Rose

Target novelisation Doctor Who - Rose

Author	Russell T Davies
Published	2018
ISBN	978 1 785 94326 3
First Edition Cover	Anthony Dry

Back cover blurb: "Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!" In a lair somewhere beneath central London, a malevolent alien intelligence is plotting the end of humanity. Shop window dummies that can move - and kill - are taking up key positions, ready to strike. Rose Tyler, an ordinary Londoner, is working her shift in a department store, unaware that this is the most important day of her life. She's about to meet the only man who understands the true nature of the threat facing Earth, a stranger who will open her eyes to all the wonder and terror of the universe - a traveller in time and space known as the Doctor.

• Tales of the Auton Invasion by Niall Jones
• The Rough, The Smooth and Rose Tyler by Matthew Kresal

Tales of the Auton Invasion by Niall Jones 17/4/21

You might question whether there is a need for novelisations in this day and age. Whereas they were once the only way to relive a Doctor Who serial, or to catch up on one you missed, it is now possible to watch episodes again and again, either on DVD or via streaming platforms such as BBC iPlayer or Britbox. This hasn't stopped the BBC from commissioning a series of novelisations of New Who episodes, however.

One of the first of these to be published was Doctor Who - Rose, Russell T Davies' adaptation of his pivotal 2005 episode. The novelisation more than justifies its existence: in straightforward but vivid prose, Davies develops and expands upon the story that brought Doctor Who back to our screens. New characters are introduced, minor characters are developed more fully, and intriguing subplots are added. In addition, the novel form allows him to get inside the heads of key characters, particularly Rose, giving the reader much deeper insight into their emotions and motivations. The Doctor's mind, however, is off limits. This ensures that he remains something of a mystery and that the reader's experience of him is largely focalised through Rose's impressions.

Whereas the broadcast episode begins high above the Earth, before zooming in on Rose, the novelisation begins below ground, in the basement of Henrik's department store, and focuses on a character who is mentioned only briefly on screen. By introducing the previously unseen character of Bernie Wilson, caretaker and conman, Davies suggests that, despite its title, the novelisation is not wholly about Rose. In the moments before his death, Wilson has a revelation. Davies writes that he 'saw that our stories are only part of bigger stories, and that the stories around us are so vast, we will never know our place in them, or how they end'. This view underpins Davies' approach to the novelisation, as snippets from the stories of other characters play out alongside Rose's own story.

One of these stories concerns Mook Jayasundera, Patrice Okereke and Sally Salter, friends of Mickey who play alongside him in the ominously named Bad Wolf Band. By including them in the story, Davies not only gives a more rounded picture of Mickey's life before meeting the Doctor but also explores the ways in which an alien invasion affects the people who are left behind in its wake. Here, Davies' vision is optimistic. The band's narrow brush with death puts their previous experiences into perspective and inspires them to embrace who they are.

Unlike the broadcast episode, which was aimed at a general audience, the novelisation contains a number of references to other Doctor Who episodes. Some of these simply incorporate material from subsequent episodes, such as the Tenth Doctor's incognito New Year's greeting to Rose and Donna's astounding ability to sleep through a crisis. Other references, however, add an extra layer of depth to the story.

Perhaps the most significant example of this relates to Clive Finch, the man Rose consults about the Doctor. The novelisation describes how Clive's obsession with the Doctor stems from his father's mysterious death during the Shoreditch Incident (a reference to Remembrance of the Daleks). This revelation highlights the extent to which the Doctor's actions have consequences that ripple down the generations, a theme that is rarely explored in the TV series. It also adds extra emotional heft to Clive's own death. Davies describes how, facing down an Auton, Clive 'found himself smiling, even as he started to cry. Because here it was at last. Adventure'. In the moments leading up to his death 'somewhere in the back of his head, he thought: Like father, like son'. Thus, Clive's involvement with the Doctor comes full circle, his death a vindication - even a triumph - as well as a tragedy.

