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.
As part of Team TARDIS, Yaz often made use of her investigative skills to help the Doctor solve problems; versatile in the area, Yaz either questioned people for information or investigated items of interest. In addition, Yaz also had training in helping reassure and calm victims and survivors of horrible incidents. This often came in handy during adventures where they needed to gain the confidence and trust of people who could help out.
Biography
Early life
Yasmin was born in late 1997 or in 1998, (PROSE: The Secret in Vault 13) the daughter of Hakim Khan and his wife, Najia. (TV: Arachnids in the UK)
Yaz begged her parents for a pet rabbit but was not allowed one because Hakim was allergic to animal fur. Instead she had a cuddly toy named Mister Hoppy. (PROSE: The Secret in Vault 13)
Education
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 after Taylor Grant called Yaz an "Islamist terrorist". (PROSE: The Good Doctor) Yasmin was also bullied by Izzy Flint, who left Yasmin feeling afraid for a whole year. (TV: The Witchfinders)
In Year 10, she snuck into Danny Biswas' house through the window. (TV: Rosa)
Work with Hallamshire Police
Around 2016, Yasmin 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)
Meeting the Doctor
As a trainee on second-year probation, (TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth) at the age of twenty, (PROSE: The Secret in Vault 13) 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.
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In hiding, Yaz and Ryan find a moment of solace against the racist culture of 1950s Alabama. (TV: Rosa)
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 embarrassed 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. A lost young girl called Tondi took a shine to Yaz as she promised to help her find her mother while the Doctor, Graham, and Ryan investigated the area to see why it was destroyed. When two super-soldiers called Tumat and Kraytos appeared, Yaz ran with Tondi despite wanting to help the Doctor. Safely out of the fighting, Yaz and Tondi hid from a group of drunken revellers, celebrating the collapse of society, as they attempted to find Tondi's aunt instead. (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)
On Proxima Ceti, Yasmin witnessed the Doctor outwitting carnivorous chessmen. (PROSE: The Secret in Vault 13)
The Doctor and her team were tasked with preventing the Genesis Seed stored in the secret Vault 13 within the Galactic Seed Vault from falling into the hands of Nightshade. (PROSE: The Secret in Vault 13)
Team TARDIS found themselves on Seffilun 27 in the 67th century. When they unearthed a sonic mine that the Doctor could not disable, all four were rendered unconscious. They were recovered by the medical ship Tsuranga and Yaz woke up after several days. Bound to Resus One, the ship was attacked by a Pting that Yaz helped defeat. (TV: The Tsuranga Conundrum)
For Yasmin's birthday, the Doctor brought her a Sontaran Frosted Boom Cake from Sontar, two zeppelins from the London Blitz and a candelabra from Paris. (PROSE: Dr. Thirteenth)
Yaz returned home to celebrate her grandmother Umbreen's birthday. Umbreen told Yaz she was her favourite granddaughter, and gave her a watch with a shattered face that was precious to her. However, Umbreen did not elaborate on the sentimental value of the watch, nor the lifelong accomplishments she spoke of. This caused Yaz to grow curious and she asked the Doctor to take her to see Umbreen when she was younger.
With the watch being put into the telepathic circuits, the TARDIS took the Doctor, Yaz, Ryan and Graham to a rural area in the Punjab on 17 August 1947, though Yaz had been expecting to be taken to Lahore in the 1950s from what her grandmother had told her of her youth. There they met Prem, who offered to take Yaz and the rest of Team TARDIS to Umbreen's house.
Upon arriving at Umbreen's house, Yaz claimed to be the sister of a third cousin of Umbreen's uncle Malik from fifteen valleys away. However, her confusion intensified when she learned that Umbreen was engaged to Prem, who looked nothing like her grandfather in the photos she had seen. Prem was also Hindu, whereas all of Yaz's family was Muslim. Realising she might not know her nani as well as she thought, Graham comforted her.
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Yaz attends the first wedding of her grandmother. (TV: Demons of the Punjab)
Yaz received henna art from her great-grandmother Hasna and spent the night before Umbreen's wedding with them and the Doctor. The following morning, she witnessed her grandmother marry Prem at the Pakistani border with India, tying their hands together as part of a Hindu wedding rite. Later, she witnessed how Prem gave Umbreen his watch, the face shattering as he passed it over.
When the Doctor realised that Manish was a murderer, Umbreen fled to Lahore. While she was taking her possessions, Yaz found a map with Sheffield marked on it, with Umbreen explaining how she wished to travel to the "exotic" city.
Back at the TARDIS, she and the Doctor spoke of Umbreen's life yet to come. She returned home to Umbreen in 2018 again. With henna still on her hands, Umbreen once again expressed distaste for her mother's designs. Yaz asked her if she was happy with her life and Yaz's grandfather; Umbreen said she was and expressed her love for Sheffield. Offering to tell Yaz the story of the watch, Yaz declined as she knew how much pain it had caused Umbreen. The two affirmed their love for each other once more. (TV: Demons of the Punjab)
Psychological profile
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)
Yasmine was best known for her strong will. Despite numerous racial slurs hurled at her during the course of her life, Yaz refused to let it get her down. Instead she worked hard to be the better person that those who looked down on her. (PROSE: The Good Doctor, TV: Rosa, The Witchfinders) Though she was bitter at the memory of such things costing her friends. (PROSE: The Good Doctor)
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) Her family liaison training helped her to provide support to those recently bereaved. (TV: The Witchfinders) She was also skilled in helping calm people by reassuring them of something they believed in already. (TV: It Takes You Away)
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) Yaz was quite good at keeping herself from making verbal slip-ups when visiting the past, especially if it would affect her future. (TV: Demons of the Punjab)
Yasmin had a lovely singing voice. (PROSE: The Good Doctor)
Behind the scenes
- Yaz is the first televised companion of South Asian descent.
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