Fanfic / Being To Timelessness

Being To Timelessness is a Doctor Who Shipping Fan Fic written by Nancy Kelley. It can basically be described as an AU of the Tenth Doctor's tenure.

Before the Ninth Doctor regenerates, the Doctor kisses Rose to absorb the power of the Vortex inside her. When he sees several timelines where he loses Rose abruptly, and one where she stays with him forever, he decides to plant a seed during a future encounter between her and a werewolf that will change the course of their futures.

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The story is divided into the following parts:

• Prologue - Eternity in Her Eyes: Prior to his regeneration into the Tenth Doctor, the Doctor sees a future where he’s with Rose forever. He can’t force it to happen, but he can gently nudge Rose in the right direction with a hint. Takes place during "The Parting of the Ways".
• Part 1 - To Make Much of Time: The Doctor thought that he's removed all traces of the Vortex from Rose after "The Parting of the Ways", but it turns out there's still something of the Wolf about her. An AU retelling of season 2 from "Tooth and Claw" through "Doomsday".
• Part 2 - Time is Still A-Flying: The Doctor and Rose have managed to escape the trap that was set for them at Torchwood. But the Master is still in London, and Election Day is on the horizon. He’s tried to separate them once; will they survive him trying again? AU retelling covering "The Runaway Bride" and season 3.
• Part 3 - The Most Wonderful Time of the Year: In the aftermath of a year as the Master's prisoners, the Doctor and Rose are ready to get back to their old life—travelling and saving the universe. But a disastrous voyage on the Titanic shows them that they still have some fresh wounds to deal with. AU of "Time Crash" and "Voyage of the Damned".
• Part 4 - Taking Time: The Doctor and Rose take time off from traveling to recuperate from the physical and mental wounds left by their year with the Master. Set in between "Voyage of the Damned" and "Partners in Crime".
• Part 5 - Forever and Never Apart: The Doctor and Rose are now back to travelling in the TARDIS. But it's not as relaxing as it once was. A bunch of new and familiar faces are meeting them on the TARDIS, and the Doctor and Rose find themselves facing the return of Bad Wolf when they hear about the stars going out. AU retelling of season 4.
• Part 6 - Forever Timeless: Two months after the events of "Journey's End", the Doctor and Rose are getting used to having such a large found family. As their travels take them throughout time and space, the members of their new found family help them out in ways they never expected. This story is an AU retelling of the 2009 specials era. As this is where the fic series leaves the Tenth Doctor's canon seasons behind, there is major divergence from show canon. Covered in this are a modified version of "The Eleventh Hour" with the Tenth Doctor and Rose, before diving into the 2009 specials: "The Next Doctor" with the Doctor and Rose, and "Planet of the Dead" with the Doctor, Rose, Donna, Jenny and Lee. "The Waters of Mars" is now replaced by an original story set in Tudor England, while "The End of Time" is replaced by an original story involving Rose teaming up with the Eighth Doctor to rescue a kidnapped Tenth Doctor.

The author has plans for additional stories which will cover Seasons 5 through 7, essentially covering stories from the Eleventh Doctor era but with the Tenth Doctor and Rose. The proposed stories are as follows:

• Part 7: An AU with the Doctor and Rose traveling with Amy and Rory. AU for "Victory of the Daleks", "The Lodger," "Vincent and the Doctor" and "The Girl who Waited".
• Part 8: An AU of "A Christmas Carol," "The Doctor’s Wife," "Closing Time" and "Nightmare in Silver".
• Part 9: This one will have the Doctor and Rose progress through an AU of "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" with Donna, Lee,^note Donna's dream husband from "Silence in the Library" and Wilfred, "Power of Three" with Amy, Rory, and Melody, "A Town Called Mercy" with Mickey and Martha, and "The Snowmen" with Victorian Clara
• Part 10: A rewrite of "Day of the Doctor", featuring the Eighth and Ninth Doctors with Rose, and the Tenth Doctor with his Rose.
• Part 11 - The Greatest Adventure: The Doctor and Rose have their own child, in a story that will include a rewrite of "Amy's Choice".
• Part 12: An AU of "Bells of St. John", "Rings of Akhaten", "Hide" and "Robot of Sherwood". Will end with the Tenth Doctor's regeneration into the Eleventh Doctor.

There are also supplementary fics that are either outtakes or deleted scenes from the main stories.

• Hope is Where Forever Begins: The Doctor and Rose mark their honeymoon with a trip to the planet Esperas.
• Timeless Outtakes: Missing scene fics that go into detail about moments that were mentioned in passing during the main stories.

In addition to existing tropes already in the episodes that these stories cover, these stories include examples of the following tropes:

Tropes in "To Make Much of Time"

• Arc Welding: The Torchwood arc of series 2 and the Master arc of series 3, as the whole Torchwood arc was an elaborate attempt by the Master to separate the Doctor from Rose.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: The Master makes his first appearance in the last chapter following the Battle of Canary Wharf, having started plans to manipulate the Doctor's and Rose's timelines.
• Adaptation Expansion: The season 2 episodes are retained, but we also see the Doctor and Rose go on the various adventures from the tie-in novels, and downtime that happens in between their adventures.
  • In the "Impossible Planet" two-parter, there's an additional scene with the Doctor and Rose bunking for the night before the Doctor and Ida suit up to go down the drill shaft. This takes place in between the scene of Scooti's death and the Doctor and Ida first donning their spacesuits. It's actually not explicit in the episode that they stayed a night on Krop Tor, but we do know from dialogue earlier in the episode that they got there just before the station went into night shift, and the author had the opinion that while Ida was raring to go straight into the drill shaft, Zach (as Acting Captain) would've insisted that she sleep first.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: The Doctor and Rose's relationship is more overtly romantic.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: In "Fear Her," Rose is written as being more sympathetic towards Chloe's situation. As originally done, Rose is compassionate, but the dialogue she's given isn't. Her "little terrors" remark contradicts how much she empathizes with the Isolus when they're talking to it moments earlier. She goes from "poor things" to "little terrors" with no real connection, because the episode's writer wanted to lead into the Doctor's revelation about him having once been a dad. That's done here by having Rose backtrack and noticing parallels between her relationship with the Doctor and Chloe's relationship with the Isolus.
  Rose Tyler: Yes, and I know what kids can be like. Right little… terrors. [He quirked an eyebrow at her. That wasn’t the word she’d meant to use] But on the other hand, I saw the look on her face when she said they needed to be together. [The Doctor felt Rose reach out across their connection, and he returned the caress] We’ve only had this for a few weeks, and already I can’t imagine not having you there, in my mind. So I wanna sympathise, but… it’s hard.
• Adapted Out: "Girl in the Fireplace" has the biggest rewriting of all the season 2 episodes outside of "Doomsday", due to the author reformatting the story to accommodate the new changes to the Doctor and Rose's relationship, as well as a desire to eliminate more problematic out-of-character moments from the episode.^note The author puts this more on Steven Moffat being the writer of GITF, and Moffat disliking Rose a lot As a result, scenes like Reinette kissing the Doctor, Reinette peeking into the Doctor's mind, and the one-on-one scene between Rose and Reinette are cut; and several others get rewritten drastically, with dialogue being changed or moved around to fit the new flow of the story.
• Age Lift: Rose is established to be 22 by the time this fic begins, in an attempt to resolve the continuity errors the first season has with Rose's age.^note According to the missing posters in "Aliens of London", Rose meets the Ninth Doctor in March 2005, when she is 19. Her birthday is in April, which means she turns 20 very early in Season 1, and she was born in 1985, making her three years younger than Billie Piper. But somehow, her birthdate is given as 1987, and the month she was born in also doesn't match up with the timing of Pete's death (which was in November 1987). So for this canon, Rose traveled with the Ninth Doctor for about 15 or so months, which is supported by canon season 1 because there are plenty of references to adventures they have offscreen, especially after Jack joins them. This means that Rose is now 21 years old by the time the Ninth Doctor regenerates into the Tenth. Taking the New Series Adventures novels into account, there's about a 3 to 4 month time jump in between "New Earth" and "Tooth & Claw", so by "Tooth & Claw", Rose has had her 22nd birthday.
• Anachronic Order: As will be seen here, when it comes to covering the events of the "Doctor-lite" episodes, the Doctor's parts in them will be dispersed to elsewhere. This is the case for this fic for "Love and Monsters".
  • The Doctor's encounter with three year old Elton in the 1980s, after defeating the elemental shade that killed Elton's mother, takes place after the "Age of Steel" and before "The Idiot's Lantern". In this instance, the Doctor is momentarily distancing himself from Rose, afraid of commitment. And Rose for her part needs some time off to recuperate from Pete's World and meeting the parallel version of her dad, which is why Elton only encountered the Doctor. The next encounter is the Abzorbaloff incident, which for the Doctor and Rose happens immediately after "The Impossible Planet" / "The Satan Pit" and before "Fear Her". And the third encounter is the Doctor and Rose battling the Hoix in Woolwich, which happens for them after "Fear Her" but before "Army of Ghosts".
    • Elton's present-day encounters with the Doctor and Rose happened in the opposite order for them to how it did for him. For him, he first encounters them fighting the Hoix in the abandoned warehouse in Woolwich. Then he sees them when they show up as he's about to be killed by the Abzorbaloff so that Rose can ream him out for harassing her mother, and for forcing them to cut short a makeout session. As he finds out, chatting with the Doctor and Rose afterwards, the Woolwich encounter hasn't happened yet for them.
      Elton Pope: You know, when I met you a few weeks ago, I thought, "Oh, this it what it's like to have an adventure with the Doctor. Big aliens and two buckets and not blue." I didn't think…
      The Doctor: Hang on, we've met before?
      Elton Pope: You remember. In Woolwich? The warehouse? Nasty roaring alien, and the two of you running around nonstop?
      The Doctor: That… that certainly sounds like something we might do. It hasn't happened for us though. [Elton stared at him, clearly not registering what he was saying. The Doctor sighed] We're time travellers; sometimes we meet people out of order. It can be a bit confusing, but that's the fun of it.
• Back from the Dead: It turns out looking into the Vortex outright caused Rose to die for several minutes, and when revived, has become infused with Time Lord DNA.
• Breather Episode: Chapters 23-33 are dubbed the "fluff" section. This section bridges the period between "The Impossible Planet" / "The Satan Pit" and "Army of Ghosts" / "Doomsday". Rose and the Doctor still go on a few adventures ("Love & Monsters", The Resurrection Casket, Nightmare on Black Island, and "Fear Her"), but the focus in this section is on their blossoming romance, to set up the emotional stakes for Canary Wharf.
• Call-Back:
  • In the conversation the Doctor has with Elton about the elemental shade that killed Elton's mother, it lasts a bit longer and Elton asks why the Doctor couldn't go back further in time to prevent her death. To which Rose points out that it's risky to go back on your own timeline, remembering the events of "Father's Day".
  • For their first date on Glaurus, Rose dons the black Victorian gown that she'd worn in 1869 Cardiff during "The Unquiet Dead".
  • Upon defeating the Hoix, the Doctor makes a call to UNIT to hand the Hoix off to them (silently thanking the Brigadier).
• Continuity Nod:
  • The events of the novels The Resurrection Casket and Nightmare on Black Island happen during the timeframe of "Love and Monsters".
  • The Doctor and Rose get a week vacation to Barcelona (the planet) in chapter 33, and the noseless dogs and other things the Doctor had mentioned as being there before he regenerated are all brought up.
  • During "Fear Her," the Doctor explains his past time as a grandfather to Rose while trying to relate to the Isolus.
  • When they're reunited post-Canary Wharf, the Doctor and Rose discuss their experiences. Rose has a brief flash of what would've happened if the TARDIS hadn't been able to locate her in Pete's World to bring her back to the prime universe:
    Rose caught an image of the Doctor pressed against the white wall, trying to reach for her. His devastation sliced through her, but before she could react to it, her vision blurred and she saw herself, pressed against an identical wall. Tears ran down her face, leaving streaks of mascara behind, but she didn’t care because no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find the Doctor.
  • Similarly, before the TARDIS pulls Rose back, she has a flash of the moment of the Doctor's first face-off with the Carrionites in "The Shakespeare Code".
  • In "Eternity in Her Eyes," the prequel fic to lead in to this fic, when the Doctor is looking at the timelines while taking the Vortex out of Rose, he sees a glimpse of what he'll look like post-regeneration. Moreover, he remembers meeting his future self and Rose on the day he used the Moment to destroy Gallifrey.
• Call-Forward:
  • In Chapter 16, while Rose is recuperating at home from the events of "Rise of the Cybermen" / "The Age of Steel", we see the encounter in "Love and Monsters" that Elton had as a kid with the Doctor, but from the Doctor's perspective.
  • In Chapter 38, upon the Doctor reuniting with Rose post-Canary Wharf, the narration notes that the Doctor briefly wonders "how long it would be before he could look at a blonde and not see Rose," subtly alluding to a moment during Donna's wedding reception in "The Runaway Bride" where the sight of a blonde-haired woman in a blue dress causes the Doctor to have a flashback of catching Rose on New Earth after Lady Cassandra left her body for the last time.
• Creating Life Is Unforeseen: Rose's reaction to learning that she not only brought Jack back to life on the Game Station, but she also made him a fixed point.
  Rose Tyler: I had this dream… What happened when I said, "I bring life?"
  The Doctor: You saved Jack’s life. He’d been shot by a Dalek, and you just… you had the entire power of the Vortex, all of time and space at your fingertips, and you used to it to bring your friend back to life. [There was more though, Rose could tell from the expression on his face]
  Rose Tyler: Doctor… is Jack rebuilding the Earth, like you said?
  [The Doctor winced and shook his head. Of course she wouldn’t rest until she knew the entire truth]
  The Doctor: He’s… well, I don’t know exactly where he is right now. He might have gone on to do that, but remember, he had the Vortex Manipulator.
  Rose Tyler: [angrily] We just left him there, without telling him and without knowing what he’d do?! Doctor!
  The Doctor: Rose, no. You don’t understand. I swear, I had a reason to leave him. [He’d never forget how wrong it felt the moment Jack had come back to life]
  Rose Tyler: What, because you were jealous and couldn’t handle the thought that I might fancy him more than whoever you regenerated into? [The remark stung, as he expected she’d intended it to, but he refused to react. Instead, he shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at her steadily]
  The Doctor: Jack… you didn’t just save his life, Rose. [A tremor of unease hit him, and he wondered what exactly the dream had shown her—clearly not everything]
  Rose Tyler: What did I do then?
  The Doctor: You made it so he can’t die. He just… he just comes back, every time. [Rose’s eyes filled with tears and she raised a hand to her mouth]
  Rose Tyler: Every time? How often has he died? How do you know that?
  The Doctor: He would come back every time. I haven’t been keeping track; I don’t know where he is or if he even knows this about himself yet. But I felt it the moment you did it. You made him a fixed point.
  Rose Tyler: I thought fixed points were events, not people.
  The Doctor: Exactly! And that’s what’s so… so wrong about it. You made him a fact, one that the rest of the universe has to bend around. And living beings are never meant to be fixed points. Being near him… it actually hurt. Especially since I was dying at the time.
  Rose Tyler: Can we go see him? I want… I want to let him know I didn’t just abandon him. And I suppose… apologise. Living forever, that’s gotta be hard.
  The Doctor: The TARDIS isn’t fond of him either, now.
• Darker and Edgier: While not much more than the existing stories from the season, the overall fic does have raunchier moments.
• Dirty Mind-Reading: Thanks to the telepathic connection, Rose can feel when the Doctor is aroused. The Doctor even mentions that "It’s possible to telepathically stimulate the pleasure centres of the brain. Depending on the level of contact, that could feel like anything from a nice snog to full intercourse.” This adds another layer of depth to their sexual moments.
• Distracted by the Sexy:
  • The gag at the beginning of "Fear Her" of the Doctor having problems parking the TARDIS is the result of him being a bit distracted whilst kissing Rose.
  • The Doctor has a moment of this before the Hoix fight due to Rose deliberately wearing provacative clothing.
• Dress Hits Floor: After a heated makeout session in chapter 32, Rose drops her clothes to the TARDIS grating to make clear she's ready to have sex with the Doctor right now and is too impatient to wait until they get to Barcelona.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Mickey's attitude towards how the Doctor and Rose treat him during the three part "Girl in the Fireplace" / "Rise of the Cybermen" / "The Age of Steel" arc, which is the reason he chooses to remain behind with Jake in Pete's World.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The epilogue reveals that the entire Battle of Canary Wharf was an elaborate attempt by the Master to get Rose out of the way, because he knew the Doctor would be stronger with her there.
• Erotic Eating: Rose and the Doctor have a moment of this in chapter 33 on their last morning in Barcelona, as Rose offers the Doctor a piece of fruit which he eats right out of her hand, while he's also fixated by her naked body.
• Fix Fic: This fic falls into the category of "Doomsday fix-its".
• Foreshadowing:
  • Beginning in "The Impossible Planet", the Doctor and Rose begin to develop a nagging feeling that someone is pulling at their timelines, and seems to be trying to forcibly separate them. The Doctor notes after "Fear Her" that not only is this a direct violation of the Laws of Time, but it's the sort of thing that only a Time Lord is capable of doing.
    The Doctor: Whatever it is, Rose, we’ll handle it together. [He touched the bond as lightly as he could, and some of the tension eased out of her shoulders]
    Rose Tyler: Right, together. [She smiled tentatively and rested her head on his shoulder. He smiled and wrapped an arm around her while they watched the reds and blues of the fireworks explode across the sky] You know what? They keep on trying to split us up, but they never ever will.
    [The timeline he’d been sensing was closer now. He could almost see their inevitable separation, and he tightened his grip on her waist]
    The Doctor: Never say never ever.
    Rose Tyler: [shivers] I felt that, Doctor. What is it? [The Doctor focused on the fluctuations in their timeline. It almost felt like someone was purposely manipulating time around them, trying to force them apart. He frowned; not only was that a direct violation of the Laws of Time, it was also impossible for almost anyone but a Time Lord. But still…]
    The Doctor: There’s something in the air. Something coming.
    Rose Tyler: What?
    The Doctor: A storm’s approaching.
    [The celebratory mood was broken, and by mutual agreement, they walked back toward the TARDIS. Rose was silent the whole way, not saying anything until they were inside]
    Rose Tyler: It feels like something is… playing with our timelines.
    The Doctor: What do you mean?
    Rose Tyler: Well, there was something… something there, and then not there, and then there again. Like it couldn’t make up its mind about what was going to happen. [Her succinct description drew a smile from him, despite the seriousness of the topic]
    The Doctor: Something like that, I suppose. There’s still something trying to split us up, Rose. But it’s not a fixed point. There’s room… there’s flexibility.
    Rose Tyler: Can’t we just—I don’t know, look at what’s going to happen and make sure we don’t go wherever it is?
    The Doctor: I learned a long time ago that it doesn’t do any good to stare at your own timeline. You can’t usually catch more than a glimpse of it anyway.
  • Then during "Army of Ghosts," the sense that someone's playing with the timelines comes back as the Doctor and Rose begin investigating the source of the ghosts. And after tracing the signal to Torchwood, and whilst talking with Yvonne Hartman and Dr. Singh about the Void ship, the Doctor and Rose get the nagging feeling that whoever is manipulating the timelines wants them to be here. They also repeatedly have several flashes of the timeline that'd have happened if Rose hadn't been brought back from Pete's World during this story and the follow-up "Time is Still a Flying". It's ultimately established that this is because despite having met Rose in 100 trillion, the Master tried to create a paradox at Canary Wharf with the hopes of separating the Doctor from Rose to spite him.
  • Chapter 23 sees the Doctor admit that he'd been planning to die while blowing up Henrik's before Rose appeared, setting the seeds for an altered "Turn Left" story in "Forever and Never Apart" (the series 4 rewrite).
  • The Doctor's exposition of the telepathic bond in Chapter 28, specifically the ability of bond mates to communicate over a distance, will come into relevance in "Time is Still A-Flying" where it allows him and Rose to maintain some degree of communication for the first part of the Master's reign.
  • When the Doctor is analyzing Rose's DNA in Chapter 31 on a DNA scanner, he notes that the Time Lord DNA strand in Rose won't show up unless the scanner is temporally aligned. The fact that she'll still register as human on almost all DNA scanners will come in handy during "Smith and Jones" as it allows the Doctor to kiss Rose to distract the Judoon without worrying about the Judoon flagging Rose as non-human.
  • As Rose is being sucked into the Void, the TARDIS manages to pull her back, which to Rose manifests itself as gold flecks appearing around her. This is a sign that Rose has been infused with huon particles as a result of looking into the heart of the TARDIS, which is also how she realizes when watching the wedding footage in "The Runaway Bride" that the same thing has happened to Donna.
• Get a Room!: The TARDIS has this attitude towards the Doctor and Rose trying to shag around the console.
  The Doctor: I don’t think the old girl approves of these activities in her console room...
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex:
  • More like "Glad to be Alive Kiss", as happens between the Doctor and Rose after "The Impossible Planet" / "The Satan Pit".
  • Their proper first time making love is after they defeat the Hoix and close the time loop regarding Elton's encounter with them in Woolwich. In the Doctor's defense, he'd already been planning to take them to Barcelona, but they had to make a detour to defeat the Hoix.
  • Once the Doctor rescues Rose from the Void.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The last chapter shows The Master to be behind the events at Canary Wharf, pulling at strings.
• Hammerspace: The joke about the Doctor's pockets being Bigger on the Inside is moved up. In show canon, it happens during "The Runaway Bride" when the Doctor is about to blow up the Racnoss' lair. In the Timeless canon, it happens during "Rise of the Cybermen" when the Doctor pulls food out of his pockets for himself and Rose to share before going to Pete Tyler's place.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Rose's DNA has been altered as a result of looking into the Vortex during "The Parting of the Ways", with her gaining a strand of DNA that is unique to Time Lords. It means that she's picked up Doctor-exclusive abilities like never aging and regenerating, and it's not the same thing as the DoctorDonna of canon season 4.
• Hotter and Sexier: The Doctor and Rose have sex several times in this fic starting in chapter 32.
• Historical In-Joke: The Doctor ghost-helped William Goldman on writing the script to The Princess Bride.
• I Choose to Stay: Jefferson has a moment of this in "The Satan Pit" when he makes his last stand to hold off the Ood while Rose, Danny and Toby escape, thanks to Rose being able to sense timelines.
  [Rose’s vision swam with the now familiar sensation of timelines shifting. This was one of those decisions that caused a split—two different ends to the story… to Jefferson]
  Rose Tyler: You can’t stop.
  [He shook his head slightly, and she saw in his eyes that he knew exactly what he was doing]
  John Jefferson: Miss Tyler, that’s my job. You’ve got your task, now see to it.
• Ignored Vital News Reports: In "Rise of the Cybermen," Rose isn't really paying all that much attention to names when her phone picks up the newscast announcing Lumic's arrival in Great Britain (as Lumic's zeppelin is flying over her).
  Her phone beeped and she pulled it out of her pocket, surprised to find it was being updated with the latest local software. She opened it up and listened to the news report about some local billionaire coming back to London, an idea building in the back of her mind during the whole thing.
• IKEA Erotica: The Doctor's description of Time Lord and Gallifreyan sex, as he explains to Rose while they're recuperating from the events of Nightmare on Black Island.
  The Doctor: So, you already know that Time Lord courtship rituals, as you call them, are almost entirely telepathic. Not surprising I suppose for a telepathic race, though the Dalavathi tie their legs together so they can only walk together, and really that’s pretty romantic when you think about it.
  Rose Tyler: Maybe, but I’m not in love with a Dalavathi.
  The Doctor: Right. Okay, so Time Lords. Well, like human mating, there’s two parts: the intimate side I alluded to last night, and then an actual bonding of the minds that’s more…more of a commitment.
  Rose Tyler: So telepathic contact can feel good?
  The Doctor: Pleasurable even. There are ways…ahem...and imagine feeling exactly how what you’re doing is making your partner feel.
  Rose Tyler: But… we already… I mean, I’ve been able to feel when you were, um, turned on ever since we got this empathic connection. So how’s this any different?
  The Doctor: It’s—well, that’s only… picking up on desire is only the first step. Knowing when you’re… aroused, well sensing it telepathically isn’t much different from observing your blown pupils or flushed cheeks.
  Rose Tyler: So… um, telepathic intimacy would be… more?
  The Doctor: Much more. It’s the difference between knowing your partner is aroused and actively doing something to arouse them. It’s possible to telepathically stimulate the pleasure centres of the brain. Depending on the level of contact, that could feel like anything from a nice snog to full intercourse.
  [Rose’s breathing stuttered and the Doctor clenched his eyes against the rising force of her desire. Blimey. He’d known it would be impossible to talk about telepathic intimacy without becoming aroused himself, but he hadn’t even thought. He pulled his hand back and shifted a few inches away from her, and she seemed to understand his need for space.]
  The Doctor: ...actually, Gallifreyans and Time Lords were, as a rule, asexual. Not much in the way of sexual attraction to one another, and the sex act was generally seen as far too messy and awkward and most definitely beneath Time Lord dignity. We reproduced with machines called looms and, for those who wanted intimate forms of pleasure, there was the telepathic connection, which was, er, more than adequate.
  [Rose fixed her gaze on their joined hands, and he wondered what she was thinking]
  Rose Tyler: Does that mean you can’t… [Her voice trailed off and it took him a moment to follow her train of thought.]
  The Doctor: Oh! Oh yes, I definitely can. [The Doctor caught himself before he launched into a scientific explanation of the functionality of vestigial penises—even he was aware that information didn’t belong in this conversation]
• Interspecies Romance: The Doctor (Time Lord) and Rose Tyler (human with Time Lord DNA)
• Internal Reveal: In chapter 26, Rose learns the truth about how she saved Jack's life and also made him a fixed point.
• Interrupted Intimacy: The Doctor and Rose are in the midst of making out while watching The Princess Bride in the TARDIS's media room, when they get interrupted by a phone call from Jackie about Elton. Understandably, this gives Rose another reason to be livid when she and the Doctor land to confront Elton.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Rose to her mother during "Doomsday", when they're about to close the Void. As much as she'd like to stay with her mother, she knows her mother's never gotten 100% closure from losing her Pete and has a chance to get it with the parallel universe Pete, while Rose needs to unshackle herself from her mother.
  Rose Tyler: I’m not leaving him. Mum, I had a life with you for nineteen years, but then I met the Doctor, and…[shrugs] I’ve got a new life with him now.
  Jackie Tyler: But what if he decides to leave you behind, or you get tired of travelling? You won’t have anyone else here, Rose.
  [There was only one thing Rose could think of that might convince her mother to trust the Doctor. Rose glanced over her shoulder, and he looked up from the computer terminal and nodded]
  Rose Tyler: That’s not gonna happen, Mum… because we’re engaged.
  [Her mum’s eyes dropped to her hand, and then she crossed her arms]
  Jackie Tyler: Then why aren’t you wearing a ring?
  Rose Tyler:' We haven’t had time to get one yet, that’s all. [Explaining the bond would take way more time than they had]
  Pete Tyler: We need to go.
  [Jackie looked at Rose, then back at Pete]
  Jackie Tyler: I’m not going without her. [Exasperation and panic were etched on every line of Pete’s face]
  Pete Tyler: Oh, my God. We’re going! [Jackie whirled on him, arms akimbo]
  Jackie Tyler: I’ve had twenty years without you, so button it. I’m not leaving her. [But Rose knew this was her mum’s best chance at happiness]
  Rose Tyler: You’ve got to.
  Jackie Tyler: Well, that’s tough.
  Rose Tyler: Mum. [She took her hand and held it to her heart] Remember what I told you before, about how I’ve changed? If I’m gonna lose you, I want to know you’re happy with Pete. You’ve got him again, an’ you can’t let a chance like that go. Losing him again would hurt you as much as losing the Doctor would hurt me. So go for me, Mum. Please?
  [The Doctor’s fingers slowed on the keyboard as he watched his Rose persuade her mother to leave her behind for good. Jackie’s eyes glistened with tears and she nodded]
  Jackie Tyler: I’ll miss you. [She hugged her daughter one last time and pressed a kiss to Rose’s cheek, then looked at the Doctor] Take care of her. [She and Pete hopper out]
  [Rose’s grief spiked as soon as they left, and he had to ask]
  The Doctor: Are you sure? Once the breach collapses, that’s it. You will never be able to see her again—your own mother!
  Rose Tyler: [tearing up] I made my choice a long time ago, and I’m never going to leave you. So what can I do to help?
• Killed Offscreen: In "The Age of Steel," the narration is following Rose and Pete between when they encounter the Cyberized version of Pete's World's Jackie and the rollout of the Cyber Controller. As a result, Angela Price's death is relegated to happening offscreen.
• Love Confession: The Doctor and Rose have theirs at the end of chapter 22, following "The Satan Pit".
• Mama Bear: During "Love and Monsters," we get to see Jackie's conversation where she tells the Doctor and Rose about Elton trying to get information about Rose from her.
• The Missus and the Ex: Averted between Rose and Sarah Jane Smith during "School Reunion". Mickey still teases the Doctor about this being the situation he's in, but Rose and Sarah Jane get along much more quickly than in the show because the Doctor tells Rose who Sarah Jane is ahead of time, so the jealousy that existed between them in the actual episode is toned down significantly.
• Modesty Bedsheet: Chapter 33 begins at the end of the Doctor and Rose's romantic getaway to Barcelona. Rose wakes up in bed, naked, and as she slides out of bed, she enjoys the Doctor's eyes looking up and down her body.
• Narnia Time: Time flows differently in some parts of the TARDIS. When Rose storms off after learning from the Doctor about how he knew she technically died and got brought back to life, she spends several hours composing herself as she works through her anger. When she's calmed down enough to approach the Doctor again, she finds that for him, no time has passed at all.
• 90% of Your Brain: Alluded to after "Fear Her" when the Doctor is analyzing Rose's DNA. The Doctor retorts that it's a complete myth.
• Not Staying for Breakfast: On the last morning of their week-long sex vacation to Barcelona, Rose wakes up naked in bed alone, though it's quickly subverted as the Doctor is just gazing out the window, and clearly itching to leave. After sharing an intimate moment, Rose has to discourage the Doctor from joining her in the shower and focus on packing.
• Paradise Planet: The planet Barcelona is depicted as a tropical paradise. This is why the Doctor chooses it as the place where he wants to make love to Rose for their first time, although the TARDIS conspires to take them to Woolwich instead to fight a Hoix (and close a time loop with Elton), so their first time having sex instead happens in the Doctor's bedroom on the TARDIS. Their week on Barcelona is comprised of them spending their days exploring the tropical paradise while spending their nights indulging in sex.
• Point of Divergence:
  • The point of deviation is when the Doctor awakens Rose's telepathy. As a result, when Rose is sucked into the Void in "Doomsday," she isn't stuck in Pete's World. Instead, the TARDIS is able to reach across the Void during the nanoseconds before it closes, and uses the fragments of her still left inside Rose from when they were Bad Wolf to pull her back and deposit her on a beach in Norway.
  • For the most part, this process has very little impact on the plots of the intermediate episodes, with most of the changes happening below the surface level. Canon events are only really altered if there's an obvious cause and effect that results from a prior change. Though at the same time, the author also works around some things that she doesn't like from the canon by reverse-engineering a reason for the change. For instance, the Doctor doesn't kiss Reinette in "Girl in the Fireplace" like he does in the actual episode because instead of going back through the fireplace, he decides to follow his lead of the clockwork droids.
• Poor Communication Kills: For the most part averted, as a new telepathic link between the Doctor and Rose allows them to better read each other. This comes in handy during "School Reunion", where the Doctor actually tells Rose right away about Sarah Jane Smith.
• Ready for Lovemaking: Rose in chapter 32, which covers the encounter with Elton and the Hoix in Woolwich. The Doctor is intending already to take Rose on a romantic getaway to Barcelona for a week, but the TARDIS chooses to detour them to Woolwich. Rather than ruin the sundress she's donned for the occasion, Rose changes into more appropriate alien-hunting attire that she also deliberately chooses to be sexually provocative: jeans, and a denim jacket over a plaid shirt open just enough to show a hint of cleavage◊. Sure enough, Rose and the Doctor begin passionately making out once they're back in the TARDIS, with things getting heated enough that they're unbuttoning each other's shirts. While the Doctor breaks the kiss to make clear he wants to wait until they get to Barcelona, Rose is too impatient to wait.
  He stepped back and Rose jumped down to the grating. “And besides, we have reservations at the most exclusive resort on Barcelona.” He shot Rose a smouldering look. “I believe you, Rose Tyler, promised to put that sundress back on.”
  But after that snog, Rose had no intention of waiting any longer—even if it was just an hour while they packed and checked into a hotel. She shook her head slightly and started walking backward toward the corridor, keeping eye contact with the Doctor.
  With his tie undone and his dark blue shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, he looked deliciously rumpled. Rose smiled, then reached for their bond and touched a spot in his mind she’d discovered got a particularly strong reaction as she finished unbuttoning her own shirt.
  His eyes darkened, and he rocked forward as if to reach for her, but then dropped his hand back to his side. “Rose?"
  Her name came out as a croak, and she took off the jacket and shirt in one move. Take us into the Vortex, Doctor, and then take me to bed.
  He moved jerkily to do her bidding, but she could still feel his confusion. Barcelona… he started as the TARDIS entered the Vortex.
  Will wait. I don’t need a fancy hotel or flowers every morning. I just need you. The time rotor chugged up and down, and Rose dropped her clothes to the grating. Take me to your room and make love to me.
  Her explicit request broke through the last of his reserve. Before Rose could even blink, he had her in his arms and was carrying her down the corridor. “How’d you move so quickly?” she asked as she untucked his shirt from the waistband of his trousers.
  “Time Lord trick,” he told her. “Pause the flow of time around you so you can move in an instant."
  Rose slid a hand under his shirt, enjoying the shudder she felt run through him. “Any other Time Lord tricks I should know about?”
  The look he gave her was pure sin. “Oh, just you wait, Rose Tyler. Just you wait.”
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • After "The Girl in the Fireplace," Rose lays into Mickey about how his spiteful jabs about the Doctor's perceived sketchiness are insulting to her (especially when Mickey was cheating on her before the whole mess with the Autons).
    Mickey Smith: So the Doctor finally turned up then?
    Rose Tyler: Yeah, I told you he wouldn’t abandon us.
    Mickey Smith: How can you know that, Rose? How can you trust him like that?
    Rose Tyler: Because I know him, Mickey. I’ve traveled with him for two years now, and he’s never left me behind.
    Mickey Smith: No, but he sent you home once. Alone. And he went to France. Alone. Don’t you see, babe? He’s always gonna think he can handle everything by himself.
    Rose Tyler: And it’s my job to remind him that he can’t. Now, are you gonna drink your tea, or should I just leave?
    [Mickey turned back to the telly and crossed his arms across his chest. Rose stared at him in disbelief; she knew his anger stemmed from resentment that she’d chosen the Doctor over him, and she suddenly felt a twinge of remorse. Not for choosing the life she had, but for leaving Mickey the way she had. They had officially broken up during the long Christmas holiday, but apparently there was still some anger. She set the tea down on the table and sat down on the other end of the sofa]
    Rose Tyler: Hey. Micks. [A beat passed, and he finally looked at her.]
    Mickey Smith: He left us, Rose. He sent us back to the ship by ourselves and we got knocked out by those droids, and then he let us sit on those tables about to be cut up while he was doing whatever with some high and mighty French mistress. Why can’t you see that you can’t count on him?
    [The words struck Rose, but not in the way Mickey intended. Ever since Rome and her stint as a statue of the goddess Fortuna, he’d been eager to blame the Doctor for everything that went wrong. Rose knew the Doctor would always do everything in his power to keep her safe, but… Her mind drifted back to the closed door and the distance it represented. You sure this isn’t going to drive him away? she asked the TARDIS, only feeling a little reassured by the ship’s confidence.]
    Rose Tyler: He didn’t send us away, Mickey. We split up to cover more ground, and you and I got captured. That happens sometimes. No normal days with the Doctor, remember?
    Mickey Smith: Yeah, but…
    Rose Tyler: No, Mickey. M’not gonna let you tell me all the reasons I should be angry that he did his job. ‘Cause going around, risking his life to save people? That’s what he does. It’s what we do—and I love it. [Rose stood up, suddenly weary of being caught between the two angsting men] Drink your tea before it gets cold. [Mickey caught her arm as she walked by]
    Mickey Smith: Hey, I’m sorry, Rose. Don’t leave—it’s not so fun to be alone in here. [There was true apology in his face]
    Rose Tyler: No more jabs at the Doctor?
    Mickey Smith: Promise.
    Rose Tyler: Okay then, Mickey, let me introduce you to the wonders of intergalactic cable.
• Relationship Upgrade: The Doctor and Rose get their upgrade to romantic couple after "The Impossible Planet," and then to sexual lovers after "Fear Her".
• The Reveal Prompts Romance: In chapter 31, Rose is aroused by the revelation that her body now contains the strand of Time Lord DNA that makes regeneration possible and thus she now has a lifespan that matches the Doctor's. She attempts to initiate sex with the Doctor, but the Doctor hastily pulls away from her because he has his own plans for how he wants their first time to go. They ultimately carry through with having sex the next day after they defeat the Hoix.
• Sequel Hook: The last chapter introduces the Master, setting up his plans for the Doctor and Rose.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: When the Doctor and Rose have sex, the narration skips over the explicit act, instead showing either the foreplay and a fade to black, or doing a "morning after" scene. The first time, from chapter 32 to chapter 33, the skip glosses over their romantic getaway to Barcelona, with Taking Time establishing that the Doctor and Rose spent twelve days in the Vortex mostly having sex, then a week long sex-filled vacation on Barcelona.
• Shown Their Work: The author consulted a neuroscientist to properly convey the scientific aspects of a telepathic bond.
• Spared by the Adaptation: As originally done in "The Satan Pit," once the Doctor breaks the gravity field that keeps Krop Tor in orbit around the black hole K37 Gem 5, he's only able to make a single trip in the TARDIS to rescue Ida Scott from suffocation. He's unable to save any of the Ood on the base, who had just been freed of the Beast's control. All of them perish, though Danny and Zach and the other survivors give them all posthumous honors. The Doctor's guilt over not saving them factors into his decision to liberate the enslaved Ood in "Planet of the Ood", telling Donna "I reckon I owe them one". In this story, the Doctor gets to the TARDIS 30 seconds earlier, rescues Ida, then rescues the 15 Ood that are being held in Ood Habitation. Any Ood who were killed during the earlier part of the episode still died, so this doesn't change his guilt in "Planet of the Ood" about not being able to save more.
• Stable Time Loop: The encounter that the Doctor and Rose have with Elton in the warehouse while they're battling the Hoix comes after the Abzorbaloff encounter in their timeline, and the opposite in Elton's linear timeline. They only know about the Hoix encounter because Elton tells them about it.
• Talk About the Weather: While shopping on Razda prior to "Army of Ghosts," Rose gets her mother a piece of bazoolium.
  Rose Tyler: Yeah. Thought it might be worth something in London, where it could be sunny one minute and pouring down rain the next. Mum’s always complaining about getting caught in the rain with the washing.
  [The Doctor reached for her hand and let Rose lead the way past the food vendors back to the TARDIS]
  The Doctor: You English are so bizarrely proud of your weather.
  Rose Tyler: [cheekily] Complaining about the weather is the national pastime.
• Telepathy: The premise of the story is that the Doctor forms a telepathic connection to Rose.
• Unreliable Narrator: The Doctor and Rose's encounter with Elton in the Woolwich warehouse in "Love & Monsters". As Elton depicted it, Rose splashes the Hoix with the incorrect substance, then a Scooby-Dooby Doors chase ensues. As the Doctor and Rose have it, Rose splashes the wrong substance on the Hoix, then she and the Doctor take off, with the Doctor continuing to distract the Hoix while Rose runs to grab the correct bucket.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: For the first 31 chapters. It finally breaks in the 32nd chapter.
• Wall Bang Her: The Doctor's snog with Rose against the TARDIS console after defeating the Hoix has shades of this with the Doctor pressing Rose up against the console until the TARDIS practically urges them to take it to the bedroom. Their reunion shag after "Doomsday" has the Doctor basically pushing Rose up against the coral struts until they scrape her back, prompting Rose to request they move to the bedroom.
• What If?: The whole story hinges on the change of Rose remembering to ask the Doctor about what the werewolf said during "Tooth and Claw", and the idea that looking into the Vortex changed Rose's biology.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Rose is not happy when the Doctor lets slip that he's known she technically died looking into the Vortex and came back to life, and didn't bother to tell her for several months.
• Wham Shot: The appearance of the Master in the last chapter, as he studies his attempts to split the Doctor and Rose apart.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside:
  • After the Battle of Canary Wharf, it's noted that whilst Rose comes back to the Doctor right away in their timeline, the rest of the world believes she disappeared for a week.
  • Time moves at different rates within different parts of the TARDIS. Rose finds this out when she storms off in anger after getting the Doctor to divulge the truth about what happened to her as Bad Wolf. She storms off so she can blow off steam for a few hours. When she leaves her secret room after calming down enough to approach the Doctor, she finds that while four hours have passed for her, only a few minutes have passed for the Doctor.

