The Poison Sky

doctorwho-quicksummaries:

(2008, written by Helen Raynor)

Donna’s mum saves Wilf by smashing the window of the car with an ax, and it’s awesome. Martha’s been cloned, and she’s as awesome as usual. The sky is being poisoned. Oh no! UNIT finally gets to kill some stuff, and that’s awesome, too. The Doctor, Martha and Donna manage to stop the Sontaran’s big plan but the Sonatarans are still around, so the smart-ass kid blows himself and the Sontarans up. The Doctor’s sad about it. Martha says bye, but before she can leave the TARDIS drags the three of them into the worst episode ever.

I honestly don’t remember how the cloned Martha came into it.  what was she for?  how did she disappear?

because I’ve only watched this two-parter the one time because it was bad

farriswheels:

I blame Martha haters for the Doctor Who producers continuing to choose white girls for companions.

really? because I’m going for “general systemic racism”

it drives the entertainment industry to write white characters and look for white actors and argue against casting actors of color because they’re “not marketable” (read: not the supposedly “default” or “neutral” race).

it props up a lot of the Martha hate, yep; people call her out on traits and actions they find acceptable or even hilarious in the Doctor or other companions

and probably a lot of the Martha hate stems from the fact that the writers handled her character arc less than well. probably it was just a coincidence that the only lady-companion of color had the weakest series-long storyline, right? that (white) Rose and the Doctor were written as mutually attracted to each other, that (white) Donna got to be the kick-ass best mate, that (white) Amy got to be interested in the Doctor as a potential fling but confident enough in her own sexuality to move on and idk get married and have an entire series of episodes about how OTP she and Rory are but (black) Martha’s relationship with the Doctor gets remembered as “pines after him, and helps him out when he needs her”?

poor fan reaction to Martha is part of the story of “why no companions of color,” I guess, but not nearly the whole one.  it’s cherry-picking an effect and isolating it from its cause.  “A white girl is a safer choice given how much shit Martha has gotten” is just an echo of “nope, companions of color couldn’t possibly be marketable.”  spoilers: well written characters always find fans, and tons of fans are, in fact, people of color (or not) searching high and low for the elusive character of color who’s actually a fully realized and well rounded person.  it’s just rare for that character to get written, because, you know: prejudice keeping her from coming into being at the writing level, the casting level, the directing level, the broad-cultural-expectations-and-racial-narratives-ingrained-in-everyone-producing-and-consuming-the-show level: every step of the way.

quest

tenlittlebullets:

cojsz:

my quest begins today. i watch the entire third series again, because i want to like Martha Jones, i do, i really really do, her character definitely deserves it. she is strong, independent, smart, powerful etc. but her constant whining about the Doctor not loving her annoys me so much i can’t even tell.

but now my quest begins. i really hope i can change my opinion about her.

YAY!  I am always happy to cheerlead for my girl Martha.  If you don’t feel like wading through a bunch of tl;dr, feel free to scroll past, but if you want Reasons To Like Martha Jones and a way to find a sympathetic take on her feelings for the Doctor, I will happily ramble about it.

I think the unrequited-love subplot was a crap writing decision, because the romantic angle tends to swallow up everything else about Ten and Martha’s dynamic and make it look like the whole thing was a silly crush.  It obscures what’s really going on there: Martha is brilliant and capable and BAMF, and she knows this, but then she meets someone who’s on a completely different cosmic level of brilliant and capable and BAMF, and who invites her into his universe.  And once she’s there, he treats her like she doesn’t exist.  She asks smart questions, he shoots her down like an idiot; she takes control of situations, he takes her for granted; she comes up with brilliant ideas, he barely acknowledges her.

Yeah, he’s a skinny alien tease and she wants in his pants for the first couple episodes before she realizes exactly how cut-up he still is about Rose; yeah, romantic feelings get mixed up in it once it’s too late for her to nip them in the bud; but I think the basic source of her frustration is not being able to tell whether this friendship is a two-way street, or even why he keeps her around except to occasionally prevent him from wandering off the roofs of tall buildings.  What Martha is really desperate for isn’t a nice snog in the TARDIS, it’s some basic trust and validation and reciprocity.  She’s pretty sure she’s earned it, but the only arbiter whose opinion she can rely on in this wide new universe is the Doctor, and he looks at her and all he sees is “not Rose; why aren’t you Rose?“  Even after he gets less edgy about accepting someone new in the TARDIS, it seems like he can only muster up any appreciation for Martha after he belatedly realizes he’s left her her hanging and owes her a substantial backlog of thanks for saving the day.  At which point he grins and gives her a hug, but it always feels forced and she knows it.

We the audience should be able to tell that she’s earned his admiration a thousand times over—she’s a fucking badass, she saves his ass more times than any other NuWho companion, and she certainly puts up with more horrible crap and puts in more blood sweat and tears for his sake than anyone should humanly be expected to.  But RTD grossly miscalculated the degree to which viewers would be right there with Ten going “but you’re not Rose,” and then he committed the further miscalculation of adding a romantic dimension to Martha’s sense of rejection, making it only too easy to set Martha up as a romantic rival to Rose and dismiss her pain as butthurt jealousy—or even get angry at her for feeling pain they think she has no right to feel.  When really, by the time she’s developed a full-blown crush she’s also accepted that the Doctor will probably never return those feelings, and she only allows herself to sigh about it quietly and in private—she never takes it out on him the way he takes his grief about Rose out on her.  She’d like her feelings returned, yeah, but she knows better than to expect that of him; what she does expect, and openly fumes when she feels she isn’t getting it, is some basic respect.

And that’s why Martha’s struggle throughout her character arc, and her eventual triumph in the finale, isn’t about getting over a crush on an emotionally-unavailable alien tease.  It’s about realizing that even when she’s out of her depth—even when she’s in Elizabethan London with no idea what the rules of time travel are, even when she’s facing down alien menaces she’s never heard of before, even when she’s on her own in a hostile time period with no idea what to do—and even if the Doctor is the one who has more of an idea what he’s doing, she doesn’t need to rely on his validation to know that she’s a fucking badass.  That’s something that none of the other companions had to come to terms with, because they never had to deal with the Doctor withholding his trust and appreciation.  Ten was a fucking wreck in s3 and Martha caught the fallout; the way the season is written tends to polarize fandom into “god, Martha needs to stop whining” or “fuck you, no, Ten needs to stop being a dick,” but in the end I think we’re meant to have sympathy for both of them as flawed people trying to do their best with a painful situation.