A Romantic Reminder?
But the Doctor doesn’t just leave it at that. Before the Doctor takes off, he gives an identical dose from the Mire Helmet to Ashildr, to give it to whoever she chooses. Clara later wonders why:
CLARA: If the repair kit never stops working, then… why did you give her two?
DOCTOR: Immortality isn’t living forever, that’s not what it feels like. Immortality is everybody else dying. She might meet someone she can’t bear to lose. That happens… I believe.
Some may argue he’s talking of River Song, but I don’t buy that in the slightest. They never even really traveled together (and they aren’t even married if I might add which was confirmed by Moffat). No, the one he wanted to travel with forever (even though he couldn’t) was Rose. Just consider the dialogue from “School Reunion:”
ROSE: How many of us have there been traveling with you?
DOCTOR: Does it matter?
ROSE: Yeah, it does, if I’m just the latest in a long line.
DOCTOR: As opposed to what?
ROSE: I thought you and me were… I obviously got it wrong. I’ve been to the year five billion, right, but this? Now this is really seeing the future. You just leave us behind. Is that what you’re going to do to me?
DOCTOR: No. Not to you.
ROSE: But Sarah Jane? You were that close to her once, and now you never even mention her. Why not?
DOCTOR: I don’t age. I regenerate. But humans decay. You wither and you die. Imagine watching that happen to someone who you…[almost saying love, a theme that continues as far as “Journey’s End”]
ROSE: What, Doctor?
DOCTOR: You can spend the rest of your life with me, but I can’t spend the rest of mine with you. I have to live on. Alone. That’s the curse of the Time Lords.
The curse of the Time Lords is what Ashildr reminded him of – all that loneliness of losing past companions like Rose, Martha, Donna, Sarah Jane, Amy, and one day Clara. He just didn’t want to lose anymore. It’s a similar reaction he had in “The Water of Mars” after losing both Rose and Donna, his love, and his best friend.
When he chose to change a fixed moment with Adelaide, the Doctor recalls saying goodbye to Rose on Bad Wolf Bay and the walls of realities being closed. He, just like the Doctor now, didn’t want to lose people.
The Doctor, always running, and never wanting to lose the people he cares about most. It’s a curse that continues from one Doctor to the next.
Earlier in the episode (as already mentioned), the Doctor even confessed to Clara the pain of losing her one day, which also supports my belief that his thoughts about immortality at the end were not referencing Clara. He told her he would one day leave her, the exact opposite of what he told Rose.
With Rose, it was different. He fell in love. She wanted to be with him “forever,” (not unlike Donna in a platonic way). He wanted to be with Rose too, but he couldn’t (no Mire technology around then). And while brooding (as he loves to do) over the words of Davros, the Doctor gave Rose a version of himself that could grow old with her. He acted at the moment, but it’s a moment he can’t take back, or so we are meant to assume considering the walls of reality should soon be open when the Time Lords return; if they aren’t opening already.
So, what would the Doctor have done, if like Ashildr and the immortal dose he gave her if he could have shared immortality with someone he loved? Would he then have been able to tell Rose (out loud) he loved her? Would the curse of the Time Lords finally have been broken? Or would this just have been a different dark choice with consequences? Just because the Doctor wants something doesn’t mean he should be able to get it. Certainly, moments in this episode gave us questions to truly ponder.
I like to believe that if given the chance, the Doctor and Rose really would have been forever. And I don’t care what anyone has to say about that…
Although (pardon the tangent), could the Moment in the 50th-anniversary special be a future version of Bad Wolf? She certainly wasn’t dressed like Bad Wolf, even though the “Moment” had taken on her appearance. Not to mention, the ring on her finger. In a previous theory, I argued that the Moment was, in fact, Bad Wolf taking on the future appearance of Rose Tyler in a war-torn parallel universe. But what if she was literally a new version of Bad Wolf? Could Rose once again look inside the Tardis (perhaps even the new Tardis she and the Human Doctor grow in the parallel universe) and become a new version of Bad Wolf? Only this time she’d have the Mire technology constantly repairing her, which would not only make her immortal, but rather an immortal with a power similar to that of the Time Lords. A new hybrid.
Plus, going back, once again to the Moment, the Zygons, Tom Baker (The Curator I believe to be a future Doctor revisiting an old face), the shushing from all three as if working to keep a secret, and familiar faces – could Bad Wolf and the Doctor be colluding to arrange events to their liking? Could they be married? Well, that all seems impossible…but I do love my impossible theories!