The Girl in the Fireplace episode bugged me for a couple of reasons. I can understand the French girl getting attached to the Doctor as her “imaginary friend” who pops into her life every few years over her lifetime. But it seemed a little odd for the Doctor to get so attached to someone who, from his perspective, he only knew for a few minutes at a time over a few yours. Especially when he’s supposed to be so involved with Rose, the 25 year old “teenager” he travels around with. He also seemed a bit broken up over her death for someone with a ship that can travel anywhere in time and space.
I don’t know all the “rules” so it’s a little unclear as to when and how much he can change things. But I get the sense that going where he has already been is “bad”.
I guess it was pretty well established in the Sarah Jane episode that the Doctor is a bit of a dick when it comes to his lady companions.
Not a dick so much as not being able to get too attached. An immortal who hangs around the short-lived is going to suffer the same heartbreak as anyone who outlives a beloved pet. How much heartache can anyone take?
The Sarah Jane episode “School Reunion” gets me misty-eyed every time “You were my life!”
Bwah? (No offense meant.) Her age was mentioned several times on the show, most poignantly in “Dalek” when the Doctor thinks she’s dead: “And you took her down with you. She was nineteen years old.” Also in the trailer to “Army of Ghosts”: “For the first nineteen years of my life nothing happened, nothing at all.”
Granted Billie Piper doesn’t look nineteen, which may be why they kept putting her age in the script; but she made a decent job of acting nineteen, I thought (with help from makeup and wardrobe only a real teenager would be seen dead in a ditch with). For contrast, check out her attempt to play a sixteen-year-old in “The Ruby in the Smoke”. That she comes anywhere close to getting away with it is entirely due to Sally Lockhart’s being such an unusual sixteen-year-old.