Doctor/Jack/Rose (Doctor Who)
Title: In The Mood performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra
Author: Raven
Email: iona.raven[at]gmail.com
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Doctor/Rose/Jack
Spoilers: Through the 2005 series with minor spoilers for The Christmas Invasion.
"I can feel it - the turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go... That's who I am. Now forget me, Rose Tyler. Go home."
-the Ninth Doctor, Rose
For the title character of a forty-year-old show, it's hard to really say definitely who and what the Doctor is. He is an alien, a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation Kasterborous, he travels at random through time and space in a ship called a TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), and he usually has one or more companions accompanying him. Beyond that, everything about the Doctor is in a constant state of flux.
The main reason for this is a side-effect of Gallifreyan biology. As a Time Lord, the Doctor is able to undergo full bodily regeneration on the point of death, meaning he cannot be killed outright, but only forced to take on a new body quite different from the old one. Not only do his looks change, but his personality goes through a sort of random reboot; while the Doctor is the same person through all his regenerations, each of his incarnations has all had different strengths, weaknesses and interests, and some have been more overtly alien than others. A brief rundown of each one follows:
-The First Doctor arrived on Earth in 1963 with his fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Susan, where they spent five months living in London in secret. When we first saw him, the Doctor was outwardly an elderly Edwardian gentleman, tetchy and irascible and less patient with the human race than his later incarnations. He is the only Doctor to have reached old age before regenerating.
-The Second Doctor was a comical, anarchic recorder-playing character quite different from his predecessor. His regeneration was forced by the Time Lords as punishment for his propensity for interfering with the affairs of other races.
-The Third Doctor was exiled to Earth, also as part of the punishment from the Time Lords, and worked as Scientific Advisor to UNIT. He was more action-orientated than the others, and had a fondness for gadgetry. His regeneration happened as a result of overexposure to crystal energy on the planet Metebelis Three.
-The Fourth Doctor was the most determinedly eccentric of all of them, a Bohemian figure with a trailing scarf and a fondness for jellybabies. Tom Baker was also the longest-serving Doctor, and so the one most people are familiar with. He regenerated after falling to his death from the Pharos Project radio telescope.
-The Fifth Doctor was a direct contrast, being the most outwardly human and vulnerable of all of them, and also the one who seemed the youngest. He liked cricket, wore a sprig of celery in his lapel, and died of a disease called spectral toxaemia on Androzani Minor, saving his companion's life in the process.
-The Sixth Doctor was different again; because of the difficulty of the regeneration, he was left unstable and psychotic and one of the first things he did was attempt to strangle his companion. He was famous for wildly colourful dress sense and being the most arrogant of all the Doctors. He was forced to regenerate by a renegade Time Lady known as the Rani.
-The Seventh Doctor was superficially clownish, but had a much darker, more manipulative air to him. He was also the last of the original series Doctors, walking off into the sunset with his companion, Ace, in 1989. His regeneration wasn't seen until the 1996 TV movie, in which he was shot, taken to hospital and put under anaesthesia. This had the effect of delaying the regeneration, meaning the Doctor was actually dead for a time.
-The Eighth Doctor suffered from massive amnesia to begin with, as a result of the botched regeneration, but stabilised eventually into a Byronic hero character, wearing a velvet frock-coat and cultivating an aura of old-world eccentricity. There is no canon concerning how he regenerated, as the new series began with the Ninth Doctor already in place, but it's probable that it happened during the Time War.
The Doctor is at least nine hundred years old, and has travelled with a great variety of human and alien companions. Throughout his regenerations, he has been brilliant, arrogant, insatiably curious and fascinated with the human race. He usually disguises his intelligence and alien status with a mask of eccentricity, but it is often clear in his views and morals that he is not human.[1]
Which brings us nicely to the Ninth Doctor, the one whom this essay primarily deals with. He differs significantly from the others because of his involvement in an event known as the Time War. Never shown on screen, it is mentioned throughout the 2005 series and is generally considered to have happened not long before the story is picked up in Rose. A war between the Time Lords and the Daleks, it led to the destruction of both, leaving only the Doctor and a solitary Dalek (forced to commit suicide by the Doctor in Dalek). It is heavily indicated that the Doctor was personally responsible for the genocide of both races, which explains why he is now the last Time Lord in the universe. Gallifrey itself is "rocks and dust… before its time", and the Time Lords can no longer be counted on to sort out tears in the timeline (as in Father's Day).
The significance of this in terms of the Ninth Doctor's character cannot be underestimated. One thing all the Doctor's previous incarnations had in common is their renegade status; he openly declared himself a rebel when he stole a TARDIS and left Gallifrey, and his subsequence interference with the affairs of other races led to his twice being put on trial by the Time Lords. He himself said he renounced the society of Time Lords, calling them corrupt and power-mad, and although they occasionally attempted to make their peace with him, even offering him the presidency (twice), he always refused in favour of his own travels with his companions. With the destruction of Gallifrey, this defining aspect of the Doctor - that he is a rebel - disappears.[2]
Coupling this with the Doctor's guilt over the part he played in the war makes for a very different ninth incarnation. This Doctor is even less accepting of death than the others, and far more likely to take it personally when there is someone he cannot save. He also has a tendency to be ruthless (his increasingly erratic behaviour in Dalek has even led some to suggest he is suffering from the Time Lord equivalent of PTSD) in order to achieve his ends. By turns manic and melancholy, his mercurial temperament makes him unpredictable.
*
"This is Rose Tyler. She's my plus one."
