Fitz Kreiner

Fitzgerald Michael Kreiner, also known as Fitz, was a mid-20th century Londoner who became good friends with the Eighth Doctor. After travelling with the Doctor and Sam Jones for a while, Fitz was separated from them and he joined Faction Paradox under the name Father Kreiner. A copy of Fitz named Kode, created through generations of remembrance with the Remote, rejoined the Eighth Doctor and had the memories of the original Fitz implanted in him. This Fitz stayed with the Doctor while he travelled with Compassion, Anji Kapoor, and Trix MacMillan. Fitz sometimes went by the stagename "Fitz Fortune". (PROSE: The Taint, EarthWorld, The Crooked World et al)

Childhood
Fitz Kreiner was born to Otto Kreiner and Muriel Kreiner in 1936. (PROSE: The Taint) Fitz's earliest memory was of a visit to the zoo with his dad, where he fed peanuts to the monkeys. (PROSE: EarthWorld) His father died when he was a boy. (PROSE: The Taint)

Fitz was an excellent guitarist. He performed under the name Fitz Fortune to avoid calling attention to his heritage. (PROSE: The Taint)

As a child, Fitz visited Brighton and Weymouth on several occasions. (PROSE: The Fall of Yquatine) He often faced bullying by other children due to his father's German origin. (PROSE: The Taint) When he was a child, he used to pretend to be Dick Barton, Special Agent. (PROSE: EarthWorld)

When Fitz was six, he lost his mum in a Woolworths. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)

At the age of eight, Fitz visited the seaside with his mother and fell off a wall, spraining his ankle. (PROSE: Vanishing Point)

At age fourteen, Fitz kicked a football into George Cullen's dad's greenhouse. (PROSE: Frontier Worlds)

Fitz was put into care when his mother got sick for the third time in a row.

Before meeting the Doctor and Sam Jones, he worked in a florist's shop and lived in a small third floor flat in Archway. (PROSE: The Taint)

Travels with the Doctor
In the 1960s, Fitz spent a few weeks working behind the bar at the Mother Black Cap in Camden Town. (PROSE: The Fall of Yquatine)

In 1963, the Doctor and Sam arrived in London, and the Doctor met Fitz at the florist shop, seeing through his faux French accent. After a crazed individual entered the shop, Fitz asked Sam out on a date, and she agreed. On their date, they were attacked; one of Fitz's friends was murdered, and he took the injured Sam back to his flat. There he tried to seduce her by lying in the bed next to her nude. This backfired when she woke up in the morning, and stormed out.

Later that day, Fitz was approached by the police, and he fled. Ending up at the hospital in which his mother was being experimented upon, he was pulled into an adventure that resulted in his mother's death. In the aftermath, with Fitz now a fugitive and grieving, the Doctor took pity on him and invited him onto the TARDIS, much to Sam's chagrin. (PROSE: The Taint)

Fitz spent two years in China in the late 1960s, where he was brainwashed by the Communist party. The brainwashing wore off once he returned to England and encountered the Doctor again. (PROSE: Revolution Man)

In San Francisco, 2002, Fitz worked as a paranormal investigator for the Doctor whilst investigating Griffin the Unnaturalist. He had sex with a dark-haired version of Sam during this period. (PROSE: Unnatural History)

Becoming Father Kreiner
When the Doctor, Sam and Fitz landed on Earth in 1996, three or four distinct iterations of Fitz Kreiner were brought into existence. Fitz was placed in the Cold by the United Nations in 1996 in Geneva and removed from it in 2593 on Ordifica. Fitz decided since he was so far from the Doctor and his own time, he would become an agent of Faction Paradox.

On joining the Faction Paradox, Fitz and the other survivors of Ordifica were taken back in time and placed on Anathema by the Faction Paradox to become their troops, the Remote. Fitz joined their society without actually becoming a part of it in the literal sense. During his time with the Remote, Fitz hunted and killed many renegade Time Lords, including the Rani and the Master, though one or more of these may have been clones.

