Grace Holloway

Dr Grace Holloway was a San Francisco cardiologist and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Technological Advancement and Research. Her work brought her into contact with the Seventh Doctor, whose regeneration she inadvertently initiated. Following this change, she became the first companion of the Eighth Doctor.

Meeting the Doctor edit
Dr Holloway was known as "Amazing Grace" by her colleagues at Walker General Hospital, where she worked as an on-call cardiologist. The "on-call" part of the job description was particularly annoying to her live-in boyfriend, Brian.

On the evening of 30 December 1999, Grace was attending the opera when she was paged. She rushed to the hospital to deal with an unusual cardiac case that had come in — the Seventh Doctor, who had suffered minor bullet wounds and who apparently had a heart defect that caused a very irregular heart beat.

Unknown to Grace, her patient had been x-rayed earlier and appeared to have two hearts. While conducting exploratory surgery with a fibre-optic camera, she could not navigate in the Doctor's circulatory system. She inadvertently caused a fatal injury to him and he died on the operating table. Upset at losing a patient, an event witnessed by the hospital's financial supporters, Grace ordered an autopsy. Due to the incident, complicated by the corpse's subsequent disappearance from the morgue, Holloway resigned the next morning rather than be complicit in a cover-up of the events. Brian also left her, taking all his possessions — along with half the furniture.

On 31 December, while she was leaving the hospital, the Eighth Doctor followed her, claiming to be the man who had died the night before. At first Grace refused to believe him, but was convinced when he took the remains of her probe from his chest. She learned he had undergone regeneration, which had changed his appearance and personality. He was also suffering from amnesia. Hours later, he suddenly regained his memories of being the Doctor, a Time Lord. He celebrated the return of his memories by kissing Grace.

With his memories restored, the Doctor enlisted Grace to help him get a beryllium chip from the atomic clock inside the Institute for Technological Advancement and Research to repair the timing mechanism inside his TARDIS and close the Eye of Harmony. She called an ambulance operated by the Master and Chang Lee. When the Doctor realised that the Master was inside the ambulance, they escaped. Before they could do so, the Master secretly possessed Grace. Returning to the TARDIS, Grace knocked out the Doctor and put him in restraints. The Master then forcibly opened the Eye using Grace's retina (freeing her from possession and returning her human eyes) so that he could steal the Doctor's lives.