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Interference Book One
(Lawrence
Miles) |
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 Name: Compassion (Formerly Laura
Tobin).
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: 1996 (In a rather roundabout
way).
Appearances:
Interference
Book One -
The
Ancestor Cell
Doctor: Eighth
Doctor.
Fellow
Companions: The
Brigadier, Sarah
Jane Smith, 3rd
Romana, Samantha
Jones, and Fitz Kreiner.
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The Blue Angel
(Paul Magrs &
Jeremy Hoad) |
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History: From the beginning, Compassion was unique
as a companion in that she was the only companion who would definitively
have never travelled with The Doctor as she was before she met him;
other companions had the potential to be more than what they were
from before their meeting with The Doctor, but Compassion would never
have travelled with The Doctor if it hadn’t been for the events.
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. A future Earth
colony completely dependent on media signals, the Remote are sterile
due to the time-travel biodata they were programmed with, resulting
in them ‘reproducing’ 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 - based on peoples’ memories
of Laura, allowing her to adapt over the centuries it would take
for Anathema to reach Earth, 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
after she was connected to the Remote 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.
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The Taking Of Planet 5
(Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham) |
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Compassion's basic outlook on life could be
best described as a sociopathic child; when she originally met Sam,
she was unable to fully understand why Sam was angry at the sale of
weapons that only killed only a few dozen people at any one time when
cars killed thousands of people every year, feeling that the only difference
was in scale without considering the moral implications of a weapon
designed to kill and the comparatively small chance of death being the
result of anyone going for a drive. 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 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")), even
if she still assisted The Doctor due to the strength of his world view
providing her with an appealing signal to obey.
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, finding the strength of The Doctor’s world-view easy
to follow even if she was more willing to resort to violence than
he would like.
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The Shadows of Avalon
(Paul Cornell) |
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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 world of Avalon - a dream-world linked to the
human subconscious - when the TARDIS was apparently torn apart when
caught in the reality barriers between Earth 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 having previously encountered Marie, a Type-103
TARDIS from Gallifrey’s future who also possessed a human form
("Alien
Bodies") -, The Doctor refused to allow this to
happen, he and Fitz 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 and she needn’t focus on
preparing for the War by sacrificing Gallifrey’s principles,
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").
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, the last featuring Fitz’s voice screaming about something
-, along with a narrow bridge over the dark chasm of her unconscious
leading to the console. 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; she also insisted on putting The Doctor and
Fitz’s rooms in that part of her, The Doctor speculating that
this was the result of her subconscious terror at what she had become ‘punishing’ him
and Fitz like a woman will scream abuse at the father of her child
while giving birth. Her console hovered over her subconscious blackness
on a stone platform, the console itself possessing harsher angles
than The Doctor’s original TARDIS and featuring a large crystal
as its centre, 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.
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The Fall of Yquatine
(Nick Walters) |
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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, accepting The Doctor’s reasons for installing the
randomiser even as she ordered him not to do something like that again
("The Fall of Yquatine"). As time went on, Compassion grew more
attached to her new role as a TARDIS as she began to accept her now powers
despite her natural fear at what she was now capable of, 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
caused by the fall 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").
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The Ancestor Cell
(Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole) |
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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 then 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 (Particularly if we assume that The Doctor’s plan to restore Gallifrey was successful only for the restored Gallifrey to be destroyed once more in the Time War against the Daleks discussed by the later Doctors). The Tenth Doctor and the Eleventh Doctor have stated that his TARDIS is the last one in the
universe ("Rise
of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel" and "The Doctor's Wife")
following the Time War, suggesting that Compassion has been
either destroyed or forgotten, but given that The Doctor
always treated Compassion as a
companion even after she became his mode of transport, it
may be that The Doctor 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. |
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