While on Anathema, he contemplated suicide; instead, he left Anathema, joined the Faction Paradox, and was indoctrinated into its ranks. He led his troops onto the planet Dust in an attempt to kill the Third Doctor for things his future self had done to Fitz. Despite his arm withering in the struggle, he tried to follow the Doctor by grabbing onto I.M. Foreman's Travelling Show, which was disguised as the Doctor's TARDIS; as a result, he was flung into the Time Vortex, where his Faction armour kept him alive and in one piece. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two) When Christine Summerfield encountered the Horror, a gestalt intelligence formed by all the sentient entities who had ever been cast into the Vortex, it spoke through the body of Father Kreiner.

Christine speculated that the universe of Chris Cwej, the Horror and the Sphinxes was a bottle universe, created by the Great Houses of a higher reality. (PROSE: Dead Romance) Indeed, I.M. Foreman suggested that these events occurred in the bottle universe she'd created, but still involved the "prime" Father Kreiner: when creating the bottle, she'd tapped into the energy of the Time Vortex, sucking up Father Kreiner and placing him within the bottle Vortex. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two) According to other accounts, however, the reality of the Horror and the Sphinxes was one and the same as I.M. Foreman's. (PROSE: Vampire Science, The Book of the War)

Father Kreiner was later retrieved from the Vortex, now at least a thousand years old. He re-encountered the Eighth Doctor and the "new" Fitz when he was summoned back into the real universe on Gallifrey. After the Doctor convinced Father Kreiner that he had only abandoned him because he was convinced he was dead, Kreiner tried to help him during the final stand-off in the Edifice, but Grandfather Paradox shot and killed him for his betrayal. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)

Kode
Before leaving Anathema, the original Fitz placed his memories in a Remembrance Tank. It moulded a replica of him out of biomass so his memories and personality would live on in the Anathema.

Generations of Fitzes lived on Anathema for over five hundred years on their journey towards Earth. By 1996, the memory of Fitz had degenerated into "Kode", named after the nickname "Code-Boy" that Fitz earned for his computer programming ability knack for the computer programming required to maintain Anathema.

After Kode arrived on Earth to sell the Cold with Compassion and Guest, the Doctor recognised elements of Fitz's personality in Kode and offered to use the TARDIS's telepathic circuits to re-remember Kode as the Fitz who had joined the Doctor in 1963 and as the man he had been when the TARDIS had lost contact with him, recreating Fitz based on both the Doctor's and the TARDIS's perceptions of who he had been. This new Fitz remembered only vague glimpses of his time as Kode. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)

Travelling with the Doctor and Compassion
Fitz travelled with the Doctor and Compassion for some time, but was occasionally troubled by his vague memories of his time as Kode. When spending some time trapped in the virtual reality world of Mechta, Fitz fell in love with Filippa, (PROSE: Parallel 59) but was unable to pursue a long-term relationship with their next trip saw the TARDIS being destroyed in a dimensional rift. After Compassion was mutated into a Type-102 TARDIS due to her receiver translating the signals she had been receiving from the TARDIS into block transfer computations, Fitz resigned himself to continuing to travel with the Doctor when he fled in Compassion to prevent the Time Lords turning her into a slave. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon)

After spending some time on the run, Compassion was drawn to Gallifrey by the Edifice, which resulted in Fitz being 'summoned' by a group of Gallifreyan youths being manipulated by Faction Paradox. This led to Father Kreiner being summoned to confront Fitz and the Doctor, leaving Fitz to desperately try to help Romana III during the Faction's invasion of Gallifrey while Father Kreiner joined the Doctor and Grandfather Paradox in the final stand on the Edifice. At the conclusion of this struggle, Father Kreiner was killed by the Grandfather, but Compassion was able to rescue Fitz and the Doctor following the destruction of Gallifrey and the Faction Paradox fleet. Compassion left the Doctor on Earth in the late nineteenth century so that he and the TARDIS could recover from the trauma of what had happened and the energy drain it had experienced respectively, subsequently leaving Fitz on Earth in 2001 so that he could reunite with the Doctor once he was fully recovered. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)

