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Adelaide Brooke
(2009) |
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| Lindsay Duncan |
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Lindsay Duncan was born in November 1950 in Edinburgh,
Scotland and attended the King Edwards VI High School
for Girls in Birmingham. She later studied at London’s
Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in
mostly unheralded theatre roles before graduating
to television productions in the late 1970’s.
These
productions include The New Avengers - "Angels
of Death" (1977), On Approval (1982), Reilly,
Ace of Spies (1983), Dead Head (1985),
and Traffik (1989). While on stage she created
the role of La Marquise de Merteuil in the Royal
Shakespeare Company's production of Les Liaisons
Dangereuses in Stratford, London and New York.
In the 1990s, she continued to appear in prestigious London stage and screen
productions, such as the 1999 television version
of Oliver Twist. She also played the part
of the wife of author Peter Mayle in the 1993 television
serial A Year in Provence. Her voice can
also can be heard in the 1991 film Star Wars:
Episode I - The Phantom Menace and she appeared
in the 1999 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield
Park. Between 2005 and 2007 she played the part
of Servilia Caepionis in 18 episodes of the HBO-BBC
series Rome.
Since appearing in Doctor Who,
as Adelaide Brooke, Lindsay Duncan has continued
to appear in various television and film roles.
Including the television comedy show Come Fly
with Me (2010 – 2011), as the Narrator, and
in 2011 television mini-series The Sinking of
the Laconia. She also played the part of Alice’s
mother in Tim Burton’s 2010 film Alice in Wonderland.
She
was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the
British Empire) in the 2009 Queen’s Birthday Honours
List for her services to Drama. |
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 Although Adelaide never actually travelled with The Doctor, she spent a great deal of time in his company
during one of the most personal adventures of his life, during
a crisis where The Doctor came disturbingly close to assuming
an attitude that more resembled The
Valeyard than any other
incarnation, rewriting history to fit what he wanted to happen
despite the dangers of doing so.
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| Adelaide Brooke |
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Adelaide’s history with The Doctor could be said to
have begun when she was a little girl during the Dalek theft
of Earth ("The Stolen Earth/Journey's
End");
locked in her room while her father left the house to search
for her mother (Neither of whom ever came back), a Dalek saw
her as she stood in at her attic window, but it turned around
and returned to the sky, leaving Adelaide with a strong resolve
to follow it, simply to explore rather than for revenge (Although
she only ever told her daughter about her encounter). With
Earth facing an environmental crisis, Adelaide constantly
drove herself to reach a point where she would be able to
reach into space to find new solutions for humanity’s
current challenges, graduating Cambridge with honours in advanced
Physics and Mathematics before earning a physics doctorate
at Rice University, subsequently becoming NASA’s first
non-American candidate. After being the first woman to land
on Mars, Adelaide was appointed the commander of Earth’s
first offworld colony, Bowie Base One, which was established
on Mars in June 2058 and remained there for over a year.
Although
the mission went well for several months, things came to a
head shortly after the Tenth Doctor arrived on Mars,
travelling alone, and found himself being questioned about
his presence on the planet in Bowie Base One before he could
escape detection. Although The Doctor attempted to leave the
base to ensure that history remained intact - aware that what
was about to happen was a fixed point in time that he couldn’t
change -, subsequent strange events in the base’s bio-dome
- essentially the base’s gardens - prompted Adelaide
to take The Doctor with her while she investigated the events,
discovering one of her crew unconscious in the corridor leading
to the bio-dome. Despite his unwillingness to get too involved,
The Doctor took the chance to ask Adelaide if the sacrifices
she had made - including leaving Earth shortly before her
first granddaughter was born - were worth it, Adelaide responding
with the assurance that she had enjoyed the chance to see
a new world, quickly earning The Doctor’s respect.
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| Adelaide and The Doctor |
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As
The Doctor and Adelaide continued to investigate the events
in the bio-dome, they discovered that other members of Adelaide’s
crew had been infected with the mysterious water-based infection
known as The
Flood, trapped in an iceberg by the ancient Martians
before it escaped into the base’s water supply thanks
to a lost filter. During their struggle against the Flood,
The Doctor came to admire Adelaide for such actions as her
refusal to shoot someone who had been infected with the Flood
when it would have been easy to do so, recognising in her
the strength and courage that he had always admired about
humans. Despite her own suspicion about the coincidence of
him showing up at this time, Adelaide in return soon recognised
that The Doctor wasn’t a coward despite his constant
attempts to leave, even sharing slight jokes with him such
as his comment about the need for bikes to make traversing
the base’s long corridors easier.
