How can a Rose/Billie Piper fan not think her separation from the Doctor at the end of "Doomsday" was the saddest moment of Doctor Who?Pretty easily, actually.
I liked Billie Piper’s role as Rose, but I never bought into her relationship with the doctor as a romance. Neither did most people. The Doctor was clinging to her because he was now the last of his kind. Bythe time we got to ’Doomsday,” he knew it, too. He had used her ad was now sending her off to be with a new family so she would forget him.
You do not see it so much in the first season with the Ninth Doctor because she was supposed to be helping him get over his survivor’s guilt, but you do see it in the second season as early as “School Reunion” when she learns about Sarah Jane smith’s travels with him. Rose suspects she is not as special as she thought she was and begins to fear she will be eventually be abandoned, too.
The Doctor falls in love with Madame de Pompadour I the very next episode.
Look at the Doctor’s reaction in ’Doomsday” as he listens to Rose explaining to her mother why she has to stay with him forever. He knows she has a misguided, unrequited love. He sneaks up behind her and forces her to go to the parallel Earth against her will.
When he visits her there at the end of the episode, he drags his feet about saying, “I love you” hoping he can fade away before he has to say it. Notice, too, in “Journey’s End” how easily he travels to the parallel Earth easily after telling her he would collapse the two universes if he even tried. He was not telling her the truth the first time around.
I do think the ending of “Doomsday” was done badly. Leaving a broken hearted nineteen year old sobbing on a Norwegian beach in the middle of winter was a non-American enig. It appears the Brits do not have this need for happy endings. Nevertheless, I thought it was cruel just from a narrative standpoint to leave the story hanging for two years with that beig the last image in our minds.
I chalk it up to Russell T. Davies often hack writing. His sense of the tragic is so over the top, he often crosses the line from entertaining viewing to horrific. The ultimate resolution was terribly trite, I might add, so the final payoff with rose hooking up with a clone of the Doctor was laughably bad. It tied the loose ends up a little too neatly. Hack writing at its worst.
It all comes down to me thinking the Doctor ditching Rose was his choice because there was no romance, but he could never convince her of that. I did feel the cruelty of stranding her that way, but I cannot describe my reaction as sadness.
