OOC: The Wake Application
Jun. 16th, 2018 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
storiesofmyownPersonal Information
Name: Allie
Age: 40+
Personal Journal:sosayethallie
Email / Plurk / Discord / Other: technosagery @ gmail dot com
Current Character(s): N/A
Character Information
Character Name: Dr. Martha Jones
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Character History:
Martha Jones @ The TARDIS Data Core
Miss Martha Jones
Before she became the Tenth Doctor's traveling Companion, Miss Martha Jones was already a beautiful, brilliant, interesting young woman. Born the second daughter of an upper middle class black family, she pursued a dream of becoming a medical doctor from early childhood when she saw X-rays of her broken arm. Where her older sister Tish was the bubbly, effervescent one who hogged the spotlight, Martha was her mother's darling, touted as 'a brilliant surgeon' from a very young age. Born in 1986, by 2008 she was a student doctor at Royal Hope Hospital.
It was at Royal Hope that she first met the Doctor, who was posing as a patient when an alien species hijacked the hospital to the moon. All around her, patients, fellow student doctors, even experienced physicians were panicking, but Martha remained calm. People feared that they would all die from lack of breathable air, and the windows would be sucked out at any second. Martha, however, reasoned that if the windows were going to be sucked out, it would've happened already, because they were hardly airtight; since they hadn't, there must be breathable air. Based on this assessment, the Doctor invited her to step outside with him to test the theory, and afterward, they joined forces to track down a rogue alien and get the Royal Hope returned to Earth.
As thanks for her help, the Doctor invited Martha to join her on a single trip through space and time on the TARDIS. She accepted, but first she made him prove that time travel was possible, which resulted in him going backward in time to show his tie to her hours before she eventually 'met' him at the hospital. And she remembered this as having happened already. Confused and delighted, she joined him in the TARDIS, and like nearly everyone before her, immediately noticed, "it's bigger on the inside."
Her single trip was supposed to be to visit Shakespeare in 1599, which they do. Martha was immediately concerned about stepping on the proverbial butterfly or killing her grandfather, but the Doctor asked, why she would do that? What had the butterfly ever done to her. Then she worried about being conspicuous as a black woman in England of the time. He told her to act like she belonged there; it always worked for him. It apparently worked for Shakespeare, too, who tried to pull with her. Martha turned him down, and had her first experience of saving the world--by supplying Shakespeare with the word "Expelliarmus!" from Harry Potter.
After Shakespeare, the Doctor decided to take her to New New York, millions of years in the future on a New Earth. She got pissed with him because he'd taken Rose, his previous Companion who he was clearly still mourning, to the same place, but there was little time to indulge her annoyance at being a replacement companion, because she was kidnapped. Later, they reunited and witnessed the death of the Face of Boe, whose last words, "You are not alone," later prove to be a clue to the identity of someone they meet.
By way of apology for taking her where he took Rose, the Doctor told Martha about his home planet's destruction and the events of the Time War and then took her to old New York. There, Martha had her first encounter with Daleks, and and another chance to save humanity with the Doctor. They also saved the life of a man who'd been turned into a pig slave, and his girlfriend stayed by his side. This prompted Martha to say that there was someone for everyone, showing her romantic nature and her desire to help the Doctor and not just the people they met, but the Doctor replied only, "Maybe."
After this trip, the Doctor returned Martha home twelve hours after they'd left in the first place. Back on Earth in 2008, they attended a black-tie event organized by her sister, Tish, where they destroyed technology with monstrous effects. Martha also revealed that she was developing somewhat of a crush on the Doctor.
When he invited her on one more trip as a thank you, Martha turned him down. She said she was tired of being just a passenger and she wasn't going unless she could be a proper Companion. The Doctor's response permitted her to think he was just going to leave her, but then he nodded and said she never really had been just a passenger, had she? And so, Miss Martha Jones became the Tenth Doctor's newest Companion.
Companion
As a Companion, Martha received an upgrade to her cellphone; the Doctor gave it 'Universal Roaming'. This proved to be important almost immediately, as she used it to contact her mum from the 42nd century to ask her a question about 20th century music; it was used as a keycode answer to a lock on a badly endangered ship. She could have used to maintain a long-distance relationship with a crewmember on that ship who had fallen for her, but she cut it off instead.
During that trip, Martha learned about the Time Lord regeneration when the Doctor was possessed by a sentient sun. In order to kill the sun particles, he had to submit to being frozen. This left him terrified and completely dependent on others, but mainly Martha, to follow his instructions. While panicking -- and showing a vulnerability that made Martha Jones, human, protective of the Doctor, Time Lord -- the Doctor revealed that if he died, he would regenerate and that he desperately didn't want to. He reached out for Martha, needing the touch of her hand, but ultimately calmed when Martha promised him it wasn't going to happen. This was significant for Martha, because he showed the same faith in her that she already had in him.
Of course, he had to go and spoil it after, by being all stoic and acting like it wasn't a big deal when she asked if he was all right. Then he made up for it tenfold by giving her her own TARDIS key. She finally felt like a proper Companion. Take that, Rose! But she also got a worrisome call from her mum, for the second time warning her that Harold Saxon (the man trying to become Prime Minister) said the Doctor wasn't safe. She promised to come round for tea. More tea-ish than tea, because she didn't tell her what she was actually doing with the Doctor or that she'd be spending quite a lot of time with him before she got around to tea. This was far from the only time she misled her family about her adventures.
During their travels, Martha and the Doctor ran afoul of aliens known as the Family of Blood, relentless hunters who would never give up tracking them. In order to evade them, the Doctor used a device that turned him into a human and crafted a human memory for him, but not before giving Martha instructions for how to handle anything that might come up and when to wake him. The plan was simply to hide in 1913 until the Family of Blood died.
England, 1913, wasn't a particularly friendly place for a bright, well-educated young black woman. Martha had to take a job as a maid at a boy's school where Smith was a headmaster in order to watch over her Doctor. She endured racism, insults, and fended off the Family of Blood, while watching her Doctor fall in love with another human woman. Another human woman who wasn't her! By this time, her own feelings for the Doctor were in full bloom, which she confessed to John Smith ("I love him to bits") while trying to get him to wake up and become the Doctor again. And after he finally did what was needed, she had to watch and try to comfort him while he mourned another lost love.
Before her unrequited feelings could take too much of a toll on their relationship, Martha and the Doctor inadvertently got stuck in 1969, waiting for a young woman, Sally Sparrow, to evade the Weeping Angels and send the TARDIS back for them. While there, Martha again had to take a service job instead of the doctoring job she was qualified for. Despite the frustration she felt at having to support them, it was a good time for her and the Doctor. They shared a flat, and spent loads of time hanging out, telling stories, and watching telly. When the TARDIS eventually returned to them, part of Martha was sorry to no longer have the Doctor to herself.
On another trip, they stopped in Cardiff to refuel the TARDIS at the Torchwood rift. Unbeknownst to Martha at the time, they picked up a hitchhiker: Captain Jack Harkness, who held on to the outside of the TARDIS while she hurtled headlong to the end of the universe. Upon exiting the TARDIS, Martha saw an injured man, went back for her medical kit and came back to try to resuscitate him. Just as she'd announced he was dead, Jack revived and immediately began flirting with her. This annoyed the Doctor, but Martha was pleased to have the attention, and she and Jack soon became fast friends (which annoyed him even more) and bonded over being ignored for Rose.
At the end of the universe, they found Professor Yana and his assistant Chantho desperately trying to save the human species by sending them to Utopia on a rocket made of spare parts. Chantho, an insectoid alien, obviously adored the Professor, and she, too, bonded with Martha over unrequited feelings. That she'd spent 17 years with the Professor never being noticed served as a warning to Martha, just a tiny niggle that sat at the back of her mind while they worked together to get the humans away.
Meanwhile, Martha noticed that Yana had a watch fob much like John Smith's biodata device, the one that returned him to being a Time Lord, in 1913. Her curiosity about it, and her discovery of Gallifreyan markings on the back of it, led to him opening the watch. He reverted to a Time Lord form, that of the Master, the Doctor's arch-nemesis! This, too, served as a warning to Martha, because Chantho tried to persuade the Master to be the kind, gentle Professor that she loved, and he called her an insect. The Master resented the Doctor's youthful form and so regenerated, then stole the TARDIS and fled. As he did, Martha realized that she knew the young Master's voice: it was the voice of Harold Saxon!
Left at the end of the world, Martha, the Doctor, and Jack had no choice but to travel back in time with nothing but Jack's teleporting time vortex manipulator. They arrive in London just in time for Harold Saxon to have become Prime Minister, and the three of them were branded dangerous fugitives. While they were on the run, Saxon announced contact with an alien race called the Toclafane (whom the Doctor knew didn't exist), and then somehow, everything went to hell.
Martha's mum, her dad, and her sister ended up servants aboard the Master's vessel The Valiant. The Master aged the Doctor 900 years down to a tiny wizened creature whom he kept almost as a pet and made him watch every horrible thing the Master did. Jack was being held captive too, and Martha just knew the Master would use his immortality as a way to torture him.
