There are a lot of things that have puzzled me about the EDA range since I started reading the books back in 2003. What is the point of the Sabbath Arc? Just what colour is the Doctor's jacket? Paul Magrs - why? But above and beyond all such considerations, even more baffling than the question of why my copy of Legacy of the Daleks has thirty pages missing from the middle but still seems such a very l-o-n-g book, is, just why is Anji Kapoor so unpopular?

Having made the decision to catch up with the EDAs back in 2002, I was determined to avoid as many possible spoilers as I could (which turned out to be good practice for the subsequent blitzkrieg of information about the new TV series). There were some things I knew, though, which I hadn't managed to avoid up to that point - mainly the big one about Gallifrey being destroyed in The Ancestor Cell, and also by extension the third Doctor being killed off in baffling two-parter Interference. I also picked up a general sense that the Sabbath Arc was unpopular and unwieldy, a claim I would heartily endorse at the moment, unless the remaining books in that sequence (Emotional Chemistry, which I've now started, and Sometime Never...) turn the whole thing into one brilliant cohesive whole - if they do, then fair enough, but at the moment I suspect we are heading for a climax of The Trial of a Timelord proportions. In which case I fear that nothing can prevent the catharsis of spurious morality.

But although I would concur with the prevailing wisdom that Sabbath and his plottings make for some very turgid books, I am at a real loss to understand the other generally-held belief, that companion Anji Kapoor was rather poor, at best a missed opportunity and at worst a mistake. Having now completed the entire run of Anji's adventures, from the glorious romp that is Escape Velocity through to the inconclusive disappointment that is Timeless, I have to say that I think Anji is somebody just a little bit special, and although she may not have left the Doctor by strutting out of an abandoned warehouse moaning about how many Daleks have been killed, I think her absence will be felt just as keenly. Well, by me anyway...

I'm old enough to remember when the announcement that those scandalous New Adventures planned to introduce a brand new, non-TV companion, was quite something. As it turned out, of course, it was the best thing they could have done, both in terms of establishing early on (it was only their tenth release) just how much freedom they intended to have from the TV show, and also because the companion thus created was the now-legendary 'Professor' Bernice Kane nee Summerfield. The fact that thirteen years later, 'Benny' is still going strong, featuring in her own ranges of both novels and audio adventures, demonstrates just how effective and versatile a creation she is.

Now, OK, I'm not for a moment claiming that Big Finish will shortly be announcing their new audio series detailing the further adventures of Ms Anji Kapoor - even allowing for the fact that she ends Timeless unexpectedly adopting a mysterious, two-hearted alien child, and her time-travelling black dog, Anji's life (with the exception of endless adventuring in time & space obviously) is of the determinedly routine and ordered variety. Other than Benny, the only ex-Who companion to ever manage a life after the show has been Sarah Jane Smith, in many ways the Frank Sinatra of Who if her number of comebacks are anything to go by. There was of course K9 & Company (stop honking) back in 1981 and an anniversary romp in The Five Doctors a couple of years later. And beyond the TV, Sarah has met the seventh Doctor in the comic strip (Train Flight); the eighth Doctor in the EDAs (Interference); and has even starred in her own mini-series of audio adventures. Thankfully, for Sarah, the always slightly absurd label of 'investigative journalist' has worked to her advantage, particularly in the audios, as at least giving the character some sense of the adventurer, some premise to hang the stories on.

I don't think that could legitimately apply to my beloved Anji. Based on her temporary return to a normal life in the first few pages of Time Zero, Anji will always gravitate back to her old career as a futures analyst, a player on the markets, etc. And although that 'Buy, Buy, Sell, Sell' world may look all very exciting in Wall Street and Capital City (does anybody else actually remember that, or have I just made it up?) I can't see it making a very satisfying dramatic set-up for an Anji mini-series. Even given the tempting opportunity to call the last episode "Buy, Buy, Bye, Bye", it would just be a mistake.

So, given that Anji lacks the user-friendly appeal of a Bernice of a Sarah, why do I like her so much? Well, who can say. My all-time favourite TV companion was Tegan Jovanka, which may have been down to the uniform, the leather mini-skirt, or my hormones, or may have been because she was a very strong and dominant personality; and in some ways Anji Kapoor has that same straight-talking sense. Where Anji scores over Tegan is in the additional 'freedom' for 'real' characterisation offered by the books (not to mention twenty years more movement towards equality). Tegan at times comes across as just a moaner, because the restrictions of the TV show sometimes required the Doctor to more or less just shut her up so he can get on and save the day.

In the books, however, there is more scope, and a longer 'running-time', to explore the personalities of the characters. Anji blatantly isn't a doe-eyed, faithful puppy dog, trailing after the Doctor because she can't so much as make a cup of coffee unsupervised. Like several TV companions, she begins her travels by losing somebody very dear to her - on TV, we've had numerous orphans, although Nyssa of Traken probably scoops the award, having lost her entire planet; and Escape Velocity powerfully wrong-foots the reader by weaving a story in which Dave, Anji's boyfriend, unexpectedly dies three-quarters of the way into the book.

