Tamsin Drew was a companion of the Eighth Doctor. A failing actress, she joined him in the TARDIS to escape a life of auditions she did not want to do and to see the universe.
After a period of time travelling with the Doctor, she became disillusioned with him due to his coldness in the face of the deaths of others whilst favouring the lives of his friends. The Monk convinced her that he was a destructive force in the universe, and took her under his wing.
Tamsin travelled with the Monk for a time, but eventually came to regret her decision, as the Monk told her countless lies and had sided with Earth's invaders, the Daleks. She was killed by the Daleks due to being "surplus to requirements".
Biography[]
Early life[]
Tamsin came from Dulwich. (AUDIO: Situation Vacant) She had ballet lessons as a girl (AUDIO: Deimos) and was scrum-half in her school's rugby team. For a time, she lived in a dingy flat in Suffolk. (AUDIO: The Book of Kells)
She attended drama school, where she did a Circus Arts module. She did contortionism but later remarked that the invention of mochaccinos hindered her abilities. (AUDIO: Nevermore) She hated improv and disliked sardines due to an interaction with Darren Green. She did her driving test at least five times, reversing into something on her fourth or fifth attempt. (AUDIO: The Book of Kells)
Upon leaving drama school, Tamsin became an actress. However, she had great trouble finding work. She did an advert for leg wax which she was later embarrassed about. (AUDIO: Situation Vacant) For "one glorious summer", she worked at the London Dungeon pretending to be "a Cockney drab who gets done to death by Jack the Ripper". (AUDIO: Deimos)
She felt that her career as an actress was failing due to her age, finding herself increasingly auditioning for "mummy" roles instead of girlfriend ones. (AUDIO: Situation Vacant)
Meeting the Doctor[]
In 2010, Tamsin, tired of her disappointing career, answered an advertisement for a time traveller's companion under the alias of Juliet Walsh, a strong, career-driven woman. She found herself auditioning, with Theo Lawson, Asha Qureshi, and Hugh Bainbridge, for the role of the Eighth Doctor's new companion, unaware that the advert had been made by the Monk and that the four were rejects. "Juliet" was the first of the possible companions to be eliminated and Tamsin went home upset. However, she had taken the jacket of a scientist who controlled many robots and was attacked by one, causing the Doctor to step in and save her.
Asha, Theo, and Hugh were all found to have malicious reasons for wanting to join the Doctor. After they were sorted out, "Juliet" revealed herself to the Doctor as Tamsin Drew and he decided to take her with him. He remarked that although he did not much like Juliet, he might like Tamsin. (AUDIO: Situation Vacant)
Companion to the Doctor[]
Tamsin was given a bedroom in the Doctor's TARDIS. (AUDIO: Relative Dimensions) Following her three-hour tour of the TARDIS, a black cat appeared in the console room and piloted the TARDIS to Nevermore, a world known as Corinth Minor before it was devastated by war. She followed the cat outside despite the Doctor's objections and was trapped in a room with the encroaching Red Death.
The Doctor saved Tamsin from choking on the Red Death by reciting the Edgar Allan Poe poem "Nevermore". A door in the room opened, revealing Morella Wendigo, a prisoner nearly finished with her sentence and the planet's only inhabitant. The Doctor walked in with Wendigo's raven guards and told Tamsin of the war crimes for which Wendigo had been imprisoned. At some point, Wendigo tied Tamsin and the Doctor together. After she left with Special Prosecutor Ugliosi and his assistant Berenice Ward, who had arrived to check in on her, Tamsin used her training in Circus Arts to free herself and the Doctor.
Ugliosi's fearful reaction to the cat prompted Wendigo to order the ravens to kill it. Tamsin rushed after it to protect it, running into the mortally wounded helicopter pilot. She was accused of conspiring to murder him and imprisoned in a psychic recreation of Poe's short story "The Premature Burial." Wendigo soothed Tamsin out of her shock by showing her a vision of a prewar Corinth Minor.
Tamsin and Wendigo found the Doctor being attacked by a psychic projection of Ugliosi's guilt created by Berenice. Ugliosi ordered the ravens to kill Berenice—something Tamsin objected to. Tamsin and the Doctor chased after Wendigo, who disclosed that she was actually the living home of survivors of the Red Death. Tamsin was sent by the Doctor to the TARDIS, where she read "The Fall of the House of Usher" aloud before being stopped by the disgruntled Doctor. The cat reappeared inside the console room and despite Tamsin's pleas, was shooed out by the Doctor. (AUDIO: Nevermore)
The Doctor and Tamsin arrived in the tannery of the Abbey of Kells in 1006 after the TARDIS was drawn there by a Time Scoop. They escaped the clutches of Olaf Eriksson and made their way to the Abbey proper. While the Doctor investigated a time eddy in the Abbey and its connections to Brother Bernard, Tamsin met Thelonious, the Abbey's abbot. She was shown the Book of Kells by Brother Patrick before falling through a hole onto Bernard and saving the Doctor from being attacked. The Doctor deduced that the Monk had set up residence in the Abbey to steal the Book and sell it at a sky-high profit. Hiding in a chest, he and Tamsin saw Brother Lucianus walk in with the Book. Their attempt to retrieve it was foiled by Tamsin's clumsiness.
