Why Charlotte Pollard Pwns Rose Tyler (Spoilers!)
Who_Daily Link: < a href="http://persiflage-1.livejournal.com/303475.html">Why Charlotte Pollard Pwns Rose Tyler by < lj user=persiflage_1> (Spoilers for Charley's audios, including Patient Zero, Paper Cuts & Blue Forgotten Planet)
My CDs of the final two Sixth Doctor & Charley audios arrived from Big Finish yesterday, and I listened to 'Paper Cuts' and 'Blue Forgotten Planet' back to back during the afternoon.
I love Big Finish - they gave the Eighth Doctor a chance to have more adventures after the TV Movie didn't win enough support to give Paul McGann a chance to play Eight on screen. And they've caused many fans to reassess Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor in light of a production team that doesn't mess him about with shoddy scripts and all the other tom-foolery that went on in CB's brief era.
And they've created some fascinating and endearing companions: Evelyn Smythe, Hex Schofield, and Lucie Miller have all won my heart. But the first audio companion to grab my heart and mind was Miss Charlotte Elspeth Pollard, known to her friends as Charley.
Charley was the first companion to fall in love with the Doctor and have that love acknowledged by the production team. She is the prototype for Russell T Davies' Rose Tyler (Charley's even blonde, like Rose) - Charley's at an impressionable age when she encounters the Eighth Doctor, who then proceeds to blow her mind AND save her life (in 'Storm Warning'), just like Rose and the Ninth Doctor in 'Rose'.
But for all their similarities there's a big difference between Charley and Rose: Charley grew up! Even as far back as 'Neverland', Charley proved to the Doctor how much she'd grown up - in fandom it's known as the Wendy Grew Up Speech because Charley compares herself to Wendy Darling, and the Eighth Doctor to Peter Pan when she decides that *she* should face the Time Lords over the problem of her continued existence and its effect on the Web of Time.
But Charley's growing up doesn't stop there. In 'The Girl Who Never Was', she decides to stop travelling with the Doctor because of his reaction (or non-reaction) to the death of C'rizz, the alien who'd been travelling with them from 'The Creed of Kromon' up to 'Absolution' - almost the entire time they were in the Divergent Universe and then back in our Universe as well. But when the Doctor tries to bring her back to Singapore on New Year's Day 1931 (where she was heading when she boarded the R101 airship and met the Doctor), they get caught up in another adventure and Charley ends up stranded on an island in the year 500,002. She manages to build a makeshift crystal telegraph and sends out an SOS repeatedly into space, hoping that someone, preferably the Doctor, will rescue her. And he does - but it's an earlier incarnation - the Sixth Doctor, rather than the Eighth. She opts to travel with him - even though he's not exactly the man with whom she fell in love - and they grow fond of each other, despite Charley's lies making Six suspicious of her (she lies to hide the fact that she's travelled with his later incarnation, because she knows enough about the Web of Time to know that she shouldn't be travelling with him.)
And then Charley runs into Mila ('Patient Zero') - a secret inhabitant of the TARDIS who's been hiding aboard the ship for centuries in an invisible, non-corporeal form ever since escaping from the Daleks, who'd held her prisoner and experimented on her with bio-engineered viruses. Mila is able to infect Charley with her own afflictions because the TARDIS doesn't protect Charley from biological infections as she does the other companions (it's hinted that this is because of the temporal paradoxes that surround Charley, which the TARDIS can sense and doesn't like), and so Mila takes on Charley's physical form, and leaves with the Doctor (at the end of 'Patient Zero') while Charley remains with the Viyrans who are able to cure her and with whom she works until they locate the Doctor again (in 'Blue Forgotten Planet').
