butterfly | Doctor Who: Did we need Martha?

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dw: series 3

Doctor Who: Did we need Martha?

Because Russell T Davies seemed to feel that the show needed to have a character who would fall in (unrequited) love with the Doctor, thus illustrating the difference between Rose and everyone else. Did it?

In some superficial ways, Martha is quite a lot like Rose -- pretty, clever Londoner girls, both of them. They even get some echo dialogue in the early episodes. The show puts them in comparable situations frequently. There are both parallels to draw and contrasts to mark.

Mostly, though, there's the Doctor.

I wasn't surprised about Martha's emotional arc. And, though it was heavy-handed at times ("He had to fall in love with a human... and it wasn't me."), I actually do agree with RTD that it was necessary. In order to establish someone as One Thing, you need to establish someone else as Other Thing. And, in this particular context, he wanted to make a distinction between one character and the entire history and future of characters to come.

Yes -- Martha was, in part, all about how special Rose was. Which sucks if you hate Rose. If you hate Rose Tyler, then a series of television that is basically saying, "Yeah, that blonde chick? One of a kind," is pretty much guaranteed to piss you off (and, of course, to the person desperately missing Rose, having episode after episode point out how irreplaceable she was is hardly going to help in the process of getting over her).

But... as the show makes very, very clear -- Rose isn't special in the ultimate 'best person ever' way. She's special in the 'best person for this one specific character/relationship' way. The Doctor writes out that she's 'perfect Rose' and, to him, she is. Now, was Rose actually portrayed as a 'perfect' character?

*bursts out laughing*

She could be petty and jealous. She wandered off. She had a tendency to throw herself into dangerous situations for personal reasons. She nearly destroyed the world because she couldn't listen to instructions. Rose Tyler was flawed.

In a lot of ways, Martha is a 'better' person. Higher class (which matters to some people). More education. Better at staying put and following instructions. Tends to do the right thing. Not so apt to get into trouble. Again, not a perfect person (she, too, had the flaw of 'jealousy'), but from an objective standpoint, probably a better bet to make. But, as they say, the heart has reasons that reason cannot know.

Now, Martha is not the first time that New Who made the distinction between Rose and Other Companions. In fact, every time that the Doctor took on someone else, it was made clear that the Doctor and Rose were a unit and other folk were nice but not necessary (something that Jack took much more easily than Mickey). Rose is the person who invites Adam and Jack on board and is also clearly the impetus for the Doctor inviting Sarah Jane on board.

There are two pre-S3 examples of the difference between Rose and Everyone Else. The first is in The Parting of the Ways, when the Doctor sends Rose home, keeps her out of danger, while everyone else is involved in the fighting (made very clear when he calls her over to help him with the wiring and takes her out of the 'active fighter' count). The second is in School Reunion and the conversation in the street that ends with the Doctor telling Rose that she won't be left behind and very nearly telling her that he loves her ("Imagine watching that happen to someone you-").

And SR, of course, has Sarah Jane -- who serves as our stand-in for Old School Companions. The Doctor very clearly has both admiration and affection for Sarah Jane (just as he does for Martha), but he's utterly thrown by the notion that he was her 'life' and that she couldn't move on without him (we see this echoed when Martha says that the Doctor is 'everything' to her, while she's basically a side-note to him -- a fun, smart, lovable side-note, but a side-note nonetheless). And both Sarah Jane and Martha have to choose to say good-bye to the Doctor in order to start getting over him.

Back when S3 was first airing, I pondered the notion that RTD was using Martha to 'ramp down' from the idea of the Doctor as a sexual/romantic person. Grace was the ramp up, a person that the Doctor was interested in who liked him not his life; Rose was the bridge (the apex; the climax; the transformation), someone he adored who adored both him and the life he offered; and Martha was someone who liked the life he offered, thought he was attractive, but didn't seem to know or like him very much as a person. Going right from Grace and Rose to a Doctor/companion relationship that was completely lacking in romance/sexuality would either be a bit of a harsh break or possibly lead to confusion. So, in order to make his divisions clear, RTD put in an intermediary position where the Doctor was clearly still a sexual/romantic figure ('lost prince') but had no interest in pursuing sex or romance (and I find it so fascinating that both of the 'unsuitable' choices were doctors -- it may show that the Doctor needs someone who complements him, not someone who echoes him).