One of the criticisms levelled against Anji seems to be that she is forever going on about poor dead Dave, and although I've joked about this myself, I actually think it works a lot better than on the TV show where any such bereavements would be shrugged off by the start of the next story. Obviously that was, again, due to the requirements of the format but in the books it would be a cheat, and a mistake, to just dump that emotion and bang on with the next adventure. OK, sometimes it feels like a token bit of grief, a mention of Dave thrown in almost as if 'grieving lover' is Anji's label in the same way as 'investigative journalist' or 'Australian stewardess' was for her predecessors. But when used properly, it can help deliver some very powerful moments. Indeed, the story Hope (which despite being nowhere near as flashy and sensational as the two books that come before it, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and Mad Dogs and Englishmen, remains one of the very best in the entire range) is as much about Anji's grief as it is about a mad metal man's attempts to rule his world.

In fact, Hope is a very good book for Anji, demonstrating very effectively that she is a person in her own right, rather than just a foil/companion/assistant/wife/prosti-- well, er, rather than just being one of the Doctor's hangers-on. Offered the opportunity to clone Dave, in return for covertly taping some footage of the TARDIS' interior, she wrestles with the decision, but soon accepts the offer. Yes, she knows she's betraying the Doctor's trust, but her list of priorities doesn't automatically always put the Doctor at the top, and she feels she owes more to Dave than to the Doctor on this occasion. The fact that in confronting the betrayal, the Doctor understands why Anji did what she did, only serves to highlight that Anji is her own woman, and that the Doctor knows it.

Another of Anji's most powerful traits is her organisational skills, and her need to be doing something. Marooned in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, with the Doctor lapsed into a blue funk and worse than useless, it is Anji who sets about scanning the news for relevant sightings and occurences relating to their investigations. Again, on the planet Hitchemus when the Doctor has gone native and trying to behave like a Tiger, it is Anji who scours the library archives trying to work out what is happening.

Given that her fellow travellers consist of an increasingly erratic Doctor, and the unflinchingly loyal and resolutely horny Fitz, it's perhaps no wonder that Anji's niche, both in terms of character and in terms of her role from the writers' point of view, is to be the organiser, the one who asks the questions, and at times states the obvious. Not questions in the traditional "What is it?What are you doing?One lump or two?" sense, but more in the sense of questioning why they are there, whether the Doctor should be doing what he's doing, even questions of morality. In the more recent books, such as Reckless Engineering, the Doctor seems to be lacking his normal compassion, prepared to sacrifice not just lives but whole worlds in pursuit of the ultimate goal of restoring order to the timelines. And just as the reader can have trouble really caring about that kind of lofty worldsview, so Anji (and to be fair, even Fitz, when he's not drunk) puts over that more human perspective. While the Doctor is deliberately not getting to know the people of the world he is about to erase, Anji is in the thick of it, even to the extent of coming to, if not understand at least empathise, with people to whom cannibalism and death and a world of primitivism are facts of daily life.

At their best, the companions of Who can not only be interesting, 'real', fully-developed people in their own right, they can also help us to know and understand, or alternatively know and not understand at all, the Doctor. Most recently, Rose Tyler has not only been the vehicle by which we have all fallen back in love with the Doctor on TV, she has also argued with him, putting her most human of viewpoints against him at his most alien, and she has even managed to change him. Not literally (although that could be said to be down to her too, all that messing about with the time vortex), but in the sense that he has moved from being a rather abrupt loner, to a man who really does enjoy what he does. Comparing the spiky solitude of Rose to the time-team smugness of Boomtown clearly marks how much he has changed.

The same is true of Anji, at least in part. OK, she hasn't restored the eighth Doctor to being that man full of life and energy and enthusiasm that he was when he arrived (and hopefully will be when he leaves) but she has at least done her bit in terms of making him stop and think. When they row in Domino Effect, even though it's a row the Doctor has deliberately started so that Anji will leave him alone, Anji argues from a reasonable and human point of view; again in Timeless, she is the there aboard the TARDIS to shake the Doctor out of a burgeoning apathy and depression, to chivvy him along.

At the end of Timeless, Anji looks at Fitz and the Doctor and regards them as "the men in her life", and that's a very good way of looking at it. Although the Doctor may carry the weight of the universe on his shoulders more than Fitz, and although Fitz may sleep around more than the Doctor, they are basically very similar people - oddball misfits, good-natured, mutually loyal. And Anji's role has been, amongst other things, to keep them in check, to keep them focused. Fitz' loyalty to the Doctor is admirable, but Anji's constant questioning, her determination to have her own opinion and make up her own mind, are very desirable traits too, and even when the stories have been rather lacking (particularly recently) their effect on the regulars has been interesting to see.

So now Anji is back in her own time, back to the normal life that has been all she's really wanted for such a long time. She may not have been showy, or sassy, or a bundle of laughs, but she's been honest, and true, and so brave. She's been herself, and she's been lovely. She's been a star.

Anji Kapoor, have a fantastic life!