Zoe Heriot
Zoe Heriot was a young scientist from the late 21st century who accompanied the Second Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon in their travels aboard the Doctor's TARDIS.
Biography
Early life
Zoe was taken from her family as a young child and subject to harsh mental and physical conditioning for brilliant children in a scheme known as the Elite Programme. She later became one of its chief opponents. (AUDIO: The Memory Cheats)
When she was eight years old, she read Oscar Wilde's complete works, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, in a day. (AUDIO: Echoes of Grey)
Meeting the Doctor
Zoe's home was a terrestrial city later shown to her in the White Void. (TV: The Mind Robber) She was an astrometricist first class and astrophysicist on board Space Station W3 (a.k.a. the Wheel) when she met the Doctor and Jamie in 2079. (AUDIO: The Dying Light) She introduced herself to them as "astrophysicist, pure mathematics major", to which her colleague, Dr Gemma Corwyn, added "with honours". Zoe had an eidetic memory. She was described by her colleagues as "the librarian". She was very bad at history, as evidenced by her lack of knowledge of the Daleks, the Ice Warriors and the T-Mat fiasco. (TV: The Wheel in Space, The Seeds of Death) Having been taught only the value of logic, her training left her emotionally underdeveloped. This lack of balance led to conflict. Some of her colleagues challenged her about her apparent lack of personal interest in the Wheel when it was about to be struck by meteorites. When she met the Doctor, Zoe was presented with a case study in how illogical, intuitive actions and instinct could be successful.
As Zoe became aware that there was more to knowledge than facts, she decided to hide in the TARDIS. She realised that she had learnt as much as she could on the Wheel, where her abilities and role were compartmentalised and defined. Zoe was ready to discover the universe and her place in it.
Before he felt ready to have her brave the terrors of the universe, however, the Doctor showed her a thought projection of his most recent encounter with the Daleks. (TV: The Wheel in Space)
Travels with the Doctor
When visiting the War Museum on Dulkis, Zoe was reminded of "the old atom test islands on Earth." At the same time, she was dismissive of the Quarks, claiming, "They're only robots." (TV: The Dominators)
In the White Void, Zoe was lured out of the TARDIS by seeing her home city on the TARDIS scanner screen. Having recognised the Karkus from the Hourly Telepress of the year 2000, Zoe was able to defeat him in unarmed combat and secure his loyalty. (TV: The Mind Robber) She used her programming skills to solve problems. Whilst helping the Doctor and Jamie deal with the Cybermen's invasion of Earth, Zoe destroyed the computer in the reception at International Electromatics. Determined to not be beaten by the "brainless tin box," Zoe gave the computer an insoluble program in ALGOL, and delighted in the computer's destruction. With her logic and mathematics, Zoe computed the attack pattern for missiles to set up a chain reaction to destroy the incoming Cyberships. (TV: The Invasion) Zoe's great knowledge and intellect were always evident, but never more so than when she was tested on the teaching machines used by the Krotons to teach and indoctrinate the Gonds. Having scored more than double the score of the best Gond students, Zoe declared the Doctor could certainly answer the questions too. (TV: The Krotons) Again using her computational and logic skills, Zoe, in further travels, worked out the trajectory of beacon segments to deduce that a band of space pirates must have their base on the planet Ta. (TV: The Space Pirates)
The group landed in the Frenko Bazaar, a famous intergalactic trading post where one could buy "just about anything". After the Doctor and Zoe rescued Jamie from a kidnapping, the trio teleported back to the shop. The Doctor was shocked to find his companions missing, having been captured by an entity. Later, all eleven Doctors rescued the companions and sent them back to their own times. (COMIC: Prisoners of Time)
At some point during her travels with the Doctor and Jamie, they visited Bob Dovie at 59A Barnsfield Crescent in Totton, Hampshire on 23 November 1963. (AUDIO: The Light at the End)
The Doctor and his companions landed on a planet where the War Lords planned to use human soldiers as an army to conquer the galaxy by picking them out of various periods of Earth's history with the the War Chief's space-time vessel technology that had been given to them. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe helped unite the various resistance movements on the planet to fight the War Lords. Unable to return the soldiers himself, the Doctor sent a hypercube to the Time Lords to return them to the right time zones. After the capture of the Doctor's TARDIS dematerialisation of the War Lord for his crimes, the Time Lords sent Zoe back to the Wheel, where she was met by Tanya Lernov. Having had her memory of her time with the Doctor and Jamie removed, other than her initial adventure with them on the Wheel, she was never aware that she had ever been away. (TV: The War Games)
Life after the Doctor
Whilst she was working on the UrtiCorp Project at station XZ49, the Third Doctor arrived, pretending to be an academic named Dr John Smith. But when Zoe saw the TARDIS, she collapsed, because the sudden return of her memories caused her to lose them completely, as a result. When she recovered, the Doctor had already left, suspecting that the Time Lords sent him there to make sure she forgot all her memories of the Doctor. (PROSE: The Tip of the Mind)
After discovering she had aged by two years after the only experience with the Doctor and Jamie she could recall, Zoe deduced she had had more adventures with the Doctor which had been wiped from her memory. About a month after her return to the Wheel, the Wheel was attacked by a Cybership. Due to her slight build, Zoe was judged unfit for conversion into a Cyberman, but upon scanning her brain and recognising her above-average intelligence, the Cybermen decided she would be suitable for conversion into a Cyber-Planner. The conversion caused Zoe's memories of the Doctor to resurface.