RTD appears to believe that Martha was a necessary character to show the difference between Rose and the rest of the Doctor's companions. In balance, though I think her part could have been more strongly written, I agree.

ETA: In the end, I think the real problem with Martha is that they only had a six-episode story to tell with her (Smith & Jones through Gridlock and Utopia through Last of the Time Lords). She would have worked better if she hadn't stayed the whole season.

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Yes. there are. Ace is a pretty good example. I've got a short list of other people who've had a season's worth or more impact on the plot at the end of this thread (http://butterfly.livejournal.com/1174301.html?thread=6013981#t6013981) and I go more into the Curse of Fenric stuff, which is Ace's Bad Wolf. So to say.

(Except I think I forgot about Turlough, whose shouting at crystals and being bullied by weird old duck-wearing dude during the Black Guardian Trilogy was a huge chunk of the plot of Season Twenty.)

Anyhow, Ten/Rose probably gets blasted more than Nine/Rose because to a lot of people outside the ship they seem to have more obnoxious and frankly illiterate fans than Nine/Rose.

It's a bit hidden in the threads, so I'm going to repeat what I said above:

I think the point that principia_coh is trying to make is that, unless Martha has an eidetic memory, spending one or two subjective years away from her studies means that she's lost quite a bit of knowledge, through lack of use and lack of additional study. It's not that she's missing objective time, but that when she comes back, she's not going to remember where she left off, because she hasn't been doing this for two years now.

So, unless she's been studying in the TARDIS in her off hours (I would have adored an off-hand reference to something like this), she's going to be off her game.

We're talking about completely different things, aren't we? The whole point is, RTD insists that the Rose-ship is More Special; some people agree with him; some people are upset that any number of other ships get short-changed because of that apparent specialness. That's all I was trying to say, and I think it's a reasonable thing to say. I don't see what other reaction is possible, for anyone who ships Doctor/anyone-other-than-Rose.

You also have to realize that your views aren't exactly shipper standard - most Doctor/Rose fics you see out there really do insist that the Doctor thought Rose was More Special Than Everyone, while I've never seen a Doctor/Romana fic proclaim that the Doctor can Never Love Again after "Warrior's Gate". So it's rather a given that people, at least those who arrived via

who_daily, come here with an understandable bias.

Ace is, actually, one of the few companions that I have not met apart from glimpses of her in the Confidentials (I've been going in a semi-sort-of-order, except, of course, I watched the Movie because it was so short). I've heard that she and the Doctor have a mentoring-type relationship, that he's very manipulative, and that I'll probably like her a great deal (I do like Turlough and his story -- I think the distinction that the fans make regarding Rose vs Everyone Else is on how much focus her story gets... of course, episodes/stories are a lot shorter (and yet more firmly held together) now than they used to be).

Anyhow, Ten/Rose probably gets blasted more than Nine/Rose because to a lot of people outside the ship they seem to have more obnoxious and frankly illiterate fans than Nine/Rose.

Ah, the kid factor. Billie and David are both utterly adorable and, thus (I suspect), adored by a large majority of the teen audience. I never take the fans who can't capitalize seriously, whether they're on my side or against me.

Well, um, the actors say - they just plain say it - that it wasn't that they had chemistry and it leaked over to the Doctor and Romana, it's that the Doctor and Romana had chemistry and it leaked over to them. It was the weirdest interview I've ever read. Eventually, you have to grant to interpretation - you might not have viewed them as romantic, but a lot of people did. So is that canon or not? And speaking of Jo, who's to say the Doctor at the end of "The Green Death" was any less broken up than the Doctor at the end of "Doomsday"? There are just bound to be different views there, not the least because, obviously, "romantic love" doesn't mean the same to different people.

RTD had every right to produce his show as he sees fit and I'm not saying otherwise, but I am saying that he has no right to expect the fans to agree with what he's doing. There just... isn't an argument of "the producer says X so X is 100% true" when it comes to characters' relationships. That's what fandom is all about. And that's the "love of the Doctor's life" issue too - it is the same as saying he wasn't in love with people before, and if someone believes he did, they're going to get annoyed.

We're talking about completely different things, aren't we?

Entirely possible. Most arguments tend to be a case of that, I've found. It's frustrating, though, trying to figure out exactly where the other person's vocabulary differs from yours.