Tamsin followed Lucianus by tracking Lucianus's voice and fought Lucianus for the Book before they were caught by Olaf. She was accused of stealing the Book by Lucianus and was sentenced by King Sitric to lose her left hand as punishment. The Doctor and Bernard arrived in time to stop this, creating chaos that allowed Thelonious to stun Sitric, Bernard, Olaf, and Patrick. Thelonious revealed that he was an incarnation of the Monk who intended to replace the malfunctioning directional unit in his TARDIS by having the Abbey's illuminators paint new circuits in the Book. Tamsin tricked him into taking the page with Patrick's inferior circuit instead of Brother Timothy's superior one. She extinguished the fire caused to the Book by the dematerialisation of his TARDIS, though not before it charred the Book's cover. (AUDIO: The Book of Kells)
Tamsin, the Doctor and an Ice Warrior. (AUDIO: Deimos)
The Doctor and Tamsin arrived on Deimos Moonbase, which had become a museum containing Ice Warrior artefacts and the atmospheric re-ioniser that was part of a failed terraforming project to create a breathable atmosphere on Mars for humans. A group of nine Ice Warriors, led by Lord Slaadek, had been awakened prematurely (AUDIO: Deimos) by the Monk to change the course of history. (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars)
Tamsin helped Gregson Grenville plant mining explosives to stop the Ice Warriors before boarding the rocket with everyone else. However, Grenville failed to make it and was killed, appalling Tamsin who believed that the Doctor should have tried to save him. (AUDIO: Deimos) She fell out with the Doctor after he seemingly believed Lucie Miller's life to be more important than Grenville's. (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars)
Companion to the Monk[]
Tamsin met the Monk, who took her in his TARDIS to show what the Doctor's interference with the Ice Warriors would have caused. The Monk took Tamsin to the aftermath of the Ice Warriors' attack on Halcyon around the 33rd century, convincing her that the Doctor was responsible for the billions of deaths there and subsequently showing him apparently collaborating with the Ice Warriors in killing 600 people on a passenger rocket.
Returning to the base, Tamsin met Lucie and told the Doctor she had "had enough" of what she considered him only looking out for his friends and the Web of Time whilst condemning the fate of Halcyon in the future to the Ice Warriors. She left with the Monk, looking to find "some old friends who also [had] a score to settle with the Doctor" to "combine their talents". (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars)
The Monk took Tamsin to Skaro after he received a message from the Daleks. However, he told Tamsin to stay in the TARDIS as they could be "volatile". She remained in there whilst he stabilised the Dalek Time Controller. (AUDIO: To the Death)
Tamsin and the Monk went to 22nd century Earth, where they collected and catalogued human artefacts while the planet was being invaded by the Daleks. She had been told by the Monk that they were collecting art for humanity when it recovered and that the Daleks were helping humanity as "medical missionaries". (AUDIO: Lucie Miller) Her motivation was a desire for the people of Earth to retain their artwork and culture after the invasion, unaware that the Monk intended to sell them. (AUDIO: To the Death)
Death[]
Tamsin, the Doctor and the Monk. (AUDIO: To the Death)
After Tamsin learned of the Monk's involvement in the invasion and that he had been lying to her, she helped the Doctor try to stop the Daleks. Shortly after, the Daleks surrounded her, the Monk and the Doctor. She was upset with the Monk, and called him "despicable", denouncing his protests that the situation was "complicated" as the defence of a child trying to apologise for making a mistake rather than taking responsibility for their own actions. While the Monk was spared for aligning with the Daleks, and the Doctor was considered a valuable prisoner, the Daleks disregarded Tamsin as "surplus" and immediately exterminated her.
The Monk mourned Tamsin's death, as he had developed strong feelings for her. Seeing this, the Doctor berated the Monk for allowing her to be the first of billions to die because of his actions in aiding the Daleks and for not realising what he had done had guaranteed her eventual murder. (AUDIO: To the Death)
Legacy[]
Tamsin was one of the companions commemorated by the Eighth Doctor right before he regenerated on Karn. (TV: The Night of the Doctor)
The Monk was upset enough by her death to try writing the Doctor out of history to take revenge on him. (AUDIO: The Secret History)
The Twelfth Doctor saw Tamsin, among other companions, when Bernice Summerfield was hit by temporal energy in the Pyramid Eternia. (PROSE: Big Bang Generation)
Appearance[]
The Doctor implied that Tamsin sometimes wore glasses and joked that she was blind. Lucie found Tamsin to be "quite pretty". King Sitric could not bear to remove Tamsin's eyes as punishment for allegedly stealing the Book of Kells, deciding to instead cut off her left hand. (AUDIO: The Book of Kells)
Personality[]
Tamsin often made references to pop culture, such as Animals Do the Funniest Things, and liked animals such as cats, (AUDIO: Nevermore) but was afraid of rats. She hated improv (AUDIO: The Book of Kells) and was nervous when she first visited an alien planet. (AUDIO: Nevermore) She proved to be poor at subterfuge and clumsy whilst panicking. (AUDIO: The Book of Kells)
Tamsin admitted that she was not quite bright. She apologised to the Doctor for "not being the sharpest pencil in the police box" and compared herself to Winnie the Pooh, the "bear of very little brain". (AUDIO: The Book of Kells) Her density was noticed by Morella Wendigo, who accused her of having a lack of either intelligence or a sense of humour and claimed to have become bored of her in seconds, (AUDIO: Nevermore), and the Doctor, who once joked that nobody could be as stupid as her. Despite this, she was able to outsmart the Monk by giving him an inferior circuit for a directional unit. (AUDIO: The Book of Kells)
Tamsin believed that all lives were equal and that the lives of one's friends should not be prized over the lives of strangers. She was willing to allow the Ice Warriors to re-ionise Mars and risk Earth in order to save the Halcyon and left the Doctor as she believed that the Monk would use time travel to make changes for the better to the universe. (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars) She helped the Monk save Earth's artwork so that humans would not lose their culture. (AUDIO: To the Death)
Skills and abilities[]
Tamsin had some skill in escapology and contortionism (AUDIO: Nevermore) and, whilst not particularly skilled at subterfuge, was able to switch out the Monk's circuit for a separate page from the Book of Kells without anybody noticing. (AUDIO: The Book of Kells)
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