Grace Holloway
Dr. Grace Holloway was a San Francisco cardiologist and first companion of the eighth incarnation of the Doctor. She was also a member of the board of trustees for the Institute for Technological Advancement and Research.
Profile
Dr. Holloway was known as "Amazing Grace" by her colleagues at Walker General Hospital, where she worked as an on-call cardiologist, the "on-call" part of the job description being particularly annoying to her live-in boyfriend, Brian. On the evening of Dec. 31, 1999, she was attending an opera with her boyfriend when she received a page and rushed to the hospital to deal with an unusual cardiac case that had come in - a middle-aged man who had suffered minor bullet wounds but who apparently had some form of heart defect that caused a very irregular heart-beat.
Unknown to Grace, her patient had been x-rayed earlier and appeared to have two hearts. In the process of conducting exploratory surgery with a fibre-optic camera she found herself unable to navigate within the man's circulatory system. In the process of the surgery, she inadvertently caused a fatal injury to the man, who died on the operating table. Upset after having lost a patient, an event witnessed by a group of hospital financial supporters, Grace ordered an autopsy. However, due to the incident, complicated by the fact the man's body subsequently disappeared from the morgue, Holloway resigned the next morning under pressure, her boyfriend also leaving her.
While leaving the hospital, she found a strange man following her, claiming to be the same man who had died the night before. Grace at first refused to believe he was the same man, but gradually became convinced, especially after watching the man extracting the remains of her probe from his chest. She learned that the man had undergone a process of regeneration which had allowed him to change his appearance and personality, but due to his being under anaesthetic at the time, he was left with memory loss, and no knowledge of who he was. Hours later, however, the man suddenly regained his memories of being the Doctor, a Time Lord, and he celebrated the return of his memories by kissing Grace on the lips.
With his memories restored, the Doctor enlisted Grace in helping him defeat the Master, his enemy. During this time she was heard to exclaim how she'd finally found the right guy, only to discover "he's from another planet!"
She was possessed for a short while by the Master, during which time she betrayed the Doctor. She later unwillingly opened the Eye of Harmony inside the TARDIS and was in fact killed, but the TARDIS used the Eye to bring her back to life.
After the defeat of the Master, the Doctor invited Grace to travel with him as a companion, but she declined. After sharing a romantic kiss with her, the Doctor departed in the TARDIS and each of them went their separate ways. (DW: Doctor Who)
After the Doctor's departure, Grace began examining the remnants of a substance the Master spat at her during the battle, which led her to working with an MI6-sponsored genetics lab in hopes of creating a Human-Time Lord hybrid capable of regeneration. When Holloway was later reunited with the Doctor, he chastised her for this, though they ultimately reconciled and parted company with another kiss. (DWM: The Fallen)
Grace Holloway's ultimate fate is unknown, however the Doctor indicated that he was familiar with her work and that she was destined to do "great things". (DW: Doctor Who) Holloway, however, misinterpreted this as being a reference to her work with MI6 on the Human/Time Lord hybrid. (DWM: The Fallen) Her long-term impact on the Doctor is evident in that sometime later, he experienced a hallucination that he and Grace were married (DWM: The Glorious Dead), not far removed from his later imagining of the life he could have led with Joan Redfern (DW: The Family of Blood). By the time of his ninth incarnation, the Doctor may have been referring to his brief dalliance when he mentioned "kissing complete strangers" in a conversation with a pair of later companions. (DW: The Long Game)
Grace expressed an interest in Puccini's operas and the art of da Vinci. (DW: Doctor Who)
Behind the scenes
- Grace at one point exclaims "I finally found the right guy and he's from another planet!". Although the 1963-89 series occasionally gave subtle hints of attraction and even romance between the Doctor and other characters, this is the first time a character, identified as a companion, had been heard to directly express attraction towards the Doctor on screen.
- According to media coverage of the film in 1996, had Doctor Who been revived as a series at that time, the character of Grace Holloway would not have continued as a regular companion.
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