Bad Wolf is pretty much my ideal for a season arc.
I love the pure, simple concept of Bad Wolf. I love that it’s such a keenly visual motif, and that it’s become such a recognisable meme through the fandom and far beyond. I love the elegant ontological paradox it contains: the way Rose in her god form is calling to herself before she even knows what’s happening. I love the romanticism of it: someone risking their life to become a god and save the person they love.
The words are commonplace yet alien: they sound like a child story-book; they’re expressed in unglamorous graffiti; yet they echo with an amorphous fairytale menace. The elemental contrast between Rose and Bad Wolf is stunning: the Earthling and the universal force, the shop girl who likes chips and the goddess made of gold and fire and the fabric of time.
Bad Wolf signifies the potential of Rose the ordinary woman: she has no idea what she will become. And she creates Bad Wolf through her ferocious determination and her love for the Doctor. “I want you safe, my Doctor”: she becomes his cosmic protector. She brings closure to the Time War, ending it with an act of life to counterpoise its terrible destruction.
Rose as Bad Wolf doesn’t just save the Doctor in The Parting of the Ways, she also sets up Bad Wolf’s ongoing relationship with the Doctor. In light of the tragedy of Rose and the Doctor’s love story (the original Doctor, that is), it’s a stunningly beautiful thing to imagine that even if he’s lost forever, a universe away from the one he loves, that she has scattered an echo of herself through that whole universe and every universe, as his cosmic protector and guardian.
There’s an eerie echo of this in Tooth and Claw: the Doctor is trapped in a room, while a wolf roams outside, trying to get in to him. It’s a beautiful and bittersweet foreshadowing of Doomsday. And the Doctor’s Big Bad Wolf eventually does find him. My inner romantic likes to think that she’ll always be out there, haunting him, ready to drop those two words in his ear when the time is right and he needs her most.
