Doctor Who Finale Secretly Kills The Best Companion?
Recently, Doctor Who aired the first finale of the Disney+ era, and it was generally considered a major success. Fans enjoyed having Russell T. Davies back as showrunner, especially because he knows how to expertly weave the humor and heartbreak the series is known for.
He might have secretly done too good a job, though: the revelation that Sutekh wiped life out everywhere the TARDIS landed means that he likely killed beloved companion Rose Tyler, and since that universe is no longer accessible, it would have been impossible to revive her or anyone else who died there.
An Old Villain Returned
For this Doctor Who bombshell to make much sense, we’re going to need to quickly recap that bonkers finale. We discover that the Big Bad is actually the Egyptian-themed villain Sutekh, someone last seen during the adventures of the Fourth Doctor. He was seemingly defeated decades ago but secretly latched onto the TARDIS, gathering power and hatching a plan to commit genocide on a cosmic scale.
Susan
You see, the Doctor Who finale revealed that everywhere the TARDIS landed since the villain’s seeming defeat, Sutekh created a servant named Susan. During the finale, he got the Susans all over the universe to unleash his “dust of death,” a very literal attack that killed anyone it came in contact with. This caused the death of countless people, but using logic straight out of a JRPG, the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) ended up dragging Sutekh through the time vortex, bringing “death to death”…in other words, bringing all the dead back to life.
The Day Is Saved Except For One Problem
All’s well that ends well with the Doctor Who finale, right? Maybe not: during the big reveal that Sutekh had been on the TARDIS all these years, we see a glimpse of Bad Wolf Bay (or “Dårlig Ulv-Stranden” if you’re Norwegian), the place in the alternate universe where Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) ended up and that we last saw in “Journey’s End.” That episode was very bittersweet: the Doctor was able to drop off a human clone of himself for Rose to spend her life with, but he also reconfirmed that he will never again be able to visit her dimension.
What does that earlier Doctor Who finale have to do with the more recent one? In short, if Sutekh created a Susan everywhere the TARDIS landed, that would include Rose’s alternate Earth. And if each Susan unleashed the dust of death, then this fan-favorite companion would have died just like everyone else throughout our universe.
Stuck In An Alternate World
The most recent Doctor Who finale had a happy ending involving dragging the bad guy through the Time Vortex, reversing his swathe of death, and restoring life to the universe. However, Rose Tyler was in an alternate world that had its own vortex and, as mentioned, could not be accessed by the TARDIS. This means that if she was killed by Sutekh (something implied by the presence of Bad Wolf Bay on the TARDIS monitor), then she would have stayed dead, unable to be resurrected.
There’s Always A Chance She’ll Return
Of course, in the Doctor Who franchise, death is often only temporary, and since we didn’t see Rose die onscreen in the finale, she might still be alive. It’s entirely possible that her universe being cut off from ours means that Sutekh was never able to activate his Susan there and couldn’t unleash the dust of death.
Until we see Rose’s beautiful face again (come on, Davies, we’re begging you!), though, we have every reason to believe that Disney+ just killed everyone’s favorite companion, a particularly egregious act considering that new companion Ruby Sunday always felt like a cheap Rose knockoff.