Tropes in "Time is Still A-Flying"

• Actor Allusion:
  • The Doctor's attire whilst he's being held prisoner by the Master is boring dark grey suits and ties. He thinks to himself, "They’re dressing me like a◊ detective inspector."
  • At one point, it's mentioned that Rose's hair was dyed blonde, not naturally blonde, much like Billie Piper.
• Adaptational Early Appearance:
  • Jack first appears in this fic after "The Runaway Bride", when he shows up at Jackie's flat while the Doctor and Rose are clearing out the place. They end up talking shop, and the Doctor gets to explain to Jack just how Bad Wolf made him immortal. The Doctor is angered to find his severed hand (which he lost during the Sycorax duel) in Jack's possession, and takes it back so he can destroy it, which has lasting repercussions on the rest of the next two stories.
  • Captain Erisa Magambo, the UNIT officer responsible for helping send Donna back to fix the "Donna's World" timeline of "Turn Left" and who later showed up in the prime timeline in "Planet of the Dead", makes a brief appearance as the head of the UNIT platoon that is sent to the Valiant after the Master is defeated to be debriefed by the Doctor. Just like he'll do with Colonel Mace in "The Sontaran Strategem," the Doctor chides her for saluting him.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Zig-zagged for the Doctor's year aboard the Valiant. He spends part of the year grieving after the Master "kills" Rose by cutting off the Doctor's telepathic bond with her. Which has the flipside of meaning that the Doctor doesn't despair over the Master's death, not immediately, because he can't look past what the Master did to Rose.
• Adaptational Context Change: When Donna first appears in the TARDIS during "The Runaway Bride," she remarks to the Doctor, upon Rose showing up in response to the commotion, "I knew it, acting all innocent. I'm not the first, am I? How many women have you abducted?" In the original episode, she said this in regards to finding Rose's jacket.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • In "Blink", we see Team TARDIS's side of the Stable Time Loop. The Doctor, Rose and Martha are stuck in 1969 for several months thanks to the Weeping Angels. Martha has to do work in a clothing store to pay their rent, the Doctor has to salvage materials to build a timey wimey detector so they can track down Billy Shipton when he arrives, the Doctor and Rose go off to the Isle of Wight for their second anniversary, and Rose at one point is laid up with the flu.
  • When Martha is watching the instructional video from the Doctor during "Human Nature", the video is longer, and the Doctor explains that he and Rose will have their normal memories repressed. He also gives Martha information about what to look for when the Family of Blood's ship arrives, and how the Family possess people as vessels.
  • In the Master arc, the show skips over the entire Year That Never Was. We're given a few hints of what happened in Tom Milligan's litany of Martha's exploits when she meets him at the beginning of "Last of the Time Lords", but that's pretty much it, unless you read the accompanying Tie-In Novel The Story of Martha. This fic makes the Master's story take place over ten whole chapters: four covering "The Sound of Drums," three covering the Year That Never Was proper, highlighting the Doctor and Rose being imprisoned on the Valiant and the Master's various means of torturing them, while also using excerpts from The Story of Martha to show what Martha is doing during her year walking the Earth; and then three more to cover "Last of the Time Lords". We also get to see Lucy's progression from the willing accomplice who dances with the Master as he directs the Toclafane to decimate the population, to the betrayed wife who shoots him, making her action not as much of a surprise.
• Adaptation Name Change: Rather than use his John Smith alias, the Doctor starts using 'John Tyler' whenever he needs to use an alias, seeing as it's more convenient when Rose is still able to use the name Rose Tyler in public.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • For "Human Nature" / "The Family of Blood," the Doctor's human persona of John Tyler is a much nicer individual than the show's John Smith. He and fobbed Rose are much easier on Martha than John in the show. Another example is in the shooting practice scene where the boys are doing practice with machine guns. When Timothy Latimer is being shoddy with practice in the show, John agrees to let the boys beat Timothy (though the way the scene is shot, it's implied this is largely because it was what the Headmaster expected of him). In this fic, he instead just calls for Latimer to simply get some private instruction time at shooting practice.
  • There's a big personality change to Francine Jones, courtesy of Rose.
    • In canon, her initial suspicion and dislike for the Doctor when they first meet in "The Lazarus Experiment" stems from the way their introduction goes. The Doctor's "I've heard so much about you!" makes her raise an eyebrow, especially since she's already fiercely determined that Martha do well in her studies. She sees the Doctor as a threat to Martha's career, and then the Master's aides begin manipulating her into being suspicious of the Doctor by telling her that he is also a threat to Martha's life. Which makes her very willing to do the Master's bidding and help lure the Doctor to him.
    • In the Timelessness-verse, Rose's people skills end up coming in handy when it comes to dealing with Francine. She's able to provide an explanation for Martha's faux pas, and has answers to all of Francine's questions about who they are (the psychic paper leads Francine to believe that she and the Doctor are from UNIT), which greatly softens Francine's hostility. Consequently, when the Master's aides try to convince Francine to not trust the Doctor, she interprets this in the context of "The Doctor doing dangerous work for a good cause". And because the Doctor is married to Rose, Francine doesn't think the Doctor is Martha's secret boyfriend, seducing her away from her schoolwork. She still isn't happy about Martha being in the line of fire by helping the Doctor and Rose stop Lazarus, but she also understands the Doctor is just doing his job, and thus is less inclined to believe whatever lies the Master spun. And after Lazarus's initial defeat, her scolding the Doctor isn't to slap him and say "Stay away from my daughter", but rather a more subdued reaction of disapproval:
      Francine Jones: I don’t like this. I know you’re doing your job, doing what you do, and I admire that—but I do not approve of you dragging my daughter into it.
      Martha Jones: Mum, helping the Doctor and Rose tonight was my choice. They didn’t force me to come along.
      Francine Jones: He may work for UNIT, but he does the most dangerous work. I’ve been told things.
      Martha Jones: What are you talking about?
      Francine Jones: Look around you. Nothing but death and destruction. That’s the kind of work he does.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: For the Doctor and Martha, since in this fic, the Doctor is married to Rose as opposed to being single and mourning being separated from her. Martha thus doesn't develop any romantic attraction to the Doctor, instead viewing him as an intriguing (and still very good looking) man who is obviously head over heels for his wife. That said, she does confide to Tallulah and Rose during "Daleks in Manhattan" that she'd have made passes at the Doctor if he was single. She isn't doing so now, because she's seen how her family fell apart when her father left her mother for Annelise.
  "He's gorgeous," Martha agreed. "If he hadn't been married when I met him…" Rose looked over at her, and she shook her head quickly. "You've got nothing to worry about," she promised. "I'd never go after a married man."
  Rose remembered the argument she and the Doctor had witnessed outside the restaurant the night they'd picked Martha up, and thought she understood.
  "Still," Martha said, mischief in her eyes, "I have to say your husband is one of the fittest blokes I've ever laid eyes on."
• Adaptational Villainy: In addition to things he already does in the show, the Master kidnaps Tish as retaliation for Rose softening up Martha's parents, makes the Doctor watch his guards beat up Rose, and cuts off their telepathic bond and lets the Doctor think he's killed her.
• Alternate Timeline: This is effectively a timeline where two major divergences have happened: the Doctor and Rose developed a telepathic and romantic relationship, and Rose didn't get trapped in Pete's World. This means that many of the series 3 stories play out in a different way because the Doctor has Rose around to ground him, instead of being broken over losing her while also dealing with Martha's unrequited feelings for him.
  • The original lead in from "Doomsday" to "The Runaway Bride" is that the Doctor is giving a final goodbye transmission to Rose, harnessing the power of a supernova to reach through the Void crack. The conversation ends, and almost immediately after that, Donna appears in the TARDIS. As it goes in Time is Still a Flying, this conversation instead involves the Doctor and Rose saying goodbye to Jackie. Then the Doctor and Rose go to sleep, and then the next morning, Donna appears in the TARDIS while the Doctor is silently praying for some sort of distraction for Rose.
    • For the first few scenes, the episode is relatively unchanged. The changes don't kick in until the motorway chase when the Doctor needs to chase after the pilot fish cab that's carrying Donna. In the show, he had to pilot the TARDIS and also open the doors and yell for Donna to break herself out and jump into the TARDIS. Here, Rose does all the piloting while the Doctor doesn't have to multitask.
    • When they're going back in time to the beginning of the Earth, Rose hears Donna out, and comforts her over Lance's betrayal, and concludes with the suggestion that they don't start any more sentences with "Lance was right?"
    • In the climax, Rose is the one to free herself and Donna from the Racnoss web, using her expert gymnast skills that she used in the Nestene Consciousness's lair to save the Doctor and Mickey.
  • In "Smith and Jones," Rose takes the role of the patient while the Doctor is the concerned husband.
    • Because the Doctor and Rose are clearly married, Martha doesn't develop a crush on the Doctor, and the Doctor also kisses Rose as a distraction for the Judoon (further ensuring Martha doesn't get mixed signals).
    • The Doctor also had made Rose her own sonic screwdriver as a Christmas present, and he's able to borrow that as a temporary backup after he fries his own to kill the first Slab.
  • In "The Shakespeare Code," Rose is able to ask the exact questions to set the Doctor on the right course regarding the identity of the witches. They still make the visit to Peter Streete at the asylum because he's the only one who knows where the witches are. Thanks to Rose's information, the Doctor has already figured out they are Carrionites before they see Peter.
  • In "Gridlock", Rose is taken captive by Milo and Cheen, instead of Martha. Martha spends the episode with the Doctor working to rescue those trapped in the freeway as well as get Rose back.
  • In "Daleks in Manhattan" / "Evolution of the Daleks", a few elements play out differently because this is not a Doctor with a bit of a death wish over losing Rose. So for instance, rather than the Doctor begging the Daleks to kill him after they blast Solomon, he tries to negotiate with them ("could we maybe discuss other options? Because frankly, I'd rather not die. Besides, do you want to live in a world without me? I mean, what would the Daleks be without an arch enemy?").
  • In "The Lazarus Experiment," Rose improves Francine's opinion of the Doctor, but on the flip-side, worsens the situation for Martha's family.
    • The Master is trying to get Francine to be suspicious of the Doctor and think he's a threat to Martha's life, something further benefited from Martha's faux pas when introducing Francine to the Doctor in the show. Rose ends up smoothing things over by introducing herself and the Doctor as investigators from UNIT. So as a result, Francine's only concern is Martha being distracted from her studies by choosing to become friends with a couple who are involved in very dangerous work. At the gala proper, this means Francine doesn't slap the Doctor after Lazarus's initial defeat and instead just tells him she doesn't like the idea of Martha jeopardizing herself hanging out with him and Rose.
    • Down the line, this means Francine doubts the stories the Master's aides are trying to whisper in her ear. She balks at the idea of betraying Martha's friends to the Master, and the Master has to kidnap Tish to force Francine and Clive to cooperate.
  • In "42," Rose stays on the TARDIS and helps the Doctor and Martha figure things out remotely. Martha also is able to contact Rose to get the answers to the trivia questions the ship crew made as passwords, instead of her parents (with the conversation to her parents instead being an "If We Get Through This…" conversation).
  • In the "Human Nature" story, Rose and the Doctor are both fobbed, and married in their human lives. Not only that, but they share the same memories, and Rose figures out that their dreams are memories before John does, without having to open the fob watch. Mother and Son of Mine's murder of Mr. Phillips is instead committed by Father and Daughter of Mine due to Son of Mine being busy at that moment seeking out Rose.
  • Played with for "Blink" since, as a Doctor-lite episode, rewrites of this episode usually focus on the Doctor's half of the story, which is all-original since the only bits known are what is said by the Doctor and Martha on the Easter Egg video message, as well as their interaction with Billy Shipton when he's sent back to 1969. So Sally Sparrow's part of the story arc is unchanged and instead we get the entirely new section covering the Doctor, Rose and Martha's time in 1969. The Doctor and Rose go on a getaway to the Isle of Wight for their first anniversary,^note A necessity given that their next one happens while they're imprisoned by the Master while Martha holds down a job at a clothing store so they can pay rent. The video message is almost entirely unchanged, except for the part where Martha comes into frame to gripe about having to pay expenses (which is replaced with Rose instead popping in to correct a choice of words said by the Doctor on the transcript, then a new scripted line of Martha complaining about the paradox that would happen if she didn't comply with the transcript).
  • Major changes happen during the Master arc.
    • As it turns out, the Master tried to create a paradox at Canary Wharf with the intention of trapping Rose in Pete's World. Her managing to stay in the prime world thanks to the Doctor waking up her telepathic connection to the TARDIS forces him to improvise a few hasty alternatives. The Doctor is shocked to find that if not for him waking up Rose's telepathy, the Master would've succeeded at this, and worse, time would've compensated for Rose's loss.
    • The Master arc also marks the first changes caused by the removal of the Doctor's severed arm that he lost during his duel with the Sycorax leader in "The Christmas Invasion". In the long-run, this story change has been done to eliminate the creation of the Metacrisis during "Journey's End" in the series 4 rewrite, but in the short-run, it does change things for the Master arc.
    • To elaborate, the Doctor finds out about the severed hand well before the trip to Malcassairo in "Utopia" (as opposed to in "Utopia") due to Jack coming by the Powell Estate post-Canary Wharf to check in on Rose. The Doctor takes the hand back from Jack and burns it, scolding him for carrying it around on him saying, “Honestly, do you know what kind of damage could be done if my biological code fell into the wrong hands?” This doesn't have any apparent effect on the story until the Doctor's confrontation with the Master when they meet on board the Valiant in "The Sound of Drums". Without access to the Doctor's biological code to make his laser screwdriver age him, the Master instead subdues the Doctor by taking Rose hostage (having overheard the Doctor and Jack's conversation where the former expressed doubt that Rose is capable of regenerating).^note It's established the Master arrived on Earth a week before the Sycorax invasion, so he's had a year and a half to cannibalize the TARDIS to make the Paradox machine. And while he could have found something with the Doctor's DNA on it during that time, he has a flair for dramatics and emotional pain. So between that and his anger over Rose being a wrench in his initial plans to turn Martha's mother against the Doctor, the Master settles for taking her hostage.
    • As a result, the Doctor thus spends the entire Year that Never Was looking like a 35 year old, forced to wear plain black suits and ties that he complains make him look like a detective inspector. Rose is also imprisoned on the Valiant, with the two being kept in separate rooms. The whole time, the Master uses psychological manipulation to torture the Doctor and Rose, with a particular flair for taunting each with what he's doing to the other. There's no scenes with the Master parading the aged Doctor around on the bridge of the Valiant for the cameras.
    • Keeping the Doctor the same age rather than a shriveled old man means some scenes have their dialogue unchanged, but are staged differently. For instance, after the Doctor's feigned attempt at a revolt on day 365, the Master's response is to chain him up by his arms and legs to a wall on the bridge before monologuing him about the Toclafane and taking Lucy to Utopia.
    • Three months before the Year that Never Was ends, the Master decides to suppress the Doctor and Rose's bond by placing a dampener on Rose, and forces the Doctor to spend several months thinking that the Master killed her (until Lucy decides to pass a message to him). Being cut off from Rose, the Doctor is way less merciful on the Master and gives him a piece of his mind once his gambit with manipulating the Archangel network to get the people of Earth to chant his name takes effect. He also finds himself siding with Martha's family when Francine picks up a gun with the intention of shooting the Master, so Rose has to take his place as the one to talk her down.
    • When the Master's body is being burned on the funeral pyre, Rose takes note of the Master's last words and realizes he probably has a way to cheat death. She finds the Master's resurrection ring, and she and the Doctor toss it into the supernova they orbited to say goodbye to Jackie in, as a poetic note to remember that Jackie would still be with them in this universe if not for the Master's actions.
• Ambiguous Syntax: In "Smith and Jones", when the Doctor and Rose introduce themselves to Martha as "The Doctor and Rose Tyler," Martha thinks that this means the Doctor's name is "Dr. Tyler," forcing them to clarify. In the interlude at the end of this segment, the Master runs into the same problem as well when he's putting in a favor with Lady Thaw to get the Doctor and Rose's names on the guest list for Lazarus's demonstration.
  "Their names are the Doctor and Rose Tyler. No, not Doctor Tyler. His wife is Rose Tyler, but he is just 'the Doctor'. It's an old nickname that’s stuck, I'm afraid. You should hear what he calls me.”
• Anachronic Order: Like with "Love & Monsters," the events of "Blink" necessitate this. The Doctor pre-records his half of the conversation with Sally Sparrow; when Sally Sparrow has the conversation, the Doctor's parts are transcribed by Larry Nightingale, with Larry filling in Sally's lines, and the Doctor uses that annotated transcript to record his half. Also, his half is recorded as an Easter Egg on 17 specific DVDs; when the Doctor tells Billy Shipton which discs to put the recording on, he's working from a list Larry and Sally have made in the future made of DVDs that have the video on them.
  In this case, the last scene of "Blink" (where Sally gives the Doctor, Martha and Rose the envelope with all the necessary information they'll need to make the DVD Easter Egg video) happens first for them. After going through the events of the "Human Nature" / "The Family of Blood" story and the book The Pirate Loop, the trio go to Wester Drumlins, kicking off the main events of the Doctor's half of the Stable Time Loop in "Blink".
• Ascended Extra: The Master has a much larger presence in the story. In addition to his arc lasting nine chapters (three for "The Sound of Drums," three for the Year that Never Was, and three for "Last of the Time Lords"), he's also now the mastermind behind Canary Wharf. And unlike the show where he's an offscreen presence until the last three episodes, here, he gets interludes following "Smith and Jones," "The Lazarus Experiment," "42," and before "The Sound of Drums," that show him adjusting to the Doctor and Rose's activities on Earth, and remind us that he's been on Earth this whole time while the Doctor, Rose and Martha have been traveling around the universe.
• Battle Couple:
  • Rose and the Doctor, repeatedly. In "The Runaway Bride," we have Rose pilot the TARDIS while the Doctor grabs Donna from the scavenger's taxi; and during the confrontation with the Racnoss, Rose rescues herself and Donna from the Empress's web while the Doctor sets off the explosives.
  • In the Daleks two-parter, Rose leads Martha, Frank, Tallulah and Laszlo on the group that figures out what the Daleks are doing by messing with the Empire State Building's construction while the Doctor is working with Dalek Sec.
  • In "The Lazarus Experiment," when they're fighting the mutated Lazarus.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
  • Lampshaded by Rose during "The Runaway Bride", who comments on how Donna's wedding dress manages to withstand running around and jumping from a moving cab without a single blemish.
  • Rose herself loses a bit of weight during her time on the Valiant as a result of eating less and her sleep cycle being thrown off by her being unable to manage the huon particles inside her.
• Berserk Button:
  • The Master revels in hurting Rose knowing that it makes the Doctor upset, whether that be to have him watch his guards beat her, or install a telepathic cloaking device on Rose to cut off her telepathic bond with the Doctor and leave him thinking the Master killed her. After "killing" her, the Master regularly mocks the Doctor's bond with Rose trying to get him to crack, and it takes the Doctor a lot of willpower to resist the urge to attack the Master. He doesn't let the gloves off again until after he's defeated the Master.
  • Rose doesn't take nicely to being called a "chav". After Lance's betrayal, as he's deriding Donna for not being able to find Germany on a map, Rose gets pissed off on Donna's behalf, being reminded of way too many occasions where she's been looked down upon because of her lack of education.^note Before she got involved in her disastrous relationship with Jimmy Stone, Rose planned on sitting for her A-levels in art Then when Lance turns on her and calls her a chav, the Doctor has to restrain her from punching him and making him prefer to be Racnoss food.
• Big Bad: The Master. Not only is he pulling strings to get to Martha through her family, but he's also tried to separate the Doctor and Rose through a long-haul gambit manipulating Torchwood.
• Blessed with Suck: A Time Lord brain, according to the Master during one of his monologues, is wired differently. It makes them great thinkers but also horrible at processing strong emotions. The Master revels in exploiting this to reduce the Doctor to a catatonic state by convincing him that he's killed Rose.
  The Master: Humans can do plenty of damage to themselves when under extreme stress, and even your inferior biology has ways of managing shock. But a Time Lord’s brain is vastly more complex. Normally that means we’re more clever, able to process things faster. However, when we’re dealt a severe shock—especially one that is telepathic as well as physical, and even more if it affects the brain itself—that quickness and complexity can cause a chain reaction leading to a mental breakdown. So we have our own special neurotransmitter that shuts down all non-essential functions until the brain is able to compartmentalise the source of the shock. Of course, my people being what they were, they preferred to take preventative measures rather than run the risk of being made insensible by grief. Hence the cold, detached demeanor most of them affected.
  Rose Tyler: Yeah, but you can’t have the joy without risking the sorrow. No wonder you lot sucked the fun out of everything.
  The Master: Your Doctor seems to have collapsed into catatonia. He is almost completely unresponsive, curled up in bed with his hand clenched around his wedding ring.
  Rose Tyler: Why are you doing this?
  The Master: [displaying a malicious smirk] The answer to that is simple, Miss Tyler. Because I can.
• Book Ends: The story opens with the Doctor and Rose orbiting the TARDIS around the same supernova. At the opening it's so Rose can send a goodbye message to her mother after having been separated from her as a result of the Master's actions at Canary Wharf. The story ends with the Doctor and Rose returning to the supernova to dispose of the Master's resurrection ring, while reminiscing about how Jackie wouldn't be trapped in Pete's World if the Master hadn't encouraged Torchwood to mess with the Void breach.
• Brick Joke:
  • One of the first things that the Doctor says upon greeting Billy Shipton when he gets sent back by Weeping Angel is that he's learned to keep his Timey Wimey Detector away from hens because "it's not pretty when they blow." Here, we see why: the Doctor manages to get a chicken to explode while just randomly pointing his detector at anything in sight just to see if it was working.
  • Post-"Evolution of the Daleks," Rose asks the Doctor to teach her a bit on how to do maintenance on the TARDIS, with dialogue that comes across like foreplay. The Doctor takes it as innuendo, and Rose comments that “Oh, console room sex is definitely on my to-do list, but I’m pretty sure she’ll only allow it in cases of life-or-death reunions.” To which the Doctor replies, “It’s a bit disturbing that we have enough of those for the condition to not actually eliminate the possibility.” After the Master is defeated in "Last of the Time Lords" and the Doctor disables the booby-trapped choker the Master used to silence Rose's telepathy, the Doctor and Rose promptly have, you guess it, console room sex. Basking in the afterglow, Rose even says, "We can finally check console room sex off the list."
• Butterfly of Doom: In "The Lazarus Experiment", Rose ends up smoothing things over when introducing Martha's family to the Doctor. She uses the psychic paper to establish to Francine that she and the Doctor are UNIT investigators and they met Martha while dealing with the aftermath of the Judoon incident. On the upside, this means that for now, Francine merely disapproves of the fact that Martha is choosing to become acquainted with people who are involved in very dangerous work. What Rose doesn't know, however, is that the Master's aides are feeding Francine misinformation about the Doctor to try to turn her against him. Thanks to Rose's interference, the Master realizes that he won't be so easily able to convince Francine to betray the Doctor, so he forces her hand by taking Tish hostage.
• Call-Back:
  • In chapter 5, "Lost and Found," while the Doctor and Rose are cleaning out Jackie's flat, they have a discussion about why Rose saving Pete's life created a paradox and caused the Reapers to appear. This includes the Doctor describing it as the Blinovich Limitation Effect.
  • When landing the TARDIS after unexpectedly picking up Donna in "The Runaway Bride," and the Doctor notes the TARDIS is acting weird, Rose comments, "It’s like Krop Tor. Feels like she’s got indigestion.”
  • During "The Lazarus Experiment," as the Doctor, Rose and Martha hide from Lazarus in the genetic manipulation chamber, Rose compares it to when she and the Doctor were trapped with Queen Victoria and Sir Robert in the library in "Tooth and Claw", and the mistletoe was keeping the Wolf out.
    Martha Jones: Are we hiding?
    The Doctor: No, he knows we’re here. But this is his masterpiece. I’m betting he won’t destroy it, not even to get at us.
    Martha Jones: But we’re trapped. [He looked around the chamber, somehow managing to avoid looking Rose in the eye, even though they were standing face to face]
    The Doctor: Well, yeah, that’s a slight problem.
    Rose Tyler: So, what’s the plan, Doctor? [She recognised the little furrow between his eyebrows that meant he was irritated]
    The Doctor: Well, the plan was to get inside here.”
    Martha Jones: Then what?
    The Doctor: Well, then I’d come up with another plan...
    [Rose felt Martha’s ribcage expand as she sucked in a panicked breath, but she couldn’t help but laugh. The Doctor’s eyes flicked down to hers, and oh yes, that was definitely annoyance]
    The Doctor: [telepathically] It’s deja vu, isn’t it? Us, trapped someplace with a monster trying to get in. [She took his hand] I’m so glad I met you.
  • During "Utopia," when the Master is stealing the TARDIS, the Doctor recalls, “He’s attempted it before when he was without a TARDIS. Tried to steal her from me in San Francisco, 1999."
  • Owing to the 20 Minutes into the Future trope through the "present day" episodes from "Aliens of London" through "Journey's End", "Blink" is an exception as the "present day" events are in 2007. It's said explicitly here that the Doctor, Rose and Martha's visit to Wester Drumlins, and the one where they get sent back, is non-lineally happening merely weeks before "Army of Ghosts".
• Call-Forward:
  • During "The Shakespeare Code," when the Doctor and Rose bring up visiting Charles Dickens and finding him surrounded by ghosts at Christmas ("The Unquiet Dead"), Martha replies “Oh that’s… Your life is mad. Next you’re going to tell me you’ve solved a mystery with Agatha Christie." To which Rose replies, “Not yet we haven’t, but might do someday.”
  • Martha declines to use psychic paper to fake a CV for a job interview, knowing that the lie of a psychic paper could be easily foiled by a background check. Something that will become relevant in "Planet of the Ood".
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: The Master makes clear that the only reason he tolerates Rose sassing him is because he needs her alive and wants to revel in the pleasure of killing her for real in front of the Doctor. After one particular bout of sass towards the end of his year of terror, he finally decides to drop his mask concerning his indifference:
  "I’ve tolerated your cheek all year, but the year is almost over. The only reason why you are still alive, Miss Tyler, is because I want the Doctor to witness the moment when I kill you for real."
• Chekhov's Gun: Recalling that Rose's DNA is still mostly human, the Doctor realizes in "Smith and Jones" that that means the Judoons' scanners will register her as human.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Sally Sparrow in "Blink". She first encounters the Doctor, Rose and Martha as they're chasing an escaped red-ridged lizard from Mauritus to give them the envelope with all the information they'll need to make the DVD Easter egg, and for that matter, which DVDs for Billy Shipton to put the Easter egg on. Then we go through the "Human Nature" / "Family of Blood" arc. Only then do we have the events that culminate in the Doctor, Martha and Rose going to Wester Drumlins and getting sent back.
  • Martha is introduced in "Smith and Jones" as just another one of the medical students Mr. Stoker is taking around the hospital to check on patients. While analyzing Rose, she notices the Doctor, and questions him about what he was doing walking up to her in the street earlier that morning and taking off his tie, which the Doctor denies. Silently, he and Rose theorize they're having a non-linear meeting with her. So after the hospital is taken to the Moon, and they see Martha and Julia Swales trying to restore order, Rose gets the idea that they need to keep an eye on her.
    Rose Tyler: [telepathically] Now what do you think is going on with that medical student?
    The Doctor: Not a clue. At a guess, for some reason in the future, I need to convince her that time travel is possible, but I have no idea why.
  • Played with for Mr. Saxon. The audience knows from the start that Mr. Saxon is the Master, but the Doctor, Rose, and Martha don't. The Doctor and Rose first come to know of Mr. Saxon in "The Lazarus Experiment," when the Doctor tries to use the psychic paper to get them into Lazarus's demonstration, only for the receptionist to wave them through as "personal guests of Mr. Saxon" (the Master had earlier called in a favor with Lady Thaw to get them on the guest list). The next day, while ice-skating with Martha on the ice lakes of Kur-ha, they discuss this with Martha and learn about "Mr. Saxon" being the impending Prime Minister (after Martha gets a call from Tish about her getting a new job working for him). But after that, they never bother to ask any more questions of it because the TARDIS, being able to see all of time at once, plants subtle orders in the Doctor and Rose's minds to not investigate "Mr. Saxon," since to investigate him before the Master can steal her in the year 100 trillion would cause a paradox.
• Continuity Nod:
  • When the Master gave the TARDIS a bump after stealing it, it landed him back on Earth a week before the Sycorax invasion.
  • In "The Runaway Bride", Rose gets to use her gymnasts' skills to rescue Donna from the web the Empress is holding her captive in, and the Doctor alludes that it's very similar to when she rescued him and Mickey from the Nestene Consciousness, saying, "I know it’s not the same as a chain over a vat of plastic, but you still got the bronze, didn’t you?”
  • In "The Lazarus Experiment," when the de-aged Lazarus unveils himself, Rose briefly worries that what Lazarus has done is the first step towards people like Lady Cassandra, who will go to extreme lengths to prolong their lives. The Doctor hesitantly admits that people like Lady Cassandra are a fixed point, but Lazarus's work is not supposed to happen.
  • Twice, Rose makes indirect references to her past relationship with Jimmy Stone, something readers of the expanded universe material will recognize.^note Jimmy Stone was a musician who Rose ran off with when she was 16, dropping out of school prior to sitting her A levels. She lived with him in a bedsit for five months, before he dumped her and left her £800 in debt, while Jimmy was in a camper van to Amsterdam with a woman called Noosh. He was later hacked to death in the Auton massacre while robbing a later girlfriend. Most of what's known about Stone's background is gleaned from an article written by Russell T. Davies in the 2006 edition of the Doctor Who Annual. The details of his death were brought up in the 2018 novelization of "Rose" The first time is in "The Runaway Bride" when Rose is consoling Donna about Lance's betrayal, and the second time is in "Blink" when she's trying to convince Martha why it won't be bad to have some temporary shop work on her employment record.
  • Between "Blink" and "Utopia," one of the places the Doctor, Rose and Martha go to is the Singing Towers of Darillium, where the Twelfth Doctor spent his last night with River Song.
  • The Doctor's and Rose's ability to sense timelines means that they occasionally see echoes or glimpses of events from the show timeline. The echoes are the ripples resulting from the Master's attempt to create a paradox at Canary Wharf to mess with the Doctor. In "The Shakespeare Code," for instance, when the Doctor and Rose are getting ready for bed in the Elephant, they have a flash of the show's version of that scene where it's the Doctor having this conversation with Martha. This is established later to have been a ripple effect from the Master's failed attempt to change history at Canary Wharf.
    • After the Master's death, when Rose finds and chucks the Master's resurrection ring into the supernova, the Doctor has flashes of the events of "The End of Time", such as the Master copying himself over the entire population of Earth.
  • The descriptions of the Time War are borrowed from "The Day of the Doctor". Chapter 14 shows the Doctor describing to Rose the actions he took as the War Doctor, up to and including using the Moment (as well as he falsely thinking Gallifrey was destroyed due to a Temporal Paradox causing him to forget that he helped his future selves save Gallifrey by freezing it in a pocket universe, which tricked the Daleks into taking each other out). At one point during the Doctor and Rose's imprisonment aboard the Valiant, the Master compels the Doctor into regaling him with the events of the Time War, and finds his descriptions of stealing the Moment hilarious.
