Abby (Doctor Who)

Abby, originally named Amy, is a fictional character played by Ciara Janson in a series of audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. A human "tracer", a device designed to track down the segments of the Key to Time, she is a companion of the Fifth Doctor.

After her travels with the Doctor, Abby, alongside her sister Zara, would return in their own audio series, Graceless.^[1]

Character history

The character first appears in The Judgement of Isskar, in which the Fifth Doctor was brought to a rainy planet where he found a compass, which led him to Amy, then just a few minutes old and not yet having a name. Telling him that the compass was a segment of the Key to Time, she asked if he could help her collect two more segments. She turned the segment into its original form and put it into a satchel leading to another universe.

Arriving on Mars in the distant past, and after the Doctor decided to name the tracer "Amy" (thinking she had agreed upon the name), Amy realised that the segment of the Key was disguised as a capstone on the pyramid in the town. The Doctor and Amy were arrested and taken to Magistrate Isskar, accused of being thieves by Isskar's beadles. They were let go with a warning not to approach the pyramid. Understanding but disobeying the warning, inside the pyramid, the Doctor and Amy met another tracer, a "sister" of Amy, who already had one of the segments of the Key in her possession, along her assistant in her quest, Harmonious 14 Zink. After agreeing to the Doctor's suggestion of naming her "Zara" ("just to shut you up"), Zara turned the segment back into a crystal, which caused massive and disastrous changes to Mars' environment. Zara left with the segment using Zink's time ring. The Doctor, Amy and Zink jumped on board an approaching ship, and the Doctor piloted it to safety. Unable to help the catastrophe inflicted on Mars, the Doctor and Amy left in the TARDIS for their next destination.

The Doctor and Amy arrived inside a castle on the ring world of Safeplace about 16,000 years later. At a castle there, there was a succession dispute between the Valdigians, Lady Mesca and Wembik. Amy worked out a compromise between Mesca and Wembik — they agreed to be married to one another, so that whoever son became king, would also be the son of the other one. When Isskar and his men, now Ice Warriors, were guided to Safeplace by Zara to find the next segment, the Doctor asked Isskar to speak to him; his men brought Amy outside the castle grounds.

Zara spent generations manipulating the Valdigians as well as the Ice Warriors. She realised the castle was the next segment and turned the segment into a crystal, trapping the Doctor, the TARDIS, the Valdigians and Isskar inside. She tried using the power of the segments to take Amy's segment from her satchel. Instead, Zara blew up her satchel, and the Safeplace segment ended up in Amy's possession. While Zara left with the time ring, Amy turned the segment back into a castle to allowing the Doctor, the Ice Warriors and the Valdigians (with the Ice Warriors towing the TARDIS) to escape. Amy then turned it back into a crystal and placed it into her satchel.

The Ice Warriors took the Doctor and Amy onto Isskar's ship to take them to tribunal, and Isskar confiscated the two segments they had, but he later helped the Doctor and Amy retrieve their segments after his ship was destroyed by Zara, and was on a collision course with the red giant, Leboon. When the last escape pod was taken, leaving the Doctor and Amy behind, the Doctor tried fixing the ship, before the Black Guardian intervened, telling the Doctor that he hoped the Doctor could explain the situation.^[2]

After finding another segment in Sudan in the 9th century,^[3] the final segment was found on the planet Chaos, where he met Romana and Princess Astra (from The Armageddon Factor). The Doctor discovered that after the key was scattered the last time, Romana had become the final segment of it. To save Romana's life, Astra offered to become the final segment instead, even if it involved her dying to do so. When the Black and White Guardians arrived to try to take the Key away from the Doctor, the Doctor threw it into the Chaos Pool, where it was destroyed, preventing the degradation that it was causing to the universe. With the Guardians leaving empty handed, Romana invited Amy to live in Gallifrey to join the Academy and become a Time Lord.^[4]

Other appearances

Amy and her sister Zara would later return in their own audio series, Graceless.^[1] In the Graceless series, Amy's name was changed to Abby, with the in-universe reason for it being given in the first story, The Sphere: Amy took the name of a woman registered in the titular space station. The out-of-universe reason for this development has not been revealed; however, some reviewers assumed that it was likely that the change was made to avoid confusion with the television companion Amy Pond.^[5][6]

List of appearances

Audio dramas

with the Fifth Doctor

• The Judgement of Isskar
• The Destroyer of Delights
• The Chaos Pool

in Graceless

• The Sphere
• The Fog
• The End
• The Line
• The Flood
• The Dark
• The Edge
• The Battle
• Consequences

References

External links

• Abby on TARDIS Data Core, an external wiki