-the Ninth Doctor, End of the World
Rose Tyler, the only child of Jackie and Peter Tyler, is a human born in London in 1986. Her father died when she was a baby, and she was brought up by her mum in a council flat. She left school without doing her A-levels and by the time she was nineteen, she was working full-time in a department store, Henrik's. She also had a boyfriend, Mickey Smith, who was four or five years older than she was.
The first episode of the series, Rose, is mostly from Rose's POV, and we see her life as an ordinary girl in London before she meets the Doctor in the basement at Henrik's. When he disappears again, Rose's first instinct is to find out as much as she can about him, even press-ganging Mickey into helping her, and we are gradually led to the conclusion that the Doctor is the most interesting and extraordinary thing that has happened to her life. Over lunch with Mickey, we hear her wistful wondering about what to do now her job is gone, and although her mother encourages her to try to get another one, she seems less than keen. Rose at this stage is a markedly unfulfilled character. Although she cares deeply for Mickey and Jackie, we can see that they do not understand her reluctance to settle down with another job or her desire for something more. Despite her lack of A-levels, her intelligence and resourcefulness are never called into question, and by the end of the episode she has saved the Doctor's life and chosen to leave her own old life behind.
This decision is a turning point for Rose. Over the course of the next few episodes, we see her adapt and grow to love the Doctor's nomadic lifestyle, and even when given the chance to go back home at the end of World War Three, she chooses to stay with him. She has strong views of her own, which sometimes clash with the Doctor's, and a tendency to befriend and empathise with all the people she meets (such as Gwyneth, Nancy and Jack), but her emotionally-focused outlook does sometimes blind her to the bigger picture. For example, in Father's Day, her actions cause the destruction of an existent timeline by the Reapers and the death of the Doctor.
Throughout the series, it is clear that Rose's character grows and changes, but certain elements do stay the same; from the beginning, she was seen to take care of Mickey and Jackie, and by the end of the series she feels the same obligation towards the Doctor and Jack.
*
"She was hanging from a barrage balloon and I had an invisible spaceship. I never stood a chance."
-Jack Harkness, The Doctor Dances
Captain Jack Harkness[3] is a rogue Time Agent, a human from the Earth colonies of the fifty-first century, and he is a conman. His speciality is attempting to palm off supposedly valuable items on unsuspecting punters, only for said items to be destroyed shortly afterwards in natural disasters (such as the eruption of Vesuvius or the detonation of a German bomb). It is during the course of running a con like this one that Jack sets in motion the events of The Empty Child and meets the Doctor and Rose: in the winter of 1941, his attempt to palm off a Chula medical transport results in the creation of an army of gas-masked zombies ready to march on London.
Initially, he is reluctant to take responsibility for what his medical transport has done, but as the severity of the situation becomes more and more apparent, he admits the con and throws in his lot with the Doctor. Despite initially coming across as uncaring and self-serving, Jack redeems himself at the end of the two episodes by using his ship to take the German bomb out into space, held in stasis so it won't explode. The problem is that jettisoning it will make it explode immediately, so Jack orders a Martini and makes peace with himself, preparing to sacrifice his life. It is most likely this action that makes the Doctor and Rose go after him, getting him out of his ship and into the TARDIS just before the bomb goes off. From this point on, he is established as another of the Doctor's companions and part of a trio of main characters.
Jack is bisexual, and makes no secret of it. As well as that, he's something of a galactic slut. There are strong hints that his most recent conquest is a soldier named Algy, and he mentions the time he once ended up in bed with a married couple who were supposed to be his executioners. He flirts indiscriminately with Rose, the Doctor and various other people he meets, such as an unnamed (male) controller on the Game Station (the Doctor informs him "there's a time and a place!"). That said, there is a more serious side to him. He became a rogue Time Agent because he is missing two years of his memory and believes they were forcibly taken from him. It is clear that he is fearful of what he may have done during this time, and he accepts the Doctor's initial refusal to trust him with resignation. "Maybe he's right not to."
However, by the events of Boom Town, the relationship between the three has deepened, and there is no further indication of mistrust between Jack and the Doctor or Rose.
*
"I wanna find a blonde in a Union Jack. A specific one, I didn't just wake up this morning with a craving."
-The Ninth Doctor, The Doctor Dances
Before Jack comes along, we start with the Doctor and Rose. As already explored, they have something significant in common before they even meet - they are both at something of a loss as to what to do with themselves. Rose is getting bored of life as a nine-to-five shop girl, and the Doctor is still dealing with the destruction of the Time Lords. Their first encounter seems inconclusive, with the Doctor unwilling to continue the association and Rose frustrated at how little he explains about himself; however, Rose's fascination with the Doctor is evident from the first. She isn't afraid to use Mickey in an attempt to find out more about him, and while the resulting adventure with the Autons does throw her a little ("Culture shock", the Doctor calls it) she sticks with the Doctor despite the danger, even saving his life in the end.
And the end of the episode - where Rose leaves Mickey and her old life behind and runs, beaming, to the waiting Doctor - can be seen to sum up why a relationship between the two works. The Doctor is beginning to realise he still has something to offer; right from the start, he emphasises the wonders of the universe he can show to Rose, if she only comes with him. In her turn, Rose is eager to see and do everything the Doctor can provide, taking the dangers as part of the deal.
