To be honest, I’m not sure there are words that fully encompass my love for Martha Jones. She is hands-down my favorite companion of the RTD era. I love her, I love Freema Agyeman, and to this day I am baffled that there are people in the fandom who hate her. I’m also still extremely annoyed at the short shrift she received during her time on the show, and that’s a topic I’m more than willing to expound on for a short while.
I suppose the number one thing I dislike about Martha’s tenure on the show was the ridiculous unrequited love storyline that she was saddled with for no particular reason. I have never felt like that storyline added anything of value to Martha’s character at all, mostly because it serves no purpose in the show itself. Right from the very first moment this subplot annoyed me, because it seemed pretty damn clear to me that the Doctor, still mourning and mooning after his lost Lenore (so to speak), was never going to notice or reciprocate Martha’s feelings. While it is a major part of Martha’s character that she gets fed up with being the Doctor’s second-best that she leaves, I don’t feel like having a romantic subplot was absolutely necessary to carry out that sort of plot. It just added unnecessary and unneeded baggage to a series that was already a big of an angstfest with Ten’s manpain.
I suppose what bothers me the most about this whole stupid pointless plot is that it doesn’t seemed to have occurred to RTD at all that there might be another source of conflict for Martha and the Doctor’s relationship. It didn’t have to be that she was in love with him but couldn’t work it up to tell him–it would have been just fine if she had only wanted to be his friend, but he kept hanging her out to dry, comparing her to some girl she’d never met who wasn’t there anymore, until things finally got to the point where Martha got fed up with being left out in the rain and left. That would have been a perfectly serviceable story. I would have loved a story like that–hell, I would have loved it if the romance subplot had been dropped after Martha had seemingly moved on in The Lazarus Experiment and 42. But no, it kept coming up and coming up and coming up, and it was nothing but a poor piece of writing that did nothing to endear the audience to Martha. We the audience knew the Doctor’s backstory–we knew why he was upset and angsting for the whole series, and the fact that Martha didn’t know this and kept mooning after him anyway made it difficult to really connect with her as a character, because deep down we irrationally expect her to know what we know. (This is a form of criticism that I despise, by the way. It is, as I’ve said, irrational and stupid to expect the characters to know everything we know about the story and the characters.)
So yes, I have so many issues with how Martha’s story was handled by RTD and the other writers, which brings me in turn to how the fandom treats Martha Jones.
Martha is probably the least popular companion of the modern incarnation of Doctor Who, and I think she probably shares a place with River Song as the companion who has the most vitriol leveled against her. From what I understand, people don’t like her because she dared to be in love with the Doctor so soon after his Twu Wuv Rose left the picture. They don’t like her because she is “clingy” and “needy” and “whiny.” She excpected “too much” from the Doctor right after he’d lost Rose.
You will perhaps not be surprised to find that I think all of this is utter bullshit.
As much as I hate the unrequited love plot of Series 3, it makes sense. Martha’s young, and from the moment she meets the Doctor he’s sort of taking her along on this interesting adventure and testing her and she likes that, I think–and then he snogs her without warning or explanation and runs off, and she is quite understandably swept off her feet. The Doctor looks young, he looks like David Tennant (which is to say, quite good), and honestly, why wouldn’t Martha feel attracted to him?
Oh, right, because Rose Tyler.
Whom Martha knows nothing about. Because the Doctor doesn’t tell her anything about Rose or what she meant to him or how she left. Only that she left recently and that she’s “with her family” and “happy.” Martha has no reason to think that Rose and the Doctor were romantically attached, though it becomes pretty apparent that she’s a rebound girl after her first couple of stories aboard the TARDIS, wherein the Doctor compares her to Rose frequently enough to make the point clear. (And also frequently enough for me to bang my head against the metaphorical wall and yell at him to get over it.)
It shouldn’t have been on Martha to find out about Rose. The Doctor was the one who invited Martha aboard, and it’s clear from his reaction at the end of Smith and Jones that he’s not totally oblivious to Martha’s attraction to him. Also, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, in Partners in Crime he mentions to Donna Noble that Martha “fancied” him. And yet he did nothing. He knew and he did nothing to explain to her why he wouldn’t reciprocate, why she shouldn’t get her hopes up, why he was having trouble moving on, and that only makes him more an asshole in my eyes, honestly.
