Adelaide Brooke

Captain Adelaide Brooke, Ph.D (12 May 1999 - 21 November 2059) was briefly a companion of the Tenth Doctor. During the Daleks' attempt to destroy reality, she ended up being orphaned when both of her parents never returned home. She was raised by her grandmother afterwards and, as the years passed, eventually became a mother and grandmother herself. She was commander of Bowie Base One on Mars in the late 2050s.

In November 2059, the base came under attack by a water-based entity called the Flood. This provoked her to give up her life to prevent the viral lifeforms from infecting humanity. It gave her granddaughter Susie Fontana Brooke the desire to be a pioneer of space travel. However, the Doctor interfered with Brooke's fate, and she took matters into her own hands to make sure critical events of time would not be cancelled out, through suicide. She was hailed as a hero in the new timeline, still inspiring her granddaughter to continue the Brooke tradition to go into space.

Early life and career
Adelaide was born in Finchley, North London on 12 May 1999. She was a child during the Daleks' abduction and invasion of Earth in 2009. Her father told her to stay in the house while he searched for her mother. Neither of her parents were ever seen again. The young Adelaide was spotted by a Dalek, but it deliberately spared her. The event inspired Adelaide to go into space. The Doctor believed the Dalek recognised her as a fixed point in history, (TV: The Waters of Mars) with the Time Lords believing she was spared by the Dalek because it thought, if she were killed before the reality bomb was activated, it could impact their ongoing invasion. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

She studied at Cambridge University, and achieved a first honours degree in combined Physics and Mathematics. She transferred to Rice University in 2017, where she earned her doctorate in Physics. After Rice, she worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Brooke became the first NASA candidate selected who was not a United States citizen. After an intensive, two-year training programme, she served on shuttle missions.

Despite her youth and inexperience at NASA, she was selected to head up Project Pit Stop, which used the Moon as a re-fuelling base for planetary exploration. This was highly successful; exploratory, unmanned shuttles were dispatched to Neptune and Jupiter via the moon. The data they obtained greatly increased humanity's knowledge of these planets.

According to her obituary, at the age of forty-two, she was a member of a three-person mission to Mars. She was the first woman to land there. Afterwards, she campaigned to have Mars chosen as a location for colonisation. However, the Tenth Doctor claimed the nine people on the Bowie Base One colony in 2058 was made up of the "very first humans on Mars", including Adelaide. In 2058, when Adelaide was now a grandmother, she led an international team to Mars, the first human colony on the planet. She found fame on Earth as a result.

Colony on Mars and meeting the Doctor
In 2059, after seventeen months of success, her crew members Andy Stone and Tarak Ital were taken over by the Flood, a viral life form. She tried to contain the infection, which failed after the Flood infected three more members of her crew and after realising containing the Flood was impossible, she ordered evacuation. Adelaide was suspicious of the newly arrived Doctor's actions and comments. She forced him to tell her the truth: Bowie Base One was going to be destroyed and the crew killed. This was a fixed point in time - he could not save her.

Though she struggled to save the colonists, when the Doctor returned to help, she resigned herself to her fate and set the base's self-destruct timer. He defiantly used the base’s robot to summon his TARDIS and saved Mia Bennett, Yuri Kerenski and her, returning them to Earth in front of Adelaide's house. She realised her survival would alter her granddaughter's life and potentially human history, leading to her growing angry with the Doctor when he dismissed the problem and referred to her fellow survivors as "little people", telling him his self-proclaimed title of Time Lord Victorious was wrong.

He dismissed her concerns and she walked into her house. (TV: The Waters of Mars) The TARDIS noticed her looking back at the Doctor with a sad smile, a look she recognised as one she’d worn when leaving battlefields and wastelands. (PROSE: What the TARDIS thought of “Time Lord Victorious”) Adelaide took her own life to preserve the timeline, with her suicide causing the Doctor to realise the seriousness of his actions, quickly coming to regret them. (TV: The Waters of Mars)

Legacy
According to the Doctor, Brooke's granddaughter, Susie Fontana Brooke, was inspired by her memory. She went into space and piloted the first lightspeed ship to Proxima Centauri. Her descendants led humanity throughout space, including to the Dragon Star, the Celestial Belt of the Winter Queen, and the Map of the Watersnake Wormholes. One of them fell in love with a Tandonian prince and created a new species.

Though the Doctor saved three people from Bowie Base One, Adelaide's suicide ensured that the timeline was not altered significantly. Her death was the fixed point in time. The only evident change was that history now recorded that she died on Earth rather than on Mars, and that she had committed suicide under "unexplained circumstances". Mia and Yuri told the world the story of Bowie Base One and hailed her as a hero. This, not the mystery of her death on Mars, was what inspired her granddaughter. (TV: The Waters of Mars)

Adelaide's fate weighed heavily on the Doctor. Her death and the subsequent summons from Ood Sigma compelled him to flee into the Dark Times after discovering a Time Fracture (PROSE: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead) created by Adelaide's brief survival. (PROSE: What the TARDIS thought of "Time Lord Victorious")

Adelaide Brooke was a hero to Devika Cullen, an astronaut who probed the atmosphere of Venus in the 2090s. (PROSE: Sunset Over Venus) A biography of Adelaide was written after her death. A copy was kept by Anke in the Verbier Museum of the Impossible, as its ending was constantly in flux. (PROSE: Canaries)

Personality
Adelaide Brooke was a strict and serious woman who often showed other people a cool demeanour; she reserved her warmth for her family. Though she cared about her crew, she treated them in a professional manner and demanded decorum and discipline. One of her crew noted that she only gave compliments if the situation was serious. During the attack of the Flood on Bowie Base One, she was devastated after witnessing two members of her crew, Steffi Ehrlich and Roman Groom, jerking after getting infected.

Adelaide was a selfless woman who sacrificed herself to preserve history. Though she knew the Doctor for less than a day, she quickly grew to accept that he was a time traveller, even before she travelled in the TARDIS. She was angry with the Doctor when he rescued her, Mia Bennett and Yuri Kerenski, telling him that "The Time Lord Victorious is wrong!", and was aghast that he could have changed the history of the entire human race. (TV: The Waters of Mars)

Behind the scenes

 * The details of her pre-Bowie Base career can be briefly seen in her obituary.
 * When initially sketching out the story, Davies considered as a potential actress to play the character who became Adelaide. In an early draft, the character was Russian, but this was changed when, still thinking of Mirren as a potential guest star, Davies felt it would have been too close to the character played by Mirren in the film . (REF: Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale - The Final Chapter)

Adelaide Brooke