  • During "The Shakespeare Code," when Martha suggests the idea of filming Love's Labour's Won and selling the footage in the 21st century for money, the Doctor and Rose vehemently reject the idea, remembering Adam Mitchell from "The Long Game."
  • At the end of "The Shakespeare Code," while the Doctor and Rose are musing about Martha's value as a companion, the Doctor notes that Martha's willingness to call out customs considered morally wrong by 21st century standards, like the orderlies' horrible treatment of their patients at Bethlem Asylum, reminds him of Rose yelling at Sneed for drugging and kidnapping her in "The Unquiet Dead" and leaving her at the mercy of the Gelth-possessed corpses.
  • When Martha begins flirting with Shakespeare, the Doctor and Rose have a moment where they recall the adventure they went on with Jack in Kyoto prior to being taken to the Game Station.
    The Doctor: I should have known Shakespeare would be an incorrigible flirt.
    Rose Tyler: How come you're not warning her of the paradox she could cause if she stayed with him? [She remembered the stern lecture her first Doctor had given her in Kyoto, when the emperor's son had tried to court her]
    The Doctor: One, the emperor's son was serious. Will is just playing. B—no, two—thirteenth century Japan had almost no contact with the western world. It would have caused a paradox for the next Empress to be English. And three…[He looked up at her] You know what the third reason is.
  • In the Sequel Hook, it turns out that the parallel Torchwood has been dealing with the stars going out and has dealt with several alien races that sought refuge on Earth as a result of lingering effects from the Reality Bomb, including the Saturnyne (the creatures from "The Vampires of Venice") and the Zinzi.
• Crazy-Prepared: The Doctor takes the extra precaution of procuring period-appropriate currency after getting Sally Sparrow's envelope of everything they'll need to make the DVD message to her in 1969.
• Damsel in Distress:
  • "The Runaway Bride" has Rose be tied up in the Racnoss web alongside Donna and Lance.
  • Rose takes Martha's place as Milo and Cheen's third passenger in "Gridlocked".
  • Rose gets taken captive by the Family of Blood during the resolution to the "Human Nature" / "Family of Blood" arc.
  • Thanks to Rose interfering with the Master's efforts to turn Martha's mother against the Doctor, he decides to kidnap Tish and used that to apply pressure to Francine.
• Deadly Euphemism: When Martha calls her mother during "42," Francine mentions that Tish has a new job working for "Mr. Saxon" but has apparently been given the day off in spite of it being around Election Day, and she's "not sure why he thought he could spare a PR person today of all days.” Then we find out that "given the day off" is a euphemism for "the Master is holding her prisoner."
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • Arriving in 1599 London for "The Shakespeare Code," Rose and Martha have to tell the Doctor that as a black woman, Martha can't just "walk around like she owns the place" without being questioned.^note This exchange was in the show, but there's a new addition with the Doctor having to correct Martha on what she read in her history books to make clear that black people did exist in Tudor England
    Martha Jones: Oh, but hold on, am I all right? I’m not going to get carted off as a slave, am I?
    The Doctor: Why would they do that?
    Martha Jones: Not exactly white, in case you haven’t noticed.
    The Doctor: I’m not even human. Just walk about like you own the place. Works for me. [Rose huffed out a breath, and the Doctor looked down at her] What?
    Rose Tyler: It works for you because you’re a white male. [The two women shared a commiserating look]
    The Doctor: What?
    Rose Tyler: It’s just different for us, that’s all. [The Doctor’s gaze shifted from Rose’s patient smile to Martha’s crossed arms and tapping toes, and he finally understood Martha’s question]
    The Doctor: Oh. OH! I forgot that history books in your time still spread that ridiculous nonsense about medieval and Renaissance Europe being an all-white society. [sheepish grin] Honestly, Martha, there were plenty of free black people in Elizabethan England. At the worst, you might encounter the same unfortunate attitudes that still persist in your time—which is certainly unpleasant, but they won’t assume you should be a slave.
    Rose Tyler: So you see, no matter where you go in time, people aren’t that different from what we’re used to.
    The Doctor: That’s right. Elizabethan England, not so different from your time.
  • In "Daleks in Manhattan," we're reminded that women in 1930 weren't expected to be involved in physical labor like tunnel cleaning from the way Mr. Diagoras reacts when Rose asks about the possibility of "accidents" happening in the tunnels. He's later uncomfortably leering at her as he abandons his quarry of volunteers in the sewers to get lost and be caught by the pig slaves.
    Rose Tyler: What do you mean? What sort of accidents?
    [Diagoras looked her up and down, and the Doctor wrapped an arm around her and glared at him. Diagoras smirked]
    Mr. Diagoras: I don’t think you need the work, doll. Anybody else?
  • For "Human Nature" / "The Family of Blood," it's averted for John and Rose, living in 1913 England. Because of the TARDIS providing a different background for their fobbed selves, John is rather progressive for his time, as seen when he refuses to give the other boys permission to beat up Timothy Latimer for zoning out at shooting practice (which causes him to earn a scolding from the Headmaster later that night during the Family's attack).
    John struggled under the expectation. It wasn’t uncommon by any means; he’d survived more than one beating when he was in school. But in his mind’s eye, he could see Rose’s disappointed look when he told her about his day. She wouldn’t think there was anything right or commendable about allowing the boys to hit each other—and truthfully, he didn’t think so, either.
    • Martha is still their maid, but as a 21st century black woman living in pre-suffrage England, she has a bit of an easier time than she has in canon. Joan Redfern gave Martha a rather hard time in the show (a lot of it a byproduct of the social rules and etiquette she was raised on). John and Rose treat Martha better than Joan did in the show, because even with their suppressed memories, the Doctor and Rose are from a different era. Jenny, the maid who later gets possessed by Mother of Mine, thinks it unusual that John and Rose don't look down on Martha, and also how unusual an arrangement Martha has in working both as their personal maid as well as for school. Martha explains that she's Rose's best friend, but John and Rose don’t have a bedroom for her at the cottage, so she does housekeeping at the school for a few hours every day in exchange for room and board. This cover story also allows her to keep a 24 hour watch on John, and be able to take mornings off to keep an eye on John and on the TARDIS without any reprisal. The Doctor and Rose briefly discuss why this happened once the adventure is over.
      "She created a nice life for us though, didn't she?" the Doctor asked.
      Rose hummed as she sipped her tea. "Yeah, it was nice. Bit slow, compared to what we're used to, and I'd never be able to stand two months in a time where I was nothing but a housewife, but… it was nice." She looked up at the Doctor. "John was more tolerant than most men were back then, I think. Certainly more domestic, helping with the cooking."
      The Doctor nodded. "John was me. He might not have known that women deserved the vote, or that a black woman would one day be allowed to study medicine, but he knew you, and he knew Martha, so his mind sort of… made allowances for your personalities."
      He ran his fingers through her hair as he talked, and Rose turned her head slightly to encourage him.
      "And since he was me, he was utterly besotted with his wife. He would have given you anything within his power. Fixing breakfast in the morning was an easy concession."
• Death Faked for You: Six months into the Year That Never Was, the Master decides to use a telepathic blocking collar to break off Rose's telepathic connection to the Doctor, which thanks to the Doctor and Rose being isolated from one another, means that he thinks the Master has killed her. In order to make it seem real, the Master also minimizes the number of guards who see her.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Since "Smith and Jones" is from the Doctor and Rose's perspective, Martha's role in the episode's events is reduced.
  • During "Human Nature" / "The Family of Blood", Joan Redfern is just another teacher at the school and most of her role in the canon story is given to Rose.
• Did You Actually Believe...?: The Master when he has his guards parade Rose before the Doctor during the confrontation on the Valiant: "Did you really think I would let Rose Tyler go free? It’s been too long since we’ve seen each other, if you could misjudge me so badly."
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In "The Family of Blood," Mr. Philips is killed by Daughter and Father of Mine, when in the show he was killed by Son and Mother of Mine. The reason for this change is due to Son of Mine having to go into the school to search for Rose at that moment.
• Don't Split Us Up: The Doctor and Rose attempt to plead this when they're being led to their cells on the Valiant. Unfortunately for them, the Master is smart enough to not have them contained in the same room.
• Doesn't Like Guns: The Doctor's aversion to guns is one core element of his personality that's retained when he temporarily becomes a human for the "Family of Blood" storyline.
  Of all John's duties at the school, shooting practice was his least favourite. He abhorred guns, though he was careful not to let the headmaster see his distaste. There were very few situations he could think of that warranted the use of weapons, and he hated the thought that he was moulding young boys into men who would reach for a gun to protect themselves, instead of their wits.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Master's response to learning the Drast have claimed Japan for themselves is to burn the islands to the ground, as a show of force to other alien races that he's in charge of Earth, and also to spite the Doctor. Martha ends up being the only one to get out of Japan alive.
• Double Agent: Some of the Master's guards on the Valiant are secretly double agents for the resistance movement, allowing Jack to slip messages to the Doctor and to Rose. Lucy also secretly passes messages after a few months.
• Easily Forgiven: Martha doesn't blame her parents in the slightest for betraying her, the Doctor, and Rose to the Master, seeing as they were forced to do so thanks to him kidnapping Tish.
• Even Evil Has Standards: After several months of the Master tormenting the Doctor with the false notion that Rose is dead, Lucy decides to end the Doctor's suffering by slipping a message from Rose, out of concern for the Doctor's wellbeing. This moment doubles as foreshadowing, as it shows her wavering loyalty to the Master, making her decision to eventually shoot him less of a surprise.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The Master shows disdain towards Rose for being a half-human/half Time Lord hybrid and also for not being native Gallifreyan, even using the diminutive "little" on a few occasions. The Doctor is dismayed to see how despite being the one who ran from the Time War, the Master isn't so different from Rassilon and others on the High Council.
  • The Doctor makes a remark in The Most Wonderful Time of the Year insinuating that the Master was far from the only Time Lord to have such a supremacy view looking down on other races, even saying that was part of the reason he left Sarah Jane Smith: because she'd not be welcomed on Gallifrey.
• Faux Affably Evil: The Master claims to view hospitality as a lost art. Hence why, after summoning the Toclafane to conquer Earth, he treats the Doctor and Rose to a hearty brunch on the Valiant before sending them to their separate cells. He can also flip back and forth between affable and malicious during his interactions with the Doctor and Rose like a switch being flipped.
• Foil:
  • Rose and Martha fall into this a bit, being from different backgrounds. Rose is a chav from the estates while Martha is a more affluent medical student.
  • Rose and Lucy Saxon. Both are blonde-haired wives to their Time Lords, and both insist on staying with said Time Lord "for better, or for worse" (Lucy saying that to Vivian Rook, and Rose saying that telepathically when she insists on staying with the Doctor on the Valiant). The biggest differences between them are that Rose is a hybrid, being infused with Time Lord DNA, while Lucy is just a normal human. Likewise, Lucy comes from an aristocratic family (as implied by her scene with Vivian Rook) while Rose comes from a working class background. Rose also has more spine to stand up to the Doctor, whereas Lucy is initially too afraid of the Master to challenge him directly.
• Forced to Watch: To elicit a reaction out of the Doctor, the Master forces him to watch as his guards beat Rose up. Later, after cutting off the Doctor's telepathic bond to Rose (and letting him think Rose is dead), the Master also takes delight in forcing Rose to watch him wallow in misery, with him being unaware she's still alive.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • Discussed when the Doctor, Rose and Martha are chasing a red-ridged lizard, they find it's managed to find its way back to London about six weeks before the Judoon's abduction of Martha's hospital. The lack of news coverage on it leads the Doctor to conclude that whatever time loop is happening, they successfully capture the lizard.
    Martha Jones: Hold on, are you telling me there was a giant red lizard roaming the streets of London six weeks ago?
    The Doctor: Yep.
    Martha Jones: How come I never heard about that, then? Heard about the Christmas star—I’m assuming that was you.
    The Doctor: Yeah, it was. And if you never heard about the lizard, it must mean we’re successful in containing it and getting it back where it belongs.
  • The Doctor and Rose have the ability to sense that the trip to Malcassairo in "Utopia" is a fixed point, with the reason becoming very clear when they find Professor Yana.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Post "Gridlock", Rose and the Doctor discuss what the Face of Boe's message "You are not alone" could mean. The Doctor takes the Face of Boe calling him "Time Lord" instead of by "Doctor" to mean that there's another Time Lord still alive, another one who survived the Time War. This of course pays off when the Doctor and the Master have their phone conversation after the bombing at Martha's apartment.
  • During chapter 44, Lucy goes to Rose to get the message to pass on to the Doctor. Knowing that she's the one who will shoot the Master after the paradox machine is undone, it seems that she knows by this point that the Master is going to lose, and she's working to get into Rose and the Doctor's good graces, in hopes that they'll be lenient on her when they turn the tables on the Master.
  • In chapter 32, during "Blink", Martha decides against using the psychic paper to fake a CV and references when applying for a job, knowing that she'll be outed as a liar if anyone bothers to do a proper background check. This is exactly what's going to trip up the Doctor, Rose and Donna when they use psychic paper in "Planet of the Ood", where Solana Mercurio figures out they're frauds after Klineman Halpen directs her to do a background check, and finds that the company they claimed to come from isn't real.
  • At the start of "Human Nature," when the Doctor is preparing to fob himself and Rose to be full humans, he has Rose go through the Chameleon Arch first, an experience that is very painful for the two of them as they feel their telepathic bond being severed (The Doctor insists on having Rose be fobbed first so that she won't have to experience the pain twice). This foreshadows the Master suppressing the Doctor and Rose's telepathic bond by planting a telepathic dampener on Rose.
  • When the Doctor, Rose and Martha leave Timothy Latimer at the end of "Family of Blood," after the conversation about what Tim saw when he opened the fob watch, Tim (who is slightly psychic) tells the Doctor and Rose, "Together, you burn at the centre of time and can see the turn of the universe. Even when the Wolf is silenced, your story will not be over. You are… forever.” The following conversation not only also foreshadows the Master temporarily silencing Rose's bond to the Doctor, but Tim's words are the basis for the message Rose uses to pass on to the Doctor (via Lucy) that she's still alive and well:
    Rose Tyler: What do you think Tim meant, about me being silenced?
    The Doctor: I honestly don’t have a clue, Rose.Last night, before I faced the Family, he asked if I could hear you, howling for your mate. I told him the truth—I can always hear you.
    Rose Tyler: Do you think something’s going to happen, and you won’t be able to?
    The Doctor: Not possible. If even changing species couldn’t get rid of our bond, nothing can.
• Gambit Pileup: "The Lazarus Experiment" is being used by the Master for several purposes: 1) he funds the experiment, knowing that a machine that will "change what it means to be human" is guaranteed to get the Doctor’s attention; 2) he's made sure Martha’s sister works for Lazarus and that Tish is in a position of influence to invite her siblings and her mother; 3) he weaponises the whole incident to convince Francine to hate the Doctor (or at least attempts to in this fic) and 4) he gets a lot of enjoyment out of putting the Doctor and Rose's names on the guest list, knowing that the rules of paradoxes will prevent them from investigating his name until it's too late.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: The Doctor and Rose get to tick off "console room sex" when the Doctor gets the Master's choker off Rose.
• Going Native: Lampshaded when the Master has Rose beaten up to spite the Doctor.
  The Master: Oh, that was fun. Do you know, Doctor, you flinched with every blow.
  The Doctor: Torture, Master? I thought physical abuse was beneath you. You've spent too much time with humans lately.
  The Master: You’re one to talk. Where's the control a Time Lord should have over his emotions? I've managed to completely wreck your composure, simply by allowing a guard to strike your bond mate a few times. [The Doctor’s lips pulled back in a silent snarl. It was more than a few times, and they both knew it] So you tell me—who's acting more human? Me, or you?
• Go-to Alias: Now that he and Rose are married, the Doctor resorts to "John Tyler" whenever he needs a human alias name. He uses this in "Smith and Jones" when he's passing Rose off as a patient in the Royal Hope Hospital, and it's his alias for the "Human Nature" story.
  Rose Tyler: What’s with you taking my name? I thought you normally went by John Smith.
  The Doctor: I wanted us to have the same last name, and you will always be Rose Tyler.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Master is revealed to have been one for the Battle of Canary Wharf. As he explains, the slight bump he was able to give to the TARDIS after the Doctor locked its coordinates on Malcassairo allowed him to arrive back in London a week before the Sycorax invasion. Harriet Jones' departure from office gave him the idea to become Minister of Defence (under which he was able to launch his Archangel network). This put him in a position to discover that the weapon Torchwood used to shoot down the Sycorax was something that humans wouldn't be able to create on their own for at least another century. He was further delighted to find that Torchwood was created just for protecting Great Britain from the Doctor. Whilst he wasn't responsible for the Void ship's arrival, he knew that Torchwood had built One Canada Square just to reach the rift into the Void. Unable to tell Torchwood what the Void ship really was without outing himself as a Time Lord, he became an unofficial advisor to Yvonne Hartman and convinced her to fire particle beams at the breach, knowing that eventually would widen the breach enough to enable the Cybermen and Daleks to come through. All of this was with the intention of trying to trap Rose in the parallel world. Except the Doctor had woken up Rose's telepathy, enabling the TARDIS to reach through the Void and bring her back. Not that that deterred the Master, for he just had to make some slight alterations to his plans to allow for Rose's presence.
• Hammerspace: The Doctor has to surrender his longcoat to the Master's aide-de-camp when he's brought to his cell. He has enough contents in his pockets to fill up an entire plastic tub from an airport security checkpoint.
• Half-Breed Discrimination: The Master thinks very lowly of Rose being a Human-Time Lord hybrid.
• Hands-On Approach: Subverted post "Daleks in Manhattan" / "Evolution of the Daleks". Rose comes into the console room and asks the Doctor to teach her how to perform repairs on the TARDIS while they wait for Martha to wake up. The Doctor thinks she's using a euphemism for sex, so she clarifies she's referring to actual maintenance.
  Rose Tyler: You know, Doctor, Martha probably won’t be up for another three hours, and I don’t think either of us are going to get any more sleep.
  The Doctor: Do you have something in mind to fill the time? [Rose stood up and ran her fingers over the controls]
  Rose Tyler: Well… you could teach me a little bit about TARDIS maintenance. [The Doctor leaned back in the jump seat and crossed his arms over his chest]
  The Doctor: That was not where I expected this conversation to go. [It only took Rose a moment to parse out what he meant, and she smiled at him, letting him see a hint of her tongue]
  Rose Tyler: Oh, console room sex is definitely on my to-do list, but I’m pretty sure she’ll only allow it in cases of life-or-death reunions.
  The Doctor: It’s a bit disturbing that we have enough of those for the condition to not actually eliminate the possibility. So, maintenance lessons it is.
• Honest John's Dealership: In "Daleks in Manhattan", the Doctor and Rose's suspicions of Mr. Diagoras when he arrives in Hooverville to recruit laborers he'll sell to the Daleks is because he casts this sort of vibe.
• Hypocritical Humor: When the Master admits that he had to be subtle when manipulating Torchwood, the Doctor reminds him of the time he called himself "Dr. Harcourt De’ath."
• Innocently Insensitive: Since Rose grew up in a council estate, her presence in series 3 highlights moments where the Doctor and Martha speak from places of privilege without realizing it. The Doctor's a given, since he's from Gallifrey and never settles down in any one time period. But Martha also counts as she comes from a middle to upper class background, meaning she doesn't understand the struggles of working class people. This is very apparent in the period-piece episodes.
  • In "The Shakespeare Code," Rose and Martha have to both call the Doctor out on his white privilege when he tells Martha to just act like she owns the place.
  • Very prominent in the Dalek two-parter of "Daleks in Manhattan" / "Evolution of the Daleks". When the Doctor, Rose and Martha are entering Hooverville, Martha is incredulous about the concept of shantytowns popping up in the middle of Central Park. Rose, who grew up in a council estate, instantly understands the citizens' plight, having seen way too many of her neighbors get evicted for missed rent payments. Later, when they first run into Tallulah, Rose understands (unlike Martha) that Tallulah couldn't report her boyfriend Laszlo's disappearance because she didn't want to lose her job:
    Rose Tyler: Have you reported him missing? [Tallulah huffed, and Rose knew what that meant]
    Tallulah: Sure. He’s just a stagehand. Who cares? The management certainly don’t. [Martha picked up a wire halo from the shelves and played with it]
    Martha Jones: Can’t you kick up a fuss or something?
    Rose Tyler: Not if she wants to keep her job. [She remembered all the times she’d held her tongue while working at Henrik’s, because she knew she’d get fired if they thought she was too difficult. Tallulah nodded, but Martha still didn’t understand
    Martha Jones: But they’d listen to you. You’re one of the stars. [Rose met Tallulah’s eyes in the mirror, and they both smiled ruefully]
    Tallulah: Oh, honey, I got one song in a back street revue and that's only because Heidi Chicane broke her ankle. [She turned away from the mirror and glared up at Martha] Which had nothing to do with me, whatever anybody says. [She sighed, and some of the fight went out of her.] I can't afford to make a fuss. If I don't make this month's rent, then before you know it, I’m in Hooverville.
    Martha Jones: Okay, I get it. [Rose knew she didn't, not really. She didn’t know what it was like to live hand-to-mouth, to wonder if there would be enough money for rent and bills and food]
  • Martha has a later instance of this in "Blink" when Rose is trying to convince her that the shop work she'll have to do for the duration of their stay in 1969 is not that bad.
  • During "The Runaway Bride," when the Doctor is taking Donna and Rose back in time to the beginning of the Earth to see what the Empress of the Racnoss is digging to the core for, the Doctor is so caught up in investigating that he doesn't realize Donna is heartbroken over Lance's betrayal until Rose (who has stepped in to console Donna) points it out to him.
  • Back in To Make Much of Time, Rose was horrified to learn that as Bad Wolf, not only did she bring Jack back to life, but she also made him immortal. So when Jack turns up at the Tyler flat, and recaps what happened to him, he unknowingly offends Rose when he lets his anger over the Doctor abandoning him get the better of him, ^note "Don't worry, Rosie, at least if I can't die, you don’t have to worry about ever saying goodbye—not that your designated driver ever takes the time to say goodbye anyway." sending Rose running off to her bedroom in tears. The Doctor is not happy at Jack's attempt to guilt-trip him and forces him to apologize to Rose.
• Insatiable Newlyweds: The Doctor and Rose.
  • The Doctor and Rose aren't quite yet married by "The Runaway Bride," but Donna has to chide them from getting too lovey-dovey around her whilst she's dealing with missing her own wedding reception. Both on the taxi ride to the reception ("OI! D’you mind not being quite so lovey dovey in front of the woman who just missed her own wedding?”) and when they're driving with Lance to the HC Clements offices.
    Donna Noble: Oh, anyone would think you two were newlyweds, the way you keep hanging onto each other.
    The Doctor: Donna, it’s not like we have room to spread out.
    Donna Noble: Yeah, because you'd let go of Blondie there if you didn't need to be practically sitting in each other's laps? [The Doctor and Rose exchanged a mutually embarrassed glance, and Donna snorted] That's what I thought.
  • In "Smith and Jones," when checking Rose over, Martha observes that the Doctor and Rose act like a newly married couple, and reasonably speculates (when Mr. Stoker presses her to make a diagnosis) that Rose might be pregnant when checking her on the morning rounds.
  • In "Daleks in Manhattan," Tallulah likens their insatiableness to her fling with Laszlo.
    Tallulah: Hey, you’re lucky, though. I saw the way that hot potato in the sharp suit looked at you—like you’re his whole world.
    Rose Tyler: Yeah, I am lucky.
    Tallulah: How long have you been married?
    Rose Tyler: Almost seven months.
    Tallulah: Oh, I thought you were newlyweds! The way he didn’t want to leave you earlier… I told myself, "they haven’t even been married for a year yet."
  • When they're being taken by the Master's guards to their cells, their parting kiss is so passionate that the guards have to pull them apart saying "we said kiss, not shag in the middle of the corridor".
• In Spite of a Nail: In "The Lazarus Experiment," Rose manages to cover for Martha's faux pas and convinces Martha's mother that she and the Doctor are investigators from UNIT. This makes Francine more suspicious of the stories the Master's aides are telling her to try persuading her the Doctor is dangerous. Ultimately, the Master resorts to kidnapping Tish a few days earlier than he does in the show^note In the show, Tish is taken into custody at the same time as her parents, with two aides grabbing her inside 10 Downing Street as Martha calls her and uses her as leverage to get Francine to betray the Doctor. Miss Dexter has them arrested when they defy her and warn Martha of the trap.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • Rose is insistent on calling the Doctor her husband. In the presence of the Master, he insists on calling the Doctor her bond mate.
  • For her part, Rose repays the Master in kind by insisting on calling him Harry like it's a dirty word.
• Institutional Apparel: The Doctor is forced to give up his normal suit and tie when imprisoned on the Valiant, since his pockets are Bigger on the Inside, and the Master makes him wear normal non-Hammerspace black suits and ties. The Doctor gripes to himself that it makes him feel like he's being dressed like a detective inspector.
• In the Past, Everyone Will Be Famous: Lampshaded by Rose to Martha in "The Shakespeare Code," when they're headed to the Globe.
  “Sometimes I think half the reason the Doctor travels is to meet all his heroes. Too bad you can’t get an autographed first edition like you did when we met Dickens. Considering the First Folio wasn’t published until after he died, no one would believe you..."
• Invented Individual: The resistance movement during the Year That Never Was has such a geographical variant. The Master gets word at one point that Martha is on her way to meet with members of the Eastern Underground at place called Cursus Hill in Turkey. However, as Brigadier Erik Calvin explains to Martha:
  Erik Calvin: There is no Cursus Hill, actually. It's disinformation. Cursus Hill isn't a geographical location; it's just the code name we give to a meet point. We decide where Cursus Hill is going to be, depending on the nature of the operation.
  Martha Jones: I see. [A faint smile crossed her face when she thought about how angry the scarred UCF agent must have been when he got to what he thought was Cursus Hill and she wasn't there]
  Erik Calvin: You are a high-value target, Miss Jones. To our certain knowledge, quite apart from their general security echelons, they have at least three dedicated kill-squads hunting for you. One in particular was closing in on your heels in Istanbul, so we had to play things close to the chest. We’ve changed the location of Cursus Hill four times in the last twenty hours. I imagine the UCF will be cursing your name right about now.
  Martha Jones: [grins] Oh, I'm sure they are. Their Master won't be too pleased with them, either.
• I Have Your Wife:
  • The Doctor plans for the possibility of Rose getting captured alongside him when they confront the Master^note he knows there's almost no chance the Master will let Rose get away if he captures the Doctor; he'll be fascinated by Jack's immortality. But Martha is just an ordinary human, so she's the only one the Doctor thinks has a good chance of getting away. But despite Rose's reassurance, he wants her to escape with Martha. Unfortunately, it turns out the Master anticipated that the Doctor would try to send Rose away.
    "Master, just calm down. Just look at what you're doing. Just stop. If you could see yourself—"
    "Oh, do excuse me," the Master said to the television cameramen who were still filming. "Little bit of personal business. Back in a minute." He looked at the guards holding the Doctor down. "Let him go."
    They shoved the Doctor down onto the floor. He pushed himself up and looked at the Master. "It's that sound. The sound in your head. What if I could help?"
    "Oh, how to shut him up?" The Master rolled his eyes and mimed talking with his hand. "I know!" He grinned widely and gestured to someone in the back of the room.
    The Doctor heard a brief scuffle, and that combined with the sudden anger from Rose told him exactly what had happened. He tried to reach for her when she was pushed to the front of the room, but the guards grabbed his hands and held them behind his back.
    "Did you really think I would let Rose Tyler go free?" The Master shook his head and tsked. "It's been too long since we've seen each other, if you could misjudge me so badly. I've got your bond mate, Doctor. Your little human-Time Lord hybrid." He twirled his laser screwdriver between his fingers. "If I remember correctly, you aren't positive she'll be able to regenerate. And—again, if memory serves—you aren't too keen to find out." His smile disappeared and he pointed the screwdriver at Rose. "Have you changed your mind?"
    The Doctor seethed with rage, but he couldn't do anything but shake his head. He wouldn't risk Rose's life.
    The Master laughed. "Look at what Earth's defender has been reduced to. Cowering on the floor, paralysed out of fear for his bond mate's life."
  • The Master's original plan with getting to Martha's family is to have his aides approach her mother and persuade her that Martha is putting herself in grave danger associating with the Doctor. Unfortunately for the Master, Rose is able to soften up Francine enough at Lazarus's demonstration^note by convincing Francine that she and the Doctor are UNIT investigators asking inquiries of Martha's movements during the Judoon incident that Francine merely sees the Doctor and Rose as a couple who do dangerous work that Martha's chosen to assist in. As a result, the Master kidnaps Tish and uses that to force Martha's parents to cooperate with him.
    • Unfortunately, when said call does happen, it's after the Master has blown up Martha's apartment, and Martha is able to see through their lies about getting back together^note especially when the night after the Judoon incident, just a week ago from her parents' perspective, they were having a fight at Leo's birthday party over Clive leaving Francine for Annelise. When Martha presses for a truthful answer, Clive, rather than see Martha meet the same fate as Tish, cracks, "Yes! Just run! I'm not sacrificing one daughter to save the other! Run, Martha!” as Miss Dexter has them arrested. Martha races over in her car with the Doctor, Rose, and Jack, only for them to be forced to flee as Miss Dexter orders the police to open fire on them. When the Master has Martha's family paraded onto the Valiant flight deck, Francine tearfully apologizes, "I'm sorry. I didn't know what to do—he had Tish."
• Improbable Age: After "The Lazarus Experiment", Rose is able to notice enough details to make her more suspicious about someone pulling strings, even without her or the Doctor knowing about the Master yet, among them being that a 24 year old girl like Tish^note When "The Lazarus Experiment" aired in 2007, Gugu Mbatha Raw (Tish) was 24 years old. She's also four years younger than Freema Agyeman (Martha); although other narration notes that Tish is meant to be older than Martha would be in charge of Lazarus's public relations team:
  Rose Tyler: Didn’t it seem like there were a lot of coincidences tonight? Did you see how surprised Martha was when Tish said she was the head of the PR department?
  The Doctor: Well, it’s not uncommon for siblings to underrate each other’s accomplishments—especially if they’ve had to fight for their parents’ attention.
  Rose Tyler: It doesn’t seem odd to you that someone so young would have that much responsibility?
  The Doctor: I hadn’t thought of it like that.
  Rose Tyler: And that the person in question just happens to be our companion’s sister?
  The Doctor: Add to that the mysterious Mr. Saxon putting our names on the guest list so we could get in without difficulty. Okay, yes. Those are a lot of coincidences.
• Just Between You and Me:
  • After getting himself elected Prime Minister, the Master decides to visit Tish in the makeshift prison he's made for her in what used to be the Racnoss lair so he can gloat.
  • Once the Master has the Doctor and Rose imprisoned on the Valiant, he enjoys making one-on-one visits to each of them to torment them.
• Just Ignore It: After "42", the TARDIS subliminally gives the Doctor, Rose and Martha directions to dismiss any suspicions they have about Harold Saxon, since learning about the Master prior to being sent to 100 trillion would cause a paradox.
• Killed Off for Real: After the Doctor and Rose burn the Master's body on the pyre, Rose finds his resurrection ring and decides it needs to be destroyed so that the Master can't bring himself back to life.^note This was how the Cult of Saxon resurrected the Master in "The End of Time" They thus chuck the ring into the nearest supernova.