As for the other criticisms, so-called, of Martha Jones…
…you know what, I don’t actually want to waste the time and space giving any of those arguments credence or thought. They’re bullshit. Martha is an extraordinarily strong character. She spent half the series saving the Doctor’s ass over and over again, only to get a handful of thank yous and a couple of hugs for her efforts. She never let her crush on the Doctor get in the way of her helping him, and she gave him the space to grieve even though she never fully knew what he was grieving for. She carried the Doctor’s useless bum through the real world twice, once under frankly extraordinary circumstances, given the time period she was forced to operate in.
And this is to say nothing of the fact that she traveled around the world for a year as the Master basically destroyed it, serving as a prophet for the Doctor’s metaphorical Jesus. And after everything she saw and did, she pushed past her experiences to help her family deal with what they went through during the Year that Never Was.
Most significantly of all, she left the Doctor. She realized that he was never going to reciprocate her feelings, and that furthermore he still wasn’t at a place where he would even be able to give her the respect she wanted (and quite frankly deserved). She realized, more importantly, that if she chose to stay she would be locking herself in a relationship that was unhealthy for her emotionally, and so she did the right thing: she got the hell out of Dodge.
Martha Jones is a star, and if you say a word against her that is not well-reasoned and backed up by considerable evidence, I will come at you.
(63/260)
Romance for the sake of romance is something that I’ve never felt good about. I agree what you’ve said in previous posts about how RTD’s constant reminders of Roses didn’t help to endear a new character the mainstream audiences, and the fact that this subplot existed only made things worst, especially when there were other things that could have been done.
For example, while I will argue that there was no purpose other than fanwank to have all previous characters appear in Series 4, I will admit that I loved Martha in the Sontoran story, especially the line about how “someone needs to stay behind and clean up”. It’s rather true; the Doctor save the day, but he never stays around to help whatever people he’s just saved recover from the mess that was just made.
That would have made a good subplot in my opinion; that after adventure they have, Martha wants to stay behind and help the people recover as best she can, but in the end has to leave with the Doctor.
Her departure would have then gone from getting out of a tacked-on, one-sided romance, to getting tired of not being able to help the people who need it the most, in this case it would be her family, who for the most part, had just spent the last year enslaved by the Master.
Yes, yes, and YES. You are channeling my brain. I love season 3, mainly because they contain amazing episodes, but also because Martha is fan freaking-tastic. She saves the Doctor’s life, literally multiple times and uses her brain to do it (CPR, learning how to revive two hearts? Come on). She asks questions because she’s curious and actually wants to know and she is a problem solver. I love when she asks the Doctor how time travel works and when she asks if they can go to his planet. She refuses to settle for a shallow relationship. Plus, she’s forced to prove herself on many occasions when the doctor loses, leaves, or practically abandons her and let’s not forget she saved the whole dang world on her own. Like a boss.
Everyone needs to be quiet about the whole “replacing Rose and not as good as Rose” because Martha was better. Accomplished, resourceful, witty–ah, I could go on (and probably will in a love-fest post of my own). The craziest scene to me was in the Shakespeare Code, which set the tone for the ENTIRE season. Seriously “It’s staring me right in the face.” Yes Doctor, it is.
Lastly, it was also annoying how RTD kept teasing feelings from the Doctor’s side, with all the flirting and how every time Martha was ready to leave, in a perfect and non-bitter manner, the Doctor would reel her right back in and keep teasing something that would never be there just because he needed a companion. In the end, I’m glad that he respected her and they ended up friends but the way he treated her was awful and selfish. I was glad she left him on her own terms and with dignity….but not just to end up with Mickey Smith. I’m still not sure how I feel about that.
Reblogged this on theliberalpragmatist and commented:
This person is my Whovian soul mate. Long live Martha Jones!
This was written centuries ago and I know I’m late because I just got into Doctor Who. Oh my god, I’m so grateful for this post. Martha Jones owns me. She’s simply superb as a companion and at the time was the brainiest, responsible and most mature companion aside from SJS. She worked so hard to do good and yet she had to prove to it to the doctor the most that she deserved to be a frequent flyer.