While the Master was busy underestimating her, Jack gave Martha his vortex manipulator and told her to run. Martha didn't want to leave them, but the Doctor had given her a clue to how the Master could be defeated, and there was no one who could do it but Martha. So she ran, but before she left, she swore she'd be back.
For almost an entire year, Martha roamed the Toclafane-blanketed Earth, traveling on foot, in cargo containers, by whatever means became available with the help of the human resistance. She circled the globe, and wherever she went, she gathered people around to tell them stories of the Doctor, to build their belief in him and help them persevere until what had been done could be undone.
During her travels, she was captured in Japan. There, she was forced to work in a factory doing grueling work, overseen by cruel taskmasters who would beat her if she fell behind on production. Her dexterous surgeon's fingers saved her life more than once in that work. And although she was bone-tired every night and giving in to desperation herself, she managed an hour or so every night to tell other factory workers the stories of the Doctor. She made several brave young friends who arranged much of this for her, and she tried to save them. But when the Toclafane rained fire on the islands, it was only Martha who escaped.
Almost a year later, with time running out, Martha returned to England and arranged for herself to be captured by some of the Master's people. She used a ruse that had arisen during her trip -- that there was a gun in four parts scattered around the globe that only she could assemble and use to kill a Time Lord, and when the Master apparently believed it, she laughed in his face. Because what she'd really done was convinced everyone everywhere to think about and reach out for the Doctor at the same, exact time, and all of those minds, amplified by the Archangel network, would save the Doctor who would save them all.
Martha didn't know exactly how it would work, but she saw the Doctor's aging reverse before her eyes. The Master tried to escape but Jack dealt with the Toclafane and the Doctor handled the Master, and he did something Martha couldn't believe: he told the Master he forgave him. But the Master didn't want forgiveness, especially not for his 'glorious' masterstroke of evil, making the Toclafane from the humans at the end of the universe (including a boy named Creet who Martha had known). And in the end, Martha had to watch when his abused wife, Lucy, shot him, and the Doctor collapsed in grief over the death of his worst enemy and oldest friend.
Owing to the destruction of a paradox machine that allowed the Toclafane to kill their ancestors without wiping themselves out, time immediately reverted back to just before the Master took control of the world and all hell broke loose. In all the world, the only people who knew what happened during the Year That Never Was, were Martha, Jack, the Doctor, Martha's family and the other humans on the Valiant.
When it was all over, the Doctor invited Martha to rejoin him on the TARDIS. But the Martha he'd sent out the year before and the Martha who stood before him now were different people. This one was harder, wiser, more confident, and suffering from a significant case of hypervigilance and oncoming PTSD. She knew her family needed her more, no matter how much the Doctor did, and she also knew her feelings for him were bad for her.
Rather than destroy what remained of their friendship, Martha told him no. She told him a story about how she'd told a friend to get out of a bad relationship and said, "This is me, getting out." But she also told him she'd learned that she wasn't second best. She really was good. And then she gave him her phone with universal roaming so she could get in touch with him if she needed him.
Dr. Martha Jones
Returned to her own life, Martha spent much of the next six months with her family. Her mother and father had reconciled during their year aboard the Valiant, and her sister needed her to remember how to have fun. Meanwhile there was dealing with Leo who hadn't been with them, his partner, and his daughter, and helping everyone get over what had happened to do.
Martha herself suffered terrible nightmares of being found and killed by the Toclafane. She channeled her hypervigilance and her inability to sleep into studying for and completing her exams. The return to 'normal' life itched sometimes, and she missed the excitement, wonder and adventure of traveling in the TARDIS, but this was her life and she had to live it.
And as soon as she passed her exams, she was contacted by UNIT and offered a job. After the Year That Never Was, Jack had also offered her work at Torchwood, which she'd turned down to be with her family, but now she took the offer of work from UNIT, because someone needed to sort out those tosspots from the inside.
Voice of a Nightingale
Not long after she began work with UNIT, Martha became involved in an investigation into an organization called the Pharm. She visited Torchwood Three and was reunited with Jack, who called her "Martha Jones, Voice of a Nightingale," in reference to how she'd 'sung' the world back into being with her stories of the Doctor during the Year that Never Was. She also met Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, Gwen Cooper, and Ianto Jones with whom she bonded quickly, teasing him about his and Jack's sexual arrangement.
Martha was discovered by the Pharm and was implanted with a Mayfly. Owen saved her life by surgically removing the Mayfly. He later did so again by taking a bullet meant for Martha, which killed him. She helped the Torchwood team thereafter and witnessed Owen being resurrected by an alien device. She then gave him a physical and discovered that he was basically a dead man walking. The alien gauntlet attacked Martha, aging her badly, but Owen was able to defeat Death and the effects were reversed. She remained very grateful to Owen and affectionate toward him, and fixed his ruined hand after Jack relieved him of duty and he tried to mangle it. Until Owen was cleared to return to duty as Torchwood's doctor, Martha stayed on.
Later, when Owen and Tosh were killed, Martha attended their funerals to provide support to Jack and Ianto especially, but also Gwen.
Child of Time
Although she missed the Doctor, Martha let her feelings for him fade. She had even tracked down and asked out the handsome young doctor she'd met during her travels in the Year that Never Was. Although Tom didn't remember it, he'd saved her life and they'd had great chemistry. Apparently that held, because when she returned to UNIT from Torchwood, she and Tom became engaged.
Shortly after their engagement, Martha became involved in a UNIT operation against the Sontarans, aliens planning to invade the Earth. Martha called the Doctor when her by-the-book commander planned an attack on a Sontaran facility. During the operation, Martha was taken captive by the Sontarans and cloned. She was kept alive in a sleeping state so that the clone could access her memories.
When the Doctor rescued Martha, he was able to tell the difference between Martha and her clone because the clone was so cavalier about the lives of her loved ones. Still, Martha was able to convince her clone to help them against the Sontarans. The clone soon died in the struggle, but before she did, she told Martha that she had many things she still wanted to do, so she should do them. This was in the forefront of Martha's mind when, after defeating the Sontarans, the Doctor invited her to travel with him again and she turned him down.
Never did the road of a Companion's path run smooth. No sooner had she turned him down than the TARDIS sucked her, the Doctor and Donna into the Time Vortex. She had to admit when they stepped out of the TARDIS that she still loved the first step on a new planet. The Doctor got grabbed and his hand was shoved into a machine; this created his daughter, Jenny.
Martha was likewise grabbed and taken away by the alien Hath. Once again, she exercised her healing skills and compassion on one of the aliens, Hath Peck. This helped her to earn the Hath's trust, and eventually to saving her own life, because when she slipped in some killer quicksand, Hath Peck sacrificed himself for her. Martha grieved deeply for Hath Peck although she'd only known him a short time.
After she was reunited with the Doctor, Donna, and Jenny, one of the humans of the planet shot at the Doctor. Jenny jumped in front of the bullet to save him. Fresh off Hath Peck's sacrifice, Martha tried to save Jenny but couldn't. The Doctor thought she might regenerate, but it was Martha who had the sad duty of informing him that she was gone.
Returned to Earth to reunite with Tom, Martha kept her clone's words close to her heart. She mulled them over, often thinking about what specific things the clone had meant. So, when the opportunity arose to take over as the Medical Director of UNIT's Project Indigo, Martha took it and moved to New York. Although it's never specified what happened to her engagement to Tom, it seems that it suffered the strain of the move, because they were apparently no longer a couple when, shortly after her promotion, the Earth got hijacked across the universe to the Medusa Cascade.
The Daleks were once again responsible, and when they invaded the Project Indigo facility, Martha was entrusted with a solemn duty. She was given Project Indigo -- an untested teleportation device, and an Osterhagen key -- one of three needed to set off twenty-five nuclear warheads beneath the Earth's crust to be set off if anything like the Master's takeover ever happened again. Against Jack's long-distance warning not to use the device, Martha did. She had to. The world, and her family, were at stake again. She had no other choice.
Although Jack, Ianto and Gwen believed her splashed all over the universe as individual atoms, Martha emerged unscathed -- at home with her mum. Her mum was so thrilled, because she believed it to be the end of the world (which it probably would be, if Martha failed and if she didn't), and Martha had come back to her. Martha, then, realized Project Indigo worked by taking the wearer to where they most wanted to go, which in Martha's case was not the Osterhagen station in Germany, but to her mum.
It was a good thing she ended up there, because former Prime Minister Harriet Jones arranged a subspace transmission to contact the Doctor's Companions in the event that Earth was in need and the Doctor didn't come. She contacted Martha, Sarah Jane and Luke Smith, and Torchwood. She also contacted Rose Tyler, but none of them knew that at the time. Together the group used Harriet's network to call Martha's phone that she'd given the Doctor. Doing so exposed the network to the Daleks, and Harriet knowingly sacrificed herself to allow them to reach him.