Davies' description of the Auton invasion is one of the highlights of the book. Going beyond what is shown in the episode, it captures the confusion and chaos of the event. The invasion is far bloodier than the TV version, with Autons decapitating and hacking to death terrified Londoners. It is also far madder, with living statues, plastic dogs and giant clowns joining the fray. The level of destruction reaches apocalyptic proportions, with the London Eye crashing into the Houses of Parliament. Despite this, the tone is hopeful, with Davies describing miraculous escapes alongside gruesome deaths.

Since the episode was broadcast, there has been much greater concern about the environmental impact of plastic. Davies addresses this in a series of passages that reveal how ubiquitous plastic has become and, consequently, how vulnerable we would be to attack by the Nestene Consciousness:

'Every form of plastic felt an urge to move, tugging at a cellular level. An instinct to rise up and kill É On deserted Pacific islands, reefs of plastic bottles tumbled together to form giant, lurching, man-shaped idols, rearing up over the surf with no one to witness their birth'

Overall, Doctor Who - Rose illustrates the ways in which novelisations can expand upon and develop their source material. The book feels like a writer's cut that adds depth to an already excellent story. Although it tells the same basic story as Rose, its differences ensure that it enriches the broadcast episode, rather than replicating it.

The Rough, The Smooth and Rose Tyler by Matthew Kresal 27/4/25

The episode Rose holds a special place in Doctor Who history. It was, if nothing else, the beginning of the series' 21st century regeneration, securing it new generations of fans and launching a series that shows no signs of stopping two decades later. As such, it comes as no surprise that it was among the first to be chosen for novelizing as nostalgia for the Target books of decades past caught up with Modern Who. Given that the episode only ran forty-odd minutes, how well could it translate to the page?

Russell T Davies, writer of both the TV episode and its prose version more than a decade later, would take a cue from Target books that expanded on their TV counterparts such as The Cave Monsters or the likes of Remembrance of the Daleks or Ghost Light. Davies takes the world's reintroduction to Doctor Who and builds upon it. Something that's clear from the opening pages of the novelization, which focus not on Rose herself but on the mentioned but unseen character of Wilson who has a rather meta realization about his existence before his demise. It's an opening that sets the tone for the slim volume that follows.

Because wherever Davies can, he fleshes out the episode so well known to fans since 2005. Mickey gets an entire band put together around him, bringing in a whole new group of supporting characters. Readers get to learn more about Clive, his family and what lies behind his quest to find out more about the Doctor. It's in that those chapters that Davies does something he was unwilling to do on TV: acknowledge Doctor Who's pre-2005 past with mentions of Doctors that were and would be to come. Scenes that didn't make the final cut on-screen appear, from the infamous burning couch to a larger role for Mickey in the Nestene's lair. It's a nice fleshing out out of a familiar tale, which adds something for even the most jaded fan to take notice of as they read.

But those extensions have their limits. Despite how slim of a book this is, there are times when it feels that Davies' prose simply exists to chew up word count. The sequence where Mickey is captured by a plastic garbage bin is a case in point, going on for pages instead of being the throwaway scene it was on-screen (and, worse, still ending with the cringe inducing satisfied belch). Nowhere is Davies more guilty of that than in the finale, a sequence that lasted only a few minutes onscreen. While it's nice to have Mickey's role put back and thus giving the character more of a presence, it also helps to drag it out. Worse comes with the Auton attack on London, a sequence that amounts to a handful of minutes on screen, which now consumes entire chapters of page count without really adding anything narratively. All of which is a shame, as it hampers what would otherwise have been a first-rate novelization.

As I discovered in 2015 when I read his 1996 Virgin New Adventures novel Damaged Goods, one has to take the rough with the smooth with Davies as a prose writer. His "writer's cut" of Rose has its moments, particularly in how it fleshes out the supporting characters and adds a wider friend circle for Mickey. Yet building up other moments causes them to lose tension or simply weighs down the book. Something that, ironically, leaves the Rose novelization as a case of damaged goods for fans to pick their way through.