There was at least some engagement on my last post about this so I decided I will in fact post a follow up. GitF was 100% a bad faith episode. Moffat wrote it because he is classist and misogynistic and hates Rose. Unfortunately, part of his purpose for the episode was to show that the Doctor will always prefer a “classy” aristocrat over Rose and he wanted to have her treated as nothing. So, all of us Rose fans have to come up with a headcanon that undermines the writer’s intentions.
I think the most common one is to believe the episode was the Doctor’s attempts to push Rose away because of her mortality and how that scares him.
That never worked for me because a major part of the Doctor’s character is his protectiveness. He would never push her away to the point of danger or abandonment. For me, I feel that fictional or not, the actions of the Doctor in that episode would be entirely unforgivable if they did happen. So my headcanon is that this episode was a nightmare Rose had.
If you are like me are also one of the fans for whom the pushing her away theory doesn’t work, read on for my explanation of why I don’t think GitF could be an actual event within canon. Moffat may be a BBC writer but it doesn’t give him a right to completely undermine the show, it doesn’t actually belong to anyone outside of financial concerns. If you’re content with believing he needed to push Rose away and that the episode did happen, you can ignore this.
Why the events GitF did not happen within canon (but could’ve happened as a nightmare)
1. Doctor Who canon is very loose as it is. With multiple writers across multiple mediums, things do contradict each other and us as fans get to decide for ourselves what fits with canon and what does not.
2. The Doctor has been clearly shown to be in love with Rose. He is protective of her to the point that if a decision will kill everyone else but give her even a slight chance of survival, he can’t actually make that decision. He almost did in Dalek, but after she didn’t get through the barricade the first time he was incapable of significantly reducing her safety for the good of everyone else. He snapped awake from a regeneration coma just because Rose said “help me”. He freaked out when Cassandra had her body and again in Tooth and Claw when she was in trouble. If you count Stone Rose that almost certainly took place before GitF and he once again, lost his mind over Rose being a statue.
I do understand seeing Sarah Jane age freaked him out. And I could’ve understood him distancing himself from Rose a bit in some way. But his instinct to protect her is so strong he’d never sacrifice her safety to push her away. Leaving her alone with clockwork for an extended period of time while he partied and invented drinks is impossible enough. Let alone the way he believed he’d have no way back to the ship when he went through the time window for the last time. Not only had he just promised she could spend the rest of her life with him, but her and Mickey would’ve likely died alone on that abandoned spaceship.
Simply, it’s just too out of character to happen within the rest of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors’ canon.
3. The horse. I have been a big horse person my entire life. Horses have extremely strong flight instincts. Even the most trusting and well trained horse in the world is never going to jump through reinforced glass. I do realize as Sci Fi fans we have to suspend disbelief for a lot of things. But we are never given an explanation as to why this horse would behave so dramatically differently from another horse. Every bizarre thing we accept in the DW universe is explained to some extent. There is a book where the Doctor tames a horse with psychic paper. But that horse is never asked to violate its instincts. That horse behaves as any other tame horse behaves. That is an example of acceptable DW suspension of belief. There is still a sci fi/alien technical explanation and I can absorb it. I cannot absorb a horse jumping through a firm glass window unless they were running from something even scarier. No matter how well trained a horse is, it’s not jumping through glass just because a humanoid asked them to. Nothing was chasing Arthur and his body language did not suggest any kind of fear to indicate he was running from something even scarier. All the droids were already in the other side of the window as well. It’s simply bizarre and impossible, even in a sci fi snow. Within this very show the Doctor states you can’t hypnotize someone beyond their survival instincts. I believe this applies to horses and a horse’s instincts is to avoid jumping through or into a reinforced barrier.
Next, we are given no explanation as to how this horse jumped through glass unscathed. Glass that was said to be so strong only a truck could break through. Horses are also extremely delicate and many have fatally injured themselves just playing in the paddock. Even for injuries not that extreme, every horse person knows that even small things result in giant vet bills.
Finally, it is once again grossly out of character for the Doctor to take a living animal and make them do something he previously calculated would required a truck.
4. Things are back to normal as if the episode never happened by the Rise of the Cybermen. If the Doctor had really developed feelings for another woman so strong that he would leave Rose for dead, then lost her, would he just be back to being the same old Doctor the very next episode? I doubt it. The Doctor is also a character known for holding on to guilt. Even if Reinette was mechanism to push Rose away, the way he abandoned her would’ve caused enough guilt he wouldn’t just be normal the very next episode. The show carries on as if Reinette never happened because Reinette never happened.
