Adelaide Brooke
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Adelaidefor other, similarly-named pages.
Captain Adelaide Brooke, Ph.D (12 May 1999-21 November 2059) was briefly a companion of the Tenth Doctor. During the Daleks' attempt to destroy reality, she ended up being orphaned when both of her parents never returned home. She was raised by her grandmother afterwards and, as the years passed, eventually became a mother and grandmother herself. She was commander of Bowie Base One on Mars in the late 2050s.
In November 2059, the base came under attack by a water-based entity called the Flood. This provoked her to give up her life to prevent the viral lifeforms from infecting humanity. It gave her granddaughter Susie Fontana Brooke the desire to be a pioneer of space travel. However, the Doctor interfered with Brooke's fate, and she took matters into her own hands to make sure critical events of time would not be cancelled out, through taking her own life. She was hailed as a hero in the new timeline, still inspiring her granddaughter to continue the Brooke tradition to go into space.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Early life[[edit] | [edit source]]
Adelaide was born in Finchley, North London on 12 May 1999. Adelaide was a child during the Daleks' abduction and invasion of Earth in 2009. Her father told her to stay in the house while he went to search for her mother. Adelaide never saw her parents again, and they were never found. The young Adelaide was spotted by a Dalek hovering over the house. The Dalek stared at her for a few moments, and then simply turned and flew away — deliberately sparing her life. The event inspired Adelaide to go into space. The Doctor believed the Dalek recognised her as a fixed point in history, (TV: The Waters of Mars [+]Loading...["The Waters of Mars (TV story)"]) with the Time Lords believing she was spared by the Dalek because it thought, if she were killed before the reality bomb was activated, it could impact their ongoing invasion. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)
She studied at Cambridge University, and achieved a first honours degree in combined Physics and Mathematics. She transferred to Rice University in 2017, where she earned her doctorate in Physics. (TV: The Waters of Mars [+]Loading...["The Waters of Mars (TV story)"])
Career[[edit] | [edit source]]
After Rice, she worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Brooke became the first NASA candidate selected who was not a United States citizen. After an intensive, two-year training programme, she served on shuttle missions. Despite her youth and inexperience at NASA, she was selected to head up Project Pit Stop, which used the Moon as a re-fuelling base for planetary exploration. This was highly successful; exploratory, unmanned shuttles were dispatched to Neptune and Jupiter via the moon. The data they obtained greatly increased humanity's knowledge of these planets.
According to her obituary, at the age of forty-two, she was a member of a three-person mission to Mars. She was the first woman to land there. Afterwards, she campaigned to have Mars chosen as a location for colonisation. However, the Tenth Doctor claimed the nine people on the Bowie Base One colony in 2058 was made up of the "very first humans on Mars", including Adelaide. In 2058, when Adelaide was now a grandmother, she led an international team to Mars, the first human colony on the planet. She found fame on Earth as a result. (TV: The Waters of Mars [+]Loading...["The Waters of Mars (TV story)"])
Fighting the Flood[[edit] | [edit source]]
In 2059, after seventeen months of success, her crew members Andy Stone and Tarak Ital were taken over by the Flood, a viral life form. She tried to contain the infection, which failed after the Flood infected three more members of her crew and after realising containing the Flood was impossible, she ordered evacuation. Adelaide was suspicious of the newly arrived Doctor's actions and comments. She forced him to tell her the truth: Bowie Base One was going to be destroyed and the crew killed. This was a fixed point in time - he could not save her.
Though she struggled to save the colonists, when the Doctor returned to help, she resigned herself to her fate and set the base's self-destruct timer. He defiantly used the base's robot to summon his TARDIS and saved Mia Bennett, Yuri Kerenski and her, returning them to Earth in front of Adelaide's house. She realised her survival would alter her granddaughter's life and potentially human history, leading to her growing angry with the Doctor when he dismissed the problem and referred to her fellow survivors as "little people", telling him his self-proclaimed title of Time Lord Victorious was wrong.
