Rose -- Commentary

Ordinary life.





We wake up with an ordinary girl doing ordinary things in her ordinary life. Rose Tyler gets up, goes to work at a shop and has lunch with her boyfriend. All ordinary things. Rose Tyler is an average girl, nothing special about her, until she meets The Doctor.



A man who has knowledge beyond the Powell Estates, beyond London, who seems unbound by the rules Rose has followed her entire life. Her encounters with The Doctor open Rose's eyes to the plastic world in which she lives.



The shop window dummies coming alive is a powerful symbol of Rose's awakening as well. She has lived a plastic life of no depth, no moving beyond the artificial boundaries of her own making. Rose doesn't really wake up and become real until she meets The Doctor.



When the plastic people have been destroyed life starts to return to normal. You can almost see Rose's life shift back towards what it was before, like the shop window dummies hardening and dying inside until Rose has to make a choice. Go with the Doctor and risk being real, or go back to her easy, shallow existence. Her life before The Doctor.



For a moment she crumples under the inertia that warns her to stay still, not to change or learn or grow. That inertia we all feel when stepping out to do something hard and new. She tells The Doctor no, and we watch her opportunity to be more, slip away.



As she begins to walk back to her life in the Powell Estates, he comes back, and gives her another opportunity. This time, Rose throws everything that hindered her, aside, and runs full force towards her new life.