Thomas Brewster

Thomas Brewster (born 1846 or 1847) was an orphan, mudlark and street urchin in Victorian London. He became a companion of the Fifth and Sixth Doctors.

Early life
Thomas' mother committed suicide in 1851, when he was 4 or 5 years old, jumping off a bridge into the River Thames.

Thomas' first encounter with the Doctor was at his mother's funeral in, where the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa were travelling down Thomas's timeline in order to remove his psychic link to a potential future.

After his mother's funeral, Thomas was enrolled into an orphanage, where he stayed for around 10 years. There, he began to have visions and dreams of his mother, which were in actually a being from a potential future trying to make their future a reality.

In 1861, Thomas left the orphanage, and was taken into the employ of the mudlark named Creek. On his first night scouring the Thames at low tide, Creek's boys discovered a blue box.

Not long after that, Creek was visited by The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa, who enquired about Thomas. Creek assumed that this meant Thomas was valuable, so he intended to sell him. Creek then drowned in an accident, and Thomas and his friend Pickens left to start a new life. It was then where the being from the potential future first directly contacted him, and began to instruct Thomas in doing deeds to aid it in becoming an actuality.

Meeting the Doctor
Thomas met the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa on 14 November 1867 while he was being haunted by what he thought was the ghost of his mother, who had died in 1851. After the Doctor helped him, he stowed away in the Doctor's TARDIS and accidentally set it on a solo flight. (AUDIO: The Haunting of Thomas Brewster)

Solo travels
Brewster gained limited control over the TARDIS. On one of his stops, the TARDIS was taken from him for ransom and he was forced to work for the Doctor's old enemy, Gerry Lenz. At this time, Brewster met the Doctor's old friends, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Polly Wright. The three of them rescued the TARDIS from Lenz and saved the Earth from dying and from a Coffinloader, a beast which fed on dying worlds. (AUDIO: The Three Companions)

Eventually, the TARDIS began to malfunction due to Brewster's meddling. Before the ship could come to any further harm, Thomas was helped by an elderly Adric, who got him back to London a few months after his departure. The Doctor invited him to join him on his travels (AUDIO: The Boy That Time Forgot) but soon after he joined, they returned to the location of one of his previous travels, where it was revealed that Brewster had sold several vital components of the TARDIS to the marooned crew of the Gamma. Among the components Brewster sold was the TARDIS' conceptual geometer, the removal of which greatly destabilised the structure of the TARDIS and eventually caused the collapse of the ship's internal dimensions. However, the Doctor was able to reconnect the geometer to the TARDIS, restoring its interior to normal. (AUDIO: Time Reef)

Leaving the Doctor
After they left, Brewster convinced the Doctor to take him to 2008 supposedly to see his future. In fact, he wished to be reunited with a young woman named Connie Winter, whom he had met whilst travelling in the Doctor's TARDIS alone. Thomas decided to stay in 2008 with Connie rather than continue travelling with the Doctor and Nyssa. (AUDIO: A Perfect World)

Reunion with the Doctor
Brewster enjoyed his life with Connie, but tragedy struck. She was hit by a car and suffered an irreversible coma. Alone in a time when he didn't fit, Brewster found the time machine he had built while under the control of the alien pretending to be his mother in 1867. He was trying to return to his own time when he was contacted by Symbios, a sentient planet which was being invaded by an alien robot species called the Terravore. Brewster provided Symbios with hosts who were riding the tube. After defeating the Terravores with the Doctor, now in his sixth incarnation, Evelyn Smythe and DI Patricia Menzies, Brewster stole the TARDIS key, snuck aboard and held the Doctor and Evelyn at gunpoint, demanding they return him to his own time. (AUDIO: The Crimes of Thomas Brewster)

Instead, the Doctor managed to disarm him and planned to hand him over to Menzies, but the TARDIS was drawn to Axos, which was trapped in a time loop. Brewster helped the Doctor defeat the Axons, and the Doctor, at Evelyn's behest, decided to return him to his own time.. (AUDIO: The Feast of Axos)

The Doctor got Brewster a job at a factory, when the machines started coming to life as a net result of a sentient device brought to Earth by an illegal alien trader named Samuel Belfrage. Brewster eventually destroyed the device and all the creatures it created, an action over which the Doctor was both dismayed and furious. Despite Evelyn's protests, the Doctor refused to take him with them and angrily proclaimed that Brewster had wasted his last chance before leaving in the TARDIS without him. Brewster arrived to apologise just as the TARDIS dematerialised. However, he went on to travel and begin a business partnership with Belfrage, who had collected all of the illegal product which the Doctor had intended to relieve him of. (AUDIO: Industrial Evolution)

Behind the scenes

 * Along with Charley Pollard, Brewster is one of only two companions created by Big Finish to travel with two incarnations of the Doctor, namely the Fifth Doctor and the Sixth Doctor. The only other Big Finish created companions to have met two Doctors are Evelyn Smythe, who served as a companion of the Sixth Doctor for several years and met the Seventh Doctor in Thicker Than Water and A Death in the Family, and Liv Chenka, who met the Seventh Doctor and later travelled with the Eighth Doctor. (AUDIO: Robophobia, The Traitor)