Doctor Who Companions - IX

Time for more breath-taking art of the Doctor's companions, courtesy of DemiSir. This time it is, of course, mathematical whiz-kid Adric and the lovely, talented and kind lady Nyssa of Traken, daughter of Tremas.

Adric is something of a self-described boy genius; he always wears the gold star he was awarded for Mathematical Excellence (the sort of thing I used to do when I was a kid, too). Despite being quite brainy, he's often not very bright - gullible, naïve, easily led by several of the villains that the TARDIS crew encounter on their adventures (in particular, the Master in Castrovalva, Monarch in Four to Doomsday, and the mad Colonel in Kinda). He did get better in that regard as things continued, but he certainly didn't become less of a nuisance. To be quite honest, Adric behaved very much like the annoying little brother of the TARDIS family of this era; Tegan, Nyssa and especially the Doctor often had to put up with quite a bit of pestering from him. It says something of his character that his final story, Earthshock, began with half an episode of him trying to annoy the Doctor into taking him back to his homeworld, Alzarius, located in E-Space (a pocket universe connected to ours through what's basically a black hole, and where the Doctor and Romana had originally met Adric when they accidentally fell into it).

On the other hand, his single greatest moment of awesome came at the *end* of his final story, when he single-handedly saved Earth from being destroyed by a Cyber-hijacked space freighter, instead setting it on a collision course with Earth 65,000,000 years ago (yep, the dinosaurs weren't killed by a rogue asteroid - they were killed by Adric! xD), and then stoically facing his own death when he realised he no longer had enough time to escape the ensuing fireball.

Nyssa, meanwhile, was a high-born lady from the Union of Traken. Her father, Consul Tremas, was one of the four advisors to the Keeper of Traken, the leader of the union who maintained peace and serenity across all of its planets for nearly a thousand years. It would not be ridiculous to refer to her as the Lady Nyssa of Traken, and in fact she sometimes is (she also used the assumed name Nyssa Traken while temporarily living on Earth and posing as a human).

Nyssa first met the Fourth Doctor and Adric when they were invited to Traken by the Keeper, to take care of a great evil called the Melkur, which turned out to be the Master's TARDIS in disguise. The Master killed the Keeper and managed to take control of the Traken Union briefly, before being outsted by the Doctor and Adric with Nyssa's help, and they said their goodbyes. Unfortunately, the Master (once again Not Quite Dead, even though he had used all his regenerations and was actually a walking rotting corpse at this stage), possessed Tremas' body, effectively killing him in the process. Nyssa was then visited by the mysterious Watcher, who took her to Logopolis to help the Doctor and Adric again, where she met the Master, now in a youthful-looking version of her father's body. Yikes. Unfortunately, things just got worse for poor Nyssa, when the Master's latest plan resulted in a large chunk of the universe collapsing into nothing through the runaway ravages of entropy; this chunk including many galaxies, in one of which resided the entire Traken Union. Completely orphaned of her people and without a homeworld any longer, Nyssa remained in the TARDIS through many adventures, most of the early ones of which she had a relatively minor part in (having been written before she was added).

Nyssa was a kind, soft-spoken individual, befitting her background, and highly intelligent. She was much more academically gifted than Adric (although she admitted that her grasp on advanced mathematics was not quite as good as his), and could discuss various branches of science with the Doctor on a roughly equal footing. She was studying telebiogenesis (a field relating to Time Lord regeneration) amongst others during her time in the TARDIS. Eventually stayed on Terminus to help find a cure for Lazar's Disease which afflicted many worlds at that time.

I - Ian, Susan and Barbara
II - Vicki, Steven and Katarina
III - Dodo, Ben and Polly
IV - Jamie, Victoria, and Zoe
V - Sergeant Benton, The Brigadier, and Captain Yates
VI - Dr Liz Shaw and Jo Grant
VII - Sarah-Jane, Harry, and Leela
VIII - Romana I, K-9 mks. I & II, Romana II
IX - Adric and Nyssa

Next up: Continuing into the worst excesses of 80s fashion with Tegan...! xD As well as Turlough and Kamelion