But the interesting aspect of the relationship is that unlike with some of the Doctor's previous companions, the power imbalance is less pronounced than one might expect. Rose is unafraid to challenge the Doctor (she tells him outright that he's wrong in The Unquiet Dead) and make her own opinion felt. Again, the unique situation of the Ninth Doctor contributes to this - although she doesn't know the details of the Time War, Rose is aware that the Doctor has been left open to being played emotionally. In Dalek, she asks him, plaintively, "What about you, Doctor? What the hell are you changing into?" in response to the way he is suddenly hellbent on revenge, and it's clear she knows how his past experience is clouding his judgement. For the Doctor, who usually has all the answers, to be vulnerable, and for his companion to be so aware of it, is unusual and introduces the idea that the Doctor needs someone to take care of him. That this someone is Rose is also made clear in the same episode; he tells her there's no-one left, no Time Lords, to which she says simply, "Good thing I'm not going anywhere."
However, this relationship is not without its pitfalls. A clear-cut example of this occurs at the end of World War Three, at a point where Rose is questioning the wisdom of leaving her family behind to travel with the Doctor. Realising that she may choose to leave him, or at least tie him down, the Doctor responds with shameless emotional manipulation:
"You can stay there if you want. But right now there's this plasma storm brewing in the Horsehead Nebula. Fires burning ten million miles wide. I could fly the TARDIS right into the heart of it and ride the shockwave all the way out, hurtle right across the sky and end up anywhere. Your choice."
As the silence hangs, we see Rose make her preparations to leave her family behind. The success of this manipulation introduces a disturbing element into the relationship: by this stage, the Doctor is willing to use particularly unscrupulous tactics to keep Rose with him, suggesting they may have actually become co-dependent. Another example many have quoted is the way in which the Doctor takes Rose to see the end of her world; rather than preserving Rose's starry-eyed wonder, the suggestion is that the Doctor is trying to drag Rose down to his level by putting her through what he went through himself in the destruction of Gallifrey.
The Doctor also makes a questionable decision in taking Rose to see the death of her father. While he can appreciate her desire to be with her father as he dies, the Doctor does not seem to understand why Rose throws caution to the winds and saves her father's life despite the damage it will do to the timeline. Although he is right, and Rose's actions do almost lead to disaster, it could be argued that he himself is at fault for not understanding it was inevitable if he allowed Rose to see her father die.
In conclusion, the Doctor is not human. He's had centuries of experience compared to nineteen-year-old Rose, and although he can be her companion, her best friend, he will always be fundamentally alien to her in the way he thinks. They are different enough for a conventional, functional relationship between them to perhaps be impossible, without some other mitigating factor.
...which is where Jack comes in.
*
"And off we go! Into time! And space!"
-the Ninth Doctor, Jack Harkness and Rose Tyler (in unison), Boom Town
From the very beginning, Jack fits. The moment she falls out of the sky into his arms, Rose trusts him; as she later tells the Doctor, he saved her life and as blokes go, "that's up there with flossing." Jack slow-dances with her in the light of Big Ben, and while this is initially extended flirting, by the end of The Doctor Dances, the attraction has deepened into real regard for each other - Rose's first thought as they leave London is if they can save Jack. Interestingly enough, the Doctor is setting the TARDIS into motion even before she speaks, with the implication that he, too, was thinking it.
The resulting scene, where Rose and the Doctor dance around the console room to Glenn Miller with Jack watching happily on, is the first indicator of how the relationship between all of three of them will pan out. As the Doctor notes, it's not clear at all which of the other two Jack would rather be dancing with, only that he would like to join in. In an episode in which dancing has been used throughout as a metaphor for sex, it's a very suggestive point to end on.
But while the relationship between Jack and Rose can be looked at fairly simply, friendship and affection that arises soon after they meet and remains steady from there on in, the relationship between Jack and the Doctor is much more complex. Although the Doctor's initial distrust is probably tempered with jealousy, it is in his nature to be wary of Jack. This wariness is only intensified when he learns of Jack's missing memories. However, the Doctor does read Jack's intentions accurately; he tells Rose he's taken care of the German bomb by "psychology" - i.e., the Doctor has played on Jack's feelings of guilt in order to make him risk his life and jettison the bomb. The ease with which the Doctor can manipulate him suggests in how much regard Jack holds him, even so early on.
After Jack is rescued, the three dance blissfully around the console room, and so ends the episode. By the time we see them again, in Boom Town, a long time has passed. It's apparent that all three have bonded in the intervening period, as they banter and finish each other's sentences, and there is no trace of distrust between any of them. In short, a great deal of character development has gone on off screen. The presence of an outsider, Mickey, throws this into sharper relief; he is aware that he is intruding on three people with private jokes and vast shared experience, and comments on it. It could even be argued that it is all three of them, and not just Rose, who finally make him lose his temper and leave.
Something else apparent in this episode is Jack's easy flirting with the Doctor as well as Rose, giving a sexual aspect to that part of the relationship that wasn't obvious before. Although the cementing of the three-way relationship seems to have happened between episodes, it's not hard to see why Jack fits in so well. Unlike Rose, he is not an innocent.. He can interact with the Doctor on an equal footing, both because as a lapsed Time Agent he knows far more about the universe than she does, but because like the Doctor, he has a defined dark side. His missing memories may mean he has perpetrated horrors in his past, something that would be familiar to the Doctor.
But as Rose says, Jack is "like [the Doctor], only with dating and dancing", and it is the lighter aspect of Jack, his easy flirtatiousness and sense of humour, that makes him easier for her to understand than the far more enigmatic Doctor. Jack serves as a bridge between a twenty-first century girl and the last Time Lord, strengthening the relationship between the Doctor and Rose and maintaining strong bonds of his own with each of them.
The extent to which the three of them have learnt to depend on each other is evident by Bad Wolf. Rose gets in the way of an energy beam and is instantly disintegrated in front of the Doctor and Jack, who are just too late to rescue her. Each of them reacts in a separate, distinctive way. The Doctor seems to withdraw, stops struggling and lets himself be captured; conversely, Jack's response is sheer fury, lashing out at the guards and trying desperately to escape. But it is worth noting that even in the midst of this rage, Jack's instinct is to protect the Doctor, shouting "Don't you touch him!" as the Doctor is arrested. Later, having discovered Rose is still alive, the pair fall into each other's arms.
