butterfly | Doctor Who: thoughts on Rose, the Master, Bad Wolf, etc.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about the Master/Lucy relationship as portrayed throughout "The Sound of the Drums" and "Last of the Time Lords" is how it felt very much like a dark reflection of the Doctor (specifically Ten)/Rose relationship. Also of great interest to me, though, was how the Master and Rose's relationships with the Doctor felt like two sides of the same coin as well.

The Doctor/Rose and Master/Lucy parallels are all pretty obvious -- Lucy and Rose are both underestimated by outsiders who don't understand that they have fully bought into what their particular Time Lord is selling.

Much as the Master is a dark mirror of Ten, so, too, is that relationship -- where Rose sees the end of the world with the Doctor and it fills her with a sense of how amazing time travel is, Lucy sees the end of the universe with the Master and it breaks her, making her as mad as the Master is.

Of equal interest to me, however, are the Rose-Master parallels. Both of them are forgiven by the Doctor for things that other people are not and both of them are extreme emotional tethers for him -- in a lot of ways, the show needed the Master in S3, because they needed the Doctor to have the same depth of emotional investment that we were used to seeing from him and he couldn't react that way to Martha and still tell the story that Russell was telling.

I think of Rose and the Master as like... matter and anti-matter. Equal and opposite. Both of them make the Doctor extremely vulnerable (the Master and Rose in the same series might well have actually made the Doctor lose his mind trying to handle the mental conflict).

("maybe it's time I settled down," he says to the Master. Because he has someone to care for -- and, in JE, he gives Rose a version of himself who can settle down with her if she chooses, someone she can care for).

But where Rose is all about the future, the Master is everything that is the past. He's still trapped in that same conflict with the Doctor, unable to break out of it even after knowing that all of their people are dead and gone. Where Rose inspires, the Master corrupts (the Toclofane versus "Dalek"). Both Rose and the Master are emotionally focused on the Doctor, but Rose wants to protect him while the Master wants to destroy him.

What the Doctor says about looking into the 'untempered schism' -- some run (the Doctor, still running), some go mad (the Master), and some are inspired. And that's Rose, who looks into the Vortex in tPotW and uses that power to do good. She doesn't run and she doesn't break. She saves.

Have I mentioned recently how brilliant Rose Tyler is?

Before "The Stolen Earth" aired, I mentioned that, if "Turn Left" was the climax of the Bad Wolf arc, that would be enough for me. And, in retrospect, TL really does feel like the culmination of the "Rose as inspiration/leader" arc (TSE/JE are there to tie up her emotional storyline with the Doctor, not her heroic storyline). She inspires Donna into her sacrifice and is clearly a mysterious leadership-type figure of the sort she was working on her way to being in "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit".

When we meet Rose, she's 'just' a shopgirl. By the time we leave her on that beach the second time, she's walked across universes on a noble quest to save all of creation and to find the person she loves -- very epic. It's pretty much classic, really, except that it's the sort of story that normally only gets handed to male characters. Rose explodes the fairy tales, I said once. "I create myself," she says in "The Parting of the Ways" and it's still one of the most empowering and powerful statements about identity and coming-into-your-own that I've ever heard.

One of the very first trailers for the new series has Rose talking about the 'choice' that she has to make -- "Stay at home with my mum, my boyfriend, my job... or I can chuck it all in for danger and monsters and life or death. What do you think?"

Even in watching those brief few seconds of Rose, it's obvious what she's going to pick. Rose is just as attracted to 'trouble' as the Doctor is -- it's one of the things that they bond over. This is what she's been waiting all her life for... she just didn't know it. She takes hold of the Doctor's life and enjoys every second of it -- both Martha and Donna have moments of regret, moments when they wish they could just go home. The closest that Rose gets to that is "School Reunion", when she asks Sarah Jane if she should leave, but even then, she expresses no regret for anything that she's done with the Doctor or for the life itself. She's afraid that her heart might get broken, not that she might die.

"I made a choice," she says, over and over. She creates herself. She chooses to go with the Doctor in "Rose". She chooses to stay with him in "The End of the World" and reaffirms that decision in "The Unquiet Dead" ("I wanted to come.") and "Dalek" ("I wouldn't have missed it for the world."). She chooses, very forcefully, to come back in "The Parting of the Ways", knowing that it might well mean her death. Her fear in "The Christmas Invasion" is that the Doctor might not want her to come and she enthusiastically says that she definitely wants to go with him.

She stays with him after "School Reunion" and, while the Doctor seems to fret over her seeing her father in "Rise of the Cybermen"/"Age of Steel", there never seems to be the slightest notion from Rose's side of things that she might possibly choose to stay there -- she's surprised and saddened over Mickey staying in Pete's World but doesn't even consider the idea of staying with him. In "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit", she tells the Doctor that being stuck with him "isn't so bad" and refuses to leave the planet without him, even knowing that she might die there.

"I made my choice a long time ago," she tells him in "Doomsday" (again, there is that echo in Lucy -- "I made my choice. For better or for worse."). "And I'm never going to leave you."

The universe being what it is, she gets torn away anyway.

Rose Tyler being who she is, she refuses to take 'impossible' for an answer.

No two people love in the same way. Rose creates and inspires and builds. The Doctor protects and aids. The Master destroys and overpowers (he's dysfunctional that way).

Julie Gardner, in talking about what the Doctor says in "Journey's End", says he gives Rose the greatest compliment that he is capable of -- he tells her that she made him better, that she could do it again. "It's a better life," Rose says in tPotW, but she rushes to clarify. "I don't mean all the travelling and... seeing aliens and spaceships and things - that don't matter. The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. You know, he showed you too. That you don't just give up. You don't just let things happen. You make a stand. You say no. You have the guts to do what's right when everyone else just runs away."

What we see, in TL, is that Rose truly does embody everything that the Doctor might have taught her. She is, fully and completely, the 'Doctor' figure to Donna in that episode. The first time that the Doctor sent her away, back in tPotW, he asked her to "have a fantastic life". A good life. He wants her to be safe and he does want her to be happy.

What Rose says, then and always, is not without you. She's fully capable of living that amazing life without him, but she doesn't want to do it, but it'll break both his hearts to watch her die. And that's the conflict that exists when you have a finite love story and a character who is not finite in the same way. Again, I really, really love the solution that Russell came up with -- it's complicated and utterly unique. It balances the conflict -- the beauty and passion of the love story against the unstoppable certainty of a story that must continue on afterwards. He made it so that that story would exist on his terms and no one else's. Rose made her choice -- a life with the Doctor.

Rose is the ultimate unstoppable force -- so much so that the previously unmovable objects not only move... they actually crack under the pressure. The Doctor himself ends up literally split into two so that he can fulfill both Rose's desires and the needs of the universe (without the advent of Ten II, the tension that existed in their relationship in S1/2 would always be there -- "I could save the world but lose you.").

And it is, I think, very powerful and freeing for the Doctor to have someone choose him as strongly as Rose does after what happens in LotTL, where the Master chooses to die just to spite him.

What is love? For Rose, it meant choosing her star and running until she caught it, protecting and joining. For the Doctor, it got to mean two things -- both accepting someone else's love fully and also letting go in order to allow her to be happy in more ways than he believed he was capable of doing. For the Master and Lucy, their connection destroyed Lucy's sanity and killed the Master, allowing him to hurt the Doctor one last time. And, though the Doctor died through Rose's kiss, that freed him to become the man who could accept her saying 'forever'. And though he died because he ran to reach her again, that freed him to become a man who could promise her the rest of his life.