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The Judgement of Isskar
(Simon Guerrier) |
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 Name: Amy/Abby
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Technically nowhere; she was created
outside of time and then deposited in our universe as a ‘newborn’ on
the planet Chaos
Appearances:
"The
Judgement of Isskar" to "The
Chaos Pool", "Graceless", "Wicked Sisters"
Doctor: Fifth
Doctor
Fellow
Companions: 2nd
Romana, technically Peri (In the sense that the
two of them were on the same planet at the same time a short distance
from each other, although they never actually met); ‘fought’ Leela when she was assigned to hunt the sisters.
History: Amy stands as unique among The Doctor’s
companions in that, when she initially joined The Doctor, it was
to request for him to act as her companion, rather than the other
way around. A sentient Tracer created by the Grace - powerful entities
outside of time - to find three segments of the Key to Time - the
reasoning being that this would prevent one person being tempted
by the full power of the Key - Amy - initially unnamed - came to
The Doctor to seek his assistance in acquiring the three segments,
recognising that The Doctor’s practical experience would be
of benefit to her even if the Grace felt that The Doctor’s
personality made him dangerous and unpredictable. Freezing time on
the planet where The Doctor was currently located to make contact
with him- the Fifth Doctor was currently travelling with Peri,
but the Grace froze time after The Doctor and Peri became separated,
thus leaving Peri totally unaware of The Doctor’s meeting with
Amy - Amy claimed the first segment of the Key - disguised as a compass-like
device The Doctor had salvaged from a crashed ship- and subsequently
accompanied The Doctor into the TARDIS.
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The Destroyer of Delights
(Jonathan Clements) |
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Initially
a naive, essentially bland woman, Amy began to develop her own personality
as time went on; a casual comment of The Doctor’s prompted
her to recognise that it ‘tickled’ when she sensed the
segments and transformed them into their natural states, subsequently
expressing awe at the warmth of Mars at their next location. Like
Romana, Amy was initially dissatisfied with the name The Doctor chose
for her - The Doctor initially mistook her reaction to her first
new planet as a response to the name ‘Amy’, having been
going through a list of names to try and find one she liked, subsequently
sticking with that name after an encounter with an Ice Warrior required
him to make introductions - but grew into it over time.
The most defining element of Amy’s personality
was her discovery of the conflict that had developed between her and her ‘sister’ Zara,
another sentient Tracer created to find the other three segments, named
by The Doctor when Amy insisted that her ‘sister’ have a name
as well. While Zara - whose initial human ‘contact’ was with
a thief called Harmonious 14 Zinc - grew to desire the power of the complete
Key and sought it all for herself, Amy, inspired by The Doctor’s
advice that one couldn’t be a benevolent dictator, rejected the Key’s
power, only using her ability to access the segments when no other choice
was available to her. When her sister Zara acquired the fourth segment
- transforming it into its natural state despite the fact that it was disguised
as a castle that still had people inside - Amy, despite being alone and
less experienced than Zara, rejected her sister’s offer on an alliance
and restored the segment to its form of a castle to save The Doctor and
its inhabitants, demonstrating her essentially pure nature.
Amy’s true independence was demonstrated
during a trip to ninth-century Sudan, where she and The
Doctor were separated after being cut off from the TARDIS and forced
to rely on
The
Black Guardian to send them to find the next segment of the Key.
Although mistaken for a slave in the court of Lord Cassim,
Amy nevertheless managed to cope well with her new situation, swiftly
identifying Lord
Cassim as a currently-weakened Black Guardian and subsequently
learning of his alliance with an alien being as he attempted to leave
Earth.
Reunited with The Doctor, the two of them swiftly tracked
down the disguise assumed by the fifth segment - which had, paradoxically
enough, actually
been created by The Black Guardian’s plans - subsequently
departing to track down the last segment.
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The Chaos Pool
(Peter Anghelides) |
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In the final struggle to acquire the sixth
segment of the Key - revealed to now be The Doctor’s old companion
Romana, who had ‘inherited’ the essence of the sixth
segment after the restoration of Princess Astra to human form and
Romana’s subsequent regeneration - Amy and Zara came together
at last, Zara recognising that she was more than just her sister’s ‘counterpart’;
like Amy, she too had a choice to make her own choices, and she had
become too human now to remain permanently her sister’s opposite.
