Rose Tyler (person)

Doctor Who - The New Series

Rose Tyler

Age: 19 in 2005.

Occupation: Shopgirl, later advisor for Torchwood.

Doctor: The Ninth Doctor, The Tenth Doctor.

Season One Rose is a nineteen-year-old girl from London in the year 2005 AD. Prior to meeting the Doctor she lived a very dull life, living with her mother Jackie in their council estate flat and working in a dead-end job in Henrik's Department Store. She also had a boyfriend, the cowardly but well-meaning Mickey Smith, who seemingly cared more for her than she did for him.

After encountering murderous mannequins at her department store, she found herself pulled into the the Doctor's strange world. After helping him save the Earth, the Doctor invited her to join him in his vehicle, the TARDIS, an offer which she initially refused until he told her it could travel in time.

Although she never did well in school, Rose is an intelligent and physically capable companion whose warmth and humanity sometimes make up for the Doctor's lapses in empathy. She has the knack of getting along well with almost everyone she meets, but has little time for bigots and boasters. However, she is prone to impulsiveness and making rash decisions. She ran off with the Doctor without thinking through the effects it would have on her boyfriend and mother, something which both of them have confronted her about on those occasions when she returns to her own time.

More dangerously, she once disrupted the entire timeline by saving her father's life in the 1980s. The chaos that ensued was finally corrected, but left a shadow on her relationship with the Doctor. Horrific though this was, it paled in comparison to the events at the end of the first season, in which Rose, Captain Jack Harkness and the Doctor found themselves aboard a distant-future space station under attack by hundreds of thousands of Daleks.

Fearing for Rose's life (Jack himself had been exterminated by the Daleks), the Doctor tricked her into entering the TARDIS, which he had rigged to deposit her back in London with her family. Refusing to let her best friends die, she convinced Jackie and Mickey to help her open up the heart of the TARDIS so that she could talk it into taking her back to help him.

In doing so, however, she looked into the Time Vortex, which irradiated her body with Vortex energy, giving her control over the universe itself. She and the TARDIS returned to the Doctor, who was preparing to be exterminated. She used her newfound powers to reduce the entire Dalek fleet to dust and bring Jack back to life, but it soon became clear that the energy was consuming her from within.

The Doctor extracted the Vortex energy with a kiss and carried the unconscious Rose into the TARDIS before leaving the station (whether or not he knew Jack was alive again is unknown). However, it emerged that the energy was killing him just as it almost killed Rose and he was forced to regenerate into the Tenth Doctor in front her.

Season Two Season two began with the Pudsey Cutaway, in which Rose had to come to terms with the Doctor's transformation. However, the Vortex energy has affected his regeneration somehow and he was forced to crashland in London on Christmas Eve 2006.

Whilst the Doctor recuperated, the Earth was threatened by the Sycorax, a race of warrior aliens. Rose was forced to play the hero and gamely confronted the Sycorax aboard their ship, but only an intervention by the Doctor himself saved her life. It was this act that convinced her this strange-looking man truly was the Doctor.

The pair continued to travel space and time and their mutually chipper attitudes saw them growing even closer than before. Rose's attitude changed from awestruck ingenue to experienced time-traveller and in a way she became a mirror of the new Doctor - something that was pointed out by her own mother.

However, their fun and games came crashing down when they landed on the Impossible Planet (episode 2.08), whose core held the Devil itself. It taunted Rose with promises that she would die in battle and, although she managed to put those thoughts to one side for some time, these promises seemed to come awfully close to happening when the pair stumbled across Torchwood.

Torchwood was a clandestine organisation hidden in the pyramid at the top of Canary Wharf that had been experimenting with alien technology. Its latest plot was to pull a sphere from the void between universes. However, this opened up cracks inbetween the Doctor's universe and another one that held the deadly Cybermen. Worst, the sphere itself contained the last remaining Daleks from the Time War.

The world soon found itself caught up in the crossfire of a war between the two species. The Doctor figured out a way to trap both sides in the Void between worlds, but in doing so Jackie, Mickey and Rose were left stranded in the other universe with a version of Rose's father.

The Doctor managed to project an image of himself through the last crack between the two realities, where it emerged that Rose and Mickey had found employment at the other universe's version of Torchwood and that they were living with Jackie and alt-Pete in his mansion. Her return to the series, like that of all the alternate universe-based characters, is unlikely.

Alternate universe Rose In the alternate universe, Pete and Jackie had no children and Rose was actually a small Yorkshire Terrier.

Appearances First season: Appears in all episodes.

Second season: Appears in all episodes except sp.03, "Attack of the Graske".