Rose (novelisation)

Rose was a novelisation based on the 2005 television episode Rose, written by Russell T Davies. It was published simultaneously with The Christmas Invasion, The Day of the Doctor, and Twice Upon a Time in 2018 and thus was tied with those stories as the first release under the Target Books banner since The Paradise of Death in 1994.

In 2020, Davies released a 21st chapter, following on from page 197, where this novelisation ends. This was entitled Revenge of the Nestene, and released independently through Davies' Instagram as part of a COVID-19 crisis Doctor Who: Lockdown! event, celebrating the 15th anniversary of the television episode. The bonus chapter was included in the 2023 illustrated edition.

Publisher's summary

2018 edition

Meet the new Doctor Who classics.

“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.

2023 edition

To celebrate the return of the show-runner Russell T Davies to Doctor Who, as well as the 60th anniversary of the show, a special illustrated edition of Rose - the story that relaunched Doctor Who for the 21st century, novelised by Russell from his original script.

'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.

Rose is the story that brought Doctor Who back for the 21st century - and Russell T Davies's novelisation, based on his script, set the standard for new-era Target novelisations. Now, with illustrations by acclaimed artist Robert Hack - this is Rose as you've never seen it before...

Chapter titles

Prologue

Descent into Terror
Enter the Doctor
Life at No.143
Plastic Attack
The Turn of the Earth
Life at No.90
The Mysteries of Juke Street
Shed of Secrets
The Pizza Surprise
Inside the Box
War Stories
The Living Statues
The Lair of the Beast
The Never-Ending War
The Army Awakes
The Battle of London
Rose Says No
Death Throes
Aftermath
The Journey Begins

Characters

Worldbuilding

The leader of the Autons wears 501s, a type of jeans.
The Doctor states the Eiffel Tower is a spaceship which he prevented from taking off, but left on idle.

Notes

A poster for the 2023 reprint of this novelisation and The Evil of the Daleks ^[+]Loading...["The Evil of the Daleks (BBC Books novelisation)"] was included in SFX 373.

