December Talking Meme: Jackie and Rose Tyler

[selenak]

With Doctor Who everywhere for the anniversary, literally on a global level, it's perhaps easy to lose sight of the fact that in 2005, when the show was relaunched, it was by no means guaranteed it would find a new audience. Especially considering the previous attempt to bring back Doctor Who - the movie of doom - had failed miserably. And the

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[selenak]

Rose: her exit started something which I don't think is a good New Who tradition, to which, that something horrible traumatic must happen to force Companion and Doctor apart. As opposed to, you know, the Companion simply deciding to do something else than travelling with the Doctor, which is what happens in most cases in Classic Who. (Where a tragic Companion exit was the exception, not the rule.) This isn't an RTD exclusive thing - Moffat did it, too, with Amy and Rory. The sole New Who Companion who gets to leave on their own volition is Martha. But with Rose it was the first time this happened. And I hadn't liked what led up to it, either, the Rose/Doctor relationship becoming a straightforward romance. I would have preferred it if Rose, after meeting Sarah Jane and after Reinette, realised that the Doctor and she were seeing their relationship in two different ways, and that rather than setting herself up for frustration it was better to leave and get on with her life (in short, not dissimilar from Martha's exit). My other Rose related frustration was that her return in s4 and ending with a human Doctor really felt like fanservice (and Davies himself, in The Writer's Tale, admits he was never satisfied with those final Rose scenes, no matter how often he rewrote them) instead of having their place in the overall story.

But that's water under the bridge now. As mentioned in other entries, I was surprised how delighted I was to see Billie Piper again, and I thought she was fabulous in the anniversary special!