Meanwhile, Mila-as-Charley has been travelling with the Sixth Doctor for years - even longer than Charley herself did, until she sacrifices herself to save the whole of Earth from a virus with which the Viyrans (who are dedicated to wiping out all viruses from the universe) accidentally infected the whole of humanity. And since the Sixth Doctor had thrown both Mila-as-Charley and Charley off the TARDIS because he couldn't tell them apart and felt he couldn't trust either one of them to tell him the truth once the real Charley revealed that she was a companion of a future incarnation of him, Charley chooses to help the Viyrans make the Doctor forget what's happened. You see the Viyrans are so secretive about their work that they will alter the memories of anyone who has any knowledge about the viruses they spend their lives cleaning up - but of course the Doctor's mind isn't so easily over-ruled as most people's. So Charley talks to the Doctor and tells him specific details about his future knowing that he won't *want* to remember (because it's never a good idea for anyone to know too much about their future, even - especially! - a Time Lord!), which will make it easier for the Viyrans to alter his memories. And then Charley leaves the Doctor for real and by her own choice, remaining with the Viyrans while the Doctor goes off to a leisure planet and recalls his companion, Mila - Charley having made the decision that Six should remember his adventures with her as having been with Mila (including a physical description of Mila). At this point Charley's future is uncertain - she's a long way from home both literally and metaphorically and may never get back to her family - but she made a personal sacrifice for the greater good, which is something Rose Tyler could never do.
The problem is that Rose Tyler never grows up - oh, she gets older, but she doesn't mature emotionally. When the Tenth Doctor speaks to her - after she's been trapped in Pete's World and he contacts her to say goodbye, she has this conversation:
Rose: Can't you come through?
Doctor: The whole thing would fracture. Two universes would collapse.
Rose: So?
This exchange sums up Rose perfectly. She doesn't give a damn about the potential for two universes to collapse, all she cares about is getting what she wants - to be with the Doctor again. The only reason she went back to save the Ninth Doctor in 'Parting of the Ways' was because ordinary life was boring and unbearable and not worth bothering with after the excitement and adventure of travels in Time and Space. And while I can understand that to a certain extent, it's Rose's attitude to Mickey and her mother, and her sublime indifference for the fate of the future Earth that really upsets me - she doesn't *care* whether the Earth is saved in the future - all she wants is to get back to the Doctor so they can carry on travelling together.
And she comes back in S4. She builds a Dimension Cannon and blasts her way back through the walls between the Universes, supposedly so that she can warn the Doctor about 'the stars going out' - but if that was all she wanted, she'd have tracked down Sarah Jane, or found a way to get a message to her to give to the Doctor. But that's not what she wants - she wants to be with the Doctor again, so she repeatedly uses the Dimension Cannon to find him - even though the Doctor had warned her about the dangers of trying to return to this universe. But Rose doesn't care about the safety of the Universe - Rose wants what she wants and she'll do anything to get it, and damn the consequences. The concept of making a personal sacrifice for the greater good is utterly alien to Rose Tyler - she's just like Peter Pan, she hasn't grown up and cannot accept responsibility for her actions. She couldn't make the kind of sacrifice that Charley made because Rose doesn't want the Doctor to forget her, or even travel with someone else instead of her - if it had been up to her, he'd have spent the remainder of his lives travelling solo (and no doubt weeping nightly into his pillow).
Not only is Charley a better realised character than Rose, but Big Finish's writers are better than New Who's because the Big Finish team have given us a Doctor/Companion love story that is realistic and doesn't leave the companion looking like a clingy, whiny, selfish, thoughtless, self-centred brat. Yes, Charley's devastated that it's Six who finds her, not Eight - but she still cares about the Doctor and wants to keep him safe, so much so that she and Mila choose to let themselves back into the TARDIS (near the end of 'Blue Forgotten Planet') to ensure that if he is going to die (as seems possible), he won't die alone, and then Mila - who by now is such a perfect copy of Charley that not even the Viyrans can tell them apart - sacrifices herself to save the Doctor and Charley. And then Charley chooses to sacrifice the Doctor's memories of her so that he can go back out into the Universe and do what he does best: look after it, because while he keeps resisting the Viyrans wiping his memories of the virus that infected the humans, they will keep him aboard their ship until he does forget. For Charley, the most important thing is that the Doctor gets on with his life - she understands that the Doctor's world doesn't revolve around her, no matter how much she loves him, not even though he loves her in return. It's a lesson Rose still needs to learn.