The only reference to that GitF is some clockwork droids in John Smith’s journal. Which could be explained by another encounter with the droids or by the Doctor looking at Rose’s mind to see the nightmare. Which would be an intimate enough moment to imprint on John Smith’s subconscious. The words “a girl in every fireplace” can once again refer to the Doctor seeing Rose’s nightmare or another off screen adventure entirely. There is no reference strong enough to confirm the actual events of GitF ever happened. The show functions exactly the same way without it. Because, it never happened.
5. The events of the show make perfect sense as a nightmare in Rose’s head. Take it from someone with a degree in psychology. Rose has abandonment wounds from Jimmy Stone. She also has abandonment wounds from her father dying when she was too young to understand it. School Reunion, the episode right before GitF triggers her abandonment wounds by making her see the Doctor has previously left companions and did not come back for them. It also makes her wonder if she is special to the Doctor. These doubts combined with her past trauma are a perfect recipe for her to have a bizarre nightmare where she gets abandoned in the most horrific way after the events of School Reunion.
I will leave you all with my fic where this was all a nightmare. Or you can write your own if you prefer. My point is that for those who feel the way I do about this episode, we do not have to accept the events as canon. We do not have to believe the Doctor has ever treated Rose this way except in her worst nightmares.
Update to address Deep Breath:
1. Doctor mentioned seeing clockwork droids before, but we know that the Doctor has many off screen adventures. He could’ve encountered the droids at any other point in his entire life besides GitF.
2. As for that episode stating the SS Madame De Pompadour existed, that still doesn’t confirm anything. There was a real life ship called the USS Queen of France. This was named for Marie Antoinette. Jackie dated a sailor once and Rose had a friend named Keisha whose brother was a sailor. This means Rose could’ve heard one of them discussing historical naval ships. This how she would imagine a ship named after Madame de Pompadour in the first place. She and the people who built the SS Madame de Pompadour and SS Marie Antoinette would’ve simply drawn inspiration from the same place. Also, there’s the fact that someone named a fictional ship Titan many years before Titanic ever existed.
Update 2: Rose was going to get an A level in French if she hadn’t run off with Jimmy. So she could’ve reasonably been familiar with some aspects of French history and able to imagine all of these things in a dream, even if it wasn’t a historically accurate dream, everyone knows weird things happen in dreams.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
gained a fictive from SPN's apocalypse world, he's lived through things even worse than what canon depicts, and is a nearly 50 year old man. you'd think he would have a lot of big feelings and exotrauma he has to deal with. yet he only wants to make me, the current host, eat dry cereal, and flip me off when i ask why.
This is a very old video that I'm sure pretty much everyone has seen by now. It was made viral when posted by 'the Dodo' (which is a PETA creation and posts a lot of misinfo, often showing stressed animals and trying to pose it as cute or "just like a human")
Basically the video is a compilation of a horse with tack on laying down. So this handler seems to be cueing the horse to lay down, most likely by pulling one rein. The horse isn't laying down on his own will,he was trained to and based on how the handler asks, probably not in a very kind and low stress way. Laying horses down is often done by tying a horse's leg up amd twisting their neck until they lose balance and fall down. Even if this was a genuine thing where the horse goes down to get out of work, that would mean riding is incredibly stressful so no matter how you cut it....
Nobody asked me, but I’m telling you anyway: it takes a long time to fully train a horse.
In fiction, written and on-screen, I often see depictions of a horse that’s wild or at least unstarted one day, then it’s the best horse on the ranch/cavalry/space ship the next.
Just—no.
Even when a gifted horse trainer and a willing horse are involved, the process of teaching a horse to be a reliable mount in a variety of conditions and environments takes many months, and that’s assuming the training sessions are frequent and intensive. I’ve heard professional horse trainers say that it takes about two years of full-time training to “finish” a horse in some disciplines, and in others, the expectation that the horse would be a top performer doesn’t come until the horse has been under saddle and ridden regularly for several years.
If your story needs a horse transformation, you could make it a trained horse with dangerous habits—maybe she’s thrown everyone who’s tried to ride her for a year, or maybe he’s anxious and bolts. Horses with these kinds of “vices” sometimes blossom relatively quickly with an empathetic, experienced rider who knows how to restore their trust and confidence.
After touching the electric fence while trying to bite his neighbor.
My phone died immediately after this video so I couldn't record him rearing in place like a maniac in between pawing. Before this video he already ran the entire pasture twice, then came back and stood there like this haha
In other words, my horse is a drama queen.
The way his brain just short-circuits is hilarious
