Nine years ago, ex-Prime Minister Harriet Jones gave her life to alert the Doctor to a Dalek invasion of Earth in the Doctor Who season four finale “The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End.” But it turns out she didn’t actually die, as everyone believed because former Who showrunner Russell T Davies has written a new poetry collection that retcons her survival.
Image: Still via Youtube
Davies revealed the bizarre resurrection to the Radio Times, stating that when he began writing and illustrating a new collection of Doctor Who poems with James Goss called Now We Are Six Hundred: A Collection of Time Lord Verse, he wanted to include a poem about Jones, whose rise and fall as the Prime Minister of the UK played a part in the background of Davies’ tenure as showrunner.
So, given that he’s the one who killed her in the first place, he decided that the poem would instead give Harriet Jones a happy ending, with Harriet escaping the Daleks that converged on her house during “The Stolen Earth” after the subwave network she used to send a message to the Doctor was detected by them:
It had to be done. And there was a poem about Harriet Jones.
Phil Collinson, who was the producer on Doctor Who when we killed Harriet Jones has nagged me about that ever since. So the first thing I did was send that to him, e-mailed it to him. ‘Alright! There’s your happy ending!’
It’s a bit of a shame that Harriet’s sacrifice — done because it was her duty to the world, even after the Doctor had arrogantly scuppered her premiership when he regenerated in “The Christmas Invasion” — has been undone. But there’s something very whimsically Doctor Who in a character being returned to life through a poem, isn’t there?