  The Doctor stared, transfixed, as several timelines suddenly disappeared. He could only see shadowy glimpses of them—of a mad Master turning everyone into his clone, of something coming back that should remain lost, of his own painful regeneration—but what he saw was enough to make him grateful that Rose had found the ring.
  • This change occurred as a result of the author needing to redo the 2009 specials, including "The End of Time," due to the Doctor being in a completely different mental place in the Timelessness-verse compared to in the show.^note In the show, the specials are essentially the story of the Doctor going mad from grief. He has once again lost everyone. Instead of finding someone to help him heal, he isolates himself. The end result is a Doctor who thinks he can force Time to obey him, and who would actually say those things to Wilf about how much more important he is. Arguably, his regeneration wasn't just because of the radiation he endured whilst saving Wilf, but also because of his mental health. The Timelessness-verse Doctor is in the exact opposite place: instead of losing his entire family, he has a bigger found family than he’s ever had before, so he’s not going to make the kind of choices the canon Doctor made that led to him being so bad off mentally that he needed a completely fresh start.
• Locked Out of the Loop:
  • The Doctor doesn't tell Rose what his plans are for integrating himself into the Archangel matrices, reasoning that if she doesn't know, the Master can't torture that information out of her. It doesn't stop Rose from figuring out his plans during one instance where the Master tries to taunt the Doctor, and the Doctor cryptically says "I have a way to get Rose back," which the Master (incorrectly) interprets as the Doctor planning to create another paradox.
  • Martha doesn't know about the Master having "killed" Rose because at the time, she's stowed away on a container ship to get from Japan to America, and narrowly escaped the Master torching the islands to eliminate the Draste. It's only when she lands in San Diego and sees the distressed look on her Resistance contact's face that she learns what happened:
    Martha Jones: What is it? What's happened?
    Martha's contact: We didn't think you'd heard. [Martha noticed with a sinking stomach that the woman hadn't actually answered her question]
    Martha Jones: Not a lot of news reaches you in the hold of a container ship. Now come on, tell me.
• Luxury Prison Suite: The Master's accommodations for the Doctor and Rose aboard the Valiant are what are normally meant to be the officers' quarters. They are furnished much like normal dorm rooms, with a bed, a table, a wardrobe, a dresser, and a private lavatory. He even has some reading material stocked in each cell. The Doctor finds hismelf being forced to trade his normal coat for boring dark grey suits with plain black ties, while Rose is supplied with the wardrobe of a chav. At all times, there is a camera monitoring them 24/7, and they must ring a button if they need to get something from one of the Master's guards.
• The Man Behind the Man: The Master manipulated the events of the Battle of Canary Wharf by acting as a traitorous advisor to Yvonne Hartman. He was the one who convinced Yvonne to fire particle beams at the Void breach under the pretense it would be a source of renewable energy.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: In "The Sound of Drums," the Doctor and Rose decide to have sex one last time on the sleeping bag Jack procures for them before they head up to the Valiant. While Jack obviously wouldn't mind, they have to be considerate of Martha. Fortunately, a little sonic screwdriver work allows the Doctor to put up a noise bubble around his and Rose's sleeping bag.
• Meanwhile Scene:
  • We get several interludes showing the Master's behind the scenes scheming, reminding us that the Master has been on Earth this whole time while the Doctor and Rose have been traveling all over the universe during this story and the preceding To Make Much of Time. After "Smith and Jones", we see him call Lady Thaw to arrange for the Doctor and Rose to be put on the guest list for Richard Lazarus's experiment in "The Lazarus Experiment". Post-Lazarus, we see the Master modifying his plans for leveraging Martha's family by kidnapping Tish and using that to leverage Martha's parents into betraying the Doctor.
  • During the Year that Never Was, the action primarily focuses on the Doctor and Rose dealing with the Master's "hospitality", but cuts away every so often to show Martha on her travels as she spreads the Doctor's name around.
• Metaphorically True: In the Master's efforts to sow distrust in Francine regarding the Doctor's presence in Martha's life, his aides tell her the truth about some of his various adventures. If not for Rose alleviating Francine's concerns, it might've worked out.
  Of course, what most of his aides didn’t know and thus couldn't tell Mrs. Jones was that all of those disasters took place over the course of 900 years of space travel. It seemed like a horribly long list if you thought the Doctor was only 35 or 40 at the oldest.
• Mind Rape: The Master tries to break Rose's telepathic barriers to get into her mind, but the strength of Rose's bond to the Doctor stops him dead in his tracks. The Master is frustrated by this little detail.^note It also ensures that he can't invade the Doctor's mind and find out about the Doctor's plans to integrate himself into the Archangel matrices
• My God, What Have I Done?: The Doctor when he realizes he paved the way for the Master to claim power when he forced Harriet Jones to step down as Prime Minister in the fallout of the Sycorax invasion.
  "I never asked you when exactly you arrived, after you pushed my TARDIS to give you extra time."
  "It was the week before Christmas, 2006. I watched the news coverage on the Sycorax ship, of course, and the downfall of Harriet Jones." He leaned back in his chair. "That was what gave me the idea to go into politics, and look at me now." He spread his hands out in front of him.
  The Doctor clenched his jaw. It had already occurred to him that the Master had stepped into the power vacuum he'd created when he'd removed Harriet Jones from office. Though he stood by his belief that the former Prime Minister had made the wrong choice in killing the fleeing Sycorax, there was no doubt that she would be preferable to her successor. At least Harriet Jones never showed signs of megalomania.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In "The Runaway Bride," we have a scene of the Doctor, Rose, Donna and Lance driving to HC Clements in Lance's SMART car. This was a scene that was cut from the aired episode for timing reasons, and featured David Tennant's parents, his sister-in-law and his two nieces as background extras.
  • The events of The Story of Martha, the tie-in novel about Martha's journey during the Year That Never Was, are incorporated into the Master storyline.
  • The events of The Last Dodo, where the Doctor and Martha liberate 3 million different species from a zoo planet, are what follow the scene in 2008 where Sally Sparrow gives them the information they'll need to get themselves out of 1969.
  • The tie-in novel The Pirate Loop is set up right before "Human Nature" when the Doctor, Rose and Martha discuss the missing starship Brilliant. The events of the novel happen in chapter 31, right after the "Human Nature" arc is resolved. It's immediately followed up by "Blink."
  • During one of their talks, the Doctor brings up the Master's time pretending to be a malicious eyesurgeon named "Dr. Harcourt De'ath", from the audio story "Time's Horizon" / "Times of the Master".
  • In chapter 22, when the Doctor, Rose, and Martha go ice-skating on the mineral lakes of Kur-ha, Rose dons the Fourth Doctor's signature scarf.
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: After the Toclafane invasion, the Master subjects the Doctor and Rose to a brunch that functions as this before sending them to their cells. During the following year, he often personally takes meals to either of their cells that more or less are also excuses for him to taunt them.
• Not His Sled: In chapter 5, Jack turns up at the Tyler flat with his "Doctor detector" as the Doctor and Rose are cleaning out Jackie's possessions. The Doctor is offended that Jack is carrying around his severed arm in a jar, and also concerned about the possibility of it falling into the wrong hands, so he takes it back from Jack and burns it in the TARDIS. The consequences of this are not seen until the Doctor confronts the Master on the Valiant. Without the severed arm, the Master has no means of accessing the Doctor's DNA to age him into an old man in a wheelchair, and instead subdues the Doctor by having his guards take Rose hostage. This also renders the Metacrisis incapable of happening in "Forever and Never Apart," the series 4 rewrite.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Lucy deliberately spills and breaks a glass of water when delivering the Doctor his lunch so she can bend down and pass a message to him about Rose being alive without the Master's cameras picking up on it.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In "The Lazarus Experiment," the Doctor and Rose have a brief one when trying to get into Lazarus's gala using the psychic paper to fake an invitation, only to be told by the greeter that they're already on the guest list as "personal guests of Mr. Saxon". Rose and the Doctor chalk it up to a time loop they'll figure out in the future, not knowing that Mr. Saxon is the Master or that he has anticipated that they'd come here, so he can try to turn Martha's mother against the Doctor.
  • In "Utopia," Rose has a bigger one than Martha when recognizing Professor Yana's fob watch. And another one when realizing she's left the TARDIS alone with Yana, right before he opens the watch and brings back the Master persona. (This was the TARDIS doing what it could to keep Rose from being taken captive by the Master)
  • Rose gets one when the Master is about to put the telepathic dampener on her to cut off her bond to the Doctor.
• Oh, Wait!: The Master, when monologuing to the Doctor about turning the human race of 100 trillion into the Toclafane.
  The Doctor: But even then, why come all this way just to destroy? [Lights flashed on the sphere]
  Toclafane: We come backwards in time, all to build a brand new empire lasting one hundred trillion years.
  The Master: With me as their Master. [The Master was trying to keep a straight face, but a smirk kept peeking out] Time Lord and humans combined. Haven’t you always dreamt of that, Doctor? [He chuckled] Oh, but of course you have—you don’t need to look any farther than your precious wife to see how much you loved the idea of Time Lords and humans mixing together. [The Doctor’s fingers twitched, but with his arms chained above his head like this, he couldn’t clench them into fists. He had to settle for pressing his lips into a thin line and glaring at the Master. The Master pushed his chair back and walked towards the Doctor] I think I prefer my way of blending with humanity.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • When Martha calls her parents after the Master sets off a bomb in her apartment, Francine tries to invite her, the Doctor and Rose over for tea since she and Clive are planning on reconciling. Martha immediately knows something is wrong because just a week ago (for them), they were fighting rather heatedly outside a crowded restaurant.
    Martha Jones: Mum, has there been anyone asking about me?
    [The hesitation wouldn’t have been noticeable to anyone who didn’t know Francine, but it was enough to make the hair on the back of Martha’s neck stand on end.]
    Francine Jones: Martha, I think perhaps you should come round. [Martha looked back at the Doctor, Rose, and Jack]
    Martha Jones: I can’t. Not now.
    Francine Jones: No, but it’s your father. We’ve been talking and we thought we might give it another go. [Martha blinked. There was no way that was true]
    Martha Jones: Don’t be so daft. Since when?
    Francine Jones: Just come around. Come to the house. We can celebrate. [Dread pooled in the pit of Martha’s stomach]
    Martha Jones: You’d never get back with him in a million years.
    Francine Jones: Ask him yourself.
    [Martha turned in a circle and clutched the phone nervously, not understanding what was going on. Less than a week ago, her parents had been yelling at each other outside of a restaurant, and now they claimed they were planning to reconcile. It wasn’t right]
    Clive Jones: Martha, it’s me.
    Martha Jones: Dad, what are you doing there? [Martha spun around to look at the Doctor, who walked towards her slowly]
    Clive Jones: Like your mother said. Come round. We can explain everything.
    [Martha’s mum could bluff her way through anything, but her father was a horrible liar]
    Martha Jones: Dad? Just say yes or no. Is there someone else there? [There was a long pause, then he shouted...]
    Clive Jones: Yes! Just run! [In the background, Martha could hear her mum say something about Tish, but her father shouted back] I’m not sacrificing one daughter to save the other! RUN, MARTHA! [There was a loud clattering noise, like the phone had hit the ground, and then sounds of a fight and her mother yelling over the top of it all]
    Martha Jones: Dad? What’s going on? Dad?! [Martha flipped her phone shut and jogged to her car] We’ve got to help them!
    The Doctor: That’s exactly what they want. It’s a trap!
  • The Doctor is normally a big pacifist. When the Master decides to torment him by "killing" Rose (as in, cutting off their telepathic bond), he is pissed enough that he attacks the Master and tries to strangle him with his bare hands, requiring a guard to come out and subdue him. And after the Master is defeated, when Francine draws a gun on the Master, and decides along with Clive and Tish that the Master should be executed, the Doctor can't help but partially agree with them. Martha's family may have had it easier, just having to be the Master's slaves, but the Doctor had to deal with the Master cutting off his telepathic bond with Rose and convincing him that he'd killed her for no other reason than to elicit a reaction out of him; whilst Rose was unfortunate enough to be a prisoner the Master could subject to various horrors just for that very purpose.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Master views Rose as one for his plans. His plan is to persuade Martha's family that the Doctor is a dangerous influence on Martha. But during Lazarus's experiment, Rose is able to allay some of Martha's parents' concerns by convincing Francine (via psychic paper) that she and the Doctor are investigators with UNIT (wanting to interview Martha over the experience at the hospital). Which greatly irritates him when he gets a call from his aide-de-camp Miss Dexter about the situation:
  The Master: Has Francine Jones agreed to bring Martha back to Earth before we introduce the Toclafane to the world? [He heard her hesitation, and stiffened] Dexter?
  Miss Dexter: We ran into an unexpected wrinkle in the plan tonight, sir. While Mrs. Jones is certainly unimpressed with the Doctor, it seems Rose Tyler managed to allay some of her concerns.
  [His eyes narrowed to slits. Of course. He hadn't written a contingency for Rose Tyler into his plan. Your interfering is causing me more problems than I expected, he thought darkly at the TARDIS, even though the ship couldn’t hear him from this distance.]
  The Master: What do you mean, exactly?
  Miss Dexter: Even when we told her about how the Doctor tends to recruit young women to join him in his dangerous lifestyle, Mrs. Jones only seemed concerned that Martha would find something to do besides medicine. The panic we expected was simply… non-existent.
  [The Master paced the length of his office, feeling his plans fall apart around him]
  The Master: But will she be persuaded to pressure her daughter into coming home for a visit?
  Miss Dexter: I’m currently not confident in the outcome of this mission, sir.
  [The Master’s hand tightened into a fist and he breathed shallowly through his nose]
  The Master: Well then, it seems like we need to find more leverage to convince her to do what we want.
  Miss Dexter: What did you have in mind, Master?
  The Master: I believe I will give young Letitia the day off tomorrow. After all, she went through quite the ordeal tonight at the gala. Assign an agent to her flat. If Mrs. Jones balks, bring Tish in and tell her mother that it would be in her family's best interests to do as we say.
• Out with a Bang: The Doctor and Rose decide to have one last screw in "The Sound of Drums" before they head up to the Valiant. And their last kiss before they are taken to their cells is close enough to shagging that the Master's guards have to forcibly pull them apart.
• Pet the Dog: Zig-zagged. The Master does send a nurse to tend to Rose's injuries after he has her beaten up on camera. She's both surprised that the Master is being so solicitous, but also disgusted at the nurse for being so coldly detached that he can look at her wounds without flinching and shows no hint of apologies for what the Master did to her.
• Play-Along Prisoner: Once Jack finds out there's a network of double agents from the Resistance on-board the Valiant, and one of them, Greg, becomes his primary guard, he begins treating his situation like this. Jack and the double-agent guards manage to create a system of passing messages throughout the ship, first to Martha's family, then eventually to the Doctor and Rose.
• Politically Correct History: When arriving in 1599 London for "The Shakespeare Code," Martha (backed up by Rose) has to point out that the Doctor's "walk about like you own the place" remark doesn't really fly on a black woman like her, especially coming from a privileged white person like the Doctor.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: For "Smith and Jones", it's Rose, and not the Doctor, who checks in as the patient for their infiltration of the Royal Hope Hospital, so as to avoid getting a lot of questions from anyone trying to do a medical checkup on the Doctor. The Doctor is still the one who does the demonstration of his time travel abilities to Martha.
• Rapid Aging: Averted. Due to the Doctor burning his severed hand, the Master has no means of accessing his biological code and using that to age him into a shrivelled old man. As a result, the Master makes do by taking Rose hostage.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The Doctor has one lined up for the Master after he's defeated.
  The Master: You can't do this. You can't do it. It's not fair!
  The Doctor: "Fair?” When have you ever cared about fairness? Specifically, what in the last two and a half years did you do because it was "fair"? [The energy around him carried him towards the Master, dropping him down gently on the other side of the flight deck, where the Master cowered against the bulkhead] Was it fair to delete the flight plan from the rocket bound to Utopia and then use those poor people’s broken minds for your own twisted purpose? Or to brainwash the people of Great Britain into voting for you for Prime Minister, only to enslave them, along with the rest of humanity? [The Doctor’s voice was getting louder with every word. Rose stepped around Martha to stand beside him and put a hand on his shoulder, hoping to calm him. It was hard, without the bond, but finally, she felt him take a deep breath. His calm was an illusion, though. A moment later, he crouched down and spat the next sentence out in the Master’s face] Was it fair to make me think you’d killed my wife, to make us both suffer the pain of a broken marriage bond?
  • He continues it after the Paradox Machine is broken, when the defeated Master is being handcuffed:
    The Master: You still haven’t answered the question. What happens to me?
    The Doctor: I’m sure UNIT has a nice cell someplace where they can keep you, until your regenerations run out. Their headquarters are located in the Tower of London, after all.
    The Master: You’re just going to… lock me up?
    The Doctor: What did you expect, Master? An open hand and a welcome onto my ship, when you killed my wife?! [exhales] I won’t let you die when you’re the only other Gallifreyan in existence, but that doesn’t mean I have to let you be part of our life.
• Red Herring: "The Lazarus Experiment" becomes one, since in the show, the Master funded Lazarus's experiment because it's what let him turn his usual laser screwdriver into an instant-aging weapon. In this fic, since the Doctor got his severed hand back from Jack and burned it long before the Master stole the TARDIS, the Master doesn't have access to the Doctor's genetic code. The Master is not put off by the deviation, as the gala still gives him a means to try to turn Francine against the Doctor and Rose.
• Ret-Gone: Despite having seen Rose at the end of the universe, the Master still tried to trap her in Pete's World and cause a paradox to taunt the Doctor.
  The Doctor: You nearly destroyed two universes.
  The Master: But I knew it would be fine, because I’d already seen you at the end of the universe.
  The Doctor: You saw Rose, too, and yet you tried to trap her in the parallel world. You were willing to create a paradox, just to ruin my life.
  The Master: Oh, but Doctor, don’t you know? Your tragic separation from Rose Tyler was the prime timeline. I could feel events pulling in that direction from the moment I arrived in 2006. [he shook his head] Then something happened in the first few months of 2007, and timelines began to change around you. All I did was attempt to pull things back to the original course of events.
  [The Doctor stilled. He hadn’t known, but if the timeframe the Master gave was accurate, he could guess what had changed their future. The TARDIS had saved Rose, but she’d only been able to do so because of her bond with Rose. If he hadn’t woken up Rose’s telepathy...]
  The Doctor: You still tried to change events you knew had happened. [For a moment, the Master’s smug grin slipped]
  The Master: Yes, and your ship interfered. Time would have compensated for Rose Tyler’s loss in this universe.
  [The Doctor knew the Master was right. Hadn’t they seen echoes of that timeline more than once in the year after Canary Wharf? He swallowed hard and adjusted his tie as he looked for a new topic of conversation. The thought that time would have marched on, uncaring of the fact that he’d lost Rose, made him nervous]
• Running Gag: The Doctor enters a period where he regularly gets chided by his companions for being a terrible TARDIS pilot compared to Rose, to which he's always indignant. Martha gets to do it here, and it extends to Donna and Jenny in Forever and Never Apart.
• Secret-Keeper:
  • During Martha's expedition in the Year That Never Was, Brigadier Erik Calvin from UNIT is one of only a few people she discloses the Doctor's real plans for defeating the Master, the Doctor having been close with Calvin's father back in the 70s (or was it the 80s?). Everyone else just assumes the false assumption Martha is looking for a mythical anti-regeneration gun.
  • After "killing" Rose, the only person the Master trusts with the truth that Rose is actually still alive is Lucy. This is out of necessity because the Master needs to make sure the rumors of Rose's "death" can't be disproven. He can't have people asking questions about things like where Lucy is taking plates of food thrice daily. If people know the food is for Rose, that there are guards visiting Rose regularly, etc, then when those behaviors still continued even after Rose was "dead", it would be hard to explain them away. But if people have already forgotten about Rose, the Master can continue taking care of her just as he had before and no one will make the connection. It also ends up backfiring on the Master since Lucy's loyalty eventually wears off and she offers to pass messages from Rose to the Doctor, worried about the Doctor's wellbeing.
• Secretly Wealthy: When clearing out Jackie's flat, Rose raises an eye to learn about the Doctor's undisclosed funds.
  Rose Tyler: Where are you going to come up with six months’ rent?
  The Doctor: [He shuffled his feet on the carpet] Remember how I said I used to work for UNIT? [It took Rose a minute, since their encounter with the Slitheen had been over three years ago, but she found the memory and nodded] Well, my salary went into a bank account that I never really touched.
  Rose Tyler: Are you saying you’re rich, but you’ve been making me pay for chips all this time?
  The Doctor: It’s not like I carry a bank card or anything! [she loved the high pitched squeak in his voice] I mean, I can use the sonic for the same thing…
• Sequel Hook: We see one setting up for the missing planets arc of series 4.
• Shipper on Deck: Since Rose is taken, Jack does his best to show his approval for her marriage to the Doctor, understanding their need for one last round of lovemaking before going to the Valiant. He's equally heartbroken when the Master forces the Doctor to reveal Rose's "death" to him.
• Sick Episode: Rose spends a few days during the 1969 period of "Blink" partially laid up with a terrible bout of flu.
• Skewed Priorities: While the Doctor, Rose, Martha and Jack are laying low in "The Sound of Drums" after being branded terrorists by the Master, Martha is irked that the Doctor, Rose and Jack aren't too concerned about the fact that the Master is holding her family captive. The entire world is at stake, and she is expecting everyone to focus on her family. Of course, it's justified in her case; since Martha's family is being used as leverage by the Master, she is primarily focused on the people she knows, while the Doctor, Rose and Jack are focused on the more global problem of the Master controlling the planet. They also care about Martha's family, but know that the only way they're going to be saved is by stopping the Master.
• Spared by the Adaptation: The addition of Rose does vastly alter the events of "42". With just the Doctor and Martha, only Riley and Scannell survive the episode. By adding Rose and allowing her to fly the TARDIS, there are fewer fatalities.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • The Master being sent back from 100 trillion is a fixed point. In order to prevent a paradox from happening after "42", the TARDIS implants on the Doctor, Martha and Rose a suggestion to brush aside any suspicions they have about Harold Saxon, to ensure that the Master can steal her in the year 100 trillion, regenerate into his Harold Saxon form, and bring her back to the 21st century to be used as the paradox machine.
    "Five hundred yards behind them, the TARDIS hummed in relief as the timelines stabilised. She should have known Harold Saxon would tickle her Wolf’s curiosity, but investigating him now would cause a paradox even she couldn’t contain.
    Before they could face the Master, they had to travel to the end of the universe and wake him up. She would have to be stolen—a ripple of the future discomfort ran through her—and only then could her Wolf and her Thief follow and set things right.
    Feeling only the tiniest hint of guilt, the TARDIS touched their minds and carefully implanted the subtle suggestion to brush aside any further questions of Harold Saxon’s identity. As much as she would want them to rescue her—had wanted them to rescue her—this was the way things had to happen."
  • Discussed during "Blink" when the Doctor, Martha, and Rose are discussing what needs to happen so that Sally Sparrow will have the information she gave to them.
    Rose Tyler: So let me see if I’ve got this: after we take care of writing the warning for Sally Sparrow and wallpapering over it, we need to build a video recording system. That way, when the angel sends Billy Shipton back, he can tape our half of the conversation with Sally. Then sometime in the future, he’s going to become… what, a video producer or something? And that recording will be added as an Easter egg to the seventeen DVDs on this list.
    The Doctor: And I’ll program an autopilot routine into the formatting of the video. Once the causality loop is complete and Sally and Larry take the DVD into the TARDIS, she’ll bring herself to us.
  • Martha's not happy about how she's locked down to working in a shop because the transcript says she will complain about having to work in a shop while waiting for the TARDIS to come back. She attempts to protest, only for the Doctor to point out that deviating from the script would break a causality loop and cause a paradox:
    Martha Jones: That transcript said I’d be working in a shop. Couldn’t I do something else, like secretarial work? My typing is pretty decent, though I don’t know shorthand.
    The Doctor: The transcript locks us into a causality loop. Sally Sparrow wrote down that you’re working in a shop because you said you worked in a shop.
    Martha Jones: I guess it’s better than maid work.
    Rose Tyler: [trying to step up] I could always be the one paying our way.
    Martha Jones: [shakes her head] Then what would I do? Sit around the flat with the Doctor all day while he tries to build a video camera out of dental floss and chewing gum? He’d drive me mad. [sips her beer] Besides, I bet it would cause just as much of a timey-wimey problem if you worked instead of me as it would if I did something besides working in a shop.
    The Doctor: I truly am sorry, Martha, but you’re not the only one who’s constrained by what the transcript says. Do you think I wouldn’t rather call up some old friends of mine and see if I couldn’t track myself down and get us a ride home? I’d love to, but the transcript says I build a video recorder and autocue, so that’s what I get to do. [shrugs] The way time worked, I probably wouldn’t have any luck if I did try to get us a ride, and then I’d be right back where I started, making an autocue.
  • After they get the TARDIS back, they decide to visit Sally and Larry, and take them to 1935 so they can get one last visit with Kathy for closure.^note Kathy had been sent back by a Weeping Angel to 1920, settled down with the first man she crossed paths with, Ben, and then had children and grandchildren, sending one of her grandsons to deliver a letter to Sally at the exact moment that she got sent back They have to go to 1935 because all her children will have been born by then, and emphasize that Kathy cannot mention this in the letters she will have her grandson deliver to Sally at Wester Drumlins, since she never mentions the visit at all in said letters.
  • When they realize the Angels are there in Wester Drumlins, the Doctor tells Martha and Rose to both grab hands with him, which ensures that they all get sent back to the same location instead of landing in different years, as part of the loop.
  • In the outtakes (a companion fic with missing scenes), we see how team TARDIS ended up at Wester Drumlins to be sent back to 1969. Noticing that the date is 2007 and this is pre-Battle of Canary Wharf, Rose opts to call her mother, and the Doctor has to tell her on what she can and cannot say so as to prevent a paradox:
    The Doctor: The TARDIS will make sure the call connects after we helped your mum with Elton, but before we came to visit for the last time. So you can tell her about our date, or about going to the Olympics, or even about seeing Elton again—but nothing else. Oh, and make sure you don’t mention the bond, since she didn’t know we were engaged until you told her at Torchwood.
  • There's a second time loop that starts in "Blink". Rose gets sick with a fever, right around the time of her first anniversary with the Doctor. The Doctor realizes that being cut off from the TARDIS might be why Rose is sick. As luck would have it, the next day, future versions of the Doctor and Rose bring the TARDIS back to 1969 just for that purpose (as will be seen in "Taking Time"), but this Doctor and this Rose can't meet them to avoid a paradox.
• Tempting Fate:
  • The Doctor and Rose make several prophetic remarks about never being split up that just reek of foreshadowing the Master's plans for once they're on the Valiant.
  • During "Human Nature", when Jenny and Martha are cleaning after getting talked down to by Jeremy Baines and Hutchinson:
    Martha Jones: [muttering to herself] That’s very funny, sir...
    Jenny: Careful, now. Don’t answer back.
    [Martha held her tongue when they were in earshot, because letting her temper fly wasn’t worth the backlash she’d get. But as soon as they couldn’t hear her…]
    Martha Jones: I’d answer back with my bucket over his head!
    Jenny: [laughs] Oh, I wish. Just think, though, in a few years time, boys like that’ll be running the country.
    [Martha sat back on her heels. She tried to forget the year, tried not to think about what was coming for these boys, but sometimes she couldn’t]
    Martha Jones: 1913. They might not.
• Trauma Conga Line: Francine Jones doesn't catch a break. Her younger daughter's workplace is abducted to the Moon by the Judoon. Then the next day, at Lazarus's gala, the Master's aides try to make her suspicious of the Doctor and Rose, only for Rose to put her at ease with a handy cover story. So the Master has Tish abducted to force her to betray Martha's friends, something she reluctantly pretends to agree to. When she and Clive refuse to go along with that and warn Martha that they're being blackmailed, the Master has them arrested and then has them and Tish forced into serving as his slaves for a year on the Valiant.
• Trust Password: While imprisoned on the Valiant, Jack finds out there are nine guards on the ship who are members of the Resistance. The one who first makes contact with him, Greg, uses an old World War II code that Jack recognizes to establish who he is. Jack convinces Greg and the others to help him relay messages to Rose and to the Doctor. After some time, Greg agrees to pass a cryptic message on to Rose, taking an iPod to her room/cell and playing "Moonlight Serenade", and describing the events of how Rose first met Jack in "The Empty Child" as a sign of trust.
  Greg: You know what this song makes me think of? Dancing with a pretty girl in the middle of an air raid, not caring if the bombs fall all around us.
  [Rose took a bite and chewed slowly as she considered what he’d just said. That was almost point by point a description of how she’d met Jack]
  Rose Tyler: [testing] Yeah, but you’d want to be near some kind of monument, wouldn’t you? Just to sorta… set the mood?
  Greg: [nods] Big Ben. Can you picture it? World War II, the bombs are falling, and I’ve just rescued a pretty girl. Now I need to get her to dance with me.
  Rose Tyler: [snorts] That sounds like Captain Jack. Always a smooth one with the ladies—drives the Doctor spare. [She kept her tone mocking, but tapped her finger on the table to indicate she’d understood the message. Jack had sent Greg, which meant he could be trusted. Greg smirked, and Rose reminded herself that he had to appear to be a normal guard.
  Greg: I can understand that. [winks] If I had a gorgeous wife like you, I wouldn’t want other men chatting her up either. [leans in; serious tone] I bet he likes the fact that hardly anyone on the Valiant has ever seen you. The Master brings the Doctor to the flight deck occasionally, and Jack… well, everyone knows Jack. But you, Rose Tyler—you’re a ghost. Some people who weren’t on board at the beginning swear you don’t even exist.[His voice was mocking, but Rose saw the warning in his eyes and a chill went down her spine. She’d wondered, off and on, if any of the other prisoners got to leave their cells. Here was her answer]''
• Undercover as Lovers: For "Human Nature" / "The Family of Blood", the TARDIS ensures that the Doctor and Rose will still be together and married for their time passing as human while they hide out in 1913.
• Unperson: Before he puts the telepathic cloaking collar on Rose to convince the Doctor that she's been killed, the Master does everything he can to basically ensure people forget about Rose so that no one gets suspicious.
  • The Master actually goes to lengths to essentially completely edit Rose out of the Doctor's life, to the point that the only people who even remember Rose even exists are the Underground and the Resistance movements. Martha is understandably furious about this, as she makes clear when she and Tom Milligan are headed to see Professor Docherty.
• We Need a Distraction: The morning after helping Rose say goodbye to her mother, the Doctor believes that Rose needs another adventure or two to lighten her spirits. He silently asks the TARDIS to help him out. A moment later, cue Donna being drawn into the TARDIS by the huon particles in her.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Jack displays a certain degree of bitterness towards the Doctor and Rose for abandoning him on the Game Station.