Using their ability to shift the segments to escape the armies of
The Black Guardian and The White Guardian - Amy restoring one segment to its
original form as a castle to give them somewhere to hide while Zara
turned another into a lake to help them escape capture - the two
Tracers worked together to keep the segments out of the hands of
others. Even when faced with the Grace themselves, now personified
in the Key to Time, Amy and Zara both rejected the Grace’s
orders to give the Key to them, instead handing the Key over to The
Doctor and allowing him to destroy the Key in the Chaos Pool where
it had been forged.
As Zara left for Atrios, having fallen in love with Atrian Captain Pargrave, Amy decided to accompany Romana back to Gallifrey,
Romana deciding that the Time Lords needed to admit non-Gallifreyians to
their ranks and feeling that Amy would make a good candidate as the first
such ‘recruit’. Amy learnt about various powers she possessed through her nature as a Tracer through her time at the Academy, including telekinesis and some knowledge of the wider universe, but she eventually left Gallifrey to track down Zara after she teleported away following an argument with Pargrave. Amy found Zara on the Sphere, a casino on a space station, but had to adopt the identity of Sphere resident Abigail Oblong-9 Menton to infiltrate it. Forced to work for the Sphere’s owner to try and help Zara, ‘Abby’ was eventually driven to destroy the Sphere so that she and her sister could escape, permanently adopting Abby as her new name as she felt that Amy would never have done such a thing.
In their subsequent travels, Abby and Zara learnt that they were basically immortal unless they chose to die, also discovering that they had the ability to travel in time on their own power after absorbing energy from the Grace and other higher-dimensional entities. So long as they were together, the sisters could travel back and forth along their personal timelines without the ‘risk’ of meeting themselves. Using these powers, they were able to change history to save others, but their efforts met with mixed results, such as attempting to re-do events because they initially made mistakes, and even their successes could have unintended consequences such as Zara accidentally erasing her daughter from existence because she and Abby changed the events that led to her meeting the child’s father. Over the course of their lives, they qualified as doctors and other experts several times over and saved several planets, but they eventually drew the attention of the Time Lords as their actions were having an increasingly worrying effect on the Web of Time.
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Wicked Sisters
(Simon Guerrier) |
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The concerns of the Time Lords led to The Doctor being assigned to confront the sisters, accompanied by his previous incarnation’s old companion Leela, with the order to basically convince the sisters to either stop what they were doing or even outright talk them into killing themselves. The Doctor and Leela found the sisters on an Earth colony that operated on a principle of killing its natives when they reached the age of forty due to an economics paper published some time ago. Abby and Zara were trying to prevent the policy becoming common, but after failing in more blatant attempts such as trying to stage a revolution or stop the original paper being published (which led to someone else writing it) they were now simply trying to make the residents see that policy as morally wrong ("Wicked Sisters 1 - The Garden of Storms").
Although the sisters tried to prove that their methods worked by saving a human colony on the moon from a from a protracted war with the Sontarans ("Wicked Sisters 2 - The Moonrakers"), thus changing the development of the colony they had been trying to change originally, this led to the colony being attacked by smoke creatures that had been drawn to the strain Abby and Zara inflicted on the Web of Time ("Wicked Sisters 3 - The People Made of Smoke"), and were now feeding on the life energy of the colonists. The Doctor eventually managed to draw the creatures into the TARDIS and trap them in the vortex, condemning himself to be drained of energy to the extent that he aged and regenerated at least once before Abby and Zara apparently sacrificed most of their powers to change history so that The Doctor was never in danger in the first place. Leela at least believed that the sisters were dead from the subsequent energy drain, but The Doctor met them one last time at a major spaceport, confirming that the sisters would continue to help others but would use their experience to find ways of doing that without reckless time travel. Whether The Doctor will meet Abby and Zara again remains to be seen, although one possibility is that they were some of the many casualties of the devastating Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks, a conflict so brutal that various higher-dimensional beings are said to have fled from reality.
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