You also have to realize that your views aren't exactly shipper standard

It's the standard in the community that I hang out with and with the shippers that I spend time with. So, you can see why it's less than enjoyable to have people assume things about me -- because, for me, the things that you're assuming have pretty much nothing to do with my shipping community.

Well, no, the Valeyard isn't a companion, unless you count companion as someone who's traveled in the TARDIS and, um, to explain what he actually is would involve spoiling you for that arc. Which I probably shouldn't do. And the Doctor only wishes the Master was his companion ;) But I was including them as examples of non-Rose characters that influence huge gobs of plot. The companion-ness (companionicity?) of UNIT is arguable, but I choose to treat them as such even though only Jo ever gets to ride in the TARDIS because they do assist the Doctor (when he doesn't assist them) and the old name for companion was assistant.

And I forgot Turlough. *facepalms* Who actually was a companion. Sigh.

I understand what you're saying about the ramifications of lost time in LotTL, but the discussion referenced Martha's intentions about her studies, claiming she abandoned her medical trainig to run-off with the Doctor.

Martha had no pre-knowledge accepting the Doctor's invitation in S&J, that she would be wandering the earth for a year, and prior to that she kept her studies mentioned in present tense. Even after Lazerus, she had only lost a couple days. Its reasonable that she had went into it thinking she would only have to recoup a days or weeks at most. No abandonement, her committment at the time occurred before she had to suffer any long-term downtime as seen in the later third of the season.

I find it intriguing that you believe Tom Baker and Lalla Ward in regards to the Doctor and Romana and yet don't believe RTD, David Tennant, Chris Eccleston, and Billie Piper when it comes to the Doctor and Rose.

Speaking of Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, I saw that commercial of the two of them that had 'the Doctor' being prompted to ask 'Romana' to marry him and thought that it was adorable, that they had sparkling chemistry, and that Romana was incredibly out-of-character. But I bet that Baker and Ward made a cute couple while it lasted.

Ace is great. The Seventh Doctor is basically training her up to be his successor as Cosmic Gadfly and they have this great relationship where she blows shit up and he clucks at her exasperatedly but fondly. Seven and Ace are a great note to end your re-watching on.

If there's an entire shipping community out there that's this sane about the issue, I want in it. I do ship them - I just ship a lot of other people too.

I can understand how this would be frustrating - just as I think you can understand how frustrating it is that 90% of the fics on Teaspoon really do go about degrading, if not dissing, every other companion. So eventually, perhaps we'd do best to cordially agree to disagree.

Probably. I mean, I don't read Teaspoon and I don't read

who_daily -- I only read D/R fic by people that I trust already, because I have a fairly narrow window of Doctor & Rose characterization that I believe (anything that involves Rose being semi-suicidal post-DD gets backspaced from very rapidly).

There is a whole lot of DW fandom out there that I'm just not all that involved with. Which is why it's a bit of a surprise to, well, have that fandom come to my journal. Not entirely unwelcome -- if I didn't want people to comment, I'd flock my entries to disable comments -- but surprising.

I believe them because they really did get married, which is as freaky as it is endearing; otherwise I'd have written it off just as easily. Much as I adore him, Tom Baker was infamous for hoarding creative control...

That commercial was the essence of freaky and endearing itself. I suppose it's the distance that actually does it for me with Four and Romana - they seem to be having two completely different conversations yet still are the only two people in the room who understand each other. It's the glorious sense of inhumanity of these two. Which really goes to explain why I'm less enthralled with the very human Ten and Rose. I suppose it does boil down to understanding love differently.

... woah, you really do have an entirely different view of this ship than the one I'm familiar and exasparated with. Luckier than I. Perhaps instead of a biased debate we should exchange fic recommendations by way of trying to convince each other? You never know.

I suppose it does boil down to understanding love differently.

Probably. For me... distance is just about the opposite of love. I can't think of any pairing that I enjoy where I don't feel a visceral, vulnerable, connection between the two characters.

Ahh, yes, that makes sense. Old Skool just doesn't get round to portraying the Doctor as vulnerable, does it? Even with Five, it's very much a facade. And I confess I usually can't stand the Doctor's portrayal as vulnerable, I enjoy him as an aloof alien, so I fall hard for romance as joy and play - what I think Four/Romana was very much all about.