And after that, all that remains is the perfect moment in The Parting of the Ways. As the three prepare to part, probably for the last time, Jack leans in and carefully kisses Rose. "Rose, you were worth fighting for."
And then he turns to the Doctor. "I wish I'd never met you, Doctor," he says, and kisses the Doctor too. "I was much better off as a coward."
Jack leaves, and the three are never seen onscreen together again.
*
"I'm just such a big fan. Number-one fan, that's me!"
-the Ninth Doctor, The Unquiet Dead
As has been observed by so many people, Doctor Who is a part of the collective British consciousness. Consequently, I grew up knowing it existed, that it was about time-travel and stripy scarves, and I could possibly, if pushed, have picked out Tom Baker from a line-up. Unfortunately I was all of two years old in 1989 at the end of the original series, and so the first time I saw it properly was the first episode of the new series in March 2005.
I watched it, I liked it, and was struck immediately with the possibility of a relationship between the Doctor and Rose. The affection between them is so clear so quickly, and the hand-holding (quickly dubbed "hand porn" by the fandom), apparent in nearly every episode, is a constant reminder of the depth of this affection and trust.
Then Jack arrived. I hated him. I thought he was smug, annoying and entirely superfluous - the last attempt to make the duo a trio was Adam, and that was a miserable failure, while Mickey as a companion never really happened - and then I changed my mind. The thing was, Adam was an idiot. And Mickey, while less of one, retained degrees of idiocy. Jack wasn't, and somewhere in the middle of his Martini soliloquy, I started to sort of love him.
And then came Boom Town, and the delicious three-way flirting, the suggestion of many off screen adventures, and Rose's very obvious rejection of Mickey. By the kisses in The Parting of the Ways, I was sold. I'm not sure if I really believe the Doctor, Jack and Rose were shagging on the floor straight after The Doctor Dances, but the amazing thing was that it wouldn't have been out of character if they had been. Even if they weren't, they are friends and would-be lovers and they need and depend on each other, and you can get all this from canon. Unlike most threesomes, they could function day-to-day as a real polyamorous relationship. The potential is there.
One side-note - a lot of argument goes on perennially in the fandom regarding the concept of the Doctor's sexuality and whether, in fact, it exists. The Doctor as an asexual being is a fandom concept that may have arisen because the Doctor was an elderly man when we first saw him, or perhaps because the show was aimed at children (and still is, in part), or both. Arguments against this view do exist in canon, however. The First Doctor was once engaged to an Aztec woman, and although it happened by accident, he was genuinely fond of her and sorry to leave her behind; the Fourth Doctor seemed to have a more-than-platonic relationship with Romana II, seen particularly clearly in City of Death; and the Ninth Doctor engaged in some obvious flirting with Jabe in End of the World. Most telling of all, Susan was the Doctor's granddaughter and there is nothing in television canon to suggest the relationship was not biological (in fact, it's strongly implied in The Empty Child that the Doctor did have children of his own).
In fact, it could probably be said that the relationship between the Doctor, Rose and Jack is an argument all by itself against the Doctor's being asexual.
*
"New teeth. That's weird."
-the Tenth Doctor, The Parting of the Ways
Sadly, the end of The Parting of the Ways does not augur well for our intrepid threesome. The Ninth Doctor is no more, having absorbed all the energy of the time vortex and regenerated in front of Rose's eyes. So far, we know nothing much at all about the tenth incarnation, except the single fact that he thinks his teeth are weird, and just recently, that his costume will consist of a loose tie and jacket, brown trousers, white Converse and a long brown duster. This would seem to indicate he is significantly different from his predecessor, but this is, of course, speculation.
Jack, unfortunately, will not be in The Christmas Invasion or the first few episodes of the new series, and the last we saw of him, he had been left for dead on the now deserted Game Station. The Doctor heard him die and Rose has no memory of what happened when she looked into the TARDIS, so they are unaware he is still alive.
In conclusion, no-one really knows what's going to happen next, when the trio will be reunited and if they will retain their old relationship. I think I speak for a few people when I say that it would be a shame if they didn't.
Communities
better_with_3 - the Doctor/Rose/Jack community on LJ.
time_and_chips - for the Doctor/Rose segment.
doctorslashjack - for Doctor/Jack.
[There doesn't seem to be an exclusively Jack/Rose community on LJ for some reason.]
Recs
Three by __kali__ - a mere drabble that nevertheless encapsulates exactly how and why the threesome works.
A Phantom of Clouds by doyle_sb4 - Jack decides the three of them need to bond. A lovely fic that packs a big wallop at the end.
Slightly Psychic Confessions by casirafics - a fic where "threesome" does actually mean porn. And there's psychic paper. It's wonderful.
Local Customs by mireille719 - in which one of the three accidentally gets married.
One Thing We Always Suspected About Captain Jack by redscharlach - and lastly, the most original take on the trio that I've come across.
Feel free to tell me about any others in the comments.
[1] He states in the TV movie that he is "half-human on [his] mother's side", but there is dispute over the canonicity of this, as it is mentioned nowhere else and all other Doctors, including the Ninth, give the impression that they are pure Time Lord.
[2] For more on this aspect of the Doctor's character, I recommend taraljc's excellent "Gallifrey go BOOM!" essay on the subject.
[3] It is unclear whether "Captain" refers to Jack's assumed rank in the American army, or whether this is a rank he actually holds as a Time Agent.