Travelling with the Doctor and Anji Kapoor
Meeting the Doctor in 2001, Fitz discovered that the Doctor had no memory of him or any of his previous adventures. Still on Earth, Fitz and the Doctor defeated an invasion by the Kulan, in addition to gaining a new travelling companion, Anji Kapoor. (PROSE: Escape Velocity) After meeting Father Kreiner, Fitz briefly suffered an identity crisis, but while held prisoner by the insane triplets on New Jupiter, Fitz was eventually able to reconcile his issues with his existence, concluding that he was still fundamentally Fitz. (PROSE: EarthWorld)

Fitz injured his ankle after he fell off a cliff when the TARDIS arrived at its next destination, and was 'captured' by Cauchemar's forces when he accidentally killed one of Cauchemar's men and the others' mental programming caused them to perceive Fitz as their colleague simply because he was wearing the dead man's coat. Fitz was subjected to the mental conditioning used on Cauchemar's men, but he was immune to it for unspecified reasons. While staying at Etty's farmhouse, he had a brief sexual relationship with Vettul before he had to return to town to help stop Cauchemar's insane plan. (PROSE: Vanishing Point)

After Anji drank some Bactrian cocktails, she remained in the TARDIS whilst Fitz and the Doctor shared an adventure on Entusso. In order to collapse the corrupt Alien Defence Incorporated, who were using the Doctor's image to advertise their company, Fitz claimed that between the Doctor and him, Fitz was the real hero. This removed any validation for the company. Shortly after, Entusso came under attack by Skarpok and his species. Believing that Fitz was a hero, Skarpok attacked him. Fitz used a Bactrian cocktail to defeat the creature, and subsequently became the avatar of ADI's advertisement campaign. (AUDIO: Fitz's Story)

Fitz left the Doctor for a time on Earth in 1894, wanting to strike out on his own rather than being the perpetual sidekick. He went on an expedition to Siberia with George Williamson. Several years later in the expedition, Fitz once again encountered the Doctor, and became part of Sabbath's plot to erase every parallel universe. (PROSE: Time Zero)

Fitz helped the Doctor to uncover the truth behind Old Man Crawley. (PROSE: The Deadstone Memorial)

After Gallifrey's destruction
Some of Fitz's memory after the destruction of Gallifrey had been destroyed, but to a far lesser degree than the Doctor's. (PROSE: Escape Velocity) Fitz soon regained his memories but never told the Doctor; the Doctor wanted to move on from his previous life. (PROSE: Halflife) Fitz developed a relationship with fellow companion Trix and planned to leave the Doctor after the Vore were defeated. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

However, Fitz, the Doctor and Trix continued travelling together for a time. On one trip, they discovered a planet where temporally-anomanous Neanderthals were being herded as temporal weapons in preparation for a time war. (PROSE: We Can't Stop What's Coming)

After leaving the Doctor
At some point after leaving the Doctor, Fitz was recruited by Iris Wildthyme to help negate a timeline created by Spiritus Mundi. (PROSE: Only Living Girls)

Legacy
When the Eighth Doctor was about to regenerate, he remembered Fitz among his past companions. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor)

During her time with the Tenth Doctor, Gabby Gonzalez learned of Fitz as one of his past companions. She mentioned him during an emotional confrontation with the Doctor over her feeling that he was pushing her away from him. (COMIC: Vortex Butterflies)

The original Fitz
Fitz thought most people stupid and would tell tall tales like J. R. R. Tolkien having been born between "R.J Tolkien" and a prostitute called Frodo.

When Sam had been attacked and was unconscious, Fitz brought her safely back to his home. He also stole her money, intending to claim her attackers had stolen it. (PROSE: The Taint)

Fitz suffered from a bit of the "comic book" syndrome; he thought that he was special only if someone noticed. (PROSE: Demontage)

He also liked to play the character of various fictional characters from movies and novels, such as James Bond. (PROSE: Revolution Man)

Fitz slept with a dark haired Sam Jones. (PROSE: Unnatural History)

The remembered Fitz
After re-remembering by the TARDIS, Fitz seemed more at ease with himself, more attuned to the ways of the TARDIS and travelling through time.