Tropes in "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year"

• Action Dress Rip: Rose has to tear portions of her dress throughout the process of helping the Doctor save the Titanic.
• Changed My Jumper: The Doctor takes his Tuxedo of Doom like in the original story, while Rose sports a gorgeous Edwardian era gown.
• Continuity Nod: Rose mentions the photographs Clive Finch showed her of the Ninth Doctor on the original Titanic.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Max Capricorn still dies in the same way that he does in the canon story, but it's Rose who kills him instead of Astrid.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Seeing as this story covers solely "Time Crash" and "Voyage of the Damned", which took place in the span of a day.
• Forgotten First Meeting: Being bonded to the Doctor means Rose is bonded to all of his past and future regenerations, as evidenced by when the Fifth Doctor appears and recognizes her during "Time Crash". But since she didn't start traveling with him until he was the Ninth Doctor, and didn't fully bond with her until he was the Tenth Doctor, earlier regenerations must promptly hide their memories of Rose lest they cause a paradox:
  Rose Tyler: Right…but you didn’t say that if we met younger versions of you, they’d recognise me.
  The Doctor: Well, first off, I think we need to assume that this was not the first time I had met us, even though it was the first time we’ve met me.
  Rose Tyler: Yeah, I picked up on that, too. But he said at the end that he forgets, and yet he knew me right away.
  The Doctor: Marriage bonds are… trans-temporal. Any time I meet you once we have a bond, I will feel your side of the bond call to me.
  Rose Tyler: Then how come you didn’t recognise me in Henrik’s? [The lines on her forehead cleared before he could answer] Oh! You didn’t know me when I met you the first time, because I hadn’t bonded with you yet.
  The Doctor: Right! Of course, every time I meet you before I met you… [The Doctor let that sentence trail off, snorting at the absolute ridiculousness of it] Anyway, if I meet you as my bond mate before I meet you properly in my ninth incarnation, I have to hide the memories so I don’t ruin my own timeline.
• Freudian Slip: When Rose is ripping into Rickston Slade for expressing delight in profiting off the Titanic disaster, she begins to have a panic attack and calls him "Harry", Rickston's behavior having reminded her too much of the trauma she endured at the hands of the Master, a trauma she's only freshly been removed from.
  Rose Tyler: I'll tell you what I think, Harry, I think you’re a self-centred, egotistical bastard who needs to learn that other people matter just as much as you do. People died today, and all you can think about is your bank account. What kind of cold, heartless… [She growled incoherently, gesturing in the air. Rickston narrowed his eyes, and Rose welcomed his attack. She wouldn’t hold back]
  Rickston Slade: Who's Harry?
  Rose Tyler: What? [Rose’s knees locked and she swayed dangerously]
• Get a Room!: The Doctor is so stunned by the Edwardian-era dress that Rose picks out that he can't resist the urge to make out passionately with her. Which earns them a scolding from one of the stewards.
  Steward: I beg your pardon, sir, but if you're going to engage in behaviour like that, I'll have to ask you to return to your stateroom.
  [For a few seconds, the Doctor contemplated doing exactly that. They might not have a stateroom, but their bedroom was close enough to count, right? But then he heard Rose's muffled snort and knew from her laughter that the moment was gone. And while he was fairly confident he could bring it back, he wanted to give her the party she'd been looking forward to]
  The Doctor: Quite right. Sorry about that. I just got… a little carried away when I saw how beautiful my wife looks tonight.
  Steward: She is lovely, but all the same, I must ask you to maintain the decorum that would have been expected on the original Titanics maiden voyage. A chaste kiss is acceptable; kisses that seem to be a prelude to indecent acts are not.
  [The Doctor nodded sharply, then spun around and walked off—and good thing, too, because Rose couldn’t restrain her laughter any longer]
  Rose Tyler:' "Indecent acts!" That was worse than the hayride driver on our honeymoon, with his "no canoodling" rule. I haven't been hand-checked on a dance floor since I was fifteen.
• Lampshade Hanging: The Doctor and Rose can't help but make a few of these insofar as searching for the mysterious culprit, from Max Capricorn's Twinkle Smile signaling he's a bad guy, to the Doctor considering his tuxedo to be a sign of bad luck.
• Mythology Gag: During the post-"Time Crash" exchange, when the Doctor's explaining how Rose's bond retroactively has bonded her to every regeneration of himself past and future, Rose comments on the Doctor's apparent jealousy towards his past self, and the Doctor replies, "So you’re saying that if we went back to, say, early 2005, and I met you before I met you, you wouldn’t be jealous of your younger self?” ...which is exactly what happened in the canon timeline as he had one last goodbye to Rose in "The End of Time" before he regenerated into the Eleventh.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Being launched into this story merely a few weeks after having spent a year as the Master's prisoners aboard the Valiant, the Doctor and Rose both are still dealing with the trauma of what happened. When Morvin dies, Foon's reaction to his death causes the Doctor to have flashbacks as he's reminded of what it felt like when the Master cut off his and Rose's telepathic bond. Likewise, Rickston Slade's general attitude reminds Rose of the Master enough to cause her to have panic attacks. After the adventure, they come to the conclusion that they've developed post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the Master's actions and they should take some time off before they go on any more adventures. This was all by design of Dalek Caan after what he saw during his emergency temporal shift.
• Shout-Out: When asking the Hosts questions to get them to take her and the Doctor to their leader, Rose trolls the Host by asking as her third question, "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?" The Host answers, "Information. That question is outside my programming."
• Spared by the Adaptation: Astrid ends up surviving the Titanic voyage, as the Doctor has her stay with Mr. Copper and Rickston Slade, and Rose takes Astrid's place as the one to drive the forklift to push Max Capricorn to his death.
• Stable Time Loop: Rose forming a bond with the Tenth Doctor bonds her to every regeneration of the Doctor pre-Ten and post-Ten. After "Time Crash", Rose wonders why the Ninth Doctor didn't recognize her in Henrik's if he'd already run into her as the Fifth Doctor. The Doctor's explanation for that is that "if I meet you as my bond mate before I meet you properly in my ninth incarnation, I have to hide the memories so I don’t ruin my own timeline." Plus, anyone who's seen "The Day of the Doctor" knows that when two regenerations of the Doctor run into one another, the earlier version is unable to retain the memories of interacting with their future self.
• Tempting Fate: "Rose. It's a ship named Titanic. The chances that some kind of disaster will befall it are frankly astronomical."

