Beatrix MacMillan, or simply Trix, is a fictional character in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels based upon the British science fiction television series, Doctor Who. The Eighth Doctor first met her in the novel Time Zero by Justin Richards, but it was not until the novel Timeless by Stephen Cole that she went on to become one of his companions. The canonicity of the novels with respect to the television series, like other Doctor Who spin-offs, is open to interpretation.

Trix's name may be a reference to Tricia McMillan a character in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, who was a script editor on Doctor Who and wrote a number of stories for the series.

Character history

The details of Trix's life before becoming involved with the Doctor have never been made clear, but it seems likely that she was a con artist, possibly involved in sex work at some point. In The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin she at one point evades arrest by police, who know her by the name "Patricia Joanne Pullman" and are seeking her for the murder of Anthony Charles Macmillan (suggesting that the name she uses while travelling in the TARDIS is an alias).

When she first met the Doctor, she was posing as a descendant of Tsar Nicholas II, a role that the Doctor's then-nemesis Sabbath hired her to play. At the end of the novel, she stowed away in the TARDIS, making brief appearances in some subsequent stories but managing to avoid detection by the Doctor and his companions until Timeless.

Possessing several character flaws and fleeing her unpleasant past, Trix is among the Doctor's more troubled companions. She is rather materialistic (a trait which causes particular problems in Emotional Chemistry by Simon A. Forward) as well as deceptive. Although her expertise in the art of disguise has proved useful at several points in her adventures with the Doctor, it also left her vulnerable to the allure of an alien that offered her the ability to remake her body at will in Halflife by Mark Michalowski.

In The Gallifrey Chronicles it is revealed that she has been collaborating with the Doctor's former companion Anji Kapoor (who left the TARDIS shortly after Trix was discovered) passing Anji information about the future on her returns to contemporary Earth, enabling Anji to invest accordingly in her job as a stockbroker. Also in that novel, she began a romantic relationship with her fellow companion Fitz Kreiner, and the pair made plans to stop travelling with the Doctor and settle for a while on contemporary Earth using some of the proceeds. However, the novel ends before revealing whether they eventually went through with this plan.

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