Once they did, Martha still had a job to do, in case the Doctor didn't come in time to rescue them. He hadn't been responding to their calls after all. So she said a tearful goodbye to her mum, never telling her what she had to do, and teleported to the Osterhagen station. There, she was confronted by a German who knew what the station was for. She threatened to kill Martha rather than let her destroy the Earth, held a gun on her, and Martha told her to do it. If the woman killed her, she wouldn't have to die knowing she'd murdered the entire population of Earth. But the woman didn't.
It took three keys to set off the warheads. When the others were ready, instead of immediately performing her duty, Martha did something else. She sent a message to the Daleks. She'd figured out that if the Daleks didn't need Earth and its people, they wouldn't have gone to the trouble of towing them all the way to the Medusa Cascade with 26 other planets. So she told the Daleks that if they didn't let the people of Earth go, she'd use the key and destroy it.
And Martha knew, as much as she hated it, that she would do it. She would destroy the Earth before she saw suffering like the Master inflicted again, because this time there was no paradox engine to reverse it. But before she could, the Daleks teleported her to join the Doctor, Jackie Tyler, Mickey Smith, Rose Tyler, Sarah Jane, and Jack in the dungeons where they were prisoners of old nemeses Davros, who had rebuilt the Dalek empire from his own genes, and Dalek Caan.
What the Daleks didn't know was that the Doctor had almost died, but he staved off his regeneration by channeling the energy into his severed hand. And then, when they tried to destroy Donna and the TARDIS, the hand started to do what dying Time Lords do -- and it created a human-Time Lord metacrisis Doctor, and also merged the Doctor and Donna. DoctorDonna saved them all, then they fought off the Daleks, and all the Companions flew the TARDIS to drag Earth back home again.
Martha was there to witness the Doctor sealing Rose and the metacrisis human Doctor off into Bad Wolf Bay again. But she was genuinely happy to have seen him and Rose reunited, even if only part of him got to stay with her. When they returned home to Earth, Jack and Martha left the TARDIS together, holding hands, and -- at least temporarily -- happy for having saved Earth again. Moments later, they were joined by Rose's ex, Mickey, who Martha had definitely noticed was pretty bloody fit.
Jack offered her another job at Torchwood, but she turned him down again. Not long after, Mickey gave her a bell, and they'd made plans for a date. That's the last thing she remembers before she Wakes.
Character Personality: 'Dark Lady.' Companion. The Girl Who Walked the Earth. A Legend. Voice of a Nightingale. Child of Time. Good. These are just some of the appellations that are applied to first Miss, then Doctor, Martha Jones: William Shakespeare, the Doctor, TVTropes, her eventual fiance Tom Milligan, Jack Harkness, Dalek Caan, both Rose and Martha herself, respectively. All of them describe aspects of her -- her beauty, her loyalty, her determination, her heroism, her charisma, her experience, her competence -- and do so appropriately, for throughout her travels with the Doctor and work with UNIT, she shows all these qualities and more.
What they miss by being only partial descriptions is that Martha is the Companion who is also the Doctor. Sure, yes, people acknowledge that Martha is a medical doctor, but to understand Martha properly, it must be understood that she is a mirror of the Doctor. The Doctor fled his family and his world to explore, to see the world, to help the helpless and to free the oppressed. Despite his best intentions and his desire not to be a killer, he turns the people around him into soldiers in his personal war. Normal, good, kind people become killers, because he won't.
Martha Jones began as a curious child, so determined to become a doctor that her walls had anatomy posters when other girls had posters of heartthrobs. She memorized the bones in the human body with the same thoroughness that led her to read all 32 of The Troubleseekers novels and the same sense of wonder that allowed her to suspend disbelief both for Harry Potter and for the Doctor.
An atypical middle child with a showboat older sister, Martha emerged into a responsible daughter, a peacemaker, and a caretaker. She runs interference between her mother and her father's girlfriend, buys her little brother a toaster for his birthday, calls her mum from across the universe for help with a trivia question and just to talk when she thinks she might die. Yet like the Doctor, she leaves her family and her world behind to travel time and space for curiosity and continues both to help the Doctor and all the aliens they encounter. Also, like the Doctor, she carries the fate of the Earth and her dysfunctional family with her wherever she goes and they (like Gallifrey and the Time Lords) are always in her mind.
And, too, both Martha and the Doctor employ charisma and stories to inspire the people around them. The Doctor has lifetimes of experience to draw from and Martha only a few years, but somehow she manages to gain the attention and affection of people all over time and space, from William Shakespeare, to various of her captors, to literally the entire world, when she must walk it to spread the message of the Doctor. Where the Doctor inspires people to fight by their belief in him, Martha inspires them to believe and endure. She allows them to think she is going to kill the Master during the Year that Never Was, and keeps them from desperation and fruitless, petty rebellion.
The main difference between Martha and the Doctor is that in her travels with him, she has seen that not taking up arms, not being willing to do the hard thing, leaves dangerous loose ends for other people to unravel. When it comes right down to the wire with the Daleks, Martha is willing to endure being branded a genocidal killer to protect the people of Earth from hopeless suffering. She is willing to be that genocidal killer to end that suffering. The Doctor thinks she's mad, but she's learned from the example he's tried to put aside after the Time War and his destruction of the Daleks.
All of the Doctor's Companions provide a foil for him and learn from him. Many of them become heroes in their own right and not just sidekicks. Martha's path is the only one that really and truly mirrors the Doctor's. Because Martha, like the Doctor, carries knowledge of the end of her species from the Year That Never Was, she is, too, in a way, a Time Lord. And, very much like the Time Lord she'll always love a little bit, she carries a perhaps misplaced sense of guilt over what she believes she caused: the enslavement of her family, the repeated torture of Jack Harkness, the aging and tormenting of the Doctor, the creation of the Toclafanes from human children of the future, and the near annihilation of humanity.
In the end, it's her choice to leave him. And when she does, it's to continue on her chosen path. She becomes a physician, someone who protects, suffers so others don't have to, occasionally plays God, and ultimately, although it's after where she'd be arriving from, a freelance alien fighter who takes on a Companion (one of the Doctor's former Companions, Mickey Smith) of her own.
That said, it still remains to tease apart the traits, strengths and weaknesses that make up Doctor Martha Jones. So, to begin, Martha is curious. She loves learning, and even now after everything she's seen, there is still nothing as exciting to her as the first step onto a new world. Every new place, species, person is a wonderful opportunity to explore.
Martha is also brave. Time and time again, she throws herself into danger on little more than the Doctor's say-so or her faith in the Doctor, to protect or save 'innocents' whose lives are at stake. Whether it's the humans of Hooverville or the crew of the SS Pentallian or all the humans of Earth, she will face down Daleks, risk an exploding Doctor, dodge and evade murderous Toclafane with nothing but her wits to shield her.
Which raises another point. Martha's dead clever. Not only is she book smart, but she's a puzzle solver. This informs how she looks at problems -- as puzzles to solve, and how she looks at the world -- a series of patterns, and, in some circumstances, how she looks at relationships -- as systems. When her friends become involved in relationships with men who don't value them, even if her friends love the men, she advises them to get out. She apples the same logic (which is also compassion) to her own relationship with the Doctor, and this is why, when she finally stops being a Companion, she tells him, "this is me, getting out."
But it's only when she must, to enable her to act or advise, that Martha's predominant approach to people is cerebral. Most of the time, she is, instead, a deeply loyal and empathetic friend. One who not only listens well to, but develops deep emotional rapport with, people of all types, species, and from all walks of life.
Because ultimately, Martha's defining trait is her compassion. When her friends hurt, she weeps with them. She is always ready with a hug, an 'are you okay?', a word of support, an expression of quiet faith. Of course, this compassion sometimes gets in her way, like when her desire to help, protect, support, love her friends turns her affection for the Doctor into an unrequited love affair.
It is this compassion that turns Martha's curiosity-driven interest in science and anatomy into a healing passion. Whenever someone is injured during their travels, Martha's first instinct is always to offer medical treatment. It doesn't matter how strange the physiology is, Martha will always try and keep trying. Her healing determination and perseverance doesn't stop with the body. She tries repeatedly to heal the Doctor's broken heart, to help shoulder the burden of Jack's pain, and when she's at Torchwood and Owen dies, she tries to hold them together. Later, after Owen dies again and Tosh dies, Martha attends their funerals to support Jack, Ianto, and Gwen.
Despite being brilliant and beautiful, Martha spends a lot of time feeling second best. Whether it's because her sister Tish is something of a spotlight hog (although Martha's clearly her mother's favorite), or because the Doctor can't see her blinding smiles for her standing in Rose's shadow, she often feels like a replacement or a rebound. At the end of her time with the Doctor, she remembers that she isn't second-best. She's good.
Martha's romantic streak and feeling like a replacement goldfish isn't her only weakness. She can get herself in trouble with how clever she is, whether by talking herself into a mess by accident, or thinking she sees the whole picture when she doesn't have some of the pieces. And she can be a bit arrogant about how much brighter she is than most people.