... d'you know... have you heard any Big Finish audios? I get a feeling you might be very pleasantly surprised by the Six/Evelyn relationship.

You said what I was thinking! I think I love you.

Russel can be accused of not delving deep enough into her character, I agree. At certain times, you only saw glimpses of her motivation. But he also didn't strip-mine her either, which leaves her as having untapped material to be delved out in other areas too. JMO~

*nodnodnod* And that was one of the problems with Rose, that her major character arc was complete by mid-season two. The rest of the season was just a holding pattern, and actually undid some of the characterisation of the first half of the season. They are clearly trying to avoid making the same mistake with Martha.

I see what you're saying, but a medical degree is like any study -- through the miracle of revision, it's possible to pick up where you left off. I once knew a medical student who deferred her studies to go backpacking for three years -- she had to do some pretty heavy revision when she got back, but after the first few days she found she'd retained most of her knowledge.

And Martha's only been gone four days from the world's perspective -- her supervising doctor is recently dead, the hospital is only just back from the moon, and the Prime Minister has just been killed by his wife, after murdering the president of the USA. So I'm pretty sure she'll get a couple of empty weeks for revision.

*helpful*

That's not...actually how the human brain works, but apparently it's the new talking point, so okay!

Ace didn't need to look into the heart of the TARDIS. (I tried to picture it, and ended up fearing for the universe just a little.)

I've noted elsewhere that one would think if Martha were a real student, she'd have been thrilled over the opportunity for essentially infinite study time, not to mention the prospect of either the TARDIS itself having a kickass library, or her being able to access them via her travels with the Doctor.

Wow, you must know some incredibly different students than I do. The kind that must be really pleasant company to spend time with, given they have no outside interests and their every thought is about furthering their studies, even when on holiday.

Of course, I may be wrong, not being a "real" student and all. I'll get back to abandoning my studies now.

I think, fundamentally, that this is the difference between us -- you see Doctor Who as having a premise that is incompatible with a romantic relationship and I don't.

I prefer to put it this way -- from the show that gave us a hero who's committed genocide and a heroine with an Electra complex, I was hoping for a central relationship more complex and nuanced than the one in Disney's Alladin.

But that's life. Love doesn't... fix everything. The Doctor still has issues. Rose still has issues. They still have places where they need to work the kinks out. If they didn't have the occasional fight or the places where they didn't quite fit, then I probably wouldn't ship them because they would strike me as a highly unrealistic relationship. No relationship is perfect and without flaw or dissent.

Issues? Yeah, genocide'll give you issues.

I see your point of view -- there IS a love story in among all the rest of it -- but I think "issues" and "places where they don't quite fit" willfully ignores the dark side of the Doctor/Rose storyline of a doomed mismatch. But I can't actually blame you, because you're seeing the gloss that RTD put there. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too -- he's making mass-market pop tv, but he wants a "serious" edge to it, and he doesn't always reconcile them sensibly. For example, I have NO idea what message I'm supposed to take away from the story about Rose and her father, where the lesson seems to be about learning to confront loss and let go of grief -- until the author waves the magic wand and brings Daddy back to life, makes him fall in love with Mommy, and gives his little girl a baby brother or sister. It's a classic example of the urge to take a sharp turn into left field just for the sake of a happy ending.

Sorry for digressing. Anyway, thanks again for the chat.

Oh, the irony.

Guess what I should be doing right now instead of fluttering around on the internet...

God bless the noble art of procrastination.

It would be a relevant point to make if it hadn't been clear that I already knew it (as I said in my OP -- "If you hate Rose Tyler, then a series of television that is basically saying, "Yeah, that blonde chick? One of a kind," is pretty much guaranteed to piss you off.").

I think you need to understand that many people who think the Doctor was a jerk to Martha and that Rose as OTP is misguided ACTUALLY REALLY LIKE THE CHARACTER OF ROSE. While the writing lost its way at points, she was an interesting character whom I and many others who disagree with you enjoyed thoroughly. I loved New Who long before Martha showed up. But, as I said somewhere way above this, the whole hearts-n-flowers, soulmate approach is 1. not what we saw in S1 and S2, and 2. an irritatingly simplistic view of the Doctor, of women in general, and, oh yeah, of love.

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Doctor Who: Did we need Martha?

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