Martha was bold, clever, curious, and empathetic, and none of that changed because she loved a man who didn't feel the same. In crises, she was cool but never detached. She kept the peace in a lively but strained family. Outside her dynamic with the Doctor, she had nearly everything in her life handled: She was a medical student. Female characters in her shoes are often painted as pushovers, but Martha pushed back. ![]() And Martha's strongest moments came when she stood knee-deep in her own feelings and demanded dignity anyway.Īt its best, Martha's story was about a woman grappling with her self-respect in the midst of an unbalanced, often unhealthy relationship. Davies finally put that idea to rest with the next companion, Catherine Tate's Donna, who was never anything more or less than the Doctor's best friend), but, to be fair, Davies wrote almost everyone in the Tenth Doctor's orbit like they had a crush on him, from Jack Harkness ( John Barrowman) to, literally, William Shakespeare. Both the best and the worst aspects of Martha's arc are tangled up in her infatuation with the Doctor: The idea that every woman in the Doctor's path was hopelessly in love with him was insulting (then-showrunner Russell T. Her uphill battle to make the Doctor - and the fans - view her on her own terms was complicated by the fact that she developed her own unrequited crush on the Time Lord, which only made Rose loom larger in her story. How can anyone compete with star-crossed romance? The sparkling chemistry between Rose and the Tenth Doctor ( David Tennant) cast a long shadow over Martha when she made her debut at the start of Season 3. Rose occupied a unique spot in the world of Doctor Who, where the golden rule has always been " no hanky-panky in the TARDIS": She was in love with the Doctor, explicitly, and he loved her back, even if the long and sexless history of the franchise prevented him from telling her before tragedy struck.Ī Salute to TV's Most Underrated Female Characters The first Black companion in the history of Doctor Who, Martha joined the sci-fi revival in 2007, following the exit of Billie Piper's massively beloved Rose. ![]() But when it came to Martha, the Doctor couldn't stop trying. On one level, that speaks to how crowded the field is: The point the show wants to make, as the Doctor loses irreplaceable friends but still finds room in the TARDIS for new ones, is that people are too unique to be compared to each other. Martha ( Freema Agyeman) was cool enough to inspire the Bard - and cooler still for turning him down - but she's always left out of conversations about the Doctor's best companions. Sometimes it's like people forget that in the world of Doctor Who, Shakespeare wrote his most famous sonnet for Martha Jones.
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