At the same time, though, Martha's got a very skewed sense of self. It's not just seeing herself as second-best. It's that when, after she's spent an entire year inspiring the world, Tom Milligan tells her that she's a legend, she tells him that's wrong. She's nothing special. It's the Doctor who is the legend. Her faith in him obscures her view of herself. This self-perception is even more apparent in the way that she's always the listener-friend. She never expects people to ask about her, and how she's doing. Instead, it's her job to listen and help, and comfort them.
Whether because of this or because she privileges logic over emotion in dealing with problems or because Martha is relentlessly independent, Martha hides her pain behind a beautiful smile, a warm hug, good humor and good cheer. In this, not only is she like the Doctor, but she is also like Jack. During The Year That Never Was, no matter what happened to her, no matter how frightened she was, no matter how hard it got, Martha never let herself cry but once--when the entire population of Japan and every living thing on its islands, burned, and she was the only one to have escaped alive.
It wasn't just grief that led Martha to give into tears; it was anger. Because Martha has one hell of a temper. It burns beneath all of her determination and oozes into sarcastic mockery at the Master when he thinks she's been traveling the world in search of pieces of a gun. It erupts into explosive fury when the Doctor tries to tell her not to call her family to warn them and she tells him, "I'll do what I like!" It sustains her through the casual racism of 1913. But the one thing she never lets it do is determine her behavior. In 1913 and in 1969, when society dictates she can't be the doctor she is, she willingly takes work in menial or service positions to support herself and the Doctor.
Ultimately, in spite of her passions and her PTSD, Martha has grown into a stable person for having helped the Doctor, Jack, Sarah Jane, Jackie, Mickey, and Rose save humanity from the Daleks again. Yet despite that, Martha has a lot to learn when she Wakes. Starting with how to let other people be her friend, and also how to live and share her own stories. She still has a lot of things she wants to do.
Powers and Abilities: Human through and through, Martha is a Badass Bookworm. Where Jack is immortal and Rose becomes nearly a god, Martha's only got what she was born with: her brain and her heart.
Martha's quite intelligent, capable of calm analysis in the midst of a crisis. It's this ability that first attracts the Doctor's attention: she reasons that if the windows of the Royal Hope hospital were going to blow out after it was hijacked to the moon they would have done so immediately, because they're not airtight; thus, there must be air outside, somehow.
She's gifted at analysis, pattern recognition, and problem-solving, which stands her in good stead as a diagnostician and scientist, and occasionally gets her in trouble. When she, Shakespeare and the Doctor are banishing the Carrionites, Shakespeare falters for a word, and Martha abruptly supplies Expelliarmus!, which successfully shuts them away and confirms her as a Harry Potter nerd at the same time. There are countless examples of her using her knowledge or books she's read to reason out a situation, including one that she will never quite forgive herself for: recognizing Professor Yana's watch as similar to John Smith's biodata device and identifying Gallifreyan writing on the back. It's her interest that leads Yana to open it, loosing the Doctor's nemesis, the Master. But even amidst her horror, she also recognizes that Yana is an acronym for the Face of Boe's last words, "You Are Not Alone," and identifies the Master's new voice as that of Harold Saxon.
In addition to these traits, she's an excellent fully licensed physician, skilled at surgery and autopsies. She's served as a combat medic for humans and aliens, and rises to the position of Medical Director of UNIT's Project Indigo before the age of 25. She speaks at least bits of several human languages (notably German) after her travels during The Year That Never Was and can recognize Gallifreyan among other alien languages. Although Martha prefers not to carry a gun -- a preference that developed long before she met the Doctor, when she chose to be a healer, but also conforms to the Doctor's preferences -- she is skilled with firearms and has hand-to-hand combat training.
But while Martha can fight, most of her 'wins' against the bad guys come from her being a Determinator. That is, if she has a special superpower, it's that Martha never gives up. She is capable of putting her emotions, her personal desires, her terror, even her physical exhaustion aside to do what must be done, and this is shown time and again. It's so pronounced that even the Doctor and Captain Jack Harkness find her presence comforting. When the Doctor is possessed by sentient sun and burning up, he panics and needs the touch of Martha's hand and her reassurance that he is not going to die, she's not going to let it happen, to calm down; this, even though her own life is at stake too. And when the Master's Toclafane blanket the Earth during the Year that Never Was, Martha travels the world, evading them, escaping when she's captured, enduring countless hardships. No matter what is thrown in her path, she keeps going, and still has her wits about her sufficient to trick the Master. It's her pure faith and determination, her heart, that convinces others to believe in the Doctor and call on him. Martha's heart literally saves the world.
While both intellect and determination are aspects of Martha's personality, they are more significant as tools in her arsenal, much like Jack's hello, and Ianto's coffee.
Samples
Here's a link to TDM, but I wrote up a network post, too, in case there was too much action in it.
Network:
Right, then. Let's do this.
[sounds of clothing ruffling from off-screen as though being smoothed down, then Martha's face appears upside down in front of the camera]
Oh, bloo-- Crikey.
[sounds of movement, then she settles in front of the camera]
Off to a great start, aren't we? Sorry. It's just... This is all a bit mad, yeah? I mean, one minute I'm agreeing to a date and the next I'm waking up in another... well, here. And it's not the first time I've gone to bed on Earth and woken up light-years away, but--and this is a bit embarrassing--I don't even know where to find a toothbrush, let alone a cracking great pair of shoes. If I'm well and truly stuck, I'm going to need some serious retail therapy.
Yeah, I know. Bend what you want, Martha. Use that beautiful brain of yours, Martha. Why buy when you can bend, nightingale?
[Bends a lolly, not an apple] Don't want to keep the Doctor away, y'see.
But it's not the shoes, right? Or the sweeties, or any of it. You can't Bend shopping. So, help a girl out? There's got to be somewhere to walk until your feet are falling off and you swear you're never going in another shop no matter how fit he is, yeah? Somewhere to collapse into a naff plastic chair and scan the Network at the end of it all?
Please. Don't make me beg. It won't be pretty. Rose? Ianto? River Song? [trails off with her saying 'Anyone?']
Third Person:
The wall of the Box against her back is a silent, reassuring presence. A comforting sentinel against the unknown dangers of her new home. Even if She isn't herself here, she's still the TARDIS to Martha, and if there's anywhere she's going to feel safe enough, after The Year That Never Was (even after the Daleks, it still sticks in her nightmares), to put her entire focus to this 'Bending', it's the TARDIS, thick with shielding, and where the Doctor--Doctor Bad Wolf, she's never going to get used to that--and Rose, Jack and Ianto, and the other Doctors and Companions can get to her in seconds. It's a little weird that this is Rose and the Doctor's bedroom, but they seem happy enough to have her use it.
She sighs and rubs her hands over her thighs. "You can do this, Doctor Martha Jones," she says to herself, and then doubles down again.
They told her to concentrate on something she knows absolutely. An apple, was someone's suggestion. Ianto's lovely coffee, that was Jack's. All right, coffee wasn't what Jack said, but Ianto shops with her. She's not going to think about or try to Bend his derriere, no matter how fit he looks in a suit, ta, Jack.
Her mum's favorite tea was her own first idea, but no. She's a scientist. There's no point Bending oxygen, even if she can. How's she to know if she's succeeded? But water-- Pure, cool, filtered H2O? That's something she can get her mind around.
"Right, then." A small quantity, enough to half-fill (not half-empty, she's still an optimist, even now) a glass. A real glass. She knows the composition of that, too.
First, she thinks through the science. The facts, ma'am. Then she visualizes it, exactly how she wants it to look. Uses calculus to rotate the glass in space. Slowly, slowly, so it doesn't disturb the surface of the water. That's it, proper surface tension. Not too much or it'll be heavy water, and you can't drink that.
Now, she thinks of how it feels in her hand. Smooth and cool. Not too cold. Not slippery, just smooth. But it's more than that, isn't it? It's not just temperature and texture, or even the subtle, barely there taste. It's how she felt, after Japan, tired, heartbroken, cried out, and so bloody thirsty, when someone put that first glass of water in her hand--
Grateful. Certain. Secure. The Master could wipe out the entire population of Japan. He could age the Doctor, torture Jack, enslave her family, but he couldn't take her faith. Not in the Doctor, and not in the simple facts: Water is water. H2O. And if she drank it, it would soothe the burn in her throat, her eyes, her soul. Because it would be water until the end of everything. It would still be water if she had to turn the Osterhagen key. (Unless it was something else, but then it wouldn't be proper water.)
She thinks of drinking it, tipping the glass to her mouth--
Martha's eyes open wide. Her lips are wet. So are her cheeks. There's a lumpy glass in her hand and when she lifts it, water sloshes inside. She's not sure which water is pure and which is salted, which she Bent and which she wept, but! It's just a first effort, but water is water. When she sips it, it soothes the burn on her lips, in her eyes, in her soul.
