#Martha Russell

[tv-moments]

Extrapolations

Season 1, “2070: Ecocide”

Director: Michael Morris

DoP: Jaime Reynoso

[akajustmerry]

What did Russel T Davies do to Freema Agyeman? (I love her and I need to know who i have to kill and why)

I love her too! But to answer your questions: RTD wrote Martha Jones in a racialised way that made her more susceptible to fan racism than she already was as a visibly Black woman. He wrote Ten in a way that he's straight up cruel to her, doesn't protect her from racism or even have the same level of empathy for her as other white companions. To this day, discussing the racism Freema endured at the hands of fans as a result of the way RTD wrote Martha has brought Freema to tears. Princess Weekes dropped a whole video essay on the racism in the way Martha and Mickey were written, which you can watch here. Also, I've shared this article before but this is a great breakdown of the Misogynoir in Martha's characterisation <3

[leikeliscomet]

'Ten should've treated Martha better by acknowledging time travelling as a Black person and not comparing her to Rose' and 'Ten and Martha were an interesting duo by having a doctor x doctor pairing an had some great character moments' and 'RTD's handling of race in s3 was dookie' and 'Martha had great character traits and many Black fans felt seen by her' need to coexist. Because I feel like bc of the way things went down in s3 people think Martha never wanted to travel with Ten AT ALL or she would never wanna travel in space or time ever again. All this 'she hates the Doctor' 'she wouldn't wanna come back' whoa hold on now...

[topsee-turvee]

10 Years - 10 Moments

The Americans (2013)

[casasupernovas]

no martha jones mention in the 60th anniversary specials was unforgivable actually.

[ghost-bison]

i became curious and searched up how the name "dalek" came to be:

at first, i thought it must have something to do with the norwegian word "dårlig", which means "bad", because of the doctor's reaction in 2x13 "doomsday" when rose said they were in bad wolf bay ("dårlig ulv stranden" if i'm not mistaken): he thought she'd said "dalek". but if you look up the pronunciation, it sounds more like /dɔːleh/ (approximate english phonetic transcription) than how she said it, /dɑːlɪg/ so i thought, even though the mix-up between "dårlig" and "dalek" was done on purpose and the definition, "bad", would be pretty damn on-the-nose, it's not it. so i did some more research.

apparently, it was terry nation (the guy who invented the daleks and davros in, i guess, 1962) who came up with it. according to him, the name simply "rolled off his typewriter", so it wasn't supposed to mean anything. but like me, he got curious and found out that the word "dalek" is serbo-croatian for "far, distant".

this really pleased me for two separate reasons: first, and this is the most obvious interpretation, the daleks are aliens from a distant world, far from earth. but i mean, to daleks or chelonians or raxacoricofallapatorians or any other alien species, the same can be said for earthlings: we are far, distant from them, and any and all species are far and distant from us.

but! if you think of the other meaning behind "distant", not geographically speaking but culturally/morally speaking, that's when things get interesting: the reason the daleks are the main foe in doctor who is that they are detached, so different from any and every other enemy the doctor and unit and torchwood and the shadow proclamation and such have ever had to fight. they keep surviving and coming back because they are so distant, so alien (in the "bizarre" sense of the word) to all other species.

if you take, for example, us humans, the doctor loves our species because of our capacity for love, forgiveness, change, compassion. you see it in the people he picks: rose, martha, then donna, etc. they represent everything he loves in a human being. everything he needs, everything he misses since his own species, which used to be capable of those feelings too, has gone.

he doesn't pick soldiers and has an aversion toward them, because as much as he pretends to hate it when his companions "wander off", he keeps choosing people whom he knows will wander off, people who will question his orders, people whom he doesn't have to feel or be superior to. whereas soldiers, they are conditioned not to question, and to follow instructions, to do as they are told.

in 1x06 "dalek", when nine realizes that the dalek's gun isn't working, he says "if you can't kill, then what are you good for, dalek? what's the point of you?". then, the dalek tells the doctor, "i am a soldier, i was bred to receive orders".

