Billie Piper Says She Hated One Part Of Her Doctor Who Exit

Billie Piper’s exit as Rose Tyler in season 2 is one of Doctor Who‘s most iconic and moving moments, as the Doctor and his companion are forced apart when the walls between universes close, separating them in two different worlds. It was a tragic end to their love story. Well, it was until Piper returned in season 4.

At that point, it was established that the breaking down of the multiverse, as caused by Davros and the Daleks’ Reality Bomb, weakened the barriers between worlds, allowing Rose to come back and find the Doctor. However, when the villains were defeated and reality was saved, Rose went back to the other universe. Over the course of the story, though, a duplicate Doctor had been created who had a human lifespan and the last time we saw Rose she was locking lips with this alt-Doctor.

The writers attempted to give Rose a happy ending, but fans have often had a problem with it, as this other Doc might look like David Tennant, but he’s not really the same Time Lord, is he? It turns out that Piper herself has this same grievance with the ending. When speaking with Doctor Who Magazine, the actress even went so far as to say she “hated” it.

“I hated that! In the same way that when I watched Beauty and the Beast – the Disney cartoon – I hated it when the Beast turned into the man, I always wanted [the Doctor] to be the beast, and her be in love with the beast. I feel like this is the same sort of loss! Like, it’s kind of a good thing, but it’s not the same. He seemed like a lesser version, didn’t he?”

Fans have often wondered what Rose and the duplicate Doctor’s life together was like and as it turns out, Piper would like to see that, too, so long as it was a kind of “dark comedy” about their domestic relationship.

“I would like to see a one-off dark comedy about Rose and the Doctor in the parallel universe. But instead of it being really sci-fi, it can have an element of sci fi but it’s very much about their romantic relationship and what’s happened to them in the time since we’ve left them. Just them cohabiting; their normal environment.”

Of course, Billie Piper is returning to voice Rose on audio in the new boxset Rose Tyler: The Dimension Cannon from Big Finish, which follows Rose’s attempts to find the Doctor prior to season 4 as she hops across universes. Feel free to pre-order that now before its release next month. Doctor Who returns to TV, meanwhile, in early 2020.