"Oh. I am good."
Name: Allie
Age: 40+
Personal Journal:
sosayethallieEmail / Plurk / Discord / Other: technosagery @ gmail dot com
Current Character(s): N/A
Character Information
Character Name: Dr. Martha Jones
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Character History:
Martha Jones @ The TARDIS Data Core
Miss Martha Jones
Before she became the Tenth Doctor's traveling Companion, Miss Martha Jones was already a beautiful, brilliant, interesting young woman. Born the second daughter of an upper middle class black family, she pursued a dream of becoming a medical doctor from early childhood when she saw X-rays of her broken arm. Where her older sister Tish was the bubbly, effervescent one who hogged the spotlight, Martha was her mother's darling, touted as 'a brilliant surgeon' from a very young age. Born in 1986, by 2008 she was a student doctor at Royal Hope Hospital.
It was at Royal Hope that she first met the Doctor, who was posing as a patient when an alien species hijacked the hospital to the moon. All around her, patients, fellow student doctors, even experienced physicians were panicking, but Martha remained calm. People feared that they would all die from lack of breathable air, and the windows would be sucked out at any second. Martha, however, reasoned that if the windows were going to be sucked out, it would've happened already, because they were hardly airtight; since they hadn't, there must be breathable air. Based on this assessment, the Doctor invited her to step outside with him to test the theory, and afterward, they joined forces to track down a rogue alien and get the Royal Hope returned to Earth.
As thanks for her help, the Doctor invited Martha to join her on a single trip through space and time on the TARDIS. She accepted, but first she made him prove that time travel was possible, which resulted in him going backward in time to show his tie to her hours before she eventually 'met' him at the hospital. And she remembered this as having happened already. Confused and delighted, she joined him in the TARDIS, and like nearly everyone before her, immediately noticed, "it's bigger on the inside."
Her single trip was supposed to be to visit Shakespeare in 1599, which they do. Martha was immediately concerned about stepping on the proverbial butterfly or killing her grandfather, but the Doctor asked, why she would do that? What had the butterfly ever done to her. Then she worried about being conspicuous as a black woman in England of the time. He told her to act like she belonged there; it always worked for him. It apparently worked for Shakespeare, too, who tried to pull with her. Martha turned him down, and had her first experience of saving the world--by supplying Shakespeare with the word "Expelliarmus!" from Harry Potter.
After Shakespeare, the Doctor decided to take her to New New York, millions of years in the future on a New Earth. She got pissed with him because he'd taken Rose, his previous Companion who he was clearly still mourning, to the same place, but there was little time to indulge her annoyance at being a replacement companion, because she was kidnapped. Later, they reunited and witnessed the death of the Face of Boe, whose last words, "You are not alone," later prove to be a clue to the identity of someone they meet.
By way of apology for taking her where he took Rose, the Doctor told Martha about his home planet's destruction and the events of the Time War and then took her to old New York. There, Martha had her first encounter with Daleks, and and another chance to save humanity with the Doctor. They also saved the life of a man who'd been turned into a pig slave, and his girlfriend stayed by his side. This prompted Martha to say that there was someone for everyone, showing her romantic nature and her desire to help the Doctor and not just the people they met, but the Doctor replied only, "Maybe."
After this trip, the Doctor returned Martha home twelve hours after they'd left in the first place. Back on Earth in 2008, they attended a black-tie event organized by her sister, Tish, where they destroyed technology with monstrous effects. Martha also revealed that she was developing somewhat of a crush on the Doctor.
When he invited her on one more trip as a thank you, Martha turned him down. She said she was tired of being just a passenger and she wasn't going unless she could be a proper Companion. The Doctor's response permitted her to think he was just going to leave her, but then he nodded and said she never really had been just a passenger, had she? And so, Miss Martha Jones became the Tenth Doctor's newest Companion.
Companion
As a Companion, Martha received an upgrade to her cellphone; the Doctor gave it 'Universal Roaming'. This proved to be important almost immediately, as she used it to contact her mum from the 42nd century to ask her a question about 20th century music; it was used as a keycode answer to a lock on a badly endangered ship. She could have used to maintain a long-distance relationship with a crewmember on that ship who had fallen for her, but she cut it off instead.
During that trip, Martha learned about the Time Lord regeneration when the Doctor was possessed by a sentient sun. In order to kill the sun particles, he had to submit to being frozen. This left him terrified and completely dependent on others, but mainly Martha, to follow his instructions. While panicking -- and showing a vulnerability that made Martha Jones, human, protective of the Doctor, Time Lord -- the Doctor revealed that if he died, he would regenerate and that he desperately didn't want to. He reached out for Martha, needing the touch of her hand, but ultimately calmed when Martha promised him it wasn't going to happen. This was significant for Martha, because he showed the same faith in her that she already had in him.
Of course, he had to go and spoil it after, by being all stoic and acting like it wasn't a big deal when she asked if he was all right. Then he made up for it tenfold by giving her her own TARDIS key. She finally felt like a proper Companion. Take that, Rose! But she also got a worrisome call from her mum, for the second time warning her that Harold Saxon (the man trying to become Prime Minister) said the Doctor wasn't safe. She promised to come round for tea. More tea-ish than tea, because she didn't tell her what she was actually doing with the Doctor or that she'd be spending quite a lot of time with him before she got around to tea. This was far from the only time she misled her family about her adventures.
During their travels, Martha and the Doctor ran afoul of aliens known as the Family of Blood, relentless hunters who would never give up tracking them. In order to evade them, the Doctor used a device that turned him into a human and crafted a human memory for him, but not before giving Martha instructions for how to handle anything that might come up and when to wake him. The plan was simply to hide in 1913 until the Family of Blood died.
England, 1913, wasn't a particularly friendly place for a bright, well-educated young black woman. Martha had to take a job as a maid at a boy's school where Smith was a headmaster in order to watch over her Doctor. She endured racism, insults, and fended off the Family of Blood, while watching her Doctor fall in love with another human woman. Another human woman who wasn't her! By this time, her own feelings for the Doctor were in full bloom, which she confessed to John Smith ("I love him to bits") while trying to get him to wake up and become the Doctor again. And after he finally did what was needed, she had to watch and try to comfort him while he mourned another lost love.
Before her unrequited feelings could take too much of a toll on their relationship, Martha and the Doctor inadvertently got stuck in 1969, waiting for a young woman, Sally Sparrow, to evade the Weeping Angels and send the TARDIS back for them. While there, Martha again had to take a service job instead of the doctoring job she was qualified for. Despite the frustration she felt at having to support them, it was a good time for her and the Doctor. They shared a flat, and spent loads of time hanging out, telling stories, and watching telly. When the TARDIS eventually returned to them, part of Martha was sorry to no longer have the Doctor to herself.
On another trip, they stopped in Cardiff to refuel the TARDIS at the Torchwood rift. Unbeknownst to Martha at the time, they picked up a hitchhiker: Captain Jack Harkness, who held on to the outside of the TARDIS while she hurtled headlong to the end of the universe. Upon exiting the TARDIS, Martha saw an injured man, went back for her medical kit and came back to try to resuscitate him. Just as she'd announced he was dead, Jack revived and immediately began flirting with her. This annoyed the Doctor, but Martha was pleased to have the attention, and she and Jack soon became fast friends (which annoyed him even more) and bonded over being ignored for Rose.
At the end of the universe, they found Professor Yana and his assistant Chantho desperately trying to save the human species by sending them to Utopia on a rocket made of spare parts. Chantho, an insectoid alien, obviously adored the Professor, and she, too, bonded with Martha over unrequited feelings. That she'd spent 17 years with the Professor never being noticed served as a warning to Martha, just a tiny niggle that sat at the back of her mind while they worked together to get the humans away.
Meanwhile, Martha noticed that Yana had a watch fob much like John Smith's biodata device, the one that returned him to being a Time Lord, in 1913. Her curiosity about it, and her discovery of Gallifreyan markings on the back of it, led to him opening the watch. He reverted to a Time Lord form, that of the Master, the Doctor's arch-nemesis! This, too, served as a warning to Martha, because Chantho tried to persuade the Master to be the kind, gentle Professor that she loved, and he called her an insect. The Master resented the Doctor's youthful form and so regenerated, then stole the TARDIS and fled. As he did, Martha realized that she knew the young Master's voice: it was the voice of Harold Saxon!
Left at the end of the world, Martha, the Doctor, and Jack had no choice but to travel back in time with nothing but Jack's teleporting time vortex manipulator. They arrive in London just in time for Harold Saxon to have become Prime Minister, and the three of them were branded dangerous fugitives. While they were on the run, Saxon announced contact with an alien race called the Toclafane (whom the Doctor knew didn't exist), and then somehow, everything went to hell.
Martha's mum, her dad, and her sister ended up servants aboard the Master's vessel The Valiant. The Master aged the Doctor 900 years down to a tiny wizened creature whom he kept almost as a pet and made him watch every horrible thing the Master did. Jack was being held captive too, and Martha just knew the Master would use his immortality as a way to torture him.
