Yasmin Khan

PC  Yasmin "Yaz" Khan was a companion of the Thirteenth Doctor and a junior police officer with Hallamshire Police. She lived in Flat 34 of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield with her parents Hakim and Najia, and her sister Sonya. She was also a practising Muslim of Pakistani descent.

Early life
As a child, Yasmin attended Redlands Primary alongside Ryan Sinclair. (TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth) Yasmin was placed in a class named for Rosa Parks. (TV: Rosa)

Her best friend was Poppy Hillman. Around 2008, when they got to high school, their friendship ended because Taylor Grant called Yaz an "Islamist terrorist". Even ten years later, this experience still hurt. (PROSE: The Good Doctor)

In year 10, she snuck into Danny Biswas' house through the window. (TV: Rosa)

Some years later, she joined Hallamshire Police as a junior officer. (TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth)

Yasmin encountered the effects of racism in the 21st century. She often had racial slurs like "paki" directed at her during her work as a police officer, and she was labelled a terrorist due to her Muslim faith. (TV: Rosa, PROSE: The Good Doctor)

Meeting the Doctor
As a trainee on second-year probation, Yaz was often sent by her superior, Ramesh Sunder, to deal with small-time petty disputes. After vocalising her need for something more, she was sent to investigate an unidentified object in the Peaks outside Sheffield. There, Yaz found the caller was Ryan Sinclair, whom she recognised from school. Ryan insisted the call was not a prank and, though Yasmin didn't initially believe him, touching the cold object lead to her doing so.

After Ryan received a call from his grandmother, Grace, Yaz accompanied him to check on her, finding her train under attack from a mysterious creature. There, she encountered the Thirteenth Doctor. Yasmin, along with Ryan, Grace and the latter's husband Graham O'Brien, helped the Doctor investigate and stop the pod's occupant, a Stenza named Tim Shaw, from abducting Karl Wright. After Grace died while disabling the coil, Yasmin attended her funeral.

Yasmin later helped the Doctor construct a teleporter to get her to her TARDIS. Though meant to stay whilst she left, Yasmin, Ryan and Graham were also teleported into deep space with her. (TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth)

Believing the pair to be bonuses in the Rally of the Twelve Galaxies, Epzo scooped Yasmin and the Doctor out of deep space and transported them aboard his ship - the Cerebos. Yaz awoke in a MediPod, stepping out to find the Doctor preparing to jettison the back of the ship, initiating a speed boost which caused them to crash onto the surface of Desolation.

On Desolation, she found Ryan and Graham, who had been similarly saved by Angstrom, Epzo's rival in what would become the final stage of the rally. The rivals, with the Doctor and her friends in tow, were tasked by Ilin, master of the rally, to race across the planet; the first to reach the finish line at the Ghost Monument would win 3.2 million krin and salvation from planet's hostile surface. The Doctor discovered that the Ghost Monument was, in fact, her TARDIS, phasing in and out of reality. After the Doctor stabilised the TARDIS, Yasmin entered it for the first time and the Doctor attempted to take them home. (TV: The Ghost Monument)

Trying to return home
Attempting to land the TARDIS back in 21st century Sheffield, the Doctor failed several times to bring Yasmin home. Explaining that the TARDIS had latched onto nearby Artron energy and that they were in 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, Yaz was excited to begin her first adventure in the past and was astonished to meet Rosa Parks. In Slim's Bar and the Sahara Springs Motel, she recounted the famous historical event of Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

She also endured many of the effects of racial segregation in the 1950s. She was misidentified as Mexican instead of a British woman of Pakistani descent and this caused her to be denied service at the bar and had to discretely enter the motel room through the back window. However, she was permitted to enter the buses in Montgomery through the front door and sit in the "white-only" section, unlike the black people who had to sit at the back of the bus. She remarked that she was unsure in her place in Montgomery due to the lack of citizens with Pakistani heritage.

Attempting to stop Krasko's plans to alter history, Yasmin and the Doctor made sure Rosa Parks left work as a seamstress on time by giving her their clothes to mend. Yasmin chatted with Parks about her life, and the latter was surprised to hear that Yaz was permitted to be a police officer.

