Jenny Flint

Jennifer "Jenny" Flint (née Scarrity) was the human maid and wife of Madame Vastra. Operating from London in the late 19th century, the two performed a variety of investigations alongside their butler Strax, forming the so-called Paternoster Gang. They were also friends and allies of the Doctor, who had saved Jenny's life during her and Vastra's first meeting.

Early life
Jennifer "Jenny" Scarrity (AUDIO: Family Matters; PROSE: A Perfect Christmas) was born to Albert and Miriam Scarrity and had two siblings: Dorothy and Barty. (AUDIO: Family Matters) She spent her childhood in a match factory. (PROSE: Assassin on the Railroads)

Ostracised by her family due to her "preferences in companionship" (WC: The Battle of Demons Run: Two Days Later) and having a strong disapproval for her parents' freakshow, Jenny ran away from home and changed her surname to "Flint", so chosen because she believed that she had to be "hard like flint" to survive on her own. (AUDIO: Family Matters)

Relationship with Vastra
Jenny met Vastra and was employed as her maid, with one account saying that the Doctor saved her life when the two women first met (TV: The Name of the Doctor) and another saying that Vastra had saved her from the Tongs. (PROSE: Madame Vastra) The two fell in love, Vastra having previously not been fond of human society. (WC: Vastra Investigates: A Christmas Prequel)

Living in London, Jenny and Vastra solved crimes and protected the British Empire, doing a lot of running and wearing "spectacular dresses" whilst doing so. (WC: The Battle of Demons Run: Two Days Later) In 1881, Jenny helped the Doctor defeat the Kraals, who had been plotting to replace Prince Bertie with an android duplicate. At the time, Vastra was in Egypt. Jenny and Vastra also battled a pair of CyberNeomorphs in Japan. (PROSE: Madame Vastra)

According to one account, Jenny and Vastra married on Christmas 1882. However, this account had Strax present for their two-year anniversary, placing the year of their wedding no earlier than 1886. (PROSE: The Red-Eyed League)

In 1886, Jenny and Vastra became aware of the corpse of a Silurian scholar and sailed on the Mary Anning in search of others, meeting the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler when the TARDIS materialised on the ship. The ship was attacked by a Myrka and the surviving crew washed up on an island where Jenny looked after the unconscious Vastra. The Doctor later returned them to 13 Paternoster Row and asked them to look after Rose for a time. (COMIC: The Lost Dimension)

In 1888, after Vastra told Jenny that she had eaten Jack the Ripper, the couple joined the Eleventh Doctor in the Battle of Demons Run and survived the attack of the Headless Monks. Afterwards, Jenny comforted Amy Pond on the kidnapping of her daughter and told her that it was not the Doctor's fault. The Doctor told River Song to take her and everybody else back to their own times. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War)

Joined by Strax
Jenny and Vastra were still on Demons Run two days later, waiting for Strax to fully recover from his wound. They invited him to join them in London 1888 and, whilst he initially refused, he accepted their offer at the last minute. The three of them left as Demons Run was evacuated (WC: The Battle of Demons Run: Two Days Later) and, following their return to their own time, Vastra and Jenny were added to the Papal Mainframe's "most wanted" list. (PROSE: Madame Vastra)

On Jenny and Vastra's two-year wedding anniversary, the couple and Strax met and defeated Kisimos, who had tried to lure Vastra away from her wife and friend. (PROSE: The Red-Eyed League)

Jenny helped investigate the strange soil on Silas Ruckford's boots and found that Lady Cornelia Basildon-Stone had had the roof of the Crystal Palace temporarily removed. She sneaked into the palace with Strax, having been assisted by Tommy Corrigan, and there killed Ajeeth to save her Sontaran friend. Following the destruction of the genetic splicer, Lady Basildon-Stone, as well as the eggs of her human-wasp hybrids, died. (COMIC: The Crystal Throne)

Around the time of Jenny and Vastra's third wedding anniversary, the Paternoster Gang went up against the Sacristans. (PROSE: A Perfect Christmas)

The Paternoster Gang solved a number of cases together, including that of an alien prankster, (PROSE: The Confounding Case of the Planetary Prankster) Lord Falstaff, (PROSE: The Pernicious Plots of the Big Game Hunter) Professor Samuel Lumber and his Dream Doorway, (PROSE: The Dangerous Dilemma of the Dream Doorway) the Wright Factory, (PROSE: The Fear Factory) psychics whom Jenny named the "Danger Thinkers" (PROSE: The Insidious Ideas of the Danger Thinkers) and the Blight of the Weirdling Woods. (PROSE: The Curious Case of the Weirdling Woods)

