Hex (Doctor Who)

Hex
Doctor Who character
Affiliated Seventh Doctor
Species Human
Home planet Earth
Home era 2021
First appearance The Harvest
Last appearance Signs and Wonders
Portrayed by Philip Olivier (voice)

Thomas Hector Schofield, nicknamed Hex, is a fictional character played by Philip Olivier in a series of audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. A staff nurse working for St. Gart's Hospital in London in the year 2021, he is a companion of the Seventh Doctor.

Biography

Hex first appeared in the play The Harvest (2004), where he met the Doctor and Ace while the two were investigating signs of alien activity at St. Gart's. Ace was going by her real name of McShane and working in Human Resources, striking up a conversation with Hex to gain information on the mysterious C-programme. When Hex gave Ace a ride to her "lodgings" in Shoreditch, he spied her going into a police box at Totter's Lane. Since Hex was hammering on the door and demanding to know what was going on, Ace let him inside the TARDIS, and Hex's world was transformed forever.

Hex aided the Doctor and Ace in their investigations at St. Gart's, uncovering the latest invasion scheme of the Cybermen and helping the time travellers defeat their old foes. At the adventure's conclusion, Hex asked if he could accompany them in their travels. The Doctor accepted him as his newest companion.

Schofield, who hated his real name and preferred to go by Hex, was incredulous of the strange things he saw but adjusted rapidly and accepted the evidence of his eyes. As a result, although he admitted that he did not know what he was getting into when he asked to join the Doctor, the Doctor and Ace seemed confident that he would be able to cope.

Hex's first real trip in the TARDIS was to an Earth city floating in deep space, centred on Uluru, where he encountered beings from the mythical Dreamtime and the alien Galyari. Once again, despite initial culture shock, he adapted quickly to his circumstances and, with Ace, ably assisted the Doctor in persuading the Dreaming to stop consuming the human inhabitants of the city (Dreamtime, 2005). He aided the Doctor in overthrowing a corrupt regime in LIVE 34 and uncovered the truth behind supernatural murders in Night Thoughts, developing a slightly flirtatious relationship with Ace.

However, after his first trip into Earth's past involved him directly in the events of the Siege of Drogheda and the Sack of Wexford (The Settling, 2006), the traumatic events he experienced caused him to realise that things do not automatically get better because the Doctor shows up and also placed him in a situation where he had to kill for the first time. He became unsure of whether he wanted to continue his travels in the TARDIS and asked Ace if she would join him if he ever left.

It was revealed in Thicker than Water (2005) that the Seventh Doctor knew that Hex was the son of Cassandra, a young woman whom the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe met in the late 1990s. Cassie left her son (whom she called Tommy) with her mother while she set off for London to find her fortune. Cassie then became involved in a blood feud between the owners of the vampire-owned club "The Dusk" and Nimrod, an agent from a covert organisation known as the Forge. On the advice of the Sixth Doctor, Cassie reluctantly abandoned the young Tommy when she became a human-vampire hybrid (Project: Twilight, 2001) until the Doctor could find a cure for her; before he could, she was hunted down, captured, and brainwashed by Nimrod to become his replacement in the field, code-name Artemis. However, when her conditioning was broken by Evelyn, Cassie turned against the Forge and was killed by Nimrod. (Project: Lazarus, 2003). The Angel of Scutari (2009) finds Hex meeting his hero Florence Nightingale. But at the end of the story, he gets shot and the Doctor rushes him into the TARDIS to take him back to where they met: St. Gart's Hospital. When they arrive, they encounter Nimrod, and his facilities successfully treat the near-fatal wound. Once he's gained his trust, Nimrod reveals to Hex that the Doctor knew his mother and watched her die. (Project Destiny, 2010). Angered, Hex chooses to stop traveling in the TARDIS. But in the next story, A Death in the Family, the Doctor apologizes to Hex and takes him to meet Evelyn, who tells him everything she knows about his mother.

Hex continued to travel with the Doctor and Ace, but he also believes that he has cheated death and suspects that death may return to collect this debt. Finally, Hex discovers that, as his name suggests, he was cursed from the beginning. His life was that of a pawn, in an eternal game between ancient Elder Gods. (Gods and Monsters, 2012) The wound he sustained at Scutari was indeed fatal, but Weyland, the being manipulating him, prolonged his life to make his final moves against the equally powerful Fenric. In an artificial world, outside time and space, Weyland was destroyed, and Hex's fatal wound returned. In a showdown within the TARDIS, Fenric was almost destroyed but managed to possess Hex's dying body. Rather than living as a god or dying on the ground, Hex hurled himself out of the TARDIS, dissolving himself and Fenric into the void. However, a final scene suggests that Hex, Weyland, and Fenric may have survived, at least in some form.

List of appearances

Audios

Short Stories

External links

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