10 Doctor Who Side Characters With Tragic Backstories

Not much is revealed about the histories of the Bowie Base One crew members in the excellent Tenth Doctor episode The Waters Of Mars, but we do know that they all hail from a version of Earth where the human population is near extinction.

This is how Captain Adelaide Brooke describes the situation, mentioning "40 long years" of "the climate, the ozone, the oil apocalypse" while chatting with the Doctor, and on top of this shared event, the various figures in the Bowie Base team each have more specific traumas in their own individual backstories.

For instance, Mia Bennett - whose obituary briefly flashes on the screen when the Doctor first meets her - was raised solely by her father. She never knew her mother, who died in a car accident shortly after Mia was born.

Elsewhere, former athlete Tarak Ital spent his earlier years being openly shunned by his own countrymen after choosing to pursue a career in medicine, while senior technician Steffi Ehrlich was motivated to join the Bowie mission after her home country was decimated in an unspecified event. And then, there's also Brooke herself, who was left as an orphan after her parents went missing in a Dalek attack.

While the Bowie Base crew is obviously full of accomplished space travellers, it's also full of damaged goods - which is somewhat fitting, considering that their lives on Mars are destined to end in disaster.