It also gave her the opportunity to gain control of the systems of the Cybership. Before the conversion was complete, Zoe had diverted the ship into the only place she could think of where the Cybermen would be unable to hurt anyone else — the Land of Fiction. Once there, she took control of the Land's damaged computer, bringing the Land of Fiction back to life. She used fictional characters and constructs to fight the Cybermen, but came to the conclusion that she needed the Doctor's help to triumph over the Cybermen. After unsuccessfully attempting to create an accurate fictional version of the Doctor, she opened a hole in space-time and sent a data-stream which drew the TARDIS into the Land. The TARDIS landed far off-course, so Zoe created a fictional version of Jamie to protect the Doctor as she drew him to her control centre. With the Doctor's help, she destroyed the Cybermen once and for all. As the Doctor returned her to the Wheel, the Time Lords' conditioning of her mind returned and she lost her memories of him once more. (AUDIO: Legend of the Cybermen)
As the years passed, Zoe began to have detailed dreams of her adventures with the Doctor and Jamie. Unable to clearly remember her dreams or reconcile them with the knowledge that she had parted company with the Doctor when the TARDIS left the Wheel, she undertook psychiatric counselling. (AUDIO: Fear of the Daleks)
In her late fifties, Zoe lived alone, unable to form relationships as a consequence of the damage to her memory. At this time she was approached by a young woman, Ali, who claimed to have met the Doctor, Jamie and the younger Zoe at the Whitaker Institute in Australia. With technological assistance, she was able to recover Zoe's recollection of that adventure. It transpired that the Company which owned the Institute had become aware of Zoe's history as a time traveller, and were seeking knowledge of what she had learned. Zoe refused to cooperate with them, but suspected that they would not let the matter rest. (AUDIO: Echoes of Grey) Her fears were justified; the Company engineered her arrest on charges that carried the death penalty, threatening to have her executed unless she could prove she had travelled in time and share the secret of time travel with them. During this time an employee for the company named Jen was responsible for helping Zoe recover her lost memories with the help of a machine. With Jen's help, Zoe is briefly able to remember some of her adventures with the Doctor, but forgets all about them once again after the sessions are over. In spite of the memories recovered during her sessions Zoe, stubbornly maintains that she had not travelled with the Doctor, claiming the Company was trying to discredit her as mentally unstable. (AUDIO: The Memory Cheats, The Uncertainty Principle)
When it became clear that Jen was making no progress with Zoe, the company sent in Kym, the woman who had originally posed as Ali when the Company first approached her. Having pioneered the technology used to recover Zoe's memories, Kym had lost her standing with the Company due to her past failure with Zoe and was attempting to succeed where Jen failed in getting the secret of time travel from Zoe. During their session, Zoe recalled an instance where the TARDIS landed on a space station called Artemis. While there, she decoded the last transmission from Artemis's sister station, Apollo, before it was destroyed. The transmission contained a virus capable of transferring itself to living tissue and other matter, apparently responsible for the destruction of space station Apollo, where it had been developed. Zoe attempted to quarantine the virus, but was knocked out when a computer terminal hit her during a meteor shower. In the end the Artemis was destroyed along with most of the crew as the virus ate away at the space station itself. Zoe was able to survive, however, thanks to an air mask given to her by a guard, keeping her alive when she was sucked out into space before being rescued by the Doctor and Jamie.
Kym realised that the events that Zoe witnessed were already happening in their current timeline as news of Apollo's destruction reached them, which turned out to be a Company-owned space station. Wanting to rectify her mistake of accidentally releasing the virus onto Artemis, Zoe agreed to go with Kym to prevent this disaster on the condition that she tell the Company the secret of time travel afterwards. Kym and Zoe were taken to the ship by Jen, with Zoe posing as a guard. As the events began to unfold, however, Zoe began to realise that Kym was behind most of the events that unfolded during her original visit to Artemis with the Doctor.
In the end, Zoe found out that Kym only brought her to the space station so she could finish decoding the virus and make a copy of it for Kym to give to the Company to get back in their good graces. After tending to her younger self and providing her with a breathing mask to survive the destruction of the space station, Zoe pursued Kym into the escape shuttle. There, she was able to send a modified version of the virus to the Company's headquarters where it would take out the Company's entire computer mainframe and then self-destruct before it could spread to any organic matter. In the process, the virus was also released into the escape shuttle, destroying it as Kym gave up her own breathing mask to keep Zoe alive before pushing her out of the ship into space, where she was eventually recovered by Jen. Now free of the Company, Jen continued to help Zoe recover her memories, even as they seemed to become increasingly hazy for her. (AUDIO: Second Chances)
Illusion
When the Second Doctor, accompanied by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, was sent to the Death Zone on Gallifrey, Zoe and Jamie appeared to the pair in the Tomb of Rassilon and warned the Doctor against going further in the direction he had chosen because they said that they were in a force field. Knowing the Time Lords had erased their memories of him, he realised that they must be an illusion. This was proven right and they both vanished. (TV: The Five Doctors)
When he was trapped in the maelstrom by the demon Melanicus, the Fifth Doctor saw an illusion of Zoe playing a carnival Hoopla. (COMIC: The Tides of Time)
Undated events
- At some point, Zoe was taken to the Black Archive by UNIT to have her record as a companion of the Doctor taken. Her memories of the visit were subsequently erased and she was sent on her way. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
Personality
Despite knowing very little about the Doctor, she was a very loyal companion. She described him as old, clever and kind. (AUDIO: The Five Dimensional Man) Although brave, she was quick to call for assistance if she needed it. (TV: The Seeds of Death) When visiting her recent history, Zoe became irritated by the out-of-date technology that they used. (PROSE: The Wheel of Ice). She was also a maths wizard. (TV: The Wheel in Space, TV: The Krotons)
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