Doctor Who: Did we need Martha?

[butterfly]

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.

Comments

[gene-lee.livejournal.com]

This post and in particular that last statement it was I and majority of people responded to:

Why is it a bad thing? Because she spends about a year away from her medical training, with no reinforcement of any kind mentioned or even hinted at. And that's before her year on walkabout. Taking off for the first few trips with the Doctor, basically up through The Lazarus Experiment? That's a vacation. But when she demanded to become a regular member of the crew rather than remain a guest? That's abandoning your studies to go running off with the Doctor.

Don't righteously act like we're all delusional and that the original poster was not stating that Martha's intentions were to abandoned her studies or any loss of skill during the year gap [which both of you seem to think is overly much] was because of her negligence about her career, even though the Saxon arc was an unfortunate turn of events that were beyond her and the Doctor's control and remote prediction.

If you're going to give the trips prior to Lazurus an "okay", then it applies to her acceptance after Lazurus as well, because any of those trips to England, New Earth, Manhattan, etc. could've ended with unintentional problems. JUST LIKE ROSE LOSING A YEAR. But I don't see any threads dedicated to criticizing Rose as "abandoning her family and Mickey" because she should have KNOWN there could be problems.


So have a thought before you throw around accusations of "Saint Martha" as your dismissal of the counter-opinions here. It's not about idealizing her, it's about both of you trying to recreate this discussion to erase your original point, just like you two want to recreate her canon as not caring about career. Bad tactic, no biscuit.

I'm leaving this discusion.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

That's actually from a comment, not from my original post. If you're upset with principia_coh's comment, you'd have better luck reaching her if you reply to one of her actual comments, as only those would reach her inbox (if she emails comments -- mind you, she may have this discussion tracked, in which case, she would know, but I wouldn't comment based on that assumption, personally). Also, by far the majority of the comments to my post have been about other things, not about Martha's status as a student.

If you're going to give the trips prior to Lazurus an "okay", then it applies to her acceptance after Lazurus as well, because any of those trips to England, New Earth, Manhattan, etc. could've ended with unintentional problems. JUST LIKE ROSE LOSING A YEAR. But I don't see any threads dedicated to criticizing Rose as "abandoning her family and Mickey" because she should have KNOWN there could be problems.

That's like saying that the Gilligan's Island crew has no reason to be any more upset than the Stargate: Atlantis crew, despite the first only signing up for a three-hour tour and the second for an undetermined length of time. Martha's first stint in the TARDIS was as 'passenger', her second as 'fellow traveler'. If you can't see the difference in those choice, then we're at an impasse anyway.

I'm leaving this discusion.

Have a safe trip home!