Adelaide Brooke
Portrayed by: Lindsay DuncanTravelled with: Tenth Doctor
Appearances: The Waters of Mars (2009 Specials)
Associated with: N/A
Enemies encountered: N/A
Captain Adelaide Brooke was first seen in The Waters of Mars (2009 Special) as the head of Bowie Base One on Mars in 2059. Adelaide was born in Finchley, North London on May 12th, 1999. Ten years later, in 2009, Adelaide bore witness to the Dalek abduction and invasion of Earth during their plans of a reality bomb. Adelaide's father told her to stay inside while he went to search for her mother, but neither returned, resulting in Adelaide being brought up by her grandmother. During the invasion, a Dalek spotted Adelaide but chose not to exterminate her, which the Doctor would later put down to the Dalek recognising that she was a fixed point in time. Adelaide studied at Cambridge University, gaining a first honours degree in combing Physics and Mathematics before transferring to Rice University in 2017 where she earned her doctorate degree in Physics. After her Rice fellowship, Adelaide began working at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, before becoming the first NASA candidate chosen that was not a United States citizen. Following an intense two year training programme with NASA, Adelaide went on to serve on numerous shuttle missions. Despite her young age and inexperience within NASA, Adelaide was chosen to head the Project Pit Stop, a project to use the moon as a refuelling base for further planetary exploration. The project was successful, resulting in unmanned shuttles being dispatched to Neptune and Jupiter, with the data they obtained increasing human knowledge of those planets significantly.
In 2058, now a mother and grandmother, Adelaide led an international team to Mars as the first human colony on the planet, which found her fame on Earth as a result. In 2059, the Doctor arrived at the Bowie Base One at the same time as the Flood began to infect her crew. Though she tried to contain the infection, she soon realised it was impossible and ordered the base to be evacuated. The Doctor's actions and comments made Adelaide suspicious, especially the mentions of her granddaughter and later Brook descendants following her into space travel. Eventually, she forced the Doctor to tell her the truth, where he revealed that she was a fixed point in time and Bowie Base One was going to be destroyed and he couldn't save her. Adelaide then struggled desperately to save the colonists before the Doctor returned to help them. Before he did so, Adelaide resigned herself to her fate and set the bases' self-destruct timer, though the Doctor was then able to successfully rescue her and fellow crew members Mia Bennett and Yuri Kerenski, where they arrived outside her house on Earth. However, Adelaide realised that her survival would change the future and alter her granddaughters life and thus human history and she became angry with the Doctor, more so when he arrogantly dismissed the problem and even referred to her fellow survivors as "little people". In order to fix the time line, Adelaide went to her home and committed suicide.
Adelaide was a serious and strict woman, often showing people a cold demeanour and only really acted warmly towards her family. Though she cared about her crew, Adelaide treated them all in a professional manner and would boss them about if she felt it was necessary to do so. One of her crew did note that she only gave out compliments if the situation they were in was serious. Adelaide was also a selfless woman who sacrificed herself to prevent history from being changed too much. Although she only knew the Doctor for less than a day, she quickly adapted to him and accepted that he was a time traveller even before her trip in the TARDIS from Mars to Earth. However, Adelaide was angry with the Doctor for saving her and potentially changing human history, angrily telling that "The 'Time Lord Victorious' is wrong!" before committing suicide to prevent the history/future being changed too much.
Adelaide's legacy included her granddaughter, Susie Fontana Brooke, who would be inspired by Adelaide's memory and fly into space herself, later piloting the first lightspeed ship to Proxima Centauri, with the rest of her family following her as well. One of Adelaide's descendants would go on to fall in love with a Trandorian prince and create a new species. Mia and Yuri told the world what happened on Bowie Base One and hailed Adelaide as a hero and it was that, not the mystery of her death on Mars that inspired her granddaughter. Her new death on Earth under "unexplained circumstances" did not change the future that much.