Tropes in "Taking Time"

• Both Sides Have a Point: The Doctor and Rose's argument on Pluvon, when Rose nearly gets killed rescuing a young girl from a flooded river. The Doctor points out that Pluvon, as a planet prone to flooding, has emergency workers trained in the specific kind of search and rescue necessary during a flood disaster, and this is training Rose doesn't have.^note In many real world floods, there are stories of police arresting or threatening to arrest people trying to mount rescues of people trapped in flooded cars. The reason for doing so is that the people in question generally have no rescue training, and risk becoming victims themselves if they enter the water Likewise, there's some validity to Rose's argument that people were in danger and if she didn't act, the girl would have drowned by the time rescuers got there.
• Stable Time Loop: On Esperas, Rose ends up encountering the First Doctor and it functions the same way the time loop in "Time Crash" works.
• What the Hell, Hero?: The Doctor chews out Rose for nearly getting killed trying to play hero on Pluvon.

Tropes in "Forever and Never Apart"

• Actor Allusion: In chapter 22, when the Doctor and Rose are discussing the idea of having kids of their own, the Doctor mentions that "Jenny looks like my fifth incarnation."
• Adaptational Badass:
  • More emphasis is put on Donna's self-esteem and confidence during the story and she's not as much of a doormat as she is in the show.
  • The Doctor is more resistant to telepathic attacks during "Midnight".
  • Mickey ends up getting Rose's original "Stolen Earth" story arc.
• Adaptation Expansion: In "Partners in Crime," there's an additional line about how the Adipose Industries building has windows designed to withstand explosions, as an explanation for why breaking the windows is impossible. Also, the Doctor gets to explain to Donna why the Adipose were allowed to live when he let the Racnoss babies drown (the juvenile Racnoss are still very deadly, whilst the Adipose babies' only crime was being the product of illegal seeding).
• Adaptation Name Change: Because in this timeline, Melody Pond was never abducted at birth from Amy and Rory, she never takes up the name River Song, instead continuing to use her birth name.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Melody Pond. She never becomes the Doctor's wife since the Doctor is married to Rose. The one thing she has in common with River besides being Amy and Rory's daughter is deciding to become an archaeologist.
• Adaptational Job Change: Melody Pond is not as old as River Song was in the original "Silence in the Library" two-parter. Consequently, she's depicted as having only just gotten her doctorate in archaeology by the time of this expedition, and is just "Dr. Melody Pond," and not a Professor.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • In "The Sontaran Strategem," Rose reminds the Doctor to play nice with the UNIT commanders. The Doctor takes this into consideration, and is way less antagonistic towards Colonel Mace. As a result, Colonel Mace actually listens to the Doctor's warnings about the Sontarans being battle-thirsty warriors. He doesn't order the initial botched attempt to challenge the Sontarans head-on in the ATMOS factory, instead going for the Doctor's proposed plan of setting mines around the factory to contain them.
  • Melody Pond is definitely a bit more mellow and nicer than River Song, seeing as she never was abducted by the Silence, and will never become the Doctor's wife. She actually feels bad about accidentally giving the Doctor and Rose spoilers about their futures, though on the flip side, said spoilers turn out to be a good thing for Rose as they concern the fact that her mother and Mickey will be coming back from Pete's World.
• Adaptational Personality Change: Since the Doctor hasn't had two years of constantly losing everyone he cares about, instead getting three years of constant love and support, by the end of "Journey's End," he's in no position to go all Time Lord Victorious.
• Adaptational Wimp: The Doctor to a degree. And for justified reasons. In the original series 4, where it's just the Doctor and Donna, the Doctor is bit more reckless, a bit less concerned with his own safety, so he is willing to take more risks. As this Doctor is a family man with a wife (Rose) and a daughter (Jenny), oftentimes he can get more stressed out and be less inclined to take risks.
• Adapted Out:
  • River Song's romance with the Doctor is cut since the Doctor is married to Rose. In addition, Melody Pond isn't meeting the Doctor and Rose out of order, so in "Silence in the Library" / "Forest of the Dead," she has no journal, and she has to use a Trust Password to prove she knows them: "Bad Wolf".
    • Also, Melody growing up with Amy and Rory means that she was never kidnapped by the Silence.^note Probably for the best, seeing as the Silence morphed from one season to the next to match whatever Steven Moffat wanted it to be depending on plot purposes
  • There is no Metacrisis Doctor or DoctorDonna due to earlier rewrites.
• Alternate Timeline:
  • It's more apparent here than ever that having extra companions on the TARDIS means that each episode is going to play out significantly differently than in canon. Some are just fix-its like in "The Unicorn and the Wasp", and some are larger changes that exist because the people and the situation are so totally different that the original story no longer fits, such as "Journey's End".
  • Rose's presence has now firmly changed the Doctor significantly compared to how the season goes in canon, because instead of over two years of grief and loss, he's had three years of happiness and with that, has developed healthier coping strategies. So there are many things that the Doctor won't do, no matter how intrinsic they are to the canon stories.
    With Rose being his partner of six years now, there are two people on the TARDIS who are versed in this lifestyle. Having a second person who knows what they're doing also makes a big difference in several places.
  • In "The Fires of Pompeii," the changes are subtle, but Donna is brought on-board much sooner with the concept of fixed points once Rose explains what happened when she tried to prevent her father's death.
  • In "Planet of the Ood," Rose gets to explain to Donna what she got to see of how the Ood were treated on Krop Tor. She also gets to be the one to shut down the barriers preventing the Ood Brain from telepathically linking every Ood together.
  • In "The Sontaran Strategem," Rose reminds the Doctor to not antagonize the UNIT brass or Martha at any point during the mission. As a result, Colonel Mace heeds the Doctor's warnings about it being suicidal to take on the Sontarans, they come up with an alternate strategy to prevent the Sontarans from being able to use the ATMOS factory to start their invasion, by setting mines around the perimeter. This ends up saving the lives of Ross Jenkins and a bunch of other UNIT soldiers. Later, at the end of the two-parter, the Doctor sets his converter bomb on a timer rather than have it be something where there needs to be someone there to personally press the button, meaning Luke Rattigan lives as well.
  • During "The Doctor's Daughter," Rose encourages the Doctor to ease off on Jenny and actually come to look at her as his daughter despite the unusual birth. As a result, when Jenny is shot by General Cobb and "dies" upon them finding the Source, the group ends up staying around enough to see Jenny wake up, and the Doctor, Rose, and Donna make the decision to welcome her into the TARDIS.
  • The Doctor, Rose and Donna bringing Jenny along after "The Doctor's Daughter" forces even more changes for the second half of the season, because there are so many things she's never done or seen before. She's both a young adult but also very very young in some ways. And having a child makes the Doctor much less reckless.
  • In "The Unicorn and the Wasp," the addition of Jenny and Rose to the mix means that Roger Curbishley's death is averted.
  • For "Silence in the Library" / "Forest of the Dead", Melody Pond is still Amy and Rory's daughter, but she's never abducted by Madame Kovarian and thus grows up with her birth name.
  • In "Midnight," the telepathic bond between Rose and the Doctor ensures that the entity has a harder time taking control of the Doctor, and also enables him to control himself to prevent the passengers mutinying against him.
  • "Turn Left" is altered very drastically. The premise of the original story (where Rose was trapped in Pete's World) was that if Donna hadn't met the Doctor, he would have died along with the Racnoss. But "The Runaway Bride" went so differently in the Timelessness canon because Rose was there. So the Doctor wasn't crazed with grief and a need to kill something—such that even if they hadn't met Donna, he would have been just fine. As a result, Rose has to take Donna's place, and the seeds for this have been laid way back in To Make Much of Time, where the Doctor admitted he hadn't planned to survive blowing up Henrik's, until he met her. The Time Beetle itself doesn't work on Rose either, since unlike Donna, Rose is part-Time Lady. So instead, the events of the alternate timeline are depicted through a bad dream Rose has afterwards about Jackie being killed by the Autons, which is also how Mickey gets in touch with her to warn her about the stars going out.
  • "The Stolen Earth" / "Journey's End" ends up being fundamentally different because there is no Metacrisis, simply because the plot elements that combined to create it are gone.
    • The inciting incident for the Metacrisis was that the Doctor was shot by a Dalek while running to reunite with Rose. That obviously doesn't happen here since the Doctor wasn't separated from Rose.
    • Furthermore, when Jack bumped into the Doctor and Rose early in Time is Still a Flying, he handed over his Doctor Detector (the Doctor's severed arm)… and the Doctor burned it, instead of just keeping a part of his body floating around in a jar for months on end.^note Which, in the interim, had ramifications for the storyline with the Master, as without access to the Doctor's biological code, the Master had to rely on alternative means to torment him As a result, "Journey's End" is entirely a Bad Wolf!Rose story. The Metacrisis Doctor's part is taken over primarily by Jenny and Bad Wolf!Rose.
    • This also means the DoctorDonna doesn't exist either, whilst "Turn Left" is no longer about Donna because Donna didn't save a suicidal Doctor in "The Runaway Bride".^note Even if she'd made the right turn to go to Jival Chowdry's photocopy business instead of HC Clements, the Doctor and Rose, plus whoever would've replaced Donna as Lance's bride, would've been able to handle the Racnoss all on their own Every reference to there being something on Donna's back and the Ood calling them the DoctorDonna gets replaced with equivalent moments hinting at Bad Wolf. All of this means that Donna gets to keep her memories and her newfound confidence in herself, and after "Journey's End" becomes a recurring TARDIS traveler.
    • A number of other characters have their roles moved around. Since Rose is with the Doctor, Donna, and Jenny in the TARDIS in this story, her original role as the dimension hopping traveler is taken over by Mickey. Mickey's motivations are much different from Rose's in that he just wants to save the universe, whereas she had been trying to find a way back to the main universe to reunite with the Doctor even before the stars began going out. Meanwhile, Pete takes over Mickey's role in the original story as the person who accompanies Jackie when she crosses back to the main universe.
    • The running reunion where the Metacrisis originally was created still exists, but it's Rose reuniting with Mickey. Jack also manages to shoot the Dalek long before it can hurt anyone. Without the distraction of the Metacrisis, Mickey and Jack are able to catch up with the Doctor and Rose, get introduced to their new mates, and be stunned to learn about Jenny being the Doctor's daughter.
• Ascended Extra: Instead of jetting off at the end of "The Doctor's Daughter," Jenny joins the TARDIS crew, alongside the Doctor, Rose, and Donna. Donna also stays with the TARDIS team after series 4 to become an honorary aunt to both Jenny and to Melody.
• Bait-and-Switch: In "The Fires of Pompeii," Lucius Petrus Dextrus's prophetic warnings about how "he is coming back" put the Doctor on edge, as he thinks Lucius is referring to the Master. In the end, Lucius's words have a double meaning. For Rose, he's referring to Mickey; and for the Doctor, he's referring to Davros.
• Battle Couple: Jackie and Pete during "The Stolen Earth" / "Journey's End"
• Brick Joke:
  • In "Partners in Crime," as the Doctor, Rose and Donna enter the secret closet in Adipose Industries where the inducer controls are located, Donna notices the green lighting and remembers something Rose said about similar green lighting in the Racnoss lair.
    Donna Noble: Oh, this looks familiar. I know what you meant now, Rose. Mood lighting.
    Rose Tyler: [grins] I think it's part of the Secret Lair DIY kit.
  • In similar fashion, when the Doctor is making his entrance into Adipose Industries through the fire exit, the utility corridors remind him very much of the ones underneath H.C. Clements.
  • Upon being introduced to Jenny in "Journey's End", Mickey asks Rose and the Doctor to promise that they'll let him watch Jackie's reaction to learning she's a grandmother. When Jack's party (comprised of himself, Jackie, Pete and Sarah Jane) are bluffing Davros, Jenny notices Jackie, the Doctor explains who she is...and Jackie lets out a little shriek on the open mic. To the side, Mickey chortles to himself.
  • At the end of "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year," the Doctor and Rose called Jack with a favor to request that he help get Mr. Copper settled in on Earth. During the Subwave network chat in "The Stolen Earth," when Harriet Jones mentions that Mr. Copper funded the project, Jack recognizes the name and says "Mr. Copper, huh? I’ll have to tell the Doctor that he kept his word."
• Bury Your Gays: Averted in "The Unicorn and the Wasp," as Roger Curbishly survives the Vespiform's attempt to kill him because Rose gets him out of the way in time.
• The Bus Came Back: Pete Tyler returns as a participant in the events of "The Stolen Earth" / "Journey's End", accompanying Jackie back to the main universe and taking Mickey's original role.
• Changed My Jumper: During "The Fires of Pompeii," Metella offers stolas for Rose and Donna to change into (gold for Rose, purple for Donna) with pallas to drape over their hair so they will be "properly attired". It takes a moment for Donna to remember from what she's seen on period dramas that Metella is really saying to them that they look like prostitutes (the only women not expected in Roman society to wear stolas).
  Donna Noble: That… that git. [Rose burst into a fit of giggles] "Like Soho," he said! Not one word about how people would think we were prossies.
  Rose Tyler: So, like Soho twenty years ago.
• Color-Coded Characters:
  • In "The Fires of Pompeii", when Donna and Rose get new stollas from Caecilius's wife, Rose wears a yellow stolla, complementing Donna's purple one.
  • For "The Unicorn and the Wasp", the women don three different colors. Rose sports a lilac colored dress (later swapped for a crimson flapper evening gown with matching hairband for dinner), Donna wears the copper flapper dress she wears in the actual episode, and Jenny a robin's-egg-blue dress.
• Composite Character: Mickey takes over the role that Rose originally held in the canon series 4 when it came to dimension hopping. This is first established in "Partners in Crime" where we see the scene where Donna originally tapped Rose on the shoulder telling her which bin she threw the keys to her mother's car in, only here, it's with Mickey. Likewise, Pete now fills Mickey's original role as Jackie's backup in "Journey's End".
• Continuity Nod:
  • In "Partners in Crime," Rose's gymnast skills once again come in handy to rescue Donna, just like in "The Runaway Bride". In this case, it's to rescue her when Miss Foster is trying to drop the window washer bucket.
  • When infiltrating Adipose Industries, Rose uses the name "Rose Lewis," borrowing the name the Doctor gave her in "Fear Her" when they were using the psychic paper to claim they were police officers.
  • Leading into "The Fires of Pompeii," when Donna declares she wants to go to Ancient Rome, Rose and the Doctor comment about the events of The Stone Rose.
    The Doctor: Hopefully this trip will be a little less… eventful than that one.
    Donna Noble: Why? What happened the last time you went to Rome?
    The Doctor: Oh, nothing much. You know… found a GENIE, got turned into statues, that sort of thing.
    Donna Noble: You were turned into statues?
    The Doctor: We got better!
  • Also during "The Fires of Pompeii," Rose is able to back up the Doctor's arguments about why Pompeii is a fixed point by bringing up her father's death and the consequences of thwarting the hit-and-run that was meant to kill him.
  • In "The Impossible Planet" / "The Satan Pit", Rose wasn't impressed with how the Krop Tor crew treated their Ood. In "Planet of the Ood", she's angered to see just how the Oods' enslavement is corporatized.
    • Delta Fifty's eyes flashing red as he dies, plus the Oods' unison chants of "The circle must be broken", creep Rose out and remind her of how the Oods on Krop Tor behaved when they were possessed by the Beast. She refuses to let that experience color her views of the rest of the Ood as a race.
    • Just the sight of the dying Delta Fifty is enough to trigger Rose's memories of Jefferson's death and Toby's final moments:
      Donna Noble: You’ve met the Ood before? [Rose shivered and pulled her coat tighter around her waist]
      Rose Tyler: Yeah. [Events and people she hadn’t thought of in almost four years came back to her with stunning clarity—the look on Jefferson’s face when he’d chosen to stay behind and hold the Ood off, her fear when Ida had told her the Doctor was gone, the red light in Toby’s eyes on the rocket, just before she’d shot the window out] Yeah. We were on a sanctuary base—deep space exploration—and the humans there had Ood with them.
      [Donna hit an icy patch and slid a few steps. When she had her feet under her again, she asked...]
      Donna Noble: Well, what are they like?
      The Doctor: The Ood are harmless. They’re completely benign. Except, the last time we met them, there was this force, like a stronger mind, powerful enough to take them over.
      Donna Noble: What sort of force?
      The Doctor: Oh, long story.
      Donna Noble: Long walk.
      The Doctor: It was the Devil.
      Donna Noble: If you’re going to take the mickey, I’ll just put my hood back up.
      Rose Tyler: No, seriously Donna. We were on a planet orbiting a black hole, and we met the Devil.
      Donna Noble: [snorts] I never know what to think with the two of you. I mean, I know you’re telling the truth, but how am I supposed to believe things like that? You sound barmy, you know that, right?
      The Doctor: Must be something different this time, though. Something closer to home.
    • Solana Mercurio's PR speech at the demonstration about the Ood being "trusted friends", and the investors eying the Ood on display the way one might admire a new car in a showroom or clothes on a shop window dummy, reminds Rose of Danny Bartock's callous remarks about the Ood being willing servants (“But the Ood offer themselves. If you don’t give them orders, they just pine away and die"). The Doctor didn't get to see much of the Ood while he was on Krop Tor to know about how they were being treated, as he and Ida were busy investigating the black hole and locating the Beast. The Doctor is disgusted when they see Kess whipping an Ood who stumbles out of marching formation, and decides to ask Rose about how the Ood on Krop Tor were treated:
      The Doctor: Last time… was it this bad, Rose? You saw them more than I did.
      Rose Tyler: No, Danny and the others were definitely idiots, but at least they treated the Ood with some respect. [Her eyes glinted] Except for wanting to use Strategy Nine. They were just going to hide away in the rocket and then open all the airlocks and shoot the Ood out into space.
      The Doctor: [nods] We only managed to save fifteen Ood last time, and we didn’t really do anything to stop the slave trade. I reckon we owe them one—what do you think, Rose?
      Rose Tyler: Absolutely. Let’s do this.
    • When Klineman Halpen has the Doctor, Rose and Donna captured and brought to his office, he accuses them of being activists from Friends of the Ood. Rose immediately recognizes that group as the organization Scooti Manista accused her of being from when she tried to ask her and Danny about the Oods' roles.
      Klineman Halpen: Why don’t you just come out and say it? FOTO activists.
      Rose Tyler: Friend of the Ood? I was asked that once before, and I’ll say the same thing I did then. Maybe I am—because as far as I’m concerned, humans have no right taking slaves.
  • In "The Sontaran Stratagem," Martha suggests Donna be truthful with her family about traveling with the Doctor, seeing as her keeping her family out of the loop allowed the Master to exploit them. Donna then asks the same thing to Rose, who cites her own experience with accidentally missing a year (in "Aliens of London").
  • In "The Sontaran Stratagem," Martha goes a little more in depth as to how her debriefing from the Master's year in control of the Earth was what led UNIT to recruit her.
  • In "The Doctor's Daughter," while Martha and her Hath escort Peck are making their way across the surface of Messaline, the planet's environment reminds Martha heavily of Malcassairo. This causes her to develop bad memories as she then remembers meeting the Master, and the Master imprisoning her family. Her failed attempt to save Peck when he drowns rescuing her from a quicksand trap causes her to develop second thoughts about being in a relationship with Tom Milligan, as she's suddenly forgotten about him completely whilst helping out the Hath.
  • After "The Doctor's Daughter" and pre-"Unicorn and the Wasp", the first planet the Doctor, Donna and Rose take Jenny to is Woman Wept, a planet that the Ninth Doctor and Rose had visited offscreen sometime prior to "Boom Town".
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Donna's arc is the same, but the whole part about her becoming the DoctorDonna during the stolen planets arc is cut completely, due to the absence of the events that led to the Metacrisis happening, replaced with Rose becoming the Bad Wolf again to defeat the Daleks.
  • Donna's reindroduction in "Partners in Crime" is handled similarly to Martha's introduction in "Smith and Jones" back in Time is Still a Flying. But unlike "Smith and Jones" where Martha was involved with the Doctor and Rose from the very beginning, Donna doesn't meet the Doctor and Rose until the climax of the story, since she's investigating separately from them. The Doctor and Rose don't even realize she's there until they happen to eavesdrop on Miss Foster's office at the same time as her. That said, there are still hints to her presence, such as the Doctor and Rose running into the cabbie who was supposed to pick up Stacy Campbell's fare shortly after Donna interacted with him, and them passing Donna's car as they infiltrate the Adipose Industries building on the second night.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Chapter 32, "The Doctor of Christmas Yet to Come," features an appearance from the Twelfth Doctor. Much like in the original canon, he's still depicted as being Peter Capaldi, and there's a more overt reference to how the Doctor used Caecilius (Capaldi's character from "The Fires of Pompeii") as the basis for his twelfth incarnation's physical appearance.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Compared to the canon "Journey's End", Donna remembers everything and retains her character growth instead of having her memories wiped, and she's still a member of Team TARDIS (though still searching for Lee, her husband from the dream world); Rose and the Doctor are happy and together, and the Doctor actually has the biggest found family in the world. He's got his own sister-figure in Donna, a bond mate and wife in Rose, and a daughter in Jenny.
• Exact Words: The "spoilers" incident when Melody mentions the incident with Jackie getting the Doctor drunk leads to the Doctor and Rose realizing Rose's mother will be returning from Pete's World at some point (“But they aren’t the Doctor and Rose who pick me up every year for Christmas. Last year, we had dinner at the Tylers’, but they don’t know that Jackie spiked the punch with ginger ‘because it just isn’t fair that himself doesn’t get drunk like the rest of us.’”). Once the adventure is resolved, the Doctor and Rose put a little more thought into it and note that Melody said "the Tylers'" plural, which would encompass not just Jackie but also Pete and their son Tony.
  Rose Tyler: I can’t stop thinking about what Melody said.
  The Doctor: About spending Christmases with your mum and Pete.
  Rose Tyler: Yeah. [Rose bit her lip. She hadn’t even really considered Pete and the baby, but Melody had clearly said, "the Tylers’.” Not just Jackie’s.] I know… you said before that it was impossible. Travel between the worlds was closed off. [The Doctor turned slightly so he could meet her questioning gaze]
  The Doctor: And if you remember, just a few months ago when you asked again, I admitted that enough impossible things seemed to be happening for it to suddenly be a possibility. [Rose nodded, but her mind was already moving on to other hints they’d gotten in the last few months]
  Rose Tyler: That Lucius bloke in Pompeii told you that "he is returning". Do you think… maybe he was talking about Mickey? [A shiver ran down her back as she said it, and she knew she was right. More than that, she knew that Mickey’s return was important, somehow. She puzzled over that for a moment. If her family was coming back from Pete’s World, it wasn’t a huge leap to wonder if Mickey would, too. So why did it feel like such an important turning point?]
  [A bend in their timeline kept the future stubbornly out of sight, no matter how hard Rose tried to see it. She huffed in exasperation, and the Doctor rested his hand on her knee]
  The Doctor: I see it too. Something’s coming. [His voice carried the same hint of foreboding that it had years ago when he’d looked up at the fireworks and said a storm was coming] And our family is right in the middle of it.
• "Eureka!" Moment: In "The Fires of Pompeii", the Doctor is shown to have realized Lucius Petrus Dextrus's right arm was made of stone right away upon realizing the soothsayers are breathing in the vapors of Vesuvius. He also seems to insinuate that Lucius's name is meant to be more of a title that's both metaphoric and literal.
• Foil: Rose and Donna. Both start their travels in the TARDIS feeling like they aren't really much special. Though they differ in their backgrounds, as Rose is from a working class council estate, while Donna is from middle-class Chiswick.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Donna doesn't show up until midway through "Partners in Crime," since the story is told from the Doctor and Rose's perspective, and like with Martha in Time is Still A-Flying, the companion doesn't get any POV segments until they're welcomed aboard the TARDIS. Still, hints of Donna's presence are dropped before she actually appears. The Doctor and Rose run into the cabbie that Donna had waved off at Stacy Campbell's place during the foot chase on the first night, and they walk past Donna's car as they reenter Adipose Industries on the second day.
  • The fact that River Song is introduced as Melody Pond, and doesn't look like Alex Kingston (instead being a brown-haired woman with a mix of Amy and Rory's facial features), foreshadows future changes that will happen once Amy and Rory come into the story. It implies that the additions of Jenny and Rose to Team TARDIS meant that Melody never gets separated from her parents, not the way she was originally anyway, gets raised by Amy and Rory in a more normal life, and thus stays Melody Pond.