By making sure that the bus was crowded enough that Parks's moment of defiance could happen, the Doctor, Graham, and Yaz reluctantly became the three extra "white" passengers that required Parks to move back. The three, as well as Ryan, then witnessed Parks's historic arrest. Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor explained how Parks would be commemorated in the future, and Yasmin saw Asteroid 284996, also named Rosaparks, in space. (TV: Rosa)

Returning home
Yaz returned home to Sheffield in 2018 just half an hour after being transported into deep space. Noticing the Doctor's sadness at the prospect of travelling alone, she invited her to tea at her family's flat, along with Ryan and Graham. There, Hakim and Sonya teased Yaz who rarely brought friends home. However, her mother rang Yaz shortly after, asking her to pick her up and to not tell her father about it.

Claiming she was taking a parcel to Najia, she left her father, sister, Ryan and the Doctor and drove to Jack Robertson's luxury hotel. She seemed impressed, but her mother confided that she had just lost her job as general manager. Robertson then appeared and had Kevin hold Yaz and Najia at gunpoint for trespassing, to which Yaz protested, asserting that they had no right and demanding to know why her mother had been sacked.

Yaz and Najia were shown a hotel room full of cobwebs, which no-one could explain. Left in the room, she was phoned by the Doctor, and the TARDIS team regrouped in the lobby, joined by Najia and Jade McIntyre. Her mother embarassed Yaz when asking if she and the Doctor were in a relationship though was more irritated when asked the same of Ryan.

After the giant spiders were contained, she offered to get her family their bread. Promising her mother she would tell her the truth about the Doctor when she returned, she had already decided to stay travelling in the TARDIS with the Doctor, a decision also followed by Ryan and Graham. (TV: Arachnids in the UK)

Team TARDIS
Yaz and team TARDIS travelled to the planet Gatan, arriving in the City of Radiant Stone in the midst of war. (COMIC: The Warmonger)

After helping the Doctor halt a war on the planet Lobos between the dog-like loba and human colonists, they had to return to retrieve Ryan's mobile phone. Accidentally, the TARDIS slipped almost six hundred years into the future, where the planet was now ruled by human zealots, served by slave loba. The zealots derived human superiority over loba from one joke by Graham, now worshipped as "the Good Doctor" while the real Doctor was forgotten. With women treated barely better than loba, Ryan and Yasmin were conflated into "St Rasmin". Almost immediately Yasmin was arrested for walking without a male relative. In prison, she met and befriended Pry, the leader of resistance. This helped the Doctor learn both sides of the story. In the end, the Doctor succeeded in uncovering the lie of the zealots, setting the record straight and brokering a lasting peace between humans and loba. (PROSE: The Good Doctor)

Personality
Yasmin was ambitious. Although outwardly confident, she wasn't overly so, and was aware that she still had much to learn; she viewed "every day [as] a learning day". (TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth) She held high aspirations, telling Rosa Parks that she wanted to be at the top of the police force. Despite enduring racism in American 1955, she spoke positively, thanking Rosa Parks for making it possible for her to be a police officer, and that (despite the hard times) America would eventually have a black President. She had a sense of humour and joked about her supposed Mexican blood when she was misidentified in Montgomery. (TV: Rosa) She rarely brought friends home and her family considered her to be "married to her job." (TV: Arachnids in the UK)

Yaz had a dislike of "being on duty at the city centre on a Friday night". (WC: Case File Two)

She was not arachnophobic. (WC: Case File Four)

Skills
Her police experience meant that she was a good negotiator, capable of forming a truce between two opposing civilians. (TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth)

She had a good knowledge of history, recounting the significance of Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. She knew what time of day Parks was arrested and had some idea about her profession. This knowledge would help the Doctor keep history in order when Krasko's actions put the past in jeopardy. (TV: Rosa)

Yasmin had a lovely singing voice. (PROSE: The Good Doctor)

Behind the scenes

 * Yaz is the first televised companion of South Asian descent.