Deviations from televised story

H.P. Wilson is renamed to Bernard Wilson, while his position at Henrik's is Senior Caretaker instead of Chief Electrical Officer.
The book opens with a prologue detailing Bernard Wilson's backstory and the events leading up to his death.
Rose is recalling these events from Bad Wolf Bay.
The novelisation includes (as a flashback) the scene from the end of the television story The End of Time where the Tenth Doctor visits Rose Tyler right before his regeneration.
The security guard that hands Rose the lottery money is given a name, Lee Lin.
The original broadcast contained an unintended error where TV presenter Graham Norton's voice was heard over a scene. This is included in the narrative with his voice being heard on a radio in the background.
The Doctor blows up Henrik's because the building is infested with plastic.
There is no mention of Rose passing the TARDIS after the Henrik's explosion.
The Henrik's explosion violently tears apart the building. Surrounded by rubble, Rose sticks around for a time to watch the aftermath of the explosion, making a brief phone call home to assure her mother she's alright.
The Powell Estate has two towers, unofficially called Enoch and Powell, of sixteen floors, with six flats per storey rising above a squat quadrant with shops on the ground level including a chemist, a newsagent, Dev the bookie's, and Chicken Shack & Rack.
Jackie holds an impromptu get-together at her flat to celebrate Rose returning home unharmed from the destruction of Henrik's. Attendees include Ru and Bau, Mrs Jayasundera, who brings baked apples, and Howard, who brings a bag of Cox's Pippins.
The butcher's Jackie recommends Rose try looking for a job at is named Martin & Heath, instead of Finch's.
During the Doctor and Jackie's first conversation, Jackie says "We're talking millions" instead of the Doctor.
The Doctor wonders why he's never been ginger while examining his reflection, a disappointment which will carry onto his immediate successors.
Rose does not go to the kitchen to make tea and is thus in the living room when the Doctor finds the Auton hand behind the sofa, and realizes it is strangling him for real immediately. Rose and the Doctor fall on the coffee table while she is trying to help pull it off of him – the hand never grabs at her face in this version. The Doctor receives several cuts from the broken glass. After the defeat of the hand, Jackie comes in, sees the damage, and reacts to Rose sitting atop the Doctor by exclaiming about Rose being a "tart". She subsequently bombards Rose with text messages about replacing the coffee table.
When Rose parts ways with the Doctor at the edge of the estate before he leaves in the TARDIS, the surroundings are a desolate field and parking lot with no buildings around, making the TARDIS's presence stand out much more.
Mickey's backstory is explored. For his sixteenth birthday, his grandmother Rita-Anne had put his name down for a flat, with the Powell Estate being "first preference". By this time, he and Rose started dating, though she maintained that "it [was] nothing special. By age eighteen he got a flat, 90 Powell Tower, though Rita-Anne told him that he was "a pain and a nuisance and she wanted him out." The first thing Mickey did when he got his flat was make sure his friends were welcome inside. Before meeting the Doctor, he was interested in football.
Odessa visited Jackie when Rose was born, with Mickey in tow.
Mickey is in an R&B band called Bad Wolf (formerly No Hot Ashes) with three of his friends - a trans woman named Sally Salter, and Mook Jayasundera and Patrice Okereke, who are attracted to each other. His friends regularly stay over at his flat, and are present when Rose stops by to visit Mickey's computer, spending the entire time debating new band names.
Mickey does not tell Rose to not look at his email.
Jackie met Odessa Smith, Sarah Clark, Suzie and Bev and in the 1980s, they formed the "Wednesday Girls", who met every Wednesday night for wine and chips. She was also the karaoke champion of 'the Spinning Wheel' and the life and soul of every party she went to. As her relationship with Jackson deteriorated, Odessa relied on the the group to cheer her up for the one night of laughter of the week; other nights were darker. Jackie would later say that Odessa "could never really cope with money, with men, or anything really" and Rose said that she "just couldn't cope". In 1989, when Mickey was five, she wandered into her room and quietly committed suicide.
Jackson Smith was working as an engineer and a part-time singer when Odessa died and was horrified to find himself a single dad and worked longer and longer hours and further further away from home until he found a job on the cruise ships moored alongside Tower Bridge. He was employed as the Second Engineer, but has aspirations to move up and sing on the ships. A two month contract was followed by a six month contract and then another, and Mickey never saw his father again. According to Rose, Jackson "just wandered off".
Rita-Anne was known as a "firebrand, meddler and a troublemaker", took Mickey into her own home not long after his father abandoned him, but kept him in the same school and ensured he remained in close contact with his friends from the Powell Estate. On his sixteenth birthday, she put him on the housing list of the Powell Estate and pushed him to move back to be closer to his friends. Rose described her as "such a great woman" who would always slap Mickey around. Three hundred people came to her funeral, for she was an extremely beloved woman, and the residents of Waterton Street closed the roads off to have a party in her memory, where people "danced and wept" until 5am. At the end, Mickey was carried on "the crowd's shoulders like a king".
Who is Doctor Who? is instead called Have you seen the Doctor????????. The top image is of the Ninth Doctor at the Taj Mahal, and includes a gallery of images of various Doctors. The picture of the Doctor at the assassination of John F. Kennedy is not on the website, and instead shows the Doctor being held back behind a cordon by two police officers.
Clive has two sons, Ben and Michael, instead of the one unnamed son on screen. This would appear to be a tribute to Michael Craze, who played Second Doctor companion Ben Jackson.
Rose tells Mickey that Clive is helping her with her compensation.
Clive's shed has a UNIT logo and the name "Torchwood" – misread by Rose as "Touchwood" due to being partially obscured – on the walls of his shed.