  • In Chapter 27, after the "Silence in the Library" / "Forest of the Dead" arc, Melody goes back to Andromeda University where she has a reunion with a future Doctor and Rose and talks about what happened. Midway through the paragraph, it's mentioned that Rose has red hair and slightly taller figure, foreshadowing that she will regenerate in the future.^note In the author's notes, it's established that regenerated Rose will look like Isla Fisher An earlier conversation that the Doctor and Rose overhear Melody having with her archaeologist team is what tells them that Jackie and Pete will be crossing back to the prime universe after "Journey's End".
• Fish out of Water: Jenny gets this hard, having been created from a cloning machine on Messaline. The Doctor, Rose, and Donna often have to take up the role of explaining Earth culture to her.
• Fix Fic: This one serves as a fix-it on both a small and a large scale. On a large scale, the Metacrisis doesn't happen, so Donna ends up retaining her memories; whilst the Doctor and Rose bring Jenny along with them for their travels after "The Doctor's Daughter". On a smaller scale, we have things like Lady Eddison's son Roger not being killed in "The Unicorn and the Wasp", the Doctor being able to prevent the passengers on the bus from mutinying against him in "Midnight", and Donna getting a better understanding in "The Fires of Pompeii" behind the importance of fixed points.
• Flat "What": Mickey and Jack's reaction to finding out that Jenny is the Doctor's daughter.
• Go-to Alias:
  • "John Tyler" is still the Doctor's go-to human alias name. Except during "Partners in Crime," where he has to use "John Smith" because he and Rose have to pretend not to know each other. He feels weird going back to his old alias.
  • After Jenny is added to the cast, the Doctor and Rose debate whether to give her a surname, and ultimately decide that since the Doctor is using the "Tyler" surname, Jenny should do the same:
    Jenny: Do you have a family name, Dad? The humans born out of the machines on Messaline didn’t, but I know they did before they came in the rocket. Is that how we do it?
    The Doctor: Time Lord naming conventions are… complicated. Not to mention, I’m the last of my family, and I hadn’t gotten along with them for centuries anyway. When I need a last name, I use Tyler. That’s Rose’s last name.
    Jenny: Would that be all right with you, Rose?
• Hidden Depths: Martha's reasons for deciding to end her relationship with Tom Milligan and ultimately ending up with Mickey are a bit more fleshed out; it's not just that she has to keep big secrets from Milligan about how she saw the Master kill him during the Year That Never Was, but also that she wants to have an open relationship like the one the Doctor and Rose have.
• Honorary Uncle: Donna becomes one to Jenny after she joins Team TARDIS, and Chapter 27 mentions that she also will function as one to Melody.
• In Spite of a Nail: The Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors still exist, and they'll still take on the forms of Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, but the Tenth Doctor's regeneration to the Eleventh has been delayed by a long time due to "The End of Time" being erased.
• It Makes Sense in Context: The Doctor's brief nod to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 in "The Fires of Pompeii" gets a little more context. (He's referring to San Franciscans who relocated to the East Bay after the quake, which was hit worse than San Francisco proper in the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989)
• It's Always Spring: "The Unicorn and the Wasp" had the notorious snafu of having it look unseasonably warm and people having a garden party in the middle of December 1926, due to the timing of when the episode was filmed. Rather than rewrite the party and move it indoors, the unseasonable weather is retained and treated as a major plot point:
  Rose Tyler: It’s a bit warm for December, isn’t it?
  The Doctor: Now that you mention it, one doesn’t usually sit outside sipping sidecars in December, no matter how mild English winters are.
  Donna Noble: [rolls eyes] Only you would find something ominous in unseasonably good weather.
  The Doctor: Donna, you’re wearing a summer dress in December. The lawn is green and the flowers are in bloom. There is something very not right about all of this. [He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned in a slow circle] The last time I witnessed global warming on this scale…
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Jackie has a moment of this when seeing Rose operate the TARDIS controls. She now understands who Rose is. Because even without Bad Wolf, this is not her little girl anymore.
• Lady in Red: For "The Unicorn and the Wasp", Rose sports a lilac colored dress for the afternoon, and a crimson flapper evening gown for dinner.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: In "The Unicorn and the Wasp" and "Silence in the Library" / "Forest of the Dead", Team TARDIS generally splits up into two subgroups to cover more ground. Donna and Jenny are paired together while the Doctor and Rose stick together.
• Locked Out of the Loop: From the way the dialogue goes when Harriet Jones is using the Subwave network to get in touch with Torchwood, Sarah Jane, Martha, and Mickey in "The Stolen Earth", it's clear that the Doctor and Rose never told Martha about getting Harriet ousted from office over her mishandling of the Sycorax invasion. Only once Harriet likens the Subwave group to being "the Doctor's secret army" does Martha get a general idea of what went wrong, recalling the Doctor's handling of the Master, the Sontarans, and the human-Hath war on Messaline.
  Mickey Smith: Bit backwards, innit, you tracking down the Doctor? After all, he was the one to depose you. I was there, remember?
  [Martha gladly accepted the cup of tea her mum brought out and studied Rose’s Mickey. The easy confidence in the way he talked to Harriet didn’t match the stories Rose had told of their growing up years, but she guessed time had changed them both]
  Harriet Jones: Yes you were, Mr. Smith. And I’ve wondered about that for a long time, whether I was wrong. But I stand by my actions to this day, because I knew, I knew that one day, the Earth would be in danger, and the Doctor would fail to appear. I told him so myself, and he didn’t listen.
  [The way Harriet framed the Doctor’s actions sounded so unfair to Martha. She didn’t know what the former Prime Minister had done that had led the Doctor to depose her, but she knew he wasn’t staying away today because he just didn’t care]
  Martha Jones: But I’ve been trying to find him. I’ve been calling Rose, but I keep getting sent straight to voicemail. And her phone is never outside of range, so there’s definitely something blocking the call.
  Mickey Smith: [holds up his own phone] Yeah, I’m not getting through either. [He looked like he wanted to say more, maybe about what Harriet had done before, but after a second of hesitation, he clamped his jaw together and shook his head]
  Harriet Jones: That’s why we need the Subwave to bring us all together. Combine forces. The Doctor’s secret army.
  [And then Martha understood. Because if Harriet didn’t understand the Doctor well enough to know he would never want an army, their falling-out made perfect sense]
• Love at First Sight: Mickey is instantly smitten with Martha from the moment he sees her face on the Subwave network group chat.
• Manchild: Jenny is basically a child in an adult's body given she was born from a progenation machine as a grown 23 year old.
• Missed Him by That Much:
  • Besides all the existing instances from "Partners in Crime", the Doctor and Rose have another instance when they give up their attempt to chase down the Adipose from the unscheduled parthenogenesis caused by Donna accidentally killing Stacey Campbell^note Technically, Donna just nonchalantly twisted her stolen pendant, and then Miss Foster went to emergency parthenogenesis after Stacey witnessed the first Adipose baby to come out of her. They stop to hail a cab back to the TARDIS...which happens to be the one that had been intending to pick up Stacey, and who just had been cancelled by Donna.
  • Mickey during "Partners in Crime," when he is using the dimension hopper. He runs into Donna, and is tempted to follow her to go find the TARDIS, but he can't because A) the stars haven't begun going out here in the Doctor's universe, and B) the dimension cannon begins calling him back at that moment in time.
• Morality Chain: Rose functions as one to the Doctor. This is very apparent in "The Sontaran Strategem" where she restrains the Doctor's hostility towards UNIT and encourages him to cooperate with Colonel Mace for the best productive outcome.
• Mythology Gag: During "The Unicorn and the Wasp", the story manages to re-insert an Agatha Christie novel shoutout that was cut from the original episode. In this AU, the resolution to the Doctor's cyanide poisoning is that Rose uses her sonic screwdriver as a "shock" (rather than a kiss from Donna). Agatha asks the Doctor, "Doctor you are impossible. Who are you?" and Rose replies, "He's The Man in the Brown Suit."^note Originally, "The Unicorn and the Wasp" had a framing device of an elderly Agatha Christie having flashbacks and dreams relating to her adventure of some 50 years earlier, and wondering who "the man in the brown suit" (the Doctor) was. The ending of the episode featured the Doctor and Donna visiting Agatha, upon which she begins to remember what happened and is shown the copy of the facsimile edition of Death in the Clouds from the year 5 billion. When it was decided to abandon the framing sequence, this second scene was remounted in the TARDIS. Both deleted scenes were included in the 2008 DVD box set of Series 4.
• On the Rebound: Since the Year That Never Was, Martha goes into a relationship with Tom Milligan. However, her failed attempt to save a drowning Peck from the quicksand trap on Messaline in "The Doctor's Daughter" makes her start to second-guess her relationship with him, especially when she realizes that she hasn't at all about Tom since this unexpected trip. She confides to Rose once reunited with them that she finds it impossible to break the news to Tom that she met him during the Master's year controlling Earth, a year Tom doesn't remember (and during which she saw the Master kill him), and because she wants to have a boyfriend with whom she can have a secrets-free life just like Rose has with the Doctor.
  Martha Jones: Do you ever wonder… what it would be like, if you’d fallen in love with someone else while travelling with the Doctor?
  Rose Tyler: Never.
  Martha Jones: Oh no, I just mean… [exhales] Right. So, let me start at the beginning. Tom doesn’t know anything about UNIT or working with Jack, or any of the rest of it.
  Rose Tyler: Why haven’t you said something to him? [Rose rubbed at her forehead. Even though the choice had been hers, Martha had never really been happy with keeping her life on the TARDIS a secret from her family. Keeping the truth of her life from her boyfriend didn’t seem at all like something she would do. Martha sighed and held her arms out for a moment before dropping them]
  Martha Jones: What am I supposed to say? "We didn’t actually meet at a medical convention—we met on the 365th day of hell, when the Master had taken over the planet"?
  Rose Tyler: But you’re keeping a huge part of who you are from him. How can he support you in the life you lead if he doesn’t even know what it’s like?
  Martha Jones: [groans] I know. And that’s why I’m asking. Because you and the Doctor… you’re partners, even before you’re romantic partners. You work together.
  Rose Tyler: Ah. [Rose finally understood where her question was coming from. She considered for a moment, then said] Well… I forget sometimes that this is what it’s like for most people who have a job like yours. The Doctor and I are lucky enough to work together, but most people who work in clandestine services or high-ranking military jobs can’t share their work with their partners.
  Martha Jones: I know, but I want a relationship like yours and the Doctor’s.
  Rose Tyler: [smiles] Then you have to decide what’s more important to you, having a real partner, or accepting the differences and loving him regardless.
  Martha Jones: Yeah. I’ve been trying not to think of it like that, but you’re right.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The Doctor figures out right away the Sontarans' clone of Martha in "The Sontaran Strategem," and along the way, he makes note of several instances through which the clone doesn't act like Martha that would be a dead giveaway, like her lack of her concern for her family, or her not being amused when the Doctor and Rose joke "Are you my mummy" while putting on their gas masks.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure:
  • Jenny during "The Unicorn and the Wasp" doesn't know right away who Agatha Christie is, so the Doctor and Rose have to explain Agatha's importance to her. Justified by the fact that Jenny was born from a cloning machine on Messaline, and this is her first adventure on Earth.
  • Rose has become guilty of this recently, as being a TARDIS traveler for so long means that even she doesn't know what ATMOS is in "The Sontaran Strategem".
• Poor Communication Kills: Averted in "The Sontaran Strategem" / "The Poison Sky", where Rose's presence softens the Doctor enough that he doesn't unnecessarily antagonize Colonel Mace. Thus, Colonel Mace is more willing to listen to the Doctor's input, and the two men devise an alternate strategy to defeat the Sontarans with way fewer UNIT soldiers dying.
• Pragmatic Adaptation:
  • Part of the reason why the Metacrisis was cut, and all the story elements that led up to its creation were changed or omitted, was because the author was against the idea of Rose having to choose between two versions of her husband.
  • Mickey takes Rose's original role in "The Stolen Earth", as the one who saves Wilf and Sylvia from a Dalek. However, he doesn't join the Subwave network group chat from the Noble household like Rose did, instead teleporting to Torchwood because he knows that's where he can find Jack and get in touch with him.
• Really 700 Years Old: Being born from a progenation machine means Jenny is only technically an infant despite having the body of a 23 year old. Trying to pass her off as the Doctor and Rose's daughter does cause some odd looks from Lady Eddison during "The Unicorn and the Wasp", who points out that Rose is too young to possibly be Jenny's mother,^note This coming from someone who had a bastard son from an extramarital affair with a Vespiform while Jackie points out that her son Tony (with Pete) is technically older than Jenny despite still being an infant:
  Jackie Tyler: You’re only six months old then?
  Jenny: I suppose?
  Jackie Tyler: [chuckling] Well, at least Tony is actually older than his niece, though I suppose you’ll have a fun time explaining how that’s possible.
• Sequel Escalation: Thanks to Rose's presence, the TARDIS team has greatly expanded compared to the original canon. The first story, To Make Much of Time, as a rewrite of season 2 where Rose was already the Doctor's companion, is essentially the same but with some minor tweaks to the stories of the individual episodes plus the addition of a romance between the Doctor and Rose . Time is Still a Flying is series 3 but with Rose added to the TARDIS crew, her presence alone changes the outcomes of several episodes and causes vast alterations to the Master arc. For Forever and Never Apart, the TARDIS roster is doubled in size (with Rose and Jenny being added), and roles that are completely swapped and people who are just in very different places emotionally and mentally. Even if the underlying story is the same—because the TARDIS is still taking them where they need to go—the way they handle the details is very, very different.
• Sequel Hook: The last chapter is of young Amy Pond's encounter with the crashed TARDIS from the start of "The Eleventh Hour".
• Shout-Out:
  • The scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail with the man who claimed a witch turned him into a newt but "got better" is parodied here when the Doctor and Rose are telling Donna about the events of The Stone Rose.
  • An Agatha Christie shout-out from the deleted scenes in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" is restored with Rose calling the Doctor The Man in the Brown Suit.
  • A few new Agatha Christie shoutouts are added to "The Unicorn and the Wasp". Just to drive the reference home, whenever it happens, the characters enunciate the book title:
    • Before talking to the suspects, Agatha likens the Doctor and Rose to her own private investigating couple Tommy and Tuppence.
    • Ordeal By Innocence when Team TARDIS first finds the wasp in the off-limits room.
    • After collecting the fluid from the stinger, he intends to analyze it back in the TARDIS so he has a planet of origin, instead of a Destination Unknown. Rose silently chides him for starting to incorporate Agatha Christie titles even in his internal thoughts.
    • As Rose chides Lady Eddison and Colonel Hugh for being uncooperative, she tells them “I understand that you all want answers. You’re scared, of course—this whole day has played out like a Three Act Tragedy, and we’ve only seen the first two acts."
    • The Doctor's cover when he's using the psychic paper to claim he's a detective (to keep the others from calling the real police):
      Agatha Christie: Someone should call the police.
      The Doctor: You don’t have to. [psychic paper flash] Chief Inspector Tyler from Scotland Yard, known as the Doctor. My family and I are on holiday, but it appears death doesn't take a holiday.
• Shown Their Work: During the windowwashing bucket rescue, when Donna insists Rose try smashing the deadlocked windows (since the Doctor's sonic screwdriver doesn't work on Miss Foster's deadlocks), Rose responds that it doesn't work like that, since the windows are made to withstand nearby explosions. This is because the building dates from the 1970s/1980s, at the height of bombing campaigns by the IRA.^note Remember that the Gherkin, one of the most iconic skyscrapers in London's financial district, only exists because of an IRA bombing that destroyed the Baltic Exchange that used to exist there
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: When Davros tries to break the Doctor in "Journey's End" by claiming that he turns people into weapons, and compares it to his creation of the Daleks, the Doctor has a counter.
  "Not murderers, Davros. Defenders. Defenders of the Earth. Caan was right. This shows you who I am. Not one of my friends was willing to just sit at home when you tried to take over the Earth. They didn’t give up or let things happen. They’re making a stand. Would I have done things differently? Possibly. But I'm proud of all of them."
• The Smurfette Principle: Gender-inverted, since as of "The Doctor's Daughter," the Doctor is the sole male amongst the four-person TARDIS crew, the other three (Rose, Donna, and Jenny) all being women.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • As the show handled it, much of Colonel Mace's trenchant personality in "The Sontaran Strategem" / "The Poison Sky" is a response to the Doctor's outright antagonistic attitude, and this is what causes him to ignore the Doctor's warnings about the Sontarans' cheating, leading to Ross Jenkins and the other UNIT troops being curbstomped and massacred by Commander Skorr's battalion. In Forever and Never Apart, the battle with the Sontarans goes differently, as the Doctor has been reminded by Rose to be on his best behavior with Colonel Mace. So Colonel Mace agrees to hear out the Doctor and Rose (Donna's presence on the Sontaran ship, and the Sontarans' tactics and means of disabling the soldiers' guns). The Doctor and Colonel Mace hence come up with an alternate strategy that minimizes bloodshed to the UNIT troops: plant mines around the factory to contain the Sontarans inside. Once UNIT has the proper ammunition that can't be disabled by the Sontarans' technology, they are able to swiftly retake the factory and mow down any who are unable to escape via their teleporter, while the Doctor and Rose seek out the cloning room where the real Martha is being held.
  • Also seen in "The Sontaran Sratagem"/"The Poison Sky" is the final step to defeating the Sontarans. The Doctor still uses the atmospheric converter to blow up the Sontarans' ship, but there are some slight differences.
    • In the show, he rigs the converter so it requires a button press in-person to detonate, with Martha protesting that he could set the converter on a timer, and then teleports up to the Sontaran ship, intending to give his own life to stop the Sontarans. Then with a few seconds left until the Sontarans launch their landing pods, Luke Rattigan simultaneously teleports himself to the Sontaran ship and the Doctor back to Earth, and presses the button to detonate the converter.
    • In the Timelessness-verse, the Doctor sets the converter on a timer and bluffs the Sontarans into thinking that the converter is on a trigger that someone has to be physically present to detonate. He then sets the timers, and teleports off just as General Staal and his troops realize they've been set up. Luke thus survives, and is allowed a proper shot at redemption, saying the Doctor's example has given him new perspective on what a mistake it was to ally with the Sontarans. The Doctor is moved enough by Luke's defense that he lets him go, suddenly remembering that Luke is only 18 years old, so he's still got plenty of time to really turn himself around and atone for his actions.
  • In "The Unicorn and the Wasp", Roger Curbishley survives the Vespiform's attempt on him due to Rose pulling him out of the way in time. The author's notes establish that this change was done partially because it lessens the amount of trauma inflicted on Lady Eddison by having her just lose her bastard half-human/half-alien son and her confidant Miss Chandrakala, instead of losing both of her children in the span of a few hours, and also averts the trope of Bury Your Gays.
  • Melody survives "Silence in the Library" / "Forest of the Dead".
  • The Doctor is able to keep Sky Silvestry from being killed by the entity in "Midnight", although is unable to prevent Joe and Claude's deaths.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • One for "Silence in the Library" / "Forest of the Dead". Melody gives the Doctor and Rose all this key information on how she knows who they were, which ensures that they will give that information to her as a trust password once she's born.
    Melody Pond: Why didn’t you and Rose warn me that our first meeting was out of order like this?
    The Doctor: Because you didn’t know when we met you. We prepared you for it, though. Teaching you about avoiding spoilers and giving you the code words so we would trust you.
    Melody Pond: But why not just tell me not to come to the Library?
    The Doctor: Causality loop. Because we met you here, it’ll be impossible to avoid things that might set you on your path to becoming an archaeologist—even little things, like giving you your own sonic screwdriver. And because of your position, you were chosen to lead this expedition, and suspecting danger, you naturally asked us to join you, which ensured we would meet you here.
    Melody Pond: Basically, you met me here, so you had to make sure you would meet me here.
    The Doctor: Basically.
  • The Doctor and Rose eavesdrop on a conversation with Anita about how the Doctor and Rose at the Library are not the ones she knows of as her godparents, which causes a double case.
    Melody Pond: You know, it’s funny. I keep wishing the Doctor and Rose were here.
    Anita: The Doctor and Rose are here, aren’t they? They are coming back, right?
    Melody Pond: You know when you see a photograph of someone you know, but it’s from years before you knew them. And even though it’s them, there’s something just… missing. A familiarity that isn’t there yet.
    [Rose squeezed the Doctor’s hand. Like meeting your first incarnation, she told him. It was the first time meeting you since meeting you the first time when you looked at me without knowing me]
    Melody Pond: ...well, yes, the Doctor and Rose are here. They came when I called, just like they always do. [The Doctor raised his eyebrows and filed that piece of information away] But they aren’t the Doctor and Rose who pick me up every year for Christmas. Last year, we had dinner at the Tylers’, but they don’t know that Jackie spiked the punch with ginger "because it just isn’t fair that himself doesn’t get drunk like the rest of us.” [Anita laughed, and Melody nodded] You see what I mean? They’re here… but they aren’t.
    • It's implied the Doctor, having overheard that converation, willingly let Jackie get him plastered so that Melody could tell him that he'd do it.
    • The epilogue for Melody in chapter 27, where she talks to her Doctor and Rose upon returning home from the Library, establishes that Rose renegerated into a redhead before Melody was born, explaining why she didn't recognize Rose right away.
      Melody Pond: It was hard not giving that away though.
      Rose Tyler: Now you know why we always leave pictures around of ourselves from back then. [Rose tugged on a strand of her hair] I did notice you seemed a little surprised by my appearance, but I just figured I’d aged, and you’d never seen me that young looking.
  • This also extends to Melody's sonic screwdriver. Which is one the Doctor made as a graduation present for her.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Pete initially sidelines Jackie when he and Mickey make their dimension hops out of Pete's World, on the grounds that someone needs to be there for their son Tony if Pete doesn't return. Jackie is offended by the insinuation and dimension hops right after him.
• Title Drop: Incidentally, it didn't happen in this fic. It actually happened back at the end of Time is Still a-Flying while the Doctor and Rose were having sex after the Year that Never Was.
  Passion built between them with soft touches and whispered words of love, their earlier frantic need softened to tender lovemaking as they moved together slowly.
  “Forever,” the Doctor vowed as he kissed her neck.
  Rose moaned and dug her nails into his back. “Forever and never apart,” she swore.
• True Blue Femininity: Many of Jenny's outfits are blue-based. On Woman Wept, she gets a blue ski jacket. For "The Unicorn and the Wasp", she sports a simple "robin's egg blue" dress.
• Trust Password: The Doctor and Rose have given Melody one for when they encounter her: "Bad Wolf".
• We Do Not Know Each Other: For "Partners in Crime," the Doctor and Rose use different alias names when they infiltrate Adipose Industries. The Doctor goes to his old "John Smith" alias and a "Health and Safety" cover story; while Rose infiltrates the call center claiming to be a temp named "Rose Lewis", and takes the role that in the original episode was filled by the call center woman who flirted with the Doctor.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Before the events of "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End", Jackie and Pete make the decision to relocate and stay in the Doctor and Rose's universe rather than stay in Pete's World once the crisis with the stars going out is resolved. While Jackie is optimistic about seeing Rose and introducing Rose to her new half-brother, this optimism fades away when she realizes that she and Pete can't settle down in London because she disappeared after Canary Wharf, while the Pete that fathered Rose has been dead for over 22 years. Fortunately, she's put at ease when Mickey reassures them that he'll ask Jack Harkness to arrange new aliases for Jackie and Pete to live under. They ultimately end up settling down in Cardiff (though Jackie would've preferred Birmingham or Manchester) where Torchwood Three is based, while Jake Simmonds takes over heading Torchwood in Pete's World.

