Doctor Who Used A Wonderbra To Turn A Hero Into A Villain

For this timey-wimey story to make sense, you need to understand the full context of the episode “New Earth.” In it, the Doctor and Rose travel millions of years into the future and explore New Earth, where they encounter a hospital where feline nuns infect clones with diseases in order to keep the planet healthy (have we mentioned lately how bonkers this show really is?). This Doctor Who ep also sees the return of Lady Cassandra, a villain from the first season who will effectively spend most of this story wearing a Wonderbra.

Memorably, Lady Cassandra appeared in the first season revival episode “The End of the World” as a stretched-out piece of skin, and to this day, fans love to quote her repeated line to her cronies: “moisturize me!” In “New Earth,” she gets a body upgrade when her mind is implanted in Rose’s body. As mentioned earlier, the Doctor Who producers put Rose in different lipstick and a Wonderbra in order to visually represent that she was secretly a villain in disguise.

At this point, you might be ready to throw your toy TARDIS at the Doctor Who crew for making an already very sexy Companion wear a Wonderbra. However, there was a plot point related to this in which Cassandra is overly flirty while in Rose’s body. She even goes so far as to kiss the Doctor, which temporarily flatters him (“Yep…still got it,” he says) and inevitably sent countless fanfiction writers into erotic overdrive.

In short, Cassandra was meant to be a kind of hidden femme fatale in this episode, and putting Rose in a Wonderbra helped emphasize the not-so-subtle fact that Cassandra would use the attractive features of this body as just another weapon in her arsenal. With that being said, Rose might have continued wearing the Wonderbra even after getting her body back. We know this thanks to some hilarious commentary from David Tennant on the DVDs containing “New Earth.”

In the commentary, it was actually Tennant who told Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies about the Wonderbra and lipstick, to which the other man incredibly replied “I never knew that.”

Afterward, Tennant told RTD, “I think the wonderbra did linger a bit, though…because she quite liked it.” Given Tennant’s famously dry sense of humor, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the bra really did linger around or if he was poking some gentle fun at his costar, Billie Piper.

Looking back, it’s kind of fitting that Doctor Who used a Wonderbra to turn a hero into a villain: this is a show that was once very nervous about giving the Doctor romantic feelings or partners, so it makes a kind of Freudian sense an old nemesis would weaponize Rose’s beauty against our hero.

It’s funnier, though, to imagine Billie Piper keeping the bra around simply because she liked how it made her look. It might not have given the lovely actor an entirely new body, but unless things change in the Disney+ era, this might be the closest this Companion will ever come to her own regeneration.