Doctor Who has a cast of secondary and tertiary characters that could reasonably populate one or two actual planets. Most of those figures don’t come back for another episode after their debut, but sometimes a striking visual is enough to guarantee an encore. When it comes to the show’s early post-reboot episodes, few images are as compelling as a flap of skin with eyes and lips stretched across a metal frame. That somewhat nightmarish creature boldly claims to be the last pure human to be born on Earth, but that’s just one of Lady Cassandra’s bold proclamations.
It is exceptionally bizarre to look back at the first season of the no-longer-new reboot series of Doctor Who after everything that followed it. The Tennant and Smith years seemed so dominant in the public consciousness, and complaints about Whittaker’s tenure kept at least some elements of those seasons in the zeitgeist. The show spent a year or so trying to recapture the Tennant era before moving into relatively new territory, but there’s no apparent effort to run back to Eccleston’s heyday. The Ninth Doctor brought a certain experimentation and a magical sense of bitterness to the show that could use a comeback.
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Who is Cassandra O’Brien.Δ17 in Doctor Who?
|
Full Name |
Lady Cassandra O’Brien.Δ17 |
|---|---|
|
Aliases |
Kitty Gillespie, Cassandra Hoots |
|
First Appearance |
Series 1, Episode 2, “The End of the World” |
|
Portrayed By |
Zoë Wanamaker |
Lady Cassandra is, by her own account, the last organic human being born on the planet Earth. The Doctor and Rose Tyler met Lady Cassandra aboard Platform One, a luxury space station that gave wealthy passengers a front-row seat to the destruction of Earth. Cassandra was little more than a thin, almost translucent, sheet of skin held up by a steel frame by this point. The overwhelming majority of her body was long gone after more than 700 plastic surgery operations, extending her life at the cost of most of her flesh. Now a tarp with eyes and a mouth, Cassandra sought to continue funding her many medical procedures to artificially prolong her lifespan. Her plan was to fabricate a hostage situation by sneaking metal spiders aboard Platform One, holding herself and her fellow passengers to ransom, and collecting the cash in secret. An exchange of insults with Rose Tyler led Cassandra to knock out the Doctor’s companion, inadvertently drawing the Doctor’s attention. The Doctor undoes her scheme and reverses her escape plan, then seemingly kills her by turning up the vessel’s heat and allowing her to explode.
Cassandra reappeared in the second season premiere, “New Earth,” the following year. Though her stretched skin exploded in her debut appearance, her brain resided in a jar beneath the steel frame, allowing her to continue her absurdly long life. Cassandra now resides in the basement of a hospital, tended to by her faithful assistant, Chip. Cassandra is obsessed with reliving her glory days, specifically a party at which she received the last compliment her appearance would ever earn. The Doctor and Rose find Cassandra again by coincidence while responding to a distress signal at the hospital. They discover that the medical facility is experimenting inhumanely on a race of cloned semi-humans, prompting them to take action against its overseers. Cassandra enters this story as a villain, possessing Rose’s body in an attempt to reclaim mobility and seek vengeance. When her plan falls apart, she possesses the Doctor, only to discover his mind blocks her attempts to use his skills. Desperate for an escape plan, Cassandra leaps into the body of an escaped clone, which forces her to reckon with the terrible treatment they’ve received. She changes her ways, helps the Doctor save the clones, and finally accepts her death. As a parting kindness, the Doctor transports Cassandra, in Chip’s body, to the party Cassandra was so obsessed with, revealing that the last person to praise her beauty was her future self.
Who is Lady Cassandra in the Doctor Who extended universe?
Cassandra’s backstory is only mentioned in passing during her two TV appearances, but books, most prominently Russel T. Davies’ short story “Lives of the Rich and Thin,” explored her early life. Lady Cassandra’s titles were wholly invented, including the “dot Delta seventeen” at the end of her handle. Most of her childhood is lost, but she was born Brian Edward Cobbs on Earth in the indefinable year 4.99/4763/A/15. Though she made wild claims about her parentage, most of them appeared to be lies. She allegedly transitioned into a woman while working security at the powerful Klime Enterprises corporation. She later married the aristocratic owner, Harry Klime, whom she almost certainly murdered for his billions of dollars. Some years later, she was tied to another murder on a Wild West-like planet where she served as a bordello’s madame. For years, she lived under a number of assumed identities as a B-movie star or a socialite. She’d marry five times, though each would die under mysterious circumstances. Cassandra used the tremendous wealth she accrued from her ill-fated marriages to afford the hundreds of surgeries that would sustain her lifespan.
Is Lady Cassandra transgender?
A brief line of dialogue in Lady Cassandra’s debut episode establishes her as a transgender woman. She mentions that she grew up “a little boy” long before she started taking on her surgeries. Cassandra is, by all accounts, the first transgender character ever to appear in the Doctor Who TV series. Her depiction raised complaints from many trans critics, but it also earned some positive attention after her second episode. Many of her traits, most notably her obsession with physical beauty, fixation on surgery as an aesthetic tool, and deranged willingness to kill, have been seen as examples of harmful tropes common to trans characters in media. In her second appearance, however, some viewers found a little more significance in her quest. Her desire to feel beautiful and the fact that her final validation can come only from herself warmed the hearts of some trans viewers. Cassandra would remain the only transgender character in Doctor Who for a number of years after her 2005 debut. In 2023, Donna Noble’s daughter, Rose, became the first transgender main character in the series. Her depiction has also been controversial, but she is the first trans character in the series portrayed by a trans actress, which is a positive step.
Cassandra is a bizarre fixture of a series with an endless march of comparably bizarre characters. Doctor Who frequently breaks new ground, but the fact that its first trans character is a skin tarp who resorts to murder and kidnapping to afford more surgeries is an unfortunate tale. However grim her first appearance was, there’s a heartbreaking coda to Cassandra’s story that gives her far more depth than her semi-transparent appearance might suggest.
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