her interior, Compassion’s structure
as a TARDIS was vastly different from The Doctor’s original ship,
even when ignoring The Doctor and Fitz’s obvious discomfort in essentially
travelling inside their friend (Fitz in particular tried not to think about
the implications of going to the toilet inside her ("The
Fall of Yquatine")).
When they originally entered Compassion, they found themselves in an ornate
corridor decorated with portraits of The Doctor’s friends, family
and past selves in varying artistic styles, progressing to another corridor
with doors leading off to Compassion’s subconscious - with such contents
as Awful Truths, Hopes for the Future and That Dream About Fitz -, along
with a narrow bridge over dark chasm of her unconscious. The emotional
part of Compassion’s mind was represented as a forest to reflect
its state of existing beyond the civilised self - as well as representing
Compassion’s new awareness of this part of herself -, Compassion’s
console room existing in a cave in this forest at the end of a long tunnel
of pipes and valves. Her console hovered over her subconscious blackness
on a stone platform, the console itself possessing harsher angles than
The Doctor’s original TARDIS, with Compassion as a TARDIS being far
less easy to control than The Doctor’s ship due to her own lack of
certainty about what she had become.
The attempt to escape the Time Lords wasn’t as
easy as it had been when The Doctor went on the run originally. Putting
aside their greater interest in finding him now, Compassion originally
refused the Randomiser that The Doctor had used to evade The
Black Guardian from his fourth incarnation, and when he installed it, it sent her into
such pain that she expelled him and Fitz from her and left them on the
planet Yquatine. When she tried to force Fitz to remove it, the resulting
spasms of pain after the Randomiser fully integrated itself into her systems
sent the two of them back a month in Yqatine’s past, Compassion abandoning
Fitz out of fear when she nearly killed him, only to find herself randomly
drifting through the Time Vortex when she tried to override the Randomiser
and leave the planet only to find herself unable to repeat the process
and return. Fortunately, Compassion was finally able to return to Yquatine
in time to save the planet, disguising herself as its President and surrendering
to the invaders ("The Fall of Yquatine"). As time went on, Compassion
grew more attached to her new role as a TARDIS, growing beyond her old
restrictions as a corporeal entity; she even began to perceive the higher
dimensions of reality as her transformation progressed, although she still
decided to remain with The Doctor and Fitz. Her physical abilities were
also altered, her status as a TARDIS rendering her essentially indestructible
and unharmed even after falling several hundred feet - although the damage
destabilised her interior to prevent anyone entering her for the next few
hours - ("Coldheart") while also allowing her to create a force
field around herself that could shock anyone attempting to attack her if
the need arose ("The
Space Age").
 |
The Ancestor Cell
(Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole) |
|
Despite The Doctor’s precautions, the Time Lords
still tried to get Compassion, the most effective attempt being an arton
inhibition field that prevented her from dematerialising and The Doctor
from regenerating until the field was shut off, forcing Compassion to ‘latch
on’ to a ‘host’ to keep herself even slightly stable
while The Doctor sought a solution to the problem. However, although The
Doctor managed to disable the field in time to escape, the Time Lords managed
to acquire information about how to predict the Randomiser, and when Compassion
next materialised, in "The
Ancestor Cell", the Time Lords were
waiting. In the resulting conflict on Gallifrey against a future version
of Faction Paradox, Compassion befriended a technician called Nivet after
he realised she was much more than a machine, also ‘reuniting’ with
The Doctor’s restored TARDIS as it sought to protect The Doctor from
the Paradox virus that he had been infected with lifetimes ago when the
Faction changed his history and killed his third incarnation ahead of schedule.
When the battle ended, at the cost of Gallifrey, Faction Paradox, and The
Doctor's memories, it was Compassion who, with the Randomiser gone, took
The Doctor to 1889 to allow him and the TARDIS, revealed to have survived
its apparent destruction, to recover, and than took Fitz to 2001 so he
could meet The Doctor after he'd recovered. Compassion than departed, taking
Nivet along to keep her functioning due to the loss of the Eye of Harmony
cutting her off from conventional power sources. Although her final fate
is unknown, it was implied that the mysterious Madam Xing - who was encountered
by the amnesic Doctor during a visit to the planet Espero in "Halflife" -
was actually Compassion in disguise, with her possible return being hinted
at during the conclusion of "The
Gallifrey Chronicles" when The
Doctor said that he had sent the returned K9 to Espero on a mission of
some sort (Most likely to ask for her assistance in restoring his lost
memories and providing a secure new ‘home’ for the Matrix,
The Doctor having downloaded the Matrix into his subconscious before Gallifrey
had been destroyed).
Her continued survival in the present series is uncertain
(Assuming that the Time War referenced by the Ninth and Tenth Doctors is
the same as the War averted by the Eighth Doctor in "The Ancestor
Cell", with the Faction simply being replaced by the Daleks after
The Doctor erased the Faction’s creator). The Tenth Doctor has stated
that his TARDIS is the last one in the universe ("Rise
of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel") following the Time War, suggesting that Compassion
has been either destroyed or forgotten, but given that he always treated
Compassion as a companion even after she became his mode of transport,
it may be that he doesn’t consider her a TARDIS in the strictest
sense of the word, preferring to allow her to make her own way in the universe
as a person rather than draw attention to her continued existence as a
TARDIS. |
|
