Jackie Tyler
Jackie Tyler is a fictional character played by Camille Coduri in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. The character, a resident of contemporary London, is introduced in the first episode of the 2005 revival as the mother of Rose Tyler, a travelling companion of the alien time traveller the Doctor. Jackie is a recurring character during Series 1 and 2 and later makes guest appearances in Series 4 and the 2010 New Year’s special, The End of Time. The character has also appeared in expanded universe material such as the Doctor Who New Series Adventures novels and the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip.
Within the series narrative, Jackie is a widow who lives alone with her daughter Rose until Rose leaves her mundane life behind to travel through time and space with the Doctor. Jackie's feeling of loss and of being left behind is explored in subsequent episodes. As the character is brought into danger by her proximity to the Doctor, she resents his influence over Rose. However, once he undergoes a regeneration, effectively becoming a new man, Jackie realises how much he cares for Rose and begins to have a more cordial relationship with him. The character was written out at the end of the 2006 series, along with Rose, in a storyline which sees them trapped in a parallel universe where Jackie forms a new relationship with an alternate version of her deceased husband Pete Tyler. She later returns in the finale of the fourth series in order to help the Doctor.
In reviving the television series after a sixteen-year hiatus, executive producer Russell T Davies was keen to provide a believable background for the Doctor's companion and a context for her travels to the past and future. The character of Jackie was created, along with Rose's on/off boyfriend Mickey, to keep the series grounded in reality. In writing Jackie, Davies incorporated both comic and tragic elements. Following the departure of the Tyler family, Davies was keen to bring Jackie back alongside Rose for future appearances. Reviewers generally reacted positively to the development of the character, though some identified unlikeable traits.
Appearances
Television
Jackie is introduced in "Rose" as the late-thirties single mother of the episode's eponymous character, Rose Tyler. After the Ninth Doctor arrives at Jackie's flat in search of Rose, Jackie attempts to seduce him. She is later attacked by shop window dummies but is saved when Rose and the Doctor destroy the alien consciousness able to control plastic. When Rose returns to London, twelve months have passed; in the intervening year Jackie had organised a missing person campaign to search for her daughter and accused Rose's boyfriend Mickey Smith of murder. She also suspects the Doctor of being an internet predator. She learns the truth about Rose's new life after battling the Slitheen and being present with Mickey as he organises a missile strike to destroy the aliens. The episode "Father's Day" depicts two younger versions of Jackie also played by Coduri. It is shown that whilst Rose was a child Jackie told her idyllic stories of her deceased father, Pete. Rose attends her parents' marriage, in which Pete is unable to recite Jackie's full name, Jacqueline Andrea Suzette Prentice, and after then travelling ahead to 1987, learns that her father was a failed entrepreneur and that her parents' marriage had been stormy; Jackie suspects Pete is an adulterer and also threatens him with divorce. In the 2005 series finale, "The Parting of the Ways", Jackie is glad to have Rose home after the Doctor returns her to the 21st century from the far future in order to protect her. She is persuaded to help return Rose to save the Doctor after Rose mentions her encounter with her father, reminding Jackie that he would try anything rather than give up.In the 2005 Christmas day episode "The Christmas Invasion" Jackie is bewildered by the Doctor's new incarnation and concerned about the side-effects of his regeneration. When he recovers, Jackie is happy for Rose to resume travelling with him. In "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel" Coduri plays a parallel universe Jackie, who is rich and famous because of the parallel Pete Tyler's success. This version of Jackie is intent on maintaining a facade; she hides the fact her marriage is deteriorating, denies turning forty and chastises Rose for speaking to her whilst posing as staff. Rose and the parallel universe Pete try to save her when the Cybermen invade, but she is killed during the attack. In "Love & Monsters", Jackie expresses how hard and lonely it has been to be left behind by her daughter. After learning a romantic interest, Elton Pope, only befriended her to track Rose and the Doctor, Jackie, she throws him out of her house, stating a priority to defend the Doctor and Rose. In "Army of Ghosts" Jackie is unwillingly taken in the TARDIS, the Doctor's time machine, to the Torchwood Institute where he brings her on an investigation. In "Doomsday", due to invading Cybermen from the parallel universe, the walls between universes break down and Jackie meets the parallel universe version of Pete. The defeat of warring Cybermen and Dalek armies results in Jackie being sent to the parallel universe, where Rose is also later trapped. In the epilogue it is mentioned that Jackie is in a relationship with Pete and expecting a baby.
In the series four finale episode "Journey's End", Jackie returns to her original earth with Mickey in order to find Rose, who has travelled back to stop the Daleks destroying reality. Comfortable carrying a large gun, Jackie blows up a Dalek to save former companion Sarah Jane Smith. After a half-human genetic clone of the Doctor wipes out the Daleks, Jackie returns to the parallel universe with Rose, who is tasked with healing the new Doctor. It is revealed that Jackie and Pete now have a young son named Tony. Jackie cameos in David Tennant's final story, "The End of Time" when the dying Tenth Doctor visits the Powell estate on New Year's Day 2005 to bid a final farewell to Rose, telling her she will have a really great year..
