Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants (35 page)

The N
in
th
Doctor

Christopher Eccleston

‘You were fantastic. And, you know what? So was I!’

The Doctor –
The Parting of the Ways

Suffering from survivor’s guilt, a battle-hardened Doctor returns after having disappeared during the Last Great Time War. Sad and lonely in ways he has never been before, the Doctor has lost touch with his emotions; along with the reason why he travels. He is in need of a new companion, someone who can remind him of what he used to be. Enter Rose Tyler...

Rose Tyler – Billie Piper
(
Rose
to
Doomsday
and
Partners in Crime,
and
Turn Left to Journey’s End,
plus
The End of Time)

On the surface Rose appears to be a very different kind of companion from those we have been used to, but when you consider her character, she is essentially a combination of Tegan and Ace. Much like Tegan she is given a TARDIS key; we see a lot of her family; and we see her leave and return. Much like Ace she develops a deep love for the Doctor, she is from a London council estate and her back-story is almost as important as the Doctor’s, driving much of the ongoing narrative of the 2005-2006 series. In the pitch document, partly printed in the
Series One Companion
(
Doctor Who Magazine Special
), we are told that ‘she loves [the Doctor], and he loves her. Simple as that. Not a kissy-kissy kind of love, this is
deeper
’.

Rose actually meets the Doctor earlier than she knew. In
The End of Time
, just after midnight on 1st January 2005, she is walking home from a party with her mother and notices the Tenth Doctor standing in the shadows. She confuses him for a drunken party goer and tells him the year. He tells her that it will be a fantastic year – knowing full well that in March they are due to meet for the first time.

When we first meet Rose in the eponymous episode, she is working as a sales assistant in a department store called Henriks, living at home with her mother and dating Mickey Smith (although judging by the dismissive way she is with him, it does comes across as if she is merely making do, waiting for something better to come along). Upon finding the mannequins in the basement of Henriks coming to life, Rose thinks she has become the victim of a student prank, until they start attacking her – at which point a hand reaches out and grabs hold of hers. She is immediately running with the Doctor, barely having a chance to find out who this mysterious man is before he blows up her place of work. Rose resigns herself to losing her job very quickly and ends up loafing around home with nothing better to do. Even Mickey’s enthusiasm over a football match fails to excite her, until the Doctor appears at her house, having followed an Auton arm there. She drags him into the flat, wanting to know more about the night before, but his answers only confuse her more. They are both attacked by the Auton arm, and she follows him out of the flat. The Doctor is impressed by her curiosity, and the ease with which she handles his answers, but he still remains distant from her. She, however, cannot get him out of her head and tries to find out more about him on the internet. This leads her to a man called Clive who collects stories about the Doctor. She becomes totally distracted and doesn’t notice that Mickey is very clearly a plastic replica. The Doctor reappears and, amidst the chaos, removes the Auton-Mickey’s head. Rose manages to activate the fire alarm, thus evacuating the restaurant safely. She realises that Clive is right; the Doctor is clearly a dangerous man, yet still she follows him into the TARDIS, after a moment’s hesitation, and is stunned by the interior. Despite her shock, she is still concerned that Mickey may now be dead. She is annoyed that the Doctor doesn’t seem to care about this. The Doctor confronts the Nestene Consciousness, and it is Rose who actually saves the day. He then offers her the chance to travel with him, but she refuses, feeling obligated to look after Mickey, who is now a gibbering mess after his Auton encounter. The Doctor says goodbye, and Rose is left alone with Mickey, clearly already regretting her decision. However, when the TARDIS returns seconds later, and the Doctor mentions it travels in time, Rose barely hesitates and runs inside, no longer giving Mickey a second thought.