Tropes in "Forever Timeless"

• Absence of Evidence: In "The Next Doctor," Rose realizes that Jackson Lake can't be a future regeneration of the Doctor both because he doesn't recognize her, and because she isn't feeling any telepathic echo like she has when the Doctor crosses paths with another regeneration (the telepathic bond is temporal, meaning it backdates and bonds her to all regenerations of the Doctor, including those from before he met Rose).
• Adaptational Badass: Lee, who in canon was nothing more than Donna's virtual husband, is now a time agent like Captain Jack.
• Alternate Timeline:
  • Rose's presence, and the telepathic bond between her and the Doctor, means that "The Next Doctor" goes differently when they figure out early on that Jackson Lake is a fraud. (Part of that has to do with the fact that the Cybermen were using infostamps stolen from the Daleks that contained outdated information)
  • This story covers the 2009 specials, but the Doctor is a much different person on account of different life experiences. In the show, the overarching story is that the Doctor is slowly going mad from grief after he's lost everyone, to the point that he is dangerously unhinged as happens in "The Waters of Mars". That five episode arc of "The Next Doctor," "Planet of the Dead," "The Waters of Mars" and the "The End of Time" two-parter is about him needing the fresh start a regeneration will give him. In the Timelessness verse, the Doctor is not in that same place. He hasn't lost Rose, and because of the way this changed series 4 in Forever and Never Apart, he didn't lose lose Donna, either. He's in the opposite place that the canon Doctor was in at the end of series 4, where instead of losing everyone he loves, he realises he has a family, made up of people who've travelled with him and some of their family. So obviously, the Doctor isn't going through the same emotional tailspin that the canon Doctor took.
  • "The End of Time" doesn't happen since Rose found the Master's ring after he died and destroyed it at the end of Time is Still a-Flying by throwing it into a supernova, meaning the Master can't come back at all. In its place is a new story, which also confirms that Rose can now regenerate. Since the Doctor has regenerated once since they met, it's Rose's turn. And without "The End of Time", the Tenth Doctor does not regenerate into the Eleventh Doctor...yet. He still will regenerate into Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor and Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor (as evidenced by Rose meeting the Twelfth Doctor in Forever and Never Apart), but those are postponed.
  • The crack in the wall in Amy's bedroom in "The Eleventh Hour" is not being caused by the Silence, but by residual effects from the Reality Bomb.
• Bait-and-Switch: "The Eleventh Hour" starts with the Doctor and Rose arriving in Leadworth to deal with the crack in Amy's wall. Every indication is that man trapped in the wall is going to be Prisoner Zero. Instead it turns out to be Lee, Donna's fiancee from the Library.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the first chapter, Jackie asks the Doctor and Rose about their wedding.
  • For chapter 2, the Doctor and Rose take Donna and Jenny to Barcelona, with Donna and Jenny spending the week there while the Doctor and Rose have their anniversary on Critias.
  • The moment the Doctor and Rose learn Amy's last name and hear her Scottish brogue, they instantly realize that she's going to be Melody's mother because Melody mentioned her mother was Scottish.
  • The crack in the wall in "The Eleventh Hour" instead is an opening into the Void, which makes Rose anxious out of the possibility the prisoner in the wall is a trapped Cyberman or Dalek.
  • Once the Doctor identifies the teleport signal Lee is emitting through the crack, Rose wonders why he can't use his sonic screwdriver to lock onto it like he did with Margaret in "Boom Town". The Doctor has to explain that won't be the case this time, as it's either degrading because it’s stuck in the Void, or the Void is blocking him from being able to lock onto it.
  • And once the Doctor and Rose (using both of their sonics at once) pull Lee out of the crack, Lee recognizes Rose from having seen her with Jenny in the Library.
  • During "The Next Doctor," the sight of the orphaned children being escorted by the Cybermen-controlled owners of the workhouses reminds the Doctor of when these same Cybermen corralled Londoners into Lumic's factories in Pete's World.
• Demoted to Extra: In "Planet of the Dead," Lady Christina's role is significantly reduced due to the fact that in the original story, she filled a void that is not there in this AU, where the Doctor has Rose, Donna and Lee with him, who are more versed in this kind of adventure.
• The Matchmaker: The moment Rose and the Doctor find Lee is the prisoner in the crack in Amy's bedroom, Rose immediately has the idea of playing matchmaker between Donna and Lee.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: With the Tenth Doctor's regeneration into the Eleventh Doctor delayed, "The Eleventh Hour" plays out much differently. This means the story takes place entirely in the 1990s and only has Amy and Rory as children, without any twelve-year time skip.

Tropes in "Hope is Where Forever Begins"