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Escape Velocity
(Colin Brake)
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 Name: Anji Kapoor
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Earth, February 2001.
Appearances:
"Escape
Velocity" -
"Timeless".
Left the TARDIS for a few months during the events of "Time Zero" and
was briefly reunited with fellow companions Fitz and Trix
in "The
Gallifrey Chronicles".
Doctor:
Eighth
Doctor.
Fellow Companions:
Fitz Kreiner and Trix MacMillan.
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Vanishing Point
(Stephen
Cole) |
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History: A stockbroker in the present, Anji first
met the Eighth
Doctor at the end of his century - long amnesic exile on 20th
century Earth. At the time, she and her boyfriend, an actor and
sci-fi
- buff named Dave, had discovered a dying man with two hearts, and
while Fitz Kreiner, waiting to meet The Doctor,
had checked up on it to make sure it wasn't him, Dave had been captured
by an alien race called The Kulan. With only one chance, Fitz
took
Anji with him to meet The Doctor in London, on February 8th, 2001,
in the St. Louis pub in London, owned by The Doctor himself, only
to learn that The Doctor had no memory of his past (Following the
traumatic events of "The
Ancestor Cell") and the TARDIS was still non-functional. Despite this, The Doctor agreed to help
Anji find Dave, only for Dave to be killed in the escape attempt
and Fitz being captured by the Kulan fleet. Fortunately, the TARDIS
had restored itself when The Doctor and Anji returned to the St
Louis, allowing them to get up onto the Kulan flagship and rescue
Fitz, although Anji's attempts to trick the Kulan into leaving
resulted in the entire fleet blowing itself apart. Thankfully,
The Doctor, Fitz and Anji managed to get off, but unfortunately
for Anji, while The Doctor may have remembered the basics of who
he is, he still didn’t know how to pilot the TARDIS; getting
to the Kulan fleet was more luck than anything else, and he was
doubtful about his ability to precisely return his ship to Earth
in Anji’s present. Until further notice, she was his companion.
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Hope
(Mark Clapham) |
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Generally, Anji was one of the many companions The Doctor
had from approximately the current period of our time. (Other
examples included
Ian
Chesterton
form 1963,
Jo Grant from
1971,
Sarah
Jane Smith
from 1974, Tegan from 1979, Peri from 1982, Ace from 1986,
and Sam
from 1997) Like those, she managed to do fairly well in
her travels with The Doctor, doing such things as shooting
an incredibly deadly cyborg in the eye ("Hope"),
fought off a madman intent on blowing up a city, ("Vanishing
Point") and help The Doctor and Fitz cope with a serious disruption
to the fabric of reality. She did make a few mistakes, such
as almost giving a complete nutcase the secrets of the TARDIS,
but nothing that wasn't very
easily remedied. Although a competent companion, she fulfilled
the traditional role of getting captured, being used as
a hostage for such forces as a
man/wasp hybrid, a rather unusual escort agency, and CIA
agents, as well as being forced to deal with some particularly
brutal racism in an alternate
timeline.
Her relationship with The Doctor and Fitz was also
difficult at times, sometimes finding it hard to reconcile Fitz’s
faith in The Doctor with his actions. During one of her earliest
adventures with The Doctor ("Eater
of Wasps"), she reflected
that he appeared almost dispassionate about the human lives lost
when a dangerous bioweapon from the future began to mutate a man
into a human/wasp hybrid life form, believing that he only got involved
because he could rather than because he genuinely cared about people.
However, as time went on she recognised that he did care about others
- as made evident when he continued to appeal to the man/wasp hybrid’s
humanity until he was certain the man it had been was dead - but
simply avoided getting obviously emotionally involved because sometimes
it was necessary; indeed, she once reflected that he reminded her
of her father, whom she had grown apart from in recent years. This
was particularly evident during the "Fractured Reality" crisis,
when The Doctor was forced to sacrifice an innocent man to return
to their home reality ("Reckless
Engineering"), or when
he allowed multiple alternate versions of himself, Fitz and Anji
to die to restore the true reality ("The
Last Resort").
Her relationship with Fitz, although occasionally punctuated by Fitz’s
casual flirting, was generally friendly, with Anji sometimes relying
on Fitz to provide a human perspective and some general information
about their travels when The Doctor found it harder to relate to
her.
