Jess Collins

Jessica "Jess" Collins was an art history student who grew up in Brixton, London.

Jess lived in Brixton with her parents Lloyd and Devina, who met on the Windrush while emigrating to Great Britain, and her brother Maxwell. (COMIC: The Pestilent Heart)

In 1972, she went with her boyfriend Dave to find out if the "Highgate Vampire" of Highgate Cemetery was real. Jess discovered a vampire creature, known as a Corvid had killed Dave by draining his psychic essence. Upon realising the cult leader Gabriel Rosewood had used his own followers as bait to easily manipulate so he could gain the Corvids' power, she called him sick, and pushed Rosewood into a tombstone to allow her and the Twelfth Doctor to escape. When the Doctor banished the Corvids to the Time Vortex, Clara Oswald insisted that the memory of Dave would help Jess when she went back to her normal life. (COMIC: The Highgate Horror)

Jess met the Doctor again six months later, and helped him to investigate an alien distress signal which was coming from Brixton tube station, as she knew the area. The Doctor was unable to go pass the ticket barriers without money, so he snuck into the station at night. Jess followed him to the station, where Lloyd worked, and they saw the animated corpse of a Hakuai attack Lloyd. The Doctor electrocuted the creature with the tracks, and had Lloyd taken to Kings College Hospital. Returning to the Hakuai corpse, the Doctor found a telepathic node on it. Activating the node, the Doctor and Jess found a recording, which revealed the creature was a criminal on the run from his own people called Moan'na who rewrote his DNA to hide among humanity on Earth. When the Doctor discovered Moan'na was near a plague pit, he and Jess rushed to Lloyd in the hospital, where Lloyd's mysterious bacterial infection turned him into a Hakuai. Lloyd then fled, taking Jess with him.

When the infection went airborne, Jess and Devina tried getting through to Lloyd, but were unsuccessful. However, the Doctor keyed Moan'na's biological resequencer to Jess and Devina's familial DNA, and fed it to Lloyd to cure him of the infection. He used the TARDIS' telepathic circuits to rewrite the DNA of the other infected humans to return them to normal, but this caused the TARDIS to overload, trapping the Doctor in 1972. With nowhere for the Doctor to go, Devina offered him to stay with the Collins family. (COMIC: The Pestilent Heart)