Author: Raven
Email: iona.raven[at]gmail.com
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Doctor/Rose/Jack
Spoilers: Through the 2005 series with minor spoilers for The Christmas Invasion.
"I can feel it - the turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go... That's who I am. Now forget me, Rose Tyler. Go home."
-the Ninth Doctor, Rose
For the title character of a forty-year-old show, it's hard to really say definitely who and what the Doctor is. He is an alien, a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation Kasterborous, he travels at random through time and space in a ship called a TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), and he usually has one or more companions accompanying him. Beyond that, everything about the Doctor is in a constant state of flux.
The main reason for this is a side-effect of Gallifreyan biology. As a Time Lord, the Doctor is able to undergo full bodily regeneration on the point of death, meaning he cannot be killed outright, but only forced to take on a new body quite different from the old one. Not only do his looks change, but his personality goes through a sort of random reboot; while the Doctor is the same person through all his regenerations, each of his incarnations has all had different strengths, weaknesses and interests, and some have been more overtly alien than others. A brief rundown of each one follows:
-The First Doctor arrived on Earth in 1963 with his fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Susan, where they spent five months living in London in secret. When we first saw him, the Doctor was outwardly an elderly Edwardian gentleman, tetchy and irascible and less patient with the human race than his later incarnations. He is the only Doctor to have reached old age before regenerating.
-The Second Doctor was a comical, anarchic recorder-playing character quite different from his predecessor. His regeneration was forced by the Time Lords as punishment for his propensity for interfering with the affairs of other races.
-The Third Doctor was exiled to Earth, also as part of the punishment from the Time Lords, and worked as Scientific Advisor to UNIT. He was more action-orientated than the others, and had a fondness for gadgetry. His regeneration happened as a result of overexposure to crystal energy on the planet Metebelis Three.
-The Fourth Doctor was the most determinedly eccentric of all of them, a Bohemian figure with a trailing scarf and a fondness for jellybabies. Tom Baker was also the longest-serving Doctor, and so the one most people are familiar with. He regenerated after falling to his death from the Pharos Project radio telescope.
-The Fifth Doctor was a direct contrast, being the most outwardly human and vulnerable of all of them, and also the one who seemed the youngest. He liked cricket, wore a sprig of celery in his lapel, and died of a disease called spectral toxaemia on Androzani Minor, saving his companion's life in the process.
-The Sixth Doctor was different again; because of the difficulty of the regeneration, he was left unstable and psychotic and one of the first things he did was attempt to strangle his companion. He was famous for wildly colourful dress sense and being the most arrogant of all the Doctors. He was forced to regenerate by a renegade Time Lady known as the Rani.
-The Seventh Doctor was superficially clownish, but had a much darker, more manipulative air to him. He was also the last of the original series Doctors, walking off into the sunset with his companion, Ace, in 1989. His regeneration wasn't seen until the 1996 TV movie, in which he was shot, taken to hospital and put under anaesthesia. This had the effect of delaying the regeneration, meaning the Doctor was actually dead for a time.
-The Eighth Doctor suffered from massive amnesia to begin with, as a result of the botched regeneration, but stabilised eventually into a Byronic hero character, wearing a velvet frock-coat and cultivating an aura of old-world eccentricity. There is no canon concerning how he regenerated, as the new series began with the Ninth Doctor already in place, but it's probable that it happened during the Time War.
The Doctor is at least nine hundred years old, and has travelled with a great variety of human and alien companions. Throughout his regenerations, he has been brilliant, arrogant, insatiably curious and fascinated with the human race. He usually disguises his intelligence and alien status with a mask of eccentricity, but it is often clear in his views and morals that he is not human.[1]
Which brings us nicely to the Ninth Doctor, the one whom this essay primarily deals with. He differs significantly from the others because of his involvement in an event known as the Time War. Never shown on screen, it is mentioned throughout the 2005 series and is generally considered to have happened not long before the story is picked up in Rose. A war between the Time Lords and the Daleks, it led to the destruction of both, leaving only the Doctor and a solitary Dalek (forced to commit suicide by the Doctor in Dalek). It is heavily indicated that the Doctor was personally responsible for the genocide of both races, which explains why he is now the last Time Lord in the universe. Gallifrey itself is "rocks and dust… before its time", and the Time Lords can no longer be counted on to sort out tears in the timeline (as in Father's Day).
The significance of this in terms of the Ninth Doctor's character cannot be underestimated. One thing all the Doctor's previous incarnations had in common is their renegade status; he openly declared himself a rebel when he stole a TARDIS and left Gallifrey, and his subsequence interference with the affairs of other races led to his twice being put on trial by the Time Lords. He himself said he renounced the society of Time Lords, calling them corrupt and power-mad, and although they occasionally attempted to make their peace with him, even offering him the presidency (twice), he always refused in favour of his own travels with his companions. With the destruction of Gallifrey, this defining aspect of the Doctor - that he is a rebel - disappears.[2]
Coupling this with the Doctor's guilt over the part he played in the war makes for a very different ninth incarnation. This Doctor is even less accepting of death than the others, and far more likely to take it personally when there is someone he cannot save. He also has a tendency to be ruthless (his increasingly erratic behaviour in Dalek has even led some to suggest he is suffering from the Time Lord equivalent of PTSD) in order to achieve his ends. By turns manic and melancholy, his mercurial temperament makes him unpredictable.
*
"This is Rose Tyler. She's my plus one."