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Dark Progeny
(Steve Emmerson) |
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Although not a traditional ‘shrinking violet’ by
any stretch, Anji’s status as the TARDIS female played a prominent
role on more than one occasion; a particularly notable adventure for her
occurred when the TARDIS was drawn to Ceres Alpha by the telepathic cries
of the resurrected children of ; seeking a mother figure, the telepathic
cry of the children had been picked up by the TARDIS telepathic circuits
and subsequently broadcast to Anji due to her being the closest thing to
a mother they could find ("Dark
Progeny"). Although of Indian
ancestry, Anji had little real faith in religion, demonstrating a regularly
effective knowledge of governments and politics due to her career as a
stockbroker. Despite her knowledge of the system - as particularly demonstrated
when she noted the economic benefits of prolonged war in "Anachrophobia" -
Anji made it clear that she recognised the flaws in a system that focused
on money over morality, briefly becoming excited at the prospect of shaping
a new society that could escape the flaws of her own before The Doctor
reminded her that they had no right to influence things on that scale ("The
Crooked World").
Throughout
her time in the TARDIS, one of her most defining aspects of her personality
was grief over Dave’s death, constantly wishing that she could have
done something to save him. During her first adventure in the TARDIS, she
spent much of her spare time composing imaginary e-mails to ‘send’ to
him as a means of coping with her recent upheaval, although The Doctor
later took her to a garden in the TARDIS to allow her to grieve once the
crisis had passed ("Earthworld"). Anji’s grief over Dave’s
death proved to be a particularly defining factor during their visit to
the city of Hope, the TARDIS having sunk into a sea of acid forcing The
Doctor to seek aid from the powerful and mysterious Silver to get it back.
While The Doctor hunted for a mysterious killer in exchange for Silver’s
services, Anji made her own deal with Silver; in exchange for scans of
the TARDIS, so he could make his own versions of it and leave Hope, he
would clone Dave from a hair sample so he could get a second chance at
life. After The Doctor tracked down the killers - really the last remnants
of humanity as it is presently known - the TARDIS was bought back up, and
Anji scanned it for Silver. However, having created his clone, Silver revealed
that he had never intended to revive Dave-II; he intended to keep the clone
inactive to be used as a study sample and create his own species of cyborgs
called Silverati, thanks to a chemical called Kallisti that he'd modified
to allow humans to transform into cyborgs like himself and create a galaxy-conquering
army. Although hurt, The Doctor refused to allow Anji’s betrayal
to affect his trust in his companions, working with Anji to activate Dave-II
and inject him with a smaller Kallisti that would only be temporary, simultaneously
programming him to help them. While Dave distracted the Silverati, The
Doctor and Anji confronted Silver, The Doctor stealing the chip containing
the information from the TARDIS while Anji shot out Silver’s organic
eye with a dart, Silver subsequently being trapped on a barren world. With
the conclusion of this adventure, Anji felt more content, having ended
the chapter of her life involving Dave.
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The Book of the Still
(Paul Ebbs) |
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Unfortunately,
peace with the past didn’t solve Anji’s continued problems
in the TARDIS. A particularly traumatic experience at this
time featured Anji’s abduction by an escort agency that used drugs
to brainwash their employees to literally become what the clients paid
for, Anji hallucinating
that she was being forced into a loveless marriage by an
uncle; when she regained her wits, The Doctor actually had to lower a bulkhead
in his temporarily-borrowed
spaceship to stop her from killing the agency owners ("The
Book of the Still"). Although she grew to enjoy the opportunities
presented to her by the chance to travel with The Doctor, taking pleasure
in the
new experiences she gathered from her time with him, she
eventually decided to leave after learning that The Doctor had essentially
sent Fitz to die
on an Arctic expedition in 1899 in order to preserve the
Web of Time, The Doctor taking her back to her own time just a few weeks
after she’d
left (Her bosses allowing her the ‘time off’ as time she had
needed in order to grieve for Dave’s death).
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The Gallifrey Chronicles
(Lance Parkin) |
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Despite
this resolve, she ended up running into The Doctor and Fitz again when
The Doctor was investigating the actions of his old enemy Sabbath at an
auction that Anji’s company had sent her to attend, the subsequent
disruption of reality causing the TARDIS to shift between various alternate
realities, including a particularly challenging one where Anji was subjected
to brutal racism as a result of the computer never being invented and advances
in communication and transport never being achieved to encourage equality
("The
Domino Effect"). Eventually, with reality having been stabilised
- leaving The Doctor with only the immediate problem of finding Sabbath’s ‘superiors’ and
restoring the possibility of alternate timelines to reality, even if the
universe itself was now safe - Anji left the TARDIS crew and returned to
her own time, with the latest crew member - Trix MacMillan, a con woman
from her era - leaving her with adoption papers to a girl called Chloe
- apparently a young surviving Time Lord who had been left trapped in the
body of a little girl due to the destruction of Gallifrey.
She
made a brief reappearance in "The
Gallifrey Chronicles", where
it was revealed that she was engaged to a man named Greg - who knew about
The Doctor , Fitz and Trix but hadn’t been told about her travels
in time - was now on the board of her company, and had kept in touch with
Trix even after her departure, Trix giving Anji stock tips based on her
trips to the future while Anji placed a share of the money aside in an
account for Trix ’s later use. |
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