Bernard Quatermass

Bernard Quatermass
Place of origin:	Earth
Appearances:	NA: The Dying Days (cameo)

Professor Bernard Quatermass was a British scientist.

Profile

Biography

He worked alongside Dr. Rachel Jensen in the British Rocket Group (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks). In 1997, paranoid and full of bleak pessimism, he appeared on television with Dr. Patrick Moore in a panel discussion regarding the possibility of life on the planet Mars. (NA: The Dying Days)

Mentions

UNIT scientific advisor Professor Malcolm Taylor named a unit of measurement after Bernard Quatermass. (DW: Planet of the Dead)

Behind the Scenes

The Quatermass serials

Quatermass and the British Rocket Group had originally appeared as the protagonist of a series of four horror-science fiction television serials written by Nigel Kneale. The first three aired during the 1950s on the BBC. (The last serial simply entitled Quatermass aired in 1979, though not on the BBC.) These would have great influence over Doctor Who over the years. In the Doctor Who Universe, the Nightshade serials stand in for the Quatermass serials. Although his last name is not mentioned on screen, the refernce to "Bernard" in Remembrance of the Daleks was intended as a reference to the character.

In 2005, the BBC aired a remake of one of the original serials, The Quatermass Experiment. Appearing in the serial were David Tennant and Indira Varma prior to their involvement as the Tenth Doctor and Suzie Costello, respectively. Mark Gatiss, longtime performer and writer of Doctor Who spinoff productions, scriptwriter for the new series, and later a guest star in The Lazarus Experiment, also appears in the production.

The character

A number of actors portrayed the character, with none considered "definitive", however Lance Parkin has said that he meant to visualized the elderly, nearly crazed John Mills version as the one appearing in the New Adventures novel The Dying Days.

The Quatermass saga and the Doctor Who Universe

Quatermass and the Pit presents some difficulties as it deals with yet another explanation for the origin of Humans and another species of intelligent life from Mars. It also features the destruction of much of London. The half-ruined future of Quatermass could fit in with Cat's Cradle: Warhead (which derived from inspiration from the serial) but does not fit in particularly well with continuity as a whole. The existence of a Bernard Quatermass in the establshed Doctor Who Universe suggests that the events seen in the various serials take place in parallel worlds (similar to that established with Pete's World and Donna's World), and that different events involving Quatermass, or at least outcomes, occurred in the DWU. It is also possible that only the first two Quatermass serials take place within the Whoniverse and that the British Experimental Rocket Group later became British Space Control.

The reference to Quatermass in Planet of the Dead is executed in such a way as to neither confirm nor deny that Quatermass exists in the Whoniverse.