While the Master was busy underestimating her, Jack gave Martha his vortex manipulator and told her to run. Martha didn't want to leave them, but the Doctor had given her a clue to how the Master could be defeated, and there was no one who could do it but Martha. So she ran, but before she left, she swore she'd be back.
For almost an entire year, Martha roamed the Toclafane-blanketed Earth, traveling on foot, in cargo containers, by whatever means became available with the help of the human resistance. She circled the globe, and wherever she went, she gathered people around to tell them stories of the Doctor, to build their belief in him and help them persevere until what had been done could be undone.
During her travels, she was captured in Japan. There, she was forced to work in a factory doing grueling work, overseen by cruel taskmasters who would beat her if she fell behind on production. Her dexterous surgeon's fingers saved her life more than once in that work. And although she was bone-tired every night and giving in to desperation herself, she managed an hour or so every night to tell other factory workers the stories of the Doctor. She made several brave young friends who arranged much of this for her, and she tried to save them. But when the Toclafane rained fire on the islands, it was only Martha who escaped.
Almost a year later, with time running out, Martha returned to England and arranged for herself to be captured by some of the Master's people. She used a ruse that had arisen during her trip -- that there was a gun in four parts scattered around the globe that only she could assemble and use to kill a Time Lord, and when the Master apparently believed it, she laughed in his face. Because what she'd really done was convinced everyone everywhere to think about and reach out for the Doctor at the same, exact time, and all of those minds, amplified by the Archangel network, would save the Doctor who would save them all.
Martha didn't know exactly how it would work, but she saw the Doctor's aging reverse before her eyes. The Master tried to escape but Jack dealt with the Toclafane and the Doctor handled the Master, and he did something Martha couldn't believe: he told the Master he forgave him. But the Master didn't want forgiveness, especially not for his 'glorious' masterstroke of evil, making the Toclafane from the humans at the end of the universe (including a boy named Creet who Martha had known). And in the end, Martha had to watch when his abused wife, Lucy, shot him, and the Doctor collapsed in grief over the death of his worst enemy and oldest friend.
Owing to the destruction of a paradox machine that allowed the Toclafane to kill their ancestors without wiping themselves out, time immediately reverted back to just before the Master took control of the world and all hell broke loose. In all the world, the only people who knew what happened during the Year That Never Was, were Martha, Jack, the Doctor, Martha's family and the other humans on the Valiant.
When it was all over, the Doctor invited Martha to rejoin him on the TARDIS. But the Martha he'd sent out the year before and the Martha who stood before him now were different people. This one was harder, wiser, more confident, and suffering from a significant case of hypervigilance and oncoming PTSD. She knew her family needed her more, no matter how much the Doctor did, and she also knew her feelings for him were bad for her.
Rather than destroy what remained of their friendship, Martha told him no. She told him a story about how she'd told a friend to get out of a bad relationship and said, "This is me, getting out." But she also told him she'd learned that she wasn't second best. She really was good. And then she gave him her phone with universal roaming so she could get in touch with him if she needed him.
Dr. Martha Jones
Returned to her own life, Martha spent much of the next six months with her family. Her mother and father had reconciled during their year aboard the Valiant, and her sister needed her to remember how to have fun. Meanwhile there was dealing with Leo who hadn't been with them, his partner, and his daughter, and helping everyone get over what had happened to do.
Martha herself suffered terrible nightmares of being found and killed by the Toclafane. She channeled her hypervigilance and her inability to sleep into studying for and completing her exams. The return to 'normal' life itched sometimes, and she missed the excitement, wonder and adventure of traveling in the TARDIS, but this was her life and she had to live it.
And as soon as she passed her exams, she was contacted by UNIT and offered a job. After the Year That Never Was, Jack had also offered her work at Torchwood, which she'd turned down to be with her family, but now she took the offer of work from UNIT, because someone needed to sort out those tosspots from the inside.
Voice of a Nightingale
Not long after she began work with UNIT, Martha became involved in an investigation into an organization called the Pharm. She visited Torchwood Three and was reunited with Jack, who called her "Martha Jones, Voice of a Nightingale," in reference to how she'd 'sung' the world back into being with her stories of the Doctor during the Year that Never Was. She also met Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, Gwen Cooper, and Ianto Jones with whom she bonded quickly, teasing him about his and Jack's sexual arrangement.
Martha was discovered by the Pharm and was implanted with a Mayfly. Owen saved her life by surgically removing the Mayfly. He later did so again by taking a bullet meant for Martha, which killed him. She helped the Torchwood team thereafter and witnessed Owen being resurrected by an alien device. She then gave him a physical and discovered that he was basically a dead man walking. The alien gauntlet attacked Martha, aging her badly, but Owen was able to defeat Death and the effects were reversed. She remained very grateful to Owen and affectionate toward him, and fixed his ruined hand after Jack relieved him of duty and he tried to mangle it. Until Owen was cleared to return to duty as Torchwood's doctor, Martha stayed on.
Later, when Owen and Tosh were killed, Martha attended their funerals to provide support to Jack and Ianto especially, but also Gwen.
Child of Time
Although she missed the Doctor, Martha let her feelings for him fade. She had even tracked down and asked out the handsome young doctor she'd met during her travels in the Year that Never Was. Although Tom didn't remember it, he'd saved her life and they'd had great chemistry. Apparently that held, because when she returned to UNIT from Torchwood, she and Tom became engaged.
Shortly after their engagement, Martha became involved in a UNIT operation against the Sontarans, aliens planning to invade the Earth. Martha called the Doctor when her by-the-book commander planned an attack on a Sontaran facility. During the operation, Martha was taken captive by the Sontarans and cloned. She was kept alive in a sleeping state so that the clone could access her memories.
When the Doctor rescued Martha, he was able to tell the difference between Martha and her clone because the clone was so cavalier about the lives of her loved ones. Still, Martha was able to convince her clone to help them against the Sontarans. The clone soon died in the struggle, but before she did, she told Martha that she had many things she still wanted to do, so she should do them. This was in the forefront of Martha's mind when, after defeating the Sontarans, the Doctor invited her to travel with him again and she turned him down.
Never did the road of a Companion's path run smooth. No sooner had she turned him down than the TARDIS sucked her, the Doctor and Donna into the Time Vortex. She had to admit when they stepped out of the TARDIS that she still loved the first step on a new planet. The Doctor got grabbed and his hand was shoved into a machine; this created his daughter, Jenny.
Martha was likewise grabbed and taken away by the alien Hath. Once again, she exercised her healing skills and compassion on one of the aliens, Hath Peck. This helped her to earn the Hath's trust, and eventually to saving her own life, because when she slipped in some killer quicksand, Hath Peck sacrificed himself for her. Martha grieved deeply for Hath Peck although she'd only known him a short time.
After she was reunited with the Doctor, Donna, and Jenny, one of the humans of the planet shot at the Doctor. Jenny jumped in front of the bullet to save him. Fresh off Hath Peck's sacrifice, Martha tried to save Jenny but couldn't. The Doctor thought she might regenerate, but it was Martha who had the sad duty of informing him that she was gone.
Returned to Earth to reunite with Tom, Martha kept her clone's words close to her heart. She mulled them over, often thinking about what specific things the clone had meant. So, when the opportunity arose to take over as the Medical Director of UNIT's Project Indigo, Martha took it and moved to New York. Although it's never specified what happened to her engagement to Tom, it seems that it suffered the strain of the move, because they were apparently no longer a couple when, shortly after her promotion, the Earth got hijacked across the universe to the Medusa Cascade.
The Daleks were once again responsible, and when they invaded the Project Indigo facility, Martha was entrusted with a solemn duty. She was given Project Indigo -- an untested teleportation device, and an Osterhagen key -- one of three needed to set off twenty-five nuclear warheads beneath the Earth's crust to be set off if anything like the Master's takeover ever happened again. Against Jack's long-distance warning not to use the device, Martha did. She had to. The world, and her family, were at stake again. She had no other choice.
Although Jack, Ianto and Gwen believed her splashed all over the universe as individual atoms, Martha emerged unscathed -- at home with her mum. Her mum was so thrilled, because she believed it to be the end of the world (which it probably would be, if Martha failed and if she didn't), and Martha had come back to her. Martha, then, realized Project Indigo worked by taking the wearer to where they most wanted to go, which in Martha's case was not the Osterhagen station in Germany, but to her mum.
It was a good thing she ended up there, because former Prime Minister Harriet Jones arranged a subspace transmission to contact the Doctor's Companions in the event that Earth was in need and the Doctor didn't come. She contacted Martha, Sarah Jane and Luke Smith, and Torchwood. She also contacted Rose Tyler, but none of them knew that at the time. Together the group used Harriet's network to call Martha's phone that she'd given the Doctor. Doing so exposed the network to the Daleks, and Harriet knowingly sacrificed herself to allow them to reach him.