The Doctor takes her to the year five billion and Platform One to witness
The End of the World
. She appears to take the plethora of alien dignitaries in her stride, at least initially, but she is quite obviously overwhelmed at the same time. While the Doctor goes off with the sentient tree, Jabe, Rose takes a bit of time out on her own to acclimatise. Her attraction to the Doctor is obvious in this story – there is a hint of jealousy when the Doctor goes off with Jabe (a sign of things to come). Rose can be quite scatty, making very bitchy and sarcastic comments when she feels she is under attack – a good example can be seen during her encounter with Cassandra, the so-called last human. She also encounters, in this story, someone who would go on to become very important to her: the Face of Boe. At the end of this first journey she is saddened to learn that no-one noticed the end of her planet because of the machinations of Cassandra. To cheer her up the Doctor returns to her own time to demonstrate the nature of time travel. With billions of years of life left on Earth they go and get some chips; something Rose later refers to as their first date.

After taking her to the future, the Doctor promises her a trip to the past. Naturally the Doctor gets the time and place wrong, but Rose doesn’t care. She is simply amazed that it is Christmas Day all over again. Upon stepping out of the TARDIS in
The Unquiet Dead
, after taking great pleasure in changing into nineteenth century dress, she carefully places her foot into the snow, amazed by the idea of travelling into the past. With her usual bravery she chases after Sneed and Gwyneth, who appear to be stealing a dead body from the Palace Theatre, but Sneed is really an undertaker and the body has been reanimated by a Gelth, a gaseous life form.

For her troubles she is chloroformed and shoved into the hearse, only to later awake in the undertakers being menaced by a zombie, another Gelth reanimated corpse. Although clearly in fear for her life, she responds with sarcasm and gusto. She meets Charles Dickens, who is now assisting the Doctor, but barely acknowledges him – although she is aware of him, she is clearly not a fan and is unfamiliar with his works. She bonds quickly with Gwyneth although, much like Ace in
The Curse of Fenric
, she displays quite a degree of social ignorance when talking about boys – Gwyneth thinks Rose talks like a ‘wild thing’, a remark that Rose is clearly insulted by initially. Rose brings Gwyneth out of her shell a little, but Gwyneth’s psychic abilities (enhanced by the Time Rift that runs through the heart of Cardiff) enable her to see into Rose’s mind and she gets more than she bargained for, including the knowledge that Rose considers her stupid. Gwyneth also sees in Rose ‘the Big Bad Wolf’, an allusion to her forthcoming encounter with the time vortex in
The Parting of the Ways
. Her own sense of morality comes into play later when the Doctor suggests that allowing the Gelth to use dead bodies to save them just might work. Rose tells him that this is wrong, until he confronts her with the analogy of a donor card, ‘It’s a different morality’, the Doctor responds. Despite this Rose insists that Gwyneth should not be used to mediate with the Gelth. As they are surrounded by the animated corpses Rose and the Doctor make their peace. Rose tells him that she is so glad she met him, and he returns the sentiment.

The Doctor takes Rose home in
Aliens of London
, promising that she will arrive twelve hours after she left. This amazes her – to think she has experienced so much in only twelve hours – but upon returning to the flat she is met by a stunned Jackie (her mother), who bursts into tears. Rose doesn’t understand such a reaction; it is as though she hasn’t stopped out before.

Then the Doctor enters the flat and explains that it hasn’t been twelve hours, rather twelve
months
. It is now March 2006! Rose has been gone a whole year.

In the intervening months Mickey has been accused of murdering Rose, and is now something of a pariah on the Powell Estate. The police arrive to question both the Doctor and Rose, who can only explain that they have been travelling together. Everyone suspects a sexual relationship, but this idea clearly embarrasses Rose, but not as much as Jackie who slaps the Doctor. Later when she finds out that the Doctor is nine-hundred years old, Rose comments that her mother is right; it is quite an age gap.