My CDs of the final two Sixth Doctor & Charley audios arrived from Big Finish yesterday, and I listened to 'Paper Cuts' and 'Blue Forgotten Planet' back to back during the afternoon.
I love Big Finish - they gave the Eighth Doctor a chance to have more adventures after the TV Movie didn't win enough support to give Paul McGann a chance to play Eight on screen. And they've caused many fans to reassess Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor in light of a production team that doesn't mess him about with shoddy scripts and all the other tom-foolery that went on in CB's brief era.
And they've created some fascinating and endearing companions: Evelyn Smythe, Hex Schofield, and Lucie Miller have all won my heart. But the first audio companion to grab my heart and mind was Miss Charlotte Elspeth Pollard, known to her friends as Charley.
Charley was the first companion to fall in love with the Doctor and have that love acknowledged by the production team. She is the prototype for Russell T Davies' Rose Tyler (Charley's even blonde, like Rose) - Charley's at an impressionable age when she encounters the Eighth Doctor, who then proceeds to blow her mind AND save her life (in 'Storm Warning'), just like Rose and the Ninth Doctor in 'Rose'.
But for all their similarities there's a big difference between Charley and Rose: Charley grew up! Even as far back as 'Neverland', Charley proved to the Doctor how much she'd grown up - in fandom it's known as the Wendy Grew Up Speech because Charley compares herself to Wendy Darling, and the Eighth Doctor to Peter Pan when she decides that *she* should face the Time Lords over the problem of her continued existence and its effect on the Web of Time.
But Charley's growing up doesn't stop there. In 'The Girl Who Never Was', she decides to stop travelling with the Doctor because of his reaction (or non-reaction) to the death of C'rizz, the alien who'd been travelling with them from 'The Creed of Kromon' up to 'Absolution' - almost the entire time they were in the Divergent Universe and then back in our Universe as well. But when the Doctor tries to bring her back to Singapore on New Year's Day 1931 (where she was heading when she boarded the R101 airship and met the Doctor), they get caught up in another adventure and Charley ends up stranded on an island in the year 500,002. She manages to build a makeshift crystal telegraph and sends out an SOS repeatedly into space, hoping that someone, preferably the Doctor, will rescue her. And he does - but it's an earlier incarnation - the Sixth Doctor, rather than the Eighth. She opts to travel with him - even though he's not exactly the man with whom she fell in love - and they grow fond of each other, despite Charley's lies making Six suspicious of her (she lies to hide the fact that she's travelled with his later incarnation, because she knows enough about the Web of Time to know that she shouldn't be travelling with him.)
And then Charley runs into Mila ('Patient Zero') - a secret inhabitant of the TARDIS who's been hiding aboard the ship for centuries in an invisible, non-corporeal form ever since escaping from the Daleks, who'd held her prisoner and experimented on her with bio-engineered viruses. Mila is able to infect Charley with her own afflictions because the TARDIS doesn't protect Charley from biological infections as she does the other companions (it's hinted that this is because of the temporal paradoxes that surround Charley, which the TARDIS can sense and doesn't like), and so Mila takes on Charley's physical form, and leaves with the Doctor (at the end of 'Patient Zero') while Charley remains with the Viyrans who are able to cure her and with whom she works until they locate the Doctor again (in 'Blue Forgotten Planet').