Once they did, Martha still had a job to do, in case the Doctor didn't come in time to rescue them. He hadn't been responding to their calls after all. So she said a tearful goodbye to her mum, never telling her what she had to do, and teleported to the Osterhagen station. There, she was confronted by a German who knew what the station was for. She threatened to kill Martha rather than let her destroy the Earth, held a gun on her, and Martha told her to do it. If the woman killed her, she wouldn't have to die knowing she'd murdered the entire population of Earth. But the woman didn't.
It took three keys to set off the warheads. When the others were ready, instead of immediately performing her duty, Martha did something else. She sent a message to the Daleks. She'd figured out that if the Daleks didn't need Earth and its people, they wouldn't have gone to the trouble of towing them all the way to the Medusa Cascade with 26 other planets. So she told the Daleks that if they didn't let the people of Earth go, she'd use the key and destroy it.
And Martha knew, as much as she hated it, that she would do it. She would destroy the Earth before she saw suffering like the Master inflicted again, because this time there was no paradox engine to reverse it. But before she could, the Daleks teleported her to join the Doctor, Jackie Tyler, Mickey Smith, Rose Tyler, Sarah Jane, and Jack in the dungeons where they were prisoners of old nemeses Davros, who had rebuilt the Dalek empire from his own genes, and Dalek Caan.
What the Daleks didn't know was that the Doctor had almost died, but he staved off his regeneration by channeling the energy into his severed hand. And then, when they tried to destroy Donna and the TARDIS, the hand started to do what dying Time Lords do -- and it created a human-Time Lord metacrisis Doctor, and also merged the Doctor and Donna. DoctorDonna saved them all, then they fought off the Daleks, and all the Companions flew the TARDIS to drag Earth back home again.
Martha was there to witness the Doctor sealing Rose and the metacrisis human Doctor off into Bad Wolf Bay again. But she was genuinely happy to have seen him and Rose reunited, even if only part of him got to stay with her. When they returned home to Earth, Jack and Martha left the TARDIS together, holding hands, and -- at least temporarily -- happy for having saved Earth again. Moments later, they were joined by Rose's ex, Mickey, who Martha had definitely noticed was pretty bloody fit.
Jack offered her another job at Torchwood, but she turned him down again. Not long after, Mickey gave her a bell, and they'd made plans for a date. That's the last thing she remembers before she Wakes.
Character Personality: 'Dark Lady.' Companion. The Girl Who Walked the Earth. A Legend. Voice of a Nightingale. Child of Time. Good. These are just some of the appellations that are applied to first Miss, then Doctor, Martha Jones: William Shakespeare, the Doctor, TVTropes, her eventual fiance Tom Milligan, Jack Harkness, Dalek Caan, both Rose and Martha herself, respectively. All of them describe aspects of her -- her beauty, her loyalty, her determination, her heroism, her charisma, her experience, her competence -- and do so appropriately, for throughout her travels with the Doctor and work with UNIT, she shows all these qualities and more.
What they miss by being only partial descriptions is that Martha is the Companion who is also the Doctor. Sure, yes, people acknowledge that Martha is a medical doctor, but to understand Martha properly, it must be understood that she is a mirror of the Doctor. The Doctor fled his family and his world to explore, to see the world, to help the helpless and to free the oppressed. Despite his best intentions and his desire not to be a killer, he turns the people around him into soldiers in his personal war. Normal, good, kind people become killers, because he won't.
Martha Jones began as a curious child, so determined to become a doctor that her walls had anatomy posters when other girls had posters of heartthrobs. She memorized the bones in the human body with the same thoroughness that led her to read all 32 of The Troubleseekers novels and the same sense of wonder that allowed her to suspend disbelief both for Harry Potter and for the Doctor.
An atypical middle child with a showboat older sister, Martha emerged into a responsible daughter, a peacemaker, and a caretaker. She runs interference between her mother and her father's girlfriend, buys her little brother a toaster for his birthday, calls her mum from across the universe for help with a trivia question and just to talk when she thinks she might die. Yet like the Doctor, she leaves her family and her world behind to travel time and space for curiosity and continues both to help the Doctor and all the aliens they encounter. Also, like the Doctor, she carries the fate of the Earth and her dysfunctional family with her wherever she goes and they (like Gallifrey and the Time Lords) are always in her mind.
And, too, both Martha and the Doctor employ charisma and stories to inspire the people around them. The Doctor has lifetimes of experience to draw from and Martha only a few years, but somehow she manages to gain the attention and affection of people all over time and space, from William Shakespeare, to various of her captors, to literally the entire world, when she must walk it to spread the message of the Doctor. Where the Doctor inspires people to fight by their belief in him, Martha inspires them to believe and endure. She allows them to think she is going to kill the Master during the Year that Never Was, and keeps them from desperation and fruitless, petty rebellion.
The main difference between Martha and the Doctor is that in her travels with him, she has seen that not taking up arms, not being willing to do the hard thing, leaves dangerous loose ends for other people to unravel. When it comes right down to the wire with the Daleks, Martha is willing to endure being branded a genocidal killer to protect the people of Earth from hopeless suffering. She is willing to be that genocidal killer to end that suffering. The Doctor thinks she's mad, but she's learned from the example he's tried to put aside after the Time War and his destruction of the Daleks.
All of the Doctor's Companions provide a foil for him and learn from him. Many of them become heroes in their own right and not just sidekicks. Martha's path is the only one that really and truly mirrors the Doctor's. Because Martha, like the Doctor, carries knowledge of the end of her species from the Year That Never Was, she is, too, in a way, a Time Lord. And, very much like the Time Lord she'll always love a little bit, she carries a perhaps misplaced sense of guilt over what she believes she caused: the enslavement of her family, the repeated torture of Jack Harkness, the aging and tormenting of the Doctor, the creation of the Toclafanes from human children of the future, and the near annihilation of humanity.
In the end, it's her choice to leave him. And when she does, it's to continue on her chosen path. She becomes a physician, someone who protects, suffers so others don't have to, occasionally plays God, and ultimately, although it's after where she'd be arriving from, a freelance alien fighter who takes on a Companion (one of the Doctor's former Companions, Mickey Smith) of her own.
That said, it still remains to tease apart the traits, strengths and weaknesses that make up Doctor Martha Jones. So, to begin, Martha is curious. She loves learning, and even now after everything she's seen, there is still nothing as exciting to her as the first step onto a new world. Every new place, species, person is a wonderful opportunity to explore.
Martha is also brave. Time and time again, she throws herself into danger on little more than the Doctor's say-so or her faith in the Doctor, to protect or save 'innocents' whose lives are at stake. Whether it's the humans of Hooverville or the crew of the SS Pentallian or all the humans of Earth, she will face down Daleks, risk an exploding Doctor, dodge and evade murderous Toclafane with nothing but her wits to shield her.
Which raises another point. Martha's dead clever. Not only is she book smart, but she's a puzzle solver. This informs how she looks at problems -- as puzzles to solve, and how she looks at the world -- a series of patterns, and, in some circumstances, how she looks at relationships -- as systems. When her friends become involved in relationships with men who don't value them, even if her friends love the men, she advises them to get out. She apples the same logic (which is also compassion) to her own relationship with the Doctor, and this is why, when she finally stops being a Companion, she tells him, "this is me, getting out."
But it's only when she must, to enable her to act or advise, that Martha's predominant approach to people is cerebral. Most of the time, she is, instead, a deeply loyal and empathetic friend. One who not only listens well to, but develops deep emotional rapport with, people of all types, species, and from all walks of life.
Because ultimately, Martha's defining trait is her compassion. When her friends hurt, she weeps with them. She is always ready with a hug, an 'are you okay?', a word of support, an expression of quiet faith. Of course, this compassion sometimes gets in her way, like when her desire to help, protect, support, love her friends turns her affection for the Doctor into an unrequited love affair.
It is this compassion that turns Martha's curiosity-driven interest in science and anatomy into a healing passion. Whenever someone is injured during their travels, Martha's first instinct is always to offer medical treatment. It doesn't matter how strange the physiology is, Martha will always try and keep trying. Her healing determination and perseverance doesn't stop with the body. She tries repeatedly to heal the Doctor's broken heart, to help shoulder the burden of Jack's pain, and when she's at Torchwood and Owen dies, she tries to hold them together. Later, after Owen dies again and Tosh dies, Martha attends their funerals to support Jack, Ianto, and Gwen.
Despite being brilliant and beautiful, Martha spends a lot of time feeling second best. Whether it's because her sister Tish is something of a spotlight hog (although Martha's clearly her mother's favorite), or because the Doctor can't see her blinding smiles for her standing in Rose's shadow, she often feels like a replacement or a rebound. At the end of her time with the Doctor, she remembers that she isn't second-best. She's good.
Martha's romantic streak and feeling like a replacement goldfish isn't her only weakness. She can get herself in trouble with how clever she is, whether by talking herself into a mess by accident, or thinking she sees the whole picture when she doesn't have some of the pieces. And she can be a bit arrogant about how much brighter she is than most people.
