Why The Rose Tyler Hate?

This face either makes you want to punch it...
Or makes you really happy...

So, when I first started watching Doctor Who, I really liked Rose Tyler. I thought she was a pretty cool companion and her first name is my middle name. There have also been times when I felt pretty low as a nursing assistant at a nursing home when I felt like I was below a girl working in a shop and I wished the Doctor would come, blow up my job, and whisk me away.

She was a very good self-insert for girls everywhere in a lot of ways which is was a Companion needs to be at times.

The problem with Rose Tyler, for me, happens when you think about her. When you really think about Rose Tyler--

Well, when I really think about Rose Tyler, I don't just think about her sad ending and how the Doctor "loved" her. Instead, I think about the whole picture, because when it comes to stories, I'm a big picture sort of person. You can distract me with the small, interpersonal stuff for about a day, but my brain runs at a million miles a second and it goes over everything I see, hear, absorb from the atmosphere and mixes it in a cauldron and new stuff comes out.

Look at my Fridge Logic on River Song and Rory's supersperm if you want to see just how it all comes together sometime.

Some people say I'm crazy, but I'm not crazy, I just think a lot.

So, when I look at the full Rose big picture, I'm left with some... confusion and concern.

See, when we meet Rose, she mentions a boyfriend who caused her to drop out of high school while talking to her best friend and current boyfriend, Mickey Smith. After spending part of an episode worried about Mickey because he's been replaced by an auton, she runs off with the Doctor barely giving Mickey more than a second thought.

Her final words to him are more her pointing out how useless he is than giving him a proper good-bye.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is how Rose treats her family (Mickey and Jackie) for the rest of the series until she is permanently forced to stay in another universe.

All through this time, the Doctor and anyone who happens to be around and the producers and the writers and Russell T. Davies (RTD) most of all, shove in our faces how she was the best companion ever. RTD even says in one interview how Rose isn't like the previous companions because she fights back, but she's pretty much par for the course.

Then there's her blatant disregard for certain other things.

First of all, the Heart of the TARDIS opening up is supposed to be like a last resort thing. It only opens when something is literally TEARING THE TARDIS APART. It opened for Margaret Blaine because she'd used technology to do exactly that.

I know that mostly the whole thing was a Hail Mary from RTD for writing his Doctor into a corner. It was probably supposed to be a big series finale if people didn't like the show, but he wrote it in exactly that way so we, the viewers get to draw conclusions.

Later we learn ripping the TARDIS apart will cause all of time and space to collapse (Series Five people!).

So, Rose Tyler, whether she knew it or not, would rather destroy all of time and space rather than let go of the Doctor so he can save humans in the future. True, she saved him, but she took a HUGE risk doing so which she didn't even fully understand.

Moreso, it's been made clear the TARDIS is sentient. In fact, she's the titular character in the episode, The Doctor's Wife. So, Rose was willing to KILL the Doctor's WIFE, his best and oldest friend, to get her way regardless of the consequences, unaware of what was truly going on.

Worse, she does it TWICE! Once in The Parting of Ways and AGAIN in Turn Left. Both situations were seemingly "dire", but in one case she was just in the wrong reality. In both cases there could've been a more clever solution we were robbed of by bad writing and shoe-horning. Though, Turn Left did make a bit more sense, she still also showed a complete disregard for Donna Noble forcing the poor woman to commit suicide...

All just to get her way.

Yes, her way was to prevent the destruction of the universe, but I'm not the kind of person who believes the ends always justify the means.

Rose Tyler's means usually involve destroying something or someone to get her way. She doesn't care.

Heck, Mickey ends up giving up on her because waiting for her to see him and the way he's been there all along was too painful and too useless because she never saw him as more than "Mickey the Idiot".

Then she starts firing a "dimension cannon" until it lets her through to other dimensions despite knowing that if she were to breakthrough to the reality where the Doctor is, she could destroy everything. Let's not discuss the name "dimension cannon" just yet. Let's discuss just what she's doing and why.

The world isn't ending when she first starts firing the dimension cannon.  There is no danger for her universe or any other universe. She knows what will happen if she breaks through, but she doesn't care. She doesn't care it'll undo everything the Doctor worked for in their last battle. She doesn't care that she could be endangering people in both realities including her newly born little brother. All Rose is focused on is getting back to the Doctor.

Granted, the Doctor isn't exacly moving on, but that's because he's being written as a sentimental moron... who's lost everything. I felt his fixation on Rose was more the straw that broke the camel's back than anything else. She was the first person he connected with after he lost everything. I give him a free pass.

Rose gets no such thing.

How do we, the viewers, not know that her firing the dimension cannon is what weakened the Doctor's reality enough for Dalek Caan to get into the Time War and save Davros?

It's called a DIMENSION CANNON.

From Mirriam Webster:

¹can·non

 noun \ˈka-nən\

: a large gun that shoots heavy metal or stone balls and that was once a common military weapon

: a large automatic gun that is shot from an aircraft

Rose is firing some kind of thing that shoots some king of large projectile at the walls between dimensions.  She says that it didn't work at first, but after a while it started to work. Did it start to work because of Davros and his reality bomb? Or did her firing a dimension CANNON weaken the walls between reality gradually over time leading to Davros being able to restart the Daleks and create his reality bomb? The series wants you to look a specific way and see events a specific way, but common sense says that the other way could very well be possible too.

Despite all that, I still feel sorry for her.

Why?

Because she ends up stranded in an alternate reality, not with the Doctor she knows and loves like she wanted, but with his human clone. His human clone with memories, mannerisms, and other things quite similar to Donna Noble. Yes, he has all the Doctor's thoughts and memories too, but he's still essentially a different being. I don't think they're going to last long as a couple, and if they do, it'll be because they're all the other knows and is comfortable with at that point.

So why do I hate Rose Tyler?

Because at least Ace let her destructive side fly without making it look like she was doing the right thing. Ace liked to blow stuff up and destroy things and she usually did it because the Doctor asked her to. Rose never listened to the Doctor when it counted, she hid her destructive nature behind sad eyes and "love", and she treated everyone else in her life like cannon fodder. That's not a good companion, that's... I don't even know what that is.

I hope I never have to find out, thank you!