Fitz enjoyed tea, and sorely missed the TARDIS's supply of tea when it was thought to be destroyed in the dimensional barriers between Avalon and Earth. (PROSE: The Fall of Yquatine)

Following the Doctor's hundred years trapped on Earth, Fitz knew more about the TARDIS and the Doctor's life than the Doctor himself. He demonstrated an affinity with the TARDIS in keeping things (such as the Doctor's memories) from the Doctor. (PROSE: Escape Velocity, EarthWorld, Trading Futures)

He had an affinity for forming friendships, first with Sam and then the Doctor, and later (although they were reluctant to admit it) Compassion and Anji.

Over time he developed a number of Doctorish traits, such as taking the lead in investigations into the unknown and taking great pride in providing expert commentary, as well as a love of travel.

He described the Doctor as being a pain, but admitted missing him when he wasn't there. For a time, while still considering him a friend, Fitz did not completely trust the Doctor, believing that he could have stolen the body of Richard Harries from Banquo Manor. (PROSE: The Banquo Legacy)

While travelling with Sam, Fitz had learned of her infatuation and confused romantic feelings for the Doctor, but only understood it after her departure and his re-remembering. When briefly travelling with Iris Wildthyme in the Enclave, he found himself considering his chances of "getting laid by Iris... and even of getting laid by the Doctor." (PROSE: The Blue Angel)

Following Gallifrey's destruction, (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) any final hesitances Fitz had about the Doctor vanished, he trusted the Doctor implicitly, and considered the Time Lord his best friend. (PROSE: EarthWorld, The Year of Intelligent Tigers) He considered his love for the Doctor "the real thing." (PROSE: The Book of the Still)

Fitz began to consider the Doctor his responsibility of sorts, putting it on himself to ensure the Doctor never remembered Gallifrey, (PROSE: EarthWorld, Trading Futures, The Tomorrow Windows) and providing moral and emotional support in upsetting or dark situations (PROSE: The Year of Intelligent Tigers, Camera Obscura)

Appearance and habits
Fitz had a thin face, large grey eyes and long hair. (PROSE: The Fall of Yquatine) He was described by Hilary Pink as shifty-eyed, and that he had the look of having experienced several lifetimes. (PROSE: Eater of Wasps)

He was taller than at least one version of Sam Jones (PROSE: Unnatural History) and a foot taller than Anji Kapoor. (PROSE: EarthWorld)

Fitz donned a leopardskin suit with snakeskin shoes whilst in Las Vegas. (PROSE: Mad Dogs and Englishmen) He once wore a wide-brimmed hat like the Eighth Doctor. (PROSE: Camera Obscura)

Fitz smoked a lot of cigarettes (though he made attempts to stop on at least one occasion (PROSE: Unnatural History) and drank just as much. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

Behind the scenes

 * Fitz was a "current" companion from 1999 to 2005, and many published fanfictions or charity anthology contributions published in that interim actually contained significant character development intended to work in conjunction with the official continuity (especially those written by BBC Books authors). Some notable examples include:
 * Lawrence Miles' Toy Story, published in Perfect Timing 2 in 1999, established the TARDIS' fondness and care for the remembered Fitz, removing the nightmares about his mother. This story would later be republished in Mad Norwegian Press' edition of Dead Romance.
 * Fitz Kreiner and the Onion of Doom by Steve Cole, also published in Missing Pieces in 2001, where Fitz is an unwitting pawn in one of the Master's plots very shortly before the events of The Taint.
 * Recursion by Dale Smith, published in Myth Makers Presents: Essentials in 2003, where it is revealed Fitz's father Otto Kreiner actually died in an alien invasion. Fitz and the Doctor create many paradoxes after many failed attempts to prevent the death.


 * In late 2022, Stephen Cole confirmed in an interview that Fitz Kreiner was bisexual and in love with the Doctor. Novels such as The Year of Intelligent Tigers, The Book of the Still, History 101, Time Zero, and Halflife make strong implications regarding his relationship with the Doctor, as well as other male characters like Sasha and George Williamson.