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| Frobisher |
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 Name: Frobisher (Real Name Avan Tarklu).
Format:
Comic, Book and Audio.
Time of Origin: Unconfirmed, but definitely
far future.
Time Span: "The Shape-Shifter" - "Funhouse",
"Mission:
Impractical", "The
Holy Terror" and "The
Maltese Penguin".
Doctor: Sixth
Doctor and Seventh
Doctor.
Fellow
Companions: None.
History: Shape-shifter companion Frobisher -
the sentient penguin - first appeared in Issue 88 of Doctor Who Magazine and
travelled with both the Sixth
and Seventh Doctors.
He was a regular in the comic strips until he was written
off in issue 133. Frobisher's
appearance in
the Marvel's strips started in the gap between seasons 21
and 22; Peri was reintroduced starting with issue 104. Frobisher
was also featured in the BBC
novel "Mission:
Impractical" and the audio stories "The
Holy Terror"' and "'The
Maltese Penguin". Both are set between the television stories "The
Trial of a Time Lord" and "Time
and the Rani". If these new adventures are to
be considered cannon, we should assume that all the strips
from the introduction of Frobisher
to the end of 'Funhouse' - in fact those before the coming
back of Peri - should be also be part of the continuity.
The subsequent strips featuring a
returning Peri after her exit in "The Trial of a Time Lord" are
obviously not, especially if her return in the Seventh Doctor
and Chris New Adventure
"Bad
Therapy" is to be counted as genuine.
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Mission: Impractical
(David A.
McIntee) |
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To
begin at The Doctor and Frobisher's first meeting, Frobisher is a
Private Eye from some time in the far future, and was hired by a man
named Dogbolter to track down the Fifth or Sixth Doctors, suggesting
that he was acquainted only with those two Doctors. However, Frobisher,
when he got into the TARDIS,
decided to not hunt The Doctor and the two of them tricked Dogbolter
to give them the money he promised Frobisher for The Doctor's capture
before they left. To stay safe, The Doctor and Frobisher are forced
to run from Dogbolter, preferably to some far distant dimension.
Frobisher's exact species is a Whifferdill, a
shape shifter that can become anything they want. They are some of the most
efficient shifters known, especially since they don't have to shift to their
natural state in between changes. Frobisher constantly maintains the shape of a
penguin because he finds it relaxing, and took the name of Frobisher because
the personality he made for that name had fewer problems than his Avan Tarklu
persona. Since he began to travel with The Doctor, he has only ever taken on
his original shape once - to escape some policemen in 'Mission:
Impractical'.
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The Holy Terror
(Rob
Shearman) |
|
Despite spending a lot of time as a penguin, Frobisher still
uses his shape shifting-ability, although more sensibly than before - he once
became a till checkout for fourteen years simply to be close to the girl who
worked there. Since joining The Doctor, he has been using his abilities for
disguise and infiltration purposes, such as when he became The Doctor's coat
during "Mission: Impractical", to look around a location they had to rob to
save two planets. Frobisher also possess The Doctor's high esteem for life,
having once changed his beak shape when he was appointed God of a castle in
"The Holy Terror", and a man made a mistake around the beak area, which may
have got the man killed. He's also very attached to The Doctor, and actually
hugged him when The Doctor had been apparently killed by an electric shock, but
had really put himself into temporary stasis to get some bounty hunters off his
tracks.
Frobisher's time with The Doctor was definitely more
difficult than his time as a Private Eye, when he mainly handled small crimes
and some divorces, but he still enjoys since it was for the adventures he has
with The Doctor that Frobisher became a PI in the first place. He prides
himself on maintaining a sense of scale about the world, and always buys
whatever approximates to a newspaper whenever he and The Doctor land somewhere.
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The Maltese Penguin
(Justin
Richards) |
|
Frobisher has helped The Doctor deal with several problems in
his time - on only his second adventure with The Doctor, the two of them
battled the legendary Thief of Time, apparently a Time Lord from the old days
who stole one of Rassilon's sacred texts and used them to steal artefacts from
planet's past ages. He also met up with The Doctor's old enemy Astrolabus, a
Time Lords on his thirteenth life, who briefly held him captive in a cabinet of
some sort that created illusionary worlds. The Doctor and Frobisher managed to
defeat Astrolabus, but he accidentally got taken to the dimension of Death. In
his last 'continuity' comic appearance, he and The Doctor were trapped by an
alien entity that took on the form of a haunted house and tried to leech off
The Doctor and Frobisher's worst fears. The Doctor barely managed to cast the
creature out of the TARDIS by destabilising Time inside the TARDIS, and even
that caused Frobisher to become a small embryo of fluid and The Doctor to
revert into the First Doctor.
Since only the above adventures can be counted as
actual Who continuity, the actual circumstances of Frobisher's departure of the
TARDIS are unknown. However, it seems a safe bet that he left to resolve a
situation or help out a troubled world, since it would be something that he'd
do, in my opinion. |
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