He dismissed her concerns and she walked into her house. (TV: The Waters of Mars [+]Loading...["The Waters of Mars (TV story)"]) The TARDIS noticed her looking back at the Doctor with a sad smile, a look she recognised as one she'd worn when leaving battlefields and wastelands. (PROSE: What the TARDIS thought of "Time Lord Victorious") Adelaide took her own life to preserve the timeline, with her suicide causing the Doctor to realise the seriousness of his actions, quickly coming to regret them. (TV: The Waters of Mars [+]Loading...["The Waters of Mars (TV story)"])
Legacy[[edit] | [edit source]]
According to the Doctor, Brooke's granddaughter, Susie Fontana Brooke, was inspired by her memory. She went into space and piloted the first lightspeed ship to Proxima Centauri. Her descendants led humanity throughout space, including to the Dragon Star, the Celestial Belt of the Winter Queen, and the Map of the Water Snake Wormholes. One of them fell in love with a Tandonian prince and created a new species.
Though the Doctor saved three people from Bowie Base One, Adelaide's suicide ensured that the timeline was not altered significantly. Her death was the fixed point in time. The only evident change was that history now recorded that she died on Earth rather than on Mars, and that she had committed suicide under "unexplained circumstances". Mia and Yuri told the world the story of Bowie Base One and hailed her as a hero. This, not the mystery of her death on Mars, was what inspired her granddaughter. (TV: The Waters of Mars [+]Loading...["The Waters of Mars (TV story)"]) Mia and Yuri later named their daughter Adelaide in her honour. (PROSE: The Waters of Mars)
Adelaide's fate weighed heavily on the Doctor. Her death and the subsequent summons from Ood Sigma compelled him to flee into the Dark Times after discovering a Time Fracture (PROSE: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead) created by Adelaide's brief survival. (PROSE: What the TARDIS thought of "Time Lord Victorious")
Adelaide Brooke was a hero to Devika Cullen, an astronaut who probed the atmosphere of Venus in the 2090s. (PROSE: Sunset Over Venus) A biography of Adelaide was written after her death. A copy was kept by Anke in the Verbier Museum of the Impossible, as its ending was constantly in flux. (PROSE: Canaries)
Other realities[[edit] | [edit source]]
A version of Adelaide also existed in the Daft Dimension. After declaring himself the "Time Lord Victorious", the Tenth Doctor decided to wear the "biggest collar ever" on his Time Lord robe, which Adelaide admitted was "not quite the threat to the universe that [she] was expecting!". (COMIC: The Daft Dimension 556)
Personality[[edit] | [edit source]]
Adelaide Brooke was a stripy and serious woman who often showed other people a cool demeanour; she reserved her warmth for her family. Though she cared about her crew, she treated them in a professional manner and demanded decorum and discipline. One of her crew noted that she only gave compliments if the situation was serious. During the attack of the Flood on Bowie Base One, she was devastated after witnessing two members of her crew, Steffi Ehrlich and Roman Groom, jerking after getting infected.
Adelaide was a selfless woman who sacrificed herself to preserve history. Though she knew the Doctor for less than a day, she quickly grew to accept that he was a time traveller, even before she travelled in the TARDIS. She was angry with the Doctor when he rescued her, Mia Bennett and Yuri Kerenski, telling him that "The Time Lord Victorious is wrong!", and was aghast that he could have changed the history of the entire human race. (TV: The Waters of Mars [+]Loading...["The Waters of Mars (TV story)"])
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
- The details of her pre-Bowie Base career can be briefly seen in her obituary.
- When initially sketching out the story, Davies considered Helen Mirren as a potential actress to play the character who became Adelaide. In an early draft, the character was Russian, but this was changed when, still thinking of Mirren as a potential guest star, Davies felt it would have been too close to the character played by Mirren in the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact. (REF: Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale - The Final Chapter)
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