Clive's photographs

Clive shows Rose pictures of incarnations other than the Ninth Doctor: He seems to know the first thirteen known incarnations of the Doctor, except the War Doctor. Rose was distracted when being shown pictures of "a man with two suits, brown and blue". The shown Doctors include
- "An old man with white hair and a black cape"
- "A little man with a Beatles mop of hair"
- "A man with a fabulous grey bouffant with a hovercraft
- "A man in [a] long scarf", by the Thames next to the Loch Ness Monster;
- "A rather hot blond man at Heathrow Airport;
- "A curly-haired man [...] dressed as a picnic";
- "A short man with an umbrella";
- "A dashing, Byronic man" at an atomic clock opening;
- "A man with a fantastic jaw, dressed in a tweed jacket and bow tie";
- "An older, angry man in a brown caretaker's coat, holding a mop", as well as;
- A photo of "a blonde woman in braces running away from a giant frog in front of Buckingham Palace".
  - He has photos of them in folders in incarnation order, seeing that the Ninth Doctor was in a box-file labelled "09". He also has two pictures of possible Doctors, including "a tall, bald black woman wielding a flaming sword" and "a young girl or boy in a hi-tech wheelchair with what looked like a robot dog at their side".
  - The illustrated edition adds in the Fugitive Doctor, Fourteenth Doctor, Fifteenth Doctor, and two of the Doctors from The Brain of Morbius ^[+]Loading...["The Brain of Morbius (TV story)"].
Clive has photographs of the TARDIS, but is clueless as to what it is, admitting he wonders if it's a mobile canteen.
Clive tells Rose a theory that people's memories of alien encounters have been wiped by cracks in time, presaging the revelations in Series 5.
Clive met his wife Caroline at Durham University when his UFO Society and her Reclaim The Night Enclave groups had both booked the same venue. His group left, but Caroline tracked him down to a bar where she apologised. They talked together through the night. They later married and had two sons, Ben and Michael. At some point, Clive became an estate agent. Sometime during February, Clive and his family visited Thorpe Park.
Clive explains to Rose that his father was present during the Shoreditch Incident of 1963. It is revealed that he was exterminated by an Imperial Dalek when Clive was two years of age. This led Clive to begin his research into 'the Doctor'. Rose empathises with him and explains that her own father died when she was six months old.
- However, according to The Persistence of Memory, Clive was 14 in 1979, meaning he was born in 1965, two years after he claimed his father had died and four years after he claimed he was born.
Mickey lets the Nestene-controlled wheelie bin out through a gate.
The duplicate of Mickey has one of his eyes pop out of his head during dinner with Rose, falling into his soup. As a result, Rose realizes he is a plastic duplicate prior to the Doctor shooting a champagne cork into his head.
The duplicate of Mickey threatens to kill the people in the restaurant if Rose doesn't tell him about the Doctor.
Since the novelisation states Mickey's mother committed suicide, instead of saying she'll have to tell his mother he's dead, Rose says she'll have to tell his friends, his uncle and the kids from the estate.
The Doctor tells Rose that the Time War rewrote the Nestene's history so it is now made of plastic instead of just controlling it.
The Doctor names the Autons to Rose; on screen, the name is only used in the closing credits.
Rose notices the cut the Doctor got when the table smashed has disappeared and he says that, while it was twelve hours ago for Rose, it has been "weeks" since for him. In the interim, he fought a pterodactyl.
The Doctor and Rose encounter a group of Autons posing as living statues on the Embankment.
Jackie goes to an office set up for Henrik's to collect Rose's compensation forms, instead of the police.
The Doctor tries to convince the Nestene to colonise an empty planet.
The first Mickey that Rose finds in the Nestene lair is another duplicate, whom she lets slip about the anti-plastic to, ending the Doctor's negotiations.
Instead of saying he fought in the war, the Doctor says he tried to stop it.
The Auton invasion is more gruesome, and includes decapitations, where the Autons form their hands into sharp blades.
Jackie and the Finches are shopping on Oxford Street when the attack begins, instead of Queens Arcade.
Clive deliberately slows the Autons down so his family can escape.
The Auton massacre is told from the point of view of several victims, including Rose's old boyfriend Jimmy Stone who is robbing his current girlfriend Abena when he is cut into pieces as he leaves her house.
Rose and Jimmy broke up after being together for a year, sometime in late 2003. When he left, Rose told him that "he'd come to no good one day", as he stole her secondhand computer which he stashed inside his car.
Donna has a cameo appearance sleeping through the Auton massacre.
The London Eye collapses into the Thames as a result of the destruction of the Nestene, sending its passenger pods into the river and onto the opposite bank, with one landing in a tree.
Rose speaks to Jackie on the phone after the massacre instead of hanging up when she answers.
The Doctor shows Rose and Mickey the view of the Earth outside the TARDIS doors.
The Doctor lands the TARDIS in the ruins of Henrik's instead of a nondescript alleyway, after promising to take Rose home. Rose imagines what the TARDIS landing in her living room would look like.
Rose is less dismissive of Mickey at the end, with their conversation ending after her "Thank you."

Continuity

Sylvia Noble and her friends also called themselves the Wednesday Girls. (TV: Partners in Crime)
The Doctor alludes to having had companions before.
The Doctor names the Western Heights of the Jaggit Brocade as a place the Nestene Consciousness could peacefully settle.
Keisha is one of the people who leaves a message for Rose after the attack, asking if she's okay.

Audiobook

This Target Book was released as an audiobook on 21 June 2018 complete and unabridged by BBC Audio and read by Camille Coduri.

Audiobook cover

External links

Official Rose page at Penguin Books

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