At the same time, though, Martha's got a very skewed sense of self. It's not just seeing herself as second-best. It's that when, after she's spent an entire year inspiring the world, Tom Milligan tells her that she's a legend, she tells him that's wrong. She's nothing special. It's the Doctor who is the legend. Her faith in him obscures her view of herself. This self-perception is even more apparent in the way that she's always the listener-friend. She never expects people to ask about her, and how she's doing. Instead, it's her job to listen and help, and comfort them.
Whether because of this or because she privileges logic over emotion in dealing with problems or because Martha is relentlessly independent, Martha hides her pain behind a beautiful smile, a warm hug, good humor and good cheer. In this, not only is she like the Doctor, but she is also like Jack. During The Year That Never Was, no matter what happened to her, no matter how frightened she was, no matter how hard it got, Martha never let herself cry but once--when the entire population of Japan and every living thing on its islands, burned, and she was the only one to have escaped alive.
It wasn't just grief that led Martha to give into tears; it was anger. Because Martha has one hell of a temper. It burns beneath all of her determination and oozes into sarcastic mockery at the Master when he thinks she's been traveling the world in search of pieces of a gun. It erupts into explosive fury when the Doctor tries to tell her not to call her family to warn them and she tells him, "I'll do what I like!" It sustains her through the casual racism of 1913. But the one thing she never lets it do is determine her behavior. In 1913 and in 1969, when society dictates she can't be the doctor she is, she willingly takes work in menial or service positions to support herself and the Doctor.
Ultimately, in spite of her passions and her PTSD, Martha has grown into a stable person for having helped the Doctor, Jack, Sarah Jane, Jackie, Mickey, and Rose save humanity from the Daleks again. Yet despite that, Martha has a lot to learn when she Wakes. Starting with how to let other people be her friend, and also how to live and share her own stories. She still has a lot of things she wants to do.
Powers and Abilities: Human through and through, Martha is a Badass Bookworm. Where Jack is immortal and Rose becomes nearly a god, Martha's only got what she was born with: her brain and her heart.
Martha's quite intelligent, capable of calm analysis in the midst of a crisis. It's this ability that first attracts the Doctor's attention: she reasons that if the windows of the Royal Hope hospital were going to blow out after it was hijacked to the moon they would have done so immediately, because they're not airtight; thus, there must be air outside, somehow.
She's gifted at analysis, pattern recognition, and problem-solving, which stands her in good stead as a diagnostician and scientist, and occasionally gets her in trouble. When she, Shakespeare and the Doctor are banishing the Carrionites, Shakespeare falters for a word, and Martha abruptly supplies Expelliarmus!, which successfully shuts them away and confirms her as a Harry Potter nerd at the same time. There are countless examples of her using her knowledge or books she's read to reason out a situation, including one that she will never quite forgive herself for: recognizing Professor Yana's watch as similar to John Smith's biodata device and identifying Gallifreyan writing on the back. It's her interest that leads Yana to open it, loosing the Doctor's nemesis, the Master. But even amidst her horror, she also recognizes that Yana is an acronym for the Face of Boe's last words, "You Are Not Alone," and identifies the Master's new voice as that of Harold Saxon.
In addition to these traits, she's an excellent fully licensed physician, skilled at surgery and autopsies. She's served as a combat medic for humans and aliens, and rises to the position of Medical Director of UNIT's Project Indigo before the age of 25. She speaks at least bits of several human languages (notably German) after her travels during The Year That Never Was and can recognize Gallifreyan among other alien languages. Although Martha prefers not to carry a gun -- a preference that developed long before she met the Doctor, when she chose to be a healer, but also conforms to the Doctor's preferences -- she is skilled with firearms and has hand-to-hand combat training.
But while Martha can fight, most of her 'wins' against the bad guys come from her being a Determinator. That is, if she has a special superpower, it's that Martha never gives up. She is capable of putting her emotions, her personal desires, her terror, even her physical exhaustion aside to do what must be done, and this is shown time and again. It's so pronounced that even the Doctor and Captain Jack Harkness find her presence comforting. When the Doctor is possessed by sentient sun and burning up, he panics and needs the touch of Martha's hand and her reassurance that he is not going to die, she's not going to let it happen, to calm down; this, even though her own life is at stake too. And when the Master's Toclafane blanket the Earth during the Year that Never Was, Martha travels the world, evading them, escaping when she's captured, enduring countless hardships. No matter what is thrown in her path, she keeps going, and still has her wits about her sufficient to trick the Master. It's her pure faith and determination, her heart, that convinces others to believe in the Doctor and call on him. Martha's heart literally saves the world.
While both intellect and determination are aspects of Martha's personality, they are more significant as tools in her arsenal, much like Jack's hello, and Ianto's coffee.
Samples
Here's a link to TDM, but I wrote up a network post, too, in case there was too much action in it.
Network:
Right, then. Let's do this.
[sounds of clothing ruffling from off-screen as though being smoothed down, then Martha's face appears upside down in front of the camera]
Oh, bloo-- Crikey.
[sounds of movement, then she settles in front of the camera]
Off to a great start, aren't we? Sorry. It's just... This is all a bit mad, yeah? I mean, one minute I'm agreeing to a date and the next I'm waking up in another... well, here. And it's not the first time I've gone to bed on Earth and woken up light-years away, but--and this is a bit embarrassing--I don't even know where to find a toothbrush, let alone a cracking great pair of shoes. If I'm well and truly stuck, I'm going to need some serious retail therapy.
Yeah, I know. Bend what you want, Martha. Use that beautiful brain of yours, Martha. Why buy when you can bend, nightingale?
[Bends a lolly, not an apple] Don't want to keep the Doctor away, y'see.
But it's not the shoes, right? Or the sweeties, or any of it. You can't Bend shopping. So, help a girl out? There's got to be somewhere to walk until your feet are falling off and you swear you're never going in another shop no matter how fit he is, yeah? Somewhere to collapse into a naff plastic chair and scan the Network at the end of it all?
Please. Don't make me beg. It won't be pretty. Rose? Ianto? River Song? [trails off with her saying 'Anyone?']
Third Person:
The wall of the Box against her back is a silent, reassuring presence. A comforting sentinel against the unknown dangers of her new home. Even if She isn't herself here, she's still the TARDIS to Martha, and if there's anywhere she's going to feel safe enough, after The Year That Never Was (even after the Daleks, it still sticks in her nightmares), to put her entire focus to this 'Bending', it's the TARDIS, thick with shielding, and where the Doctor--Doctor Bad Wolf, she's never going to get used to that--and Rose, Jack and Ianto, and the other Doctors and Companions can get to her in seconds. It's a little weird that this is Rose and the Doctor's bedroom, but they seem happy enough to have her use it.
She sighs and rubs her hands over her thighs. "You can do this, Doctor Martha Jones," she says to herself, and then doubles down again.
They told her to concentrate on something she knows absolutely. An apple, was someone's suggestion. Ianto's lovely coffee, that was Jack's. All right, coffee wasn't what Jack said, but Ianto shops with her. She's not going to think about or try to Bend his derriere, no matter how fit he looks in a suit, ta, Jack.
Her mum's favorite tea was her own first idea, but no. She's a scientist. There's no point Bending oxygen, even if she can. How's she to know if she's succeeded? But water-- Pure, cool, filtered H2O? That's something she can get her mind around.
"Right, then." A small quantity, enough to half-fill (not half-empty, she's still an optimist, even now) a glass. A real glass. She knows the composition of that, too.
First, she thinks through the science. The facts, ma'am. Then she visualizes it, exactly how she wants it to look. Uses calculus to rotate the glass in space. Slowly, slowly, so it doesn't disturb the surface of the water. That's it, proper surface tension. Not too much or it'll be heavy water, and you can't drink that.
Now, she thinks of how it feels in her hand. Smooth and cool. Not too cold. Not slippery, just smooth. But it's more than that, isn't it? It's not just temperature and texture, or even the subtle, barely there taste. It's how she felt, after Japan, tired, heartbroken, cried out, and so bloody thirsty, when someone put that first glass of water in her hand--
Grateful. Certain. Secure. The Master could wipe out the entire population of Japan. He could age the Doctor, torture Jack, enslave her family, but he couldn't take her faith. Not in the Doctor, and not in the simple facts: Water is water. H2O. And if she drank it, it would soothe the burn in her throat, her eyes, her soul. Because it would be water until the end of everything. It would still be water if she had to turn the Osterhagen key. (Unless it was something else, but then it wouldn't be proper water.)
She thinks of drinking it, tipping the glass to her mouth--
Martha's eyes open wide. Her lips are wet. So are her cheeks. There's a lumpy glass in her hand and when she lifts it, water sloshes inside. She's not sure which water is pure and which is salted, which she Bent and which she wept, but! It's just a first effort, but water is water. When she sips it, it soothes the burn on her lips, in her eyes, in her soul.
"Oh. I am good."