The Doctor's isolation
Whilst disapproving of the Eleventh Doctor's isolation in 1892, the Paternoster Gang assisted him in it and kept in contact with him, requesting his help on 26 November but being turned down. (AUDIO: Regeneration Impossible) Nonetheless, Jenny tried to pique his interest by telling about Erasmus Pink's drunken plan to split the Earth and a man on Praed Street who apparently had an invisible wife, attempts which were unsuccessful. (WC: The Great Detective)

Jenny, Vastra and Strax saved Harry, paying Mr Ransit in order to keep him in their custody, and thwarted an alien who possessed the corpse of Able Hecklington and planned to blot out the Sun. Jenny offered Harry the chance to work as a kitchen boy under her friend Mary in Lincoln. (PROSE: Devil in the Smoke)

The Paternoster Gang stopped a man behind a crime which involved identical twins, undetectable poison and an ancient Egyptian curse. After Inspector Gregson took the man away, Jenny remained hopeful of the Doctor getting in contact with them, believing that he could only sulk in the TARDIS for so long. She also noticed that it was snowing despite the absence of clouds (WC: Vastra Investigates) and they soon became aware that the snow had a low-level telepathic field. Jenny and Vastra began investigating Walter Simeon and his Great Intelligence Institute.

Jenny saw Clara Oswin Oswald calling for the Doctor and took her to Paternoster Row to be given Vastra's one word test. She trapped the Ice Governess behind a force field and helped guard Latimer and his children, later being the first to see Clara's body when she fell from the clouds. She attended Clara's funeral and was confused when the Doctor ran off, saying that he was going to find her. (TV: The Snowmen)

Sweetville and Trenzalore
In 1893, Jenny infiltrated Sweetville to find the Doctor, Vastra having seen him in a dead man's optogram. She was able to free him from captivity and help him cure himself of the red leech poison, later meeting and being confused by Clara Oswald, about whom the Doctor would give Jenny no answers. The three of them were saved from Winifred Gillyflower by Vastra and Strax, after which Jenny and Vastra prevented the poison from being placed inside of Mrs Gillyflower's rocket, thwarting her and Mr Sweet. (TV: The Crimson Horror)

Later that year, the Paternoster Gang entered a dream-induced conference call with Clara and River Song to discuss Clarence DeMarco's coordinates to the Doctor's tomb, during which Jenny was murdered by the Whisper Men. Her body was taken to Trenzalore and she was revived by Strax, only to vanish when the Great Intelligence entered the Doctor's time stream to kill him. However, Clara's actions restored her to the timeline. (TV: The Name of the Doctor)

Further investigations
On 12 December 1894, Jenny accompanied Vastra and Strax to the London Zoo, where they encountered a fog laced with temporal radiation that devolved living things into their ancestors. When Vastra was affected by the fog, Jenny prevented her from acting on savage instincts by reminding her of their love. (PROSE: The Evolution Episode)

Meeting the new Doctor
Along with Vastra and Strax, Jenny arrived at the Thames, where a Tyrannosaurus Rex had suddenly appeared without explanation. She managed to calm the beast and contain it within a small area within the Thames using several sonic devices, before, much to her and Vastra's amazement, the dinosaur spat out the TARDIS. She was reunited with Clara as well as the Doctor, who had newly regenerated into his twelfth incarnation, and was going through post-regenerative madness. Taking him back to the house she and Vastra shared, the trio did their best to get the Doctor to sleep off his trauma.

That night, however, Vastra and Jenny discovered that the dinosaur had been reduced to nothing more than smoke and ash via spontaneous combustion, and joined with the Doctor in taking on the case. The next morning, Clara discovered a cryptic ad in a newspaper which led them to Mancini's Family Restaurant, which served as an organ-harvesting factory for a ship-load of Clockwork Droids that had crashed there millions of years earlier. After receiving a distress signal from Clara, who was trapped inside the crashed spaceship with the Doctor, she and Vastra cut through the clockwork decoys populating the restaurant and made their way down to the crashed ship.