-the Ninth Doctor, End of the World
Rose Tyler, the only child of Jackie and Peter Tyler, is a human born in London in 1986. Her father died when she was a baby, and she was brought up by her mum in a council flat. She left school without doing her A-levels and by the time she was nineteen, she was working full-time in a department store, Henrik's. She also had a boyfriend, Mickey Smith, who was four or five years older than she was.
The first episode of the series, Rose, is mostly from Rose's POV, and we see her life as an ordinary girl in London before she meets the Doctor in the basement at Henrik's. When he disappears again, Rose's first instinct is to find out as much as she can about him, even press-ganging Mickey into helping her, and we are gradually led to the conclusion that the Doctor is the most interesting and extraordinary thing that has happened to her life. Over lunch with Mickey, we hear her wistful wondering about what to do now her job is gone, and although her mother encourages her to try to get another one, she seems less than keen. Rose at this stage is a markedly unfulfilled character. Although she cares deeply for Mickey and Jackie, we can see that they do not understand her reluctance to settle down with another job or her desire for something more. Despite her lack of A-levels, her intelligence and resourcefulness are never called into question, and by the end of the episode she has saved the Doctor's life and chosen to leave her own old life behind.
This decision is a turning point for Rose. Over the course of the next few episodes, we see her adapt and grow to love the Doctor's nomadic lifestyle, and even when given the chance to go back home at the end of World War Three, she chooses to stay with him. She has strong views of her own, which sometimes clash with the Doctor's, and a tendency to befriend and empathise with all the people she meets (such as Gwyneth, Nancy and Jack), but her emotionally-focused outlook does sometimes blind her to the bigger picture. For example, in Father's Day, her actions cause the destruction of an existent timeline by the Reapers and the death of the Doctor.
Throughout the series, it is clear that Rose's character grows and changes, but certain elements do stay the same; from the beginning, she was seen to take care of Mickey and Jackie, and by the end of the series she feels the same obligation towards the Doctor and Jack.
*
"She was hanging from a barrage balloon and I had an invisible spaceship. I never stood a chance."
-Jack Harkness, The Doctor Dances
Captain Jack Harkness[3] is a rogue Time Agent, a human from the Earth colonies of the fifty-first century, and he is a conman. His speciality is attempting to palm off supposedly valuable items on unsuspecting punters, only for said items to be destroyed shortly afterwards in natural disasters (such as the eruption of Vesuvius or the detonation of a German bomb). It is during the course of running a con like this one that Jack sets in motion the events of The Empty Child and meets the Doctor and Rose: in the winter of 1941, his attempt to palm off a Chula medical transport results in the creation of an army of gas-masked zombies ready to march on London.
Initially, he is reluctant to take responsibility for what his medical transport has done, but as the severity of the situation becomes more and more apparent, he admits the con and throws in his lot with the Doctor. Despite initially coming across as uncaring and self-serving, Jack redeems himself at the end of the two episodes by using his ship to take the German bomb out into space, held in stasis so it won't explode. The problem is that jettisoning it will make it explode immediately, so Jack orders a Martini and makes peace with himself, preparing to sacrifice his life. It is most likely this action that makes the Doctor and Rose go after him, getting him out of his ship and into the TARDIS just before the bomb goes off. From this point on, he is established as another of the Doctor's companions and part of a trio of main characters.
Jack is bisexual, and makes no secret of it. As well as that, he's something of a galactic slut. There are strong hints that his most recent conquest is a soldier named Algy, and he mentions the time he once ended up in bed with a married couple who were supposed to be his executioners. He flirts indiscriminately with Rose, the Doctor and various other people he meets, such as an unnamed (male) controller on the Game Station (the Doctor informs him "there's a time and a place!"). That said, there is a more serious side to him. He became a rogue Time Agent because he is missing two years of his memory and believes they were forcibly taken from him. It is clear that he is fearful of what he may have done during this time, and he accepts the Doctor's initial refusal to trust him with resignation. "Maybe he's right not to."
However, by the events of Boom Town, the relationship between the three has deepened, and there is no further indication of mistrust between Jack and the Doctor or Rose.
*
"I wanna find a blonde in a Union Jack. A specific one, I didn't just wake up this morning with a craving."
-The Ninth Doctor, The Doctor Dances
Before Jack comes along, we start with the Doctor and Rose. As already explored, they have something significant in common before they even meet - they are both at something of a loss as to what to do with themselves. Rose is getting bored of life as a nine-to-five shop girl, and the Doctor is still dealing with the destruction of the Time Lords. Their first encounter seems inconclusive, with the Doctor unwilling to continue the association and Rose frustrated at how little he explains about himself; however, Rose's fascination with the Doctor is evident from the first. She isn't afraid to use Mickey in an attempt to find out more about him, and while the resulting adventure with the Autons does throw her a little ("Culture shock", the Doctor calls it) she sticks with the Doctor despite the danger, even saving his life in the end.
And the end of the episode - where Rose leaves Mickey and her old life behind and runs, beaming, to the waiting Doctor - can be seen to sum up why a relationship between the two works. The Doctor is beginning to realise he still has something to offer; right from the start, he emphasises the wonders of the universe he can show to Rose, if she only comes with him. In her turn, Rose is eager to see and do everything the Doctor can provide, taking the dangers as part of the deal.
But the interesting aspect of the relationship is that unlike with some of the Doctor's previous companions, the power imbalance is less pronounced than one might expect. Rose is unafraid to challenge the Doctor (she tells him outright that he's wrong in The Unquiet Dead) and make her own opinion felt. Again, the unique situation of the Ninth Doctor contributes to this - although she doesn't know the details of the Time War, Rose is aware that the Doctor has been left open to being played emotionally. In Dalek, she asks him, plaintively, "What about you, Doctor? What the hell are you changing into?" in response to the way he is suddenly hellbent on revenge, and it's clear she knows how his past experience is clouding his judgement. For the Doctor, who usually has all the answers, to be vulnerable, and for his companion to be so aware of it, is unusual and introduces the idea that the Doctor needs someone to take care of him. That this someone is Rose is also made clear in the same episode; he tells her there's no-one left, no Time Lords, to which she says simply, "Good thing I'm not going anywhere."