soldiers, whatever species they are, are too much like daleks: they wouldn't question him. that's why, when he realized he was the last of his species, the dalek turned to the doctor, his greatest enemy ("then what should i do?"), and then rose ("order me to die"), for orders. that's why twelve refused to keep journey blue as his traveling companion in 8x02 "into the dalek": people who don't question orders are dangerous to his lifestyle.

he needs people who go against what he says. not only that, but the doctor is, himself, a soldier of sorts, and sometimes he needs the right orders (1x06 "dalek": "what the hell are you changing into, doctor?" -rose ; "the runaway bride": "doctor, you can stop now"/"sometimes i think you need someone to stop you" -donna ; 4x02 "the fires of pompeii": "not the whole town, just save someone" -donna). else caecilius' family would have died in pompeii. else the doctor would use guns, he would die, he would try to break fixed points in time, he would lose himself.

in that sense, the daleks are as far from the doctor and his children of time as can be. i wrote about it somewhere in a one-shot someday: "the daleks weren’t robots, per se, but they kind of were, for someone like the doctor, or the humans, who both felt everything so deeply when all those monsters knew was hatred".

the daleks are to the doctor what dependence and servitude are to freedom, and in that sense, they are distant.

[variousqueerthings]

rtd first era is like

s1: awkward closed-off secretly (not so secretly) silly alien learns to feel things again because of a woman who feels so much and isn't afraid to challenge the silly alien on the importance of these feelings

s2: formerly awkward closed-off secretly (not so secretly) silly alien feels so hard that there's no defense left against an inevitable loss that both alien and woman pretended wasn't going to happen

s3: silly alien now bleeding uncontrollably everywhere, but a doctor comes along and does triage on the wounds. experience deeply traumatises this doctor and her whole family and she has to leave

s4: silly alien now in some tricky equilibrium, tries to balance bleeding heart with living, made easier because of a very special woman who understands on some intimate level the struggle of this balance. things looking up on the whole. but watch out

specials: oh no oh no oh no oh dear

[brekkerholmes]

you start doctor who thinking it'll be a fun little series about an alien having adventures through time and space and you end up watching this mf suffer for 47 episodes straight

(edit: no spoilers please! i still have the end of time pt1 and pt2 left to watch😭 wish me luck)

(edit 2: i already watched them and i'm devastated)

[morganhopesmith1996]

Got this set from Walmart Today :)

[badxwolf]

“[Donna, Martha, Rose, Jack, Sarah Jane and Mickey] were all created to show off Doctor Who’s central premise: the world and the universe is wonderful, ordinary people can do great things, and the human race survives.”

- Russell T Davies, The Writers Tale

[digitalfountains]

Martha Hunt by Russell James

[unnamedmedicalprofessional]

I don't think either approach is bad but there's a certain irony in RTD era companions travelling full time with The Doctor but the audience sees their families a lot, but Moffat's companions travel part time but the audience hardly sees their family.

[unfriendlyneighbourhoodhorror]

[juviavevo]

finding out ncuti gatwa is the new doctor, david tennant is returning for 3 specials and rtd is returning as a writer so you excitingly decide to rewatch all of doctor who (2005) again since 2014: no fear

actually rewatching doctor who (2005) again and realising that the rtd1 era was more antiblack than you remembered it to be and he’s now also writing the first black (main) doctor: one fear

[dandelionjack]

thinking about human nature/the family of blood as an overarching metaphor for the intrinsic connection between the conservative nuclear family structure and racism. it definitely wasn’t intentional but the more i think about it… yeah it was right on a message level that they went back to the edwardian era and the events were set specifically in the pre ww1 period. the prejudice and discrimination martha suffers is juxtaposed with the so-called carefree life in the oft-idealised, oft-romanticised ‘golden age’ of the english village that john smith gets to experience. it works. im pivoting on my perception of this story tbh. it should be read as social horror, a parable about the way (white, male) privilege literally erases a person’s compassion and free-thinking tendencies (their humanity) in favour of conformity (what does a chameleon do? it blends in). and it works!!

[casasupernovas]