Jenny and Vastra, assisted by Strax, fought off the clockwork robots as they attacked the Doctor and Clara, forcing the droids' control node to evacuate in his escape capsule, quickly followed by the Doctor. They fought off the droids, but over time the robots began to overwhelm them. Jenny and her companions were saved when the control node fell — or was pushed — out of his escape capsule. Victorious, Jenny and the others returned to their house, where Clara returned to travelling with the Doctor. Meanwhile, Jenny, Vastra and Strax also returned to life as normal on Paternoster Row. (TV: Deep Breath)

Continued investigations
During a December in the 1890s, Jenny helped to investigate reports of a poltergeist that was breaking plates in an old house. The haunting turned out to be a false alarm when the house was discovered to be built atop an old Bakerloo Line that caused the house to shake every time a train came through.

The following month she attended the Carnival of Curiosities in search of Marlowe Hapworth's killer, where she ran into Clara Oswald and the Twelfth Doctor. (PROSE: Silhouette)

Undated events
At some point, Jenny taught Clara how to pick locks. (PROSE: The Crawling Terror)

Legacy
As one of the people she had met during her travels with the Doctor, Jenny was included in a series of notes written by Clara when she was planning to confess to Danny Pink via phone call about her adventures with the Doctor. (TV: Dark Water)

Shortly before regenerating, the Twelfth Doctor dreamt of Jenny along with some of his other companions. (TV: The Doctor Falls)

Personality
Jenny had a romantic relationship with Vastra, despite the fact that she was a different species. She seemed proud to be married to the Silurian, noting that Dr Simeon had never been married. (WC: Vastra Investigates, TV: The Snowmen) This commitment to her marriage was further shown when the Doctor kissed her after she rescued him from Ada Gillyflower's cell. Although he only intended to show his gleeful gratitude, Jenny promptly slapped him in annoyance. (TV: The Crimson Horror) Jenny showed jealousy when Vastra showed interest in others. She was also quite sarcastic at times. For example, she replied, "Thank you," to Vastra's comment that mammals all looked alike. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War) Her sarcastic nature was also shown when she said, "At your service," to Simeon. (TV: The Snowmen) When Vastra explained to Clara about the public image she and Jenny had to maintain, Jenny wondered aloud why she still acted as a maid in the house. (TV: Deep Breath)

Even though she lived with a "lizard woman" and a "potato dwarf", Jenny was something of a realist as she still believed Clara to be dead during the events of the Crimson Horror and was deeply confused when the Doctor stated otherwise, despite the fact that the Doctor had told her before that there was another version of her somewhere in the universe. However, she seemed satisfied when she saw the truth for herself and didn't believe the new Clara to be an imposter. She was subsequently impressed by Clara's deduction of where Winifred Gillyflower was keeping her rocket and the two eventually became friends. (TV: The Crimson Horror, Deep Breath)

Jenny proved very courageous and kind, risking life and limb for those in need. She, along with Vastra and Strax, joined the Doctor's rescue mission and also comforted Amy about the loss of her child. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War) She comforted Clara to help her cope with the Doctor's new persona and helped her during her time in the Victorian era. (TV: Deep Breath) She risked her own life to stop Vastra from becoming a savage primitive and reminded her of their bond. (PROSE: The Evolution Episode)

Abilities
Jenny was quite capable in combat — she survived the Battle of Demons Run without any injury. She displayed excellent skills with a sword during the battle, and was capable of using a blaster against Headless Monks. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War) She also used unarmed martial arts when confronted in Sweetville, and was, as the Doctor put it, "everyone's favourite lock-picking Victorian chambermaid". (TV: The Crimson Horror)

She was also of "considerably" above average intelligence. (AUDIO: The Cars That Ate London!)

Spin-off?
Since their first appearance, Vastra and Jenny became popular characters in fandom, with fans wishing for a spin-off series to be made based on their adventures. Steven Moffat addressed this, saying that he considered making a spin-off when he created the two characters, but wouldn't have the time, though he said he would like to revisit them. Since their debut, Vastra, Jenny and Strax have returned for four additional episodes and three minisodes. Although no television spinoff materialised, they did receive their own short story series in the Doctor Who Adventures magazine called The Paternoster Gang Investigates and later The Paternoster Gang from Big Finish Productions.

Other matters

 * The book The Secret Lives of Monsters includes an excerpt from a book called A Study in Green in which Vastra, Jenny and Strax encounter Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Jenny bought all 200 copies of the book to keep it off the shelves.
 * Jenny was supposed to appear as a hallucination when the Eleventh Doctor regenerated, along with other of the Doctor's companions. In the end, only Amy appeared.