6. Mickey Smith Finds His Grandma Again
Now don't go making this icky by applying the modern interpretation of 'romantic' onto it. By the time we got to The Age of Steel we'd spent a year and a half comfortable in the knowledge that Mickey Smith was sort of a hapless buffoon. He'd proven himself in The Parting of the Ways by putting what Rose wanted ahead of his own needs, but still he was a fairly shallow character. And then, thanks to the sci fi magic of a parallel world he got to see his long dead grandmother again. Just prior to this exchange we learn that his grandmother - who raised him- had tripped on a tear in the stairway carpet that he had failed to repair and broken her neck. Which is a hell of a lot of guilt to carry, and goes some way toward explaining why he was so surface level afterwards. And then this parallel Grandmother opens her door and we see the exact same tear, just waiting to kill her again. And Mickey's first instinct is to see himself as helpless in the situation, begging her to get it fixed before she breaks her neck. To which she replies, as any grandmother would, that he could just do it for her. And Mickey Smith realizes that he has another chance. That he is not helpless. That he
matters. Again, he leaves the shallow surface shell that he's been mired in and learns to re-engage emotionally. That's what the whole Romantic movement was about, summed up by a woman with a tear in her carpet and a mean left hook with her cane.