Literature
Jackie appears in several of the Ninth and Tenth Doctor New Series Adventures novels. In Winner Takes All by Jacqueline Rayner, published in May 2005, Jackie falls for a scheme to take humans "on holiday" to fight in an alien war. A thug who lives in Rose's estate mugs Jackie and takes the "winning ticket" that qualifies her for the trip. Jackie ends up in hospital, but her assailant fares worse: he takes her place as a remote-controlled soldier on an alien planet, and is killed. Jackie makes cameo appearances in Only Human by Gareth Roberts and The Stealers of Dreams by Steve Lyons published in September 2005. In Only Human, a time-lost Neanderthal flirts with Jackie at a London nightclub before Captain Jack Harkness steers him away from her, feeling that Jackie would not appreciate further Doctor-related strangeness in her life. In The Stealers of Dreams, Rose uses the "superphone" to call Jackie from a human colony world in the future. Jackie complains that Rose did not let her know she was going to be in Cardiff during her recent visit to that city. Jackie appears in the introductory section of The Stone Rose, released in April 2006, in which she and Mickey alert the Doctor and Rose to a strange statue of Rose in the British Museum. Released the same month, The Feast of the Drowned by Stephen Cole, is set wholly on contemporary earth and explores the context of Jackie's relationship with Rose further. When Rose is captured by the malevolent "waterhive", Jackie is targeted by ghostly apparitions seeking to lure her to the same fate.Jackie also appears in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip "The Green-Eyed Monster" in which she and the Tenth Doctor feign a romantic relationship in order to free Rose from possession by a creature that feeds on jealousy.
Audio drama
Following the folding of AudioGO and Big Finish's acquisition of the new series license, Billie Piper and David Tennant reprised their roles as Rose Tyler and the Tenth Doctor in Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor Adventures. Coduri reprised her role as Jackie in the story titled Infamy of the Zaross, released in November 2017, where she calls the Doctor and Rose for help when an alien invasion strikes Norwich while Jackie is visiting friends. During this encounter Jackie is teleported up to an alien ship, and overhears crucial information about the Zaross's masters that reveal their true nature. Cordui narrated two short trips titled The Siege of Big Ben and Flight into Hull which depict Jackie working with the Meta-Crisis Doctor; Siege shows Jackie doubting the Meta-Crisis Doctor after he lies to a woman who wanted to use time travel to save her dead husband, and Flight depicts the Meta-Crisis Doctor and Jackie facing another alternate version of Jackie trying to escape her dying world. Coduri featured in the Ninth Doctor Chronicles alongside Piper and Adam Mitchell, where she is manipulated into helping sell a new fad that turns out to be a tool of an alien invasion. She also returns in Rose Tyler – The Dimension Canon, where she plays both the "prime" Jackie Tyler now living in Pete's World and two alternate versions of herself, including a world where she and Pete were never married and a world where Pete created a technology that is powered by the life energies of the deceased.Development
Casting and concept
In creating Rose as a new companion for the 2005 revival of Doctor Who executive producer and lead writer Russell T Davies felt that it would be necessary to examine the questions of "do her family miss her?" and "has she gone missing?" which he believed to be unavoidable questions. Davies created Jackie and Mickey and provided a story structure that would see Rose return frequently to them in order to make her "real" and to "give her a life". In Davies' original pitch for the series, Jackie was initially named Judy Tyler. The roles of Jackie and Mickey were cast alongside other guest characters for the 2005 series' first production block including Joseph Green and Indra Ganesh from "Aliens of London" and "World War Three". Camille Coduri was suggested to casting director Andy Pryor and the other members of the production team by executive producer Mal Young. Both producer Phil Collinson and executive producer Julie Gardner felt that Coduri and Billie Piper physically resembled each other and this aided the portrayal of their mother/daughter relationship. Discussing Coduri's casting, Collinson stated that she "understood what Jackie was, from the very first scene she read". Coduri was already "very familiar" with Davies' work as writer and executive producer and so "was very excited and quite terrified" about being part of the series because of her level of respect for him.Coduri felt Jackie to share similarities with herself, insofar as she is "very protective of children" and a "bit gobby". The Doctor Who Annual 2006, published in August 2005, gives further background information on Jackie in an article written by Russell T Davies. Davies states that Jackie supports herself financially by working occasionally from home as a hairdresser. In the Journal of Commonwealth Literature Lindy A. Orthia observes that the "giro-collecting" Jackie is part of the group of companions introduced in Davies' era of Doctor Who that are "drawn from a cosmopolitan vision" in that they are all "black, queer and/or working class." Orthia contends that whilst working-class companions had featured previously in the show "none were unskilled workers nor chronically under- or unemployed like Rose, Donna and Jackie."