However, this relationship is not without its pitfalls. A clear-cut example of this occurs at the end of World War Three, at a point where Rose is questioning the wisdom of leaving her family behind to travel with the Doctor. Realising that she may choose to leave him, or at least tie him down, the Doctor responds with shameless emotional manipulation:
"You can stay there if you want. But right now there's this plasma storm brewing in the Horsehead Nebula. Fires burning ten million miles wide. I could fly the TARDIS right into the heart of it and ride the shockwave all the way out, hurtle right across the sky and end up anywhere. Your choice."
As the silence hangs, we see Rose make her preparations to leave her family behind. The success of this manipulation introduces a disturbing element into the relationship: by this stage, the Doctor is willing to use particularly unscrupulous tactics to keep Rose with him, suggesting they may have actually become co-dependent. Another example many have quoted is the way in which the Doctor takes Rose to see the end of her world; rather than preserving Rose's starry-eyed wonder, the suggestion is that the Doctor is trying to drag Rose down to his level by putting her through what he went through himself in the destruction of Gallifrey.
The Doctor also makes a questionable decision in taking Rose to see the death of her father. While he can appreciate her desire to be with her father as he dies, the Doctor does not seem to understand why Rose throws caution to the winds and saves her father's life despite the damage it will do to the timeline. Although he is right, and Rose's actions do almost lead to disaster, it could be argued that he himself is at fault for not understanding it was inevitable if he allowed Rose to see her father die.
In conclusion, the Doctor is not human. He's had centuries of experience compared to nineteen-year-old Rose, and although he can be her companion, her best friend, he will always be fundamentally alien to her in the way he thinks. They are different enough for a conventional, functional relationship between them to perhaps be impossible, without some other mitigating factor.
...which is where Jack comes in.
*
"And off we go! Into time! And space!"
-the Ninth Doctor, Jack Harkness and Rose Tyler (in unison), Boom Town
From the very beginning, Jack fits. The moment she falls out of the sky into his arms, Rose trusts him; as she later tells the Doctor, he saved her life and as blokes go, "that's up there with flossing." Jack slow-dances with her in the light of Big Ben, and while this is initially extended flirting, by the end of The Doctor Dances, the attraction has deepened into real regard for each other - Rose's first thought as they leave London is if they can save Jack. Interestingly enough, the Doctor is setting the TARDIS into motion even before she speaks, with the implication that he, too, was thinking it.
The resulting scene, where Rose and the Doctor dance around the console room to Glenn Miller with Jack watching happily on, is the first indicator of how the relationship between all of three of them will pan out. As the Doctor notes, it's not clear at all which of the other two Jack would rather be dancing with, only that he would like to join in. In an episode in which dancing has been used throughout as a metaphor for sex, it's a very suggestive point to end on.
But while the relationship between Jack and Rose can be looked at fairly simply, friendship and affection that arises soon after they meet and remains steady from there on in, the relationship between Jack and the Doctor is much more complex. Although the Doctor's initial distrust is probably tempered with jealousy, it is in his nature to be wary of Jack. This wariness is only intensified when he learns of Jack's missing memories. However, the Doctor does read Jack's intentions accurately; he tells Rose he's taken care of the German bomb by "psychology" - i.e., the Doctor has played on Jack's feelings of guilt in order to make him risk his life and jettison the bomb. The ease with which the Doctor can manipulate him suggests in how much regard Jack holds him, even so early on.
After Jack is rescued, the three dance blissfully around the console room, and so ends the episode. By the time we see them again, in Boom Town, a long time has passed. It's apparent that all three have bonded in the intervening period, as they banter and finish each other's sentences, and there is no trace of distrust between any of them. In short, a great deal of character development has gone on off screen. The presence of an outsider, Mickey, throws this into sharper relief; he is aware that he is intruding on three people with private jokes and vast shared experience, and comments on it. It could even be argued that it is all three of them, and not just Rose, who finally make him lose his temper and leave.
Something else apparent in this episode is Jack's easy flirting with the Doctor as well as Rose, giving a sexual aspect to that part of the relationship that wasn't obvious before. Although the cementing of the three-way relationship seems to have happened between episodes, it's not hard to see why Jack fits in so well. Unlike Rose, he is not an innocent.. He can interact with the Doctor on an equal footing, both because as a lapsed Time Agent he knows far more about the universe than she does, but because like the Doctor, he has a defined dark side. His missing memories may mean he has perpetrated horrors in his past, something that would be familiar to the Doctor.
But as Rose says, Jack is "like [the Doctor], only with dating and dancing", and it is the lighter aspect of Jack, his easy flirtatiousness and sense of humour, that makes him easier for her to understand than the far more enigmatic Doctor. Jack serves as a bridge between a twenty-first century girl and the last Time Lord, strengthening the relationship between the Doctor and Rose and maintaining strong bonds of his own with each of them.
The extent to which the three of them have learnt to depend on each other is evident by Bad Wolf. Rose gets in the way of an energy beam and is instantly disintegrated in front of the Doctor and Jack, who are just too late to rescue her. Each of them reacts in a separate, distinctive way. The Doctor seems to withdraw, stops struggling and lets himself be captured; conversely, Jack's response is sheer fury, lashing out at the guards and trying desperately to escape. But it is worth noting that even in the midst of this rage, Jack's instinct is to protect the Doctor, shouting "Don't you touch him!" as the Doctor is arrested. Later, having discovered Rose is still alive, the pair fall into each other's arms.
