Adelaide Brooke was the secondary protagonist of the 2009 Doctor Who special "The Waters of Mars". She led humanity's first manned mission to Mars in 2058 which ended in tragedy in 2059 when she and her entire crew died. The circumstances behind the mission's destructive end would go unknown to the public back on Earth, but Adelaide and her crew would all be remembered as heroes and their sacrifice would inspire further exploration of space by mankind. This important moment in human history is threatened with the sudden arrival of the Doctor on Mars on the day of the disaster.
Adelaide was portrayed by Lindsay Duncan.
History[]
Early life[]
Adelaide was born in Finchley, North London on 12 May 1999. She was a child during the Daleks' abduction and invasion of Earth in 2009 (in the episodes "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End"). Her father told her to stay in the house while he searched for her mother. Neither of her parents were ever seen again. The young Adelaide was spotted by a Dalek, but it deliberately spared her. The event inspired Adelaide to go into space. The Doctor believed the Dalek recognised her as a fixed point in history.
Life as an astronaut[]
Adelaide studied at Cambridge University, and achieved a first honours degree in combined Physics and Mathematics. She transferred to Rice University in 2017, where she earned her doctorate in Physics. After Rice, she worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Brooke became the first NASA candidate selected who was not a United States citizen. After an intensive, two-year training programme, she served on shuttle missions.
Despite her youth and inexperience at NASA, she was selected to head up Project Pit Stop, which used the Moon as a re-fuelling base for planetary exploration. This was highly successful; exploratory, unmanned shuttles were dispatched to Neptune and Jupiter via the moon. The data they obtained increased greatly humanity's knowledge of these planets.
At the age of forty-two (presumably in 2041), she was a member of a three-person mission to Mars. She was the first woman to land there. Afterwards, she campaigned to have Mars chosen as a location for colonisation. In 2058, when Adelaide was now a grandmother, she led an international team to Mars, the first human colony on the planet. She found fame on Earth as a result.
Bowie Base One[]
On November 21st 2059, Adelaide and the crew of Bowie Base One were stunned by the arrival of the Doctor. Minutes after the Doctor appeared in the colony, disaster struck. An ancient Martian virus known as the Flood, which had been laying dormant in an underground glacier for millions of years, began infecting the colonists through their water supply. Adelaide pressed the Doctor for answers as he clearly knew something about what was happening, and the Time Lord sorrowfully explained that the destruction of the base and the deaths of the entire crew were a fixed point in history that he could not interfere with.
Adelaide and her crewmates struggled frantically to contain the Flood, but to no avail. Their attempts to escape the colony also proved futile as Edward Gold destroyed the shuttle to prevent the Flood from travelling to Earth. History was playing out as it should be until the Doctor, frustrated at having to leave these people to their fate, came to the conclusion that as the last of the Time Lords, the laws of time were his to rewrite if he so chose. Refusing to let everybody die, the Doctor brought the TARDIS into the base and saved Adelaide and the two remaining uninfected colonists, Mia Bennett and Yuri Kerenski.
Death[]
The Doctor returned Adelaide, Mia and Yuri to Earth alive and well, though Adelaide was less than grateful. Realising that the Doctor was a time-traveller after everything he told her about the Mars disaster being a fixed event, she scolded the Doctor about his brazen disregard for upsetting the course of history. The Doctor dismissed Adelaide and even went so far as to refer to Mia and Yuri as "little people" in the grand scheme of things, which angered Adelaide further.
Having been returned to her home in London, Adelaide went inside, un-holstering her gun as she did so. Off-screen, she turned the gun on herself and fired, thus ensuring that history would still play out as it was meant to. Though the Doctor saved three people from Bowie Base One, Adelaide's suicide ensured that the timeline was not altered significantly. Her death was the fixed point in time. The only evident change was that history now recorded that she died on Earth rather than on Mars, and that she had committed suicide under "unexplained circumstances". Mia and Yuri told the world the story of Bowie Base One and hailed her as a hero. This, not the mystery of her death on Mars, was what inspired her granddaughter Sophie to take up space exploration, leading mankind in their journey across the stars.