Billie Piper’s Doctor Who audio spinoff will finally give Rose Tyler some solo adventures

Billie Piper will reprise her Doctor Who role for a series of audio adventures that let former companion Rose Tyler take center stage.

Fan favorite Billie Piper is headed back to the world of Doctor Who once more, but not the way you might think.

No, Rose Tyler won’t be running into Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor any time soon. (SIGH.) But she will be starring in her own new series of Big Finish audio adventures next year, focusing on Rose’s time in an alternate dimension following the heartbreaking and generally ugly cry-inducing events of season 2 finale “Doomsday”.

Called Rose Tyler: Dimension Canon, the four-episode audio series will follow Rose on a journey across the multiverse as she searches for a way to get back to the Doctor and figure out why all of reality is collapsing around her.

This isn’t the first time that Piper has reprised her role as Rose for Big Finish — she reunited with David Tennant last year for a series of adventures that were set during season 2. It is, however, the first time that Piper will be headlining her own series, whether in visual or audio form.

(And it’s about time, if you ask me.)

The really neat trick of Dimension Canon is that it’s set during a significant gap within Doctor Who canon. After the tragic events of “Doomsday”, Rose was ostensibly trapped in a parallel universe forever. Yet, she somehow managed to mysteriously pop back up onscreen at several key points in season 4, before finally reuniting with the Tenth Doctor in “The Stolen Earth.” The show never really bothered to explain Rose’s sudden dimension-hopping ways, nor did it tell us much about what had happened to her in the two seasons’ worth of intervening time on her second Earth.

Well, it looks like we’re finally going to find out what that was all about.

And since these stories will be set after “Doomsday,” but before Rose acquires her own meta-crisis version of the Doctor to live happily ever after with, we’ll get to see the first companion of modern Doctor Who all on her own.

For once, Rose gets to be the undisputed hero of her own story, something we never got to see much during her time on the show. This isn’t saying that her partnership with the Doctor was bad or belittling — not by any stretch. They were an amazing team together. But they were so very clearly a package deal, that we didn’t often get to see Rose stepping up on her own in significant ways, and she certainly didn’t get to headline her own adventures solo. These stories should definitely change that by explaining how Rose channeled her initial devastation at the end “Doomsday” into a trip through the multiverse to save all of existence.

Talk about a glow up!

“I love how normal Rose is, and yet really extraordinary,” Piper said in a statement. “She lived a normal average life but she is incredibly curious and has an enormous capacity for love and empathy and is really spirited. She is extraordinary.”

In all honesty, this aggressive normalcy is part of the reason that Rose Tyler has been a fan favorite since her introduction in 2005. And it’s why her character is uniquely positioned to tell the stories this series is poised to tackle.

Unlike most Doctor Who or Who-adjacent stories, Rose Tyler: Dimension Canon apparently won’t include monsters, alien threats or villains to fight. Instead, it will focus primarily on Rose, her family — Camille Coduri and Shaun Dingwall both reprise their roles as Rose’s parents — and the other human characters she meets along the way. And who better to navigate these stories of regular people than one of the most everyday companions the modern series has ever seen?

There’s honestly quite a bit of potential here: From the everyday stories of strangers living in the universes that Rose finds herself in along the way, there’s also the potential that she could run into a parallel version of a character we already know. (And we do know this will happen at least once, since Mark Benton will be playing an alternate version of the alien hunter Clive that Rose met in her very first episode.)

Plus, the Rose we see again in season 4 is markedly different from the character we said goodbye to in Bad Wolf Bay. How did she grow into such a respected leader in “Pete’s World”? What happened to her there? (She does mention at one point that she worked for Torchwood, a fact which is certainly enough story for several episodes by itself.) It should be intriguing to find out.

The four episodes of Rose Tyler: Dimension Cannon will be called “The Endless Night,” “The Flood,” “Ghost Machines” and “The Last Party on Earth”. The set will go on sale in September 2019, but is available for pre-order right now.