It is now becoming clear that the Doctor is also falling for Rose – her passion and enthusiasm reminds him of the man he used to be. Unfortunately such a connection has a price, one that becomes more evident as time progresses. Considering that Mickey waited a whole year for her, Rose is incredibly dismissive of him. She is much more concerned that the Doctor might have left her (even though he gave her a TARDIS key to prove that he will return) than the fact that Mickey has learned all about the Doctor in the intervening year. Mickey calls the Doctor Rose’s new ‘boyfriend’, but Rose says the Doctor is more than that – he is much more important. In a quiet moment in the TARDIS, while the Doctor observes the news of the supposed first alien contact, Rose admits that she did miss Mickey, and although Mickey buys it, it is clear she is lying. She has never given Mickey a second thought once she stepped in the TARDIS at the end of
Rose
. She doesn’t much care for Mickey being involved – when he is explaining about the Doctor’s past with UNIT, Rose throws him a look of derision. He is definitely not welcome in Rose’s new world. Despite this, Rose’s concern for others is on display when she reaches Downing Street and sees how upset Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North (yes, you know who she is), is over witnessing a Slitheen kill and skin a man. After Rose suggests blowing up Downing Street to stop the Slitheen, Harriet points out that she is a very violent young woman, but Rose doesn’t care, she has faith that the Doctor will do whatever is necessary to save them all; even if it means sacrificing them in the process. Jackie implores the Doctor to consider Rose, but Rose is adamant that her life is unimportant. Once the Slitheen are defeated, and Rose is enticed back to the TARDIS, Jackie points out how infatuated she is with him. Rose denies it, but is soon packing her bags to continue her travels. Once again she leaves Jackie and Mickey to worry – they both know now how dangerous life with the Doctor can be.

In the next story,
Dalek
, we see a blatant example of how fickle a girl Rose really is. In this, she meets a young genius, Adam Mitchell, working in Henry van Statten’s underground base in Utah, 2012 (six years in her future). She finds that Adam reminds her somewhat of the Doctor, and draws close to him (
The Long Game
). It seems that Rose is still not entirely certain about her feelings for the Doctor – or perhaps she doesn’t think they are being fully reciprocated – and as a result she hooks on to the closest alternative. As with Mickey, she appears to be settling for second best until she can have the man of her dreams – the Doctor. Such a mercurial trait is further expanded upon when she meets Jack in
The Empty Child
.

Still, her sympathetic nature is on display when she hears the sound of the ‘Metaltron’ being tortured, and demands that Adam take her to see it. At this point she knows nothing of the Daleks and their part in the Last Great Time War (but she soon discovers it all), and fails to realise that the Dalek is manipulating her when it talks of its pain. She reaches out to comfort it, and in so doing gives it the chronon energy (a safe radiation picked up through travelling in the time vortex) it needs to rebuild itself. Later when she is trapped by the Dalek, and the Doctor blames himself, Rose tells him ‘it wasn’t your fault’, a further example of her concern for the emotional well-being of others. The Dalek gets more than it bargained for by sampling Rose’s DNA, and picks up some of her compassion, to the point where she is able to talk the Dalek out of killing, and even assists it in committing suicide, rather than live on as the last of its kind. When the Doctor confronts the Dalek, armed with a gun, Rose is shocked by what the Doctor has become – the Dalek merely wants to feel the warmth of the sun on its skin (it has opened up its outer casing to show the mutated Kaled form inside), but the Doctor is determined to kill it. Rose thinks it is the Doctor who has become the monster. Her horror and shock snaps the Doctor out of his rage, and he is unable to express himself clearly, such is the emotional damage done to him by the events of the Time War.

With Adam in tow they arrive on Satellite 5 (
The Long Game
). Rose initially finds Adam’s awe amusing, until he faints at the site of Earth as seen from an observation window. The Doctor points out that Adam’s
her
boyfriend, and Rose looks at the unconscious Adam dismissively; ‘not anymore,’ she says.

A curious, and almost inexplicable, thing happens at the end of this story. Adam is found to be using technology from the year 200,000 to profit himself when he returns to 2012 – the Doctor is greatly angered by this and promptly returns Adam home, complete with the cranial port that opens a hole in his forehead to his brain. The Doctor claims he only takes the best, a moment of pride for Rose. She seems uncertain about leaving Adam behind, but the Doctor’s comment settles it for her, and she rather smugly returns to the TARDIS with the Doctor.