And after that, all that remains is the perfect moment in The Parting of the Ways. As the three prepare to part, probably for the last time, Jack leans in and carefully kisses Rose. "Rose, you were worth fighting for."
And then he turns to the Doctor. "I wish I'd never met you, Doctor," he says, and kisses the Doctor too. "I was much better off as a coward."
Jack leaves, and the three are never seen onscreen together again.
*
"I'm just such a big fan. Number-one fan, that's me!"
-the Ninth Doctor, The Unquiet Dead
As has been observed by so many people, Doctor Who is a part of the collective British consciousness. Consequently, I grew up knowing it existed, that it was about time-travel and stripy scarves, and I could possibly, if pushed, have picked out Tom Baker from a line-up. Unfortunately I was all of two years old in 1989 at the end of the original series, and so the first time I saw it properly was the first episode of the new series in March 2005.
I watched it, I liked it, and was struck immediately with the possibility of a relationship between the Doctor and Rose. The affection between them is so clear so quickly, and the hand-holding (quickly dubbed "hand porn" by the fandom), apparent in nearly every episode, is a constant reminder of the depth of this affection and trust.
Then Jack arrived. I hated him. I thought he was smug, annoying and entirely superfluous - the last attempt to make the duo a trio was Adam, and that was a miserable failure, while Mickey as a companion never really happened - and then I changed my mind. The thing was, Adam was an idiot. And Mickey, while less of one, retained degrees of idiocy. Jack wasn't, and somewhere in the middle of his Martini soliloquy, I started to sort of love him.
And then came Boom Town, and the delicious three-way flirting, the suggestion of many off screen adventures, and Rose's very obvious rejection of Mickey. By the kisses in The Parting of the Ways, I was sold. I'm not sure if I really believe the Doctor, Jack and Rose were shagging on the floor straight after The Doctor Dances, but the amazing thing was that it wouldn't have been out of character if they had been. Even if they weren't, they are friends and would-be lovers and they need and depend on each other, and you can get all this from canon. Unlike most threesomes, they could function day-to-day as a real polyamorous relationship. The potential is there.
One side-note - a lot of argument goes on perennially in the fandom regarding the concept of the Doctor's sexuality and whether, in fact, it exists. The Doctor as an asexual being is a fandom concept that may have arisen because the Doctor was an elderly man when we first saw him, or perhaps because the show was aimed at children (and still is, in part), or both. Arguments against this view do exist in canon, however. The First Doctor was once engaged to an Aztec woman, and although it happened by accident, he was genuinely fond of her and sorry to leave her behind; the Fourth Doctor seemed to have a more-than-platonic relationship with Romana II, seen particularly clearly in City of Death; and the Ninth Doctor engaged in some obvious flirting with Jabe in End of the World. Most telling of all, Susan was the Doctor's granddaughter and there is nothing in television canon to suggest the relationship was not biological (in fact, it's strongly implied in The Empty Child that the Doctor did have children of his own).
In fact, it could probably be said that the relationship between the Doctor, Rose and Jack is an argument all by itself against the Doctor's being asexual.
*
"New teeth. That's weird."
-the Tenth Doctor, The Parting of the Ways
Sadly, the end of The Parting of the Ways does not augur well for our intrepid threesome. The Ninth Doctor is no more, having absorbed all the energy of the time vortex and regenerated in front of Rose's eyes. So far, we know nothing much at all about the tenth incarnation, except the single fact that he thinks his teeth are weird, and just recently, that his costume will consist of a loose tie and jacket, brown trousers, white Converse and a long brown duster. This would seem to indicate he is significantly different from his predecessor, but this is, of course, speculation.
Jack, unfortunately, will not be in The Christmas Invasion or the first few episodes of the new series, and the last we saw of him, he had been left for dead on the now deserted Game Station. The Doctor heard him die and Rose has no memory of what happened when she looked into the TARDIS, so they are unaware he is still alive.
In conclusion, no-one really knows what's going to happen next, when the trio will be reunited and if they will retain their old relationship. I think I speak for a few people when I say that it would be a shame if they didn't.
Communities
better_with_3 - the Doctor/Rose/Jack community on LJ.
time_and_chips - for the Doctor/Rose segment.
doctorslashjack - for Doctor/Jack.
[There doesn't seem to be an exclusively Jack/Rose community on LJ for some reason.]
Recs
Three by __kali__ - a mere drabble that nevertheless encapsulates exactly how and why the threesome works.
A Phantom of Clouds by doyle_sb4 - Jack decides the three of them need to bond. A lovely fic that packs a big wallop at the end.
Slightly Psychic Confessions by casirafics - a fic where "threesome" does actually mean porn. And there's psychic paper. It's wonderful.
Local Customs by mireille719 - in which one of the three accidentally gets married.
One Thing We Always Suspected About Captain Jack by redscharlach - and lastly, the most original take on the trio that I've come across.
Feel free to tell me about any others in the comments.
[1] He states in the TV movie that he is "half-human on [his] mother's side", but there is dispute over the canonicity of this, as it is mentioned nowhere else and all other Doctors, including the Ninth, give the impression that they are pure Time Lord.
[2] For more on this aspect of the Doctor's character, I recommend taraljc's excellent "Gallifrey go BOOM!" essay on the subject.
[3] It is unclear whether "Captain" refers to Jack's assumed rank in the American army, or whether this is a rank he actually holds as a Time Agent.