As the virus spread
and its hosts escaped containment, the crew began preparations
to escaped by taking Action One of
evacuation, but Adelaide had already realised that something
was different about The Doctor. As The Doctor prepared to
depart the base, Adelaide locked him in the airlock to make
him tell her what would happen to them, aware that he knew
more than them without actually knowing about his true identity
as a time traveller. With no other choice, The Doctor admitted
that the base would be destroyed that day when Adelaide activated
Action Five, detonating the base to contain the Flood, her
actions inspiring her granddaughter Susie Fontana-Brooke’s
later drive to explore space as she became the pilot of Earth’s
first faster-than-light ship. Adelaide tried to ask The Doctor
to help them, but he initially stated that he couldn’t
help, reflecting that the Dalek had spared her because it
was aware that her death was a fixed point in time and space,
informing her that her death had to happen for history to
unfold as it should.
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| Escaping From The Flood |
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Even as Adelaide gave The Doctor a chance
to depart, he was left to listen as the Flood infiltrated
the base, the crew
being separated and trapped by the water as it began to flood
into the base, contaminating the base’s food supplies,
matters coming to a head when Adelaide’s second-in-command
was forced to destroy the shuttle - their only way home -
after he was infected to prevent the Flood using it to go
back to Earth. Briefly allowing his pain and rage over the
Time War to motivate him, The Doctor decided to try and save
the crew, concluding that, with the death of the Time Lords,
he could now command the Laws of Time for his own without
the Time Lords to enforce the rules on him, resolved to continue
fighting even as Time itself apparently ‘warred’ against
him to trap the surviving crew in that area. Using one of
the base’s modified drone robots, The Doctor was able
to send the robot through the Flood-infected waters in order
to reach the TARDIS, subsequently remotely activating the
TARDIS using the robot’s arms and programming it to
travel to his current location, where he could then take the
surviving three crew members back to Earth.
Despite the fact
that all three of the crew were aware that The Doctor had
just saved their lives, none of them could
easily accept what had just taken place. While the other two
survivors - nurse Yuri Kerenski and geologist Mia Bennett
- were merely shaken and stunned at the TARDIS’s interior
and their sudden return to Earth, Adelaide, remembering The
Doctor’s tales of the inspiration her story provided
for her granddaughter, was clearly horrified and angered at
The Doctor’s arrogance in making such a potentially
Earth-altering choice - The Doctor speculating that Adelaide
could now inspire her granddaughter face-to-face while Adelaide
recognised that he couldn’t be sure of that -, denouncing
his claims to be ‘the Time Lord Victorious’ as
wrong. As The Doctor returned to the TARDIS after Adelaide
returned to her house, he heard a gunshot from inside the
house, his memory automatically ‘updating’ to
reveal that the only real change to history was Yuri and Mia
living to tell of Adelaide’s sacrifice to save humanity
from the Flood, Adelaide’s death preserving her granddaughter’s
original destiny.
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| Young Adelaide Visited by
a Dalek |
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With her sacrifice, Adelaide reminded
The Doctor that he could not have the right to make choices
that
could threaten
the history of the world simply because he thought it was
the right thing to do, helping him to recognise that he had
gone too far in attempting to shape history in such a manner
(An action chillingly reminiscent of The Valeyard’s
actions in "He Jests at Scars...", looking at a
universe where The Valeyard defeated The Doctor and went on
to cause so much damage to the universe that he used the TARDIS
force fields to immobilise himself in the console room to
stop himself making things worse). Although The Doctor only
knew her for a brief time, her actions and sacrifice had a
profound impact on him, particularly when his subsequent adventure
found him putted against the Time Lords as they attempted
to save themselves by destroying the universe, once again
prompting him to recognise the dangers of the course of action
he’d tried to carry out and remind him of what he could
never allow himself to become ("The End of Time").
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