Meanwhile, Mila-as-Charley has been travelling with the Sixth Doctor for years - even longer than Charley herself did, until she sacrifices herself to save the whole of Earth from a virus with which the Viyrans (who are dedicated to wiping out all viruses from the universe) accidentally infected the whole of humanity. And since the Sixth Doctor had thrown both Mila-as-Charley and Charley off the TARDIS because he couldn't tell them apart and felt he couldn't trust either one of them to tell him the truth once the real Charley revealed that she was a companion of a future incarnation of him, Charley chooses to help the Viyrans make the Doctor forget what's happened. You see the Viyrans are so secretive about their work that they will alter the memories of anyone who has any knowledge about the viruses they spend their lives cleaning up - but of course the Doctor's mind isn't so easily over-ruled as most people's. So Charley talks to the Doctor and tells him specific details about his future knowing that he won't *want* to remember (because it's never a good idea for anyone to know too much about their future, even - especially! - a Time Lord!), which will make it easier for the Viyrans to alter his memories. And then Charley leaves the Doctor for real and by her own choice, remaining with the Viyrans while the Doctor goes off to a leisure planet and recalls his companion, Mila - Charley having made the decision that Six should remember his adventures with her as having been with Mila (including a physical description of Mila). At this point Charley's future is uncertain - she's a long way from home both literally and metaphorically and may never get back to her family - but she made a personal sacrifice for the greater good, which is something Rose Tyler could never do.
The problem is that Rose Tyler never grows up - oh, she gets older, but she doesn't mature emotionally. When the Tenth Doctor speaks to her - after she's been trapped in Pete's World and he contacts her to say goodbye, she has this conversation:
Rose: Can't you come through?
Doctor: The whole thing would fracture. Two universes would collapse.
Rose: So?
This exchange sums up Rose perfectly. She doesn't give a damn about the potential for two universes to collapse, all she cares about is getting what she wants - to be with the Doctor again. The only reason she went back to save the Ninth Doctor in 'Parting of the Ways' was because ordinary life was boring and unbearable and not worth bothering with after the excitement and adventure of travels in Time and Space. And while I can understand that to a certain extent, it's Rose's attitude to Mickey and her mother, and her sublime indifference for the fate of the future Earth that really upsets me - she doesn't *care* whether the Earth is saved in the future - all she wants is to get back to the Doctor so they can carry on travelling together.
And she comes back in S4. She builds a Dimension Cannon and blasts her way back through the walls between the Universes, supposedly so that she can warn the Doctor about 'the stars going out' - but if that was all she wanted, she'd have tracked down Sarah Jane, or found a way to get a message to her to give to the Doctor. But that's not what she wants - she wants to be with the Doctor again, so she repeatedly uses the Dimension Cannon to find him - even though the Doctor had warned her about the dangers of trying to return to this universe. But Rose doesn't care about the safety of the Universe - Rose wants what she wants and she'll do anything to get it, and damn the consequences. The concept of making a personal sacrifice for the greater good is utterly alien to Rose Tyler - she's just like Peter Pan, she hasn't grown up and cannot accept responsibility for her actions. She couldn't make the kind of sacrifice that Charley made because Rose doesn't want the Doctor to forget her, or even travel with someone else instead of her - if it had been up to her, he'd have spent the remainder of his lives travelling solo (and no doubt weeping nightly into his pillow).
Not only is Charley a better realised character than Rose, but Big Finish's writers are better than New Who's because the Big Finish team have given us a Doctor/Companion love story that is realistic and doesn't leave the companion looking like a clingy, whiny, selfish, thoughtless, self-centred brat. Yes, Charley's devastated that it's Six who finds her, not Eight - but she still cares about the Doctor and wants to keep him safe, so much so that she and Mila choose to let themselves back into the TARDIS (near the end of 'Blue Forgotten Planet') to ensure that if he is going to die (as seems possible), he won't die alone, and then Mila - who by now is such a perfect copy of Charley that not even the Viyrans can tell them apart - sacrifices herself to save the Doctor and Charley. And then Charley chooses to sacrifice the Doctor's memories of her so that he can go back out into the Universe and do what he does best: look after it, because while he keeps resisting the Viyrans wiping his memories of the virus that infected the humans, they will keep him aboard their ship until he does forget. For Charley, the most important thing is that the Doctor gets on with his life - she understands that the Doctor's world doesn't revolve around her, no matter how much she loves him, not even though he loves her in return. It's a lesson Rose still needs to learn.