#rose gets one donna gets one where's martha's!!!!

[yesokayiknow]

okay but when's martha getting an emotional support ten

[foolishlyzephyrus]

i feel like it’s so integral to have at least one “at home” episode for every companion. so much character to be revealed in the premise of aliens interfering with everyday life once they are back on earth

[nat-20s]

Donna's season is definitely what I most remember of the Tenth Doctor so sometimes people talk about how Ten wasn't very physically affectionate and tended to hold himself back from touch and I'm like ????. Ten was holding hands or clinging to or hugging Donna constantly. They could not be physically separated for too long or they'd both get sad. And then I'm like ah right. Ten was his most Babygirl with Donna lmao

[nomairuins]

thank GODDD the doctor is taking time to work on himself maybe now he can stop ruining womens lives .

[catelyngrant]

So I'm thinking about the Fourteenth Doctor, and the bi-generation, and how he may have come to an end. What happened to him after those years he spent with Donna and her family, and with so many other friends on Earth (oh, I am headcanon-ing, friends), existing day-to-day and beginning to heal? After he learned how to let himself be loved, and shown compassion, and forgiven—and, eventually, learned to love, forgive, and care for himself? What happened when, at the end of this journey, his regeneration energy (I assume?) traveled back (in some hand-wavey fashion) to become the Fifteenth Doctor, who is born out of that love and forgiveness and compassion and is ready to move forward in the universe?

Fourteen becomes Fifteen—but what about the TARDIS?

Fourteen's TARDIS was created for the same reason Fourteen was: they needed to slow down, to be gentle. They needed to find a home that wasn't moving at the speed of light. So maybe this TARDIS is a little gentler, too. Maybe she's a little more careful of herself and her charges.

When Fourteen takes Rose to Mars, they land right where they're supposed to, and Rose sees wonders. Nothing bad happens, and they return home five minutes after they left.

When Shaun wants to see a football match from 1988, he opens the TARDIS door and she takes him right there, flying all by herself, to Fourteen's chagrin.

When Fourteen takes Mel to New York, they have adventures that don't involve running, or hiding, or screaming with anything but laughter. When Fourteen takes Jo, Ace, and Tegan to the Jurassic era, the only danger he faces is when he makes an age joke.

When, after Sarah Jane dies (yeeeears in the future, tyvm), Fourteen takes Luke, Maria, Clyde, and Rani to see Florana—the place he promised to take Sarah Jane all those years ago—the TARDIS chooses the safest, most beautiful moment in time for them to honor her memory.

When Donna and Martha and Yaz and Shirley sneak in for a joyride, they have the time of their lives, and the TARDIS covers for them. (Fourteen suspects, but can't prove it.)

When Fourteen is struggling, and chafing at life on Earth, and just needs to run, to fix things, to solve puzzles, to get away from the day-to-day of it all, the TARDIS lets him. She takes him so many places he's never been before, and they're all beautiful and wild and remind him what he loves about the universe.

(He tries, a few times, to go places that might bring him pain, and she gently refuses.)

And every now and then, someone will try to get in. This TARDIS doesn't have a key; she just opens to those in her care, and refuses entry to those she doesn't trust. She is safe, and so are they.

When Donna's in her eighties and can't get around as easily, the TARDIS takes her where she can manage. When Rose is overwhelmed with the pain of the world, the TARDIS takes her to places where none of that pain exists, and lets her stay as long as she needs to.

They live magnificent lives, and the TARDIS takes care of them. And then, at the end of it, Fourteen is ready for what comes next, and he becomes Fifteen. There's only one Doctor again.

But this TARDIS...

I think she stays, right in the corner of that yard. She leaves and then lands so precisely that roots and ivy grow over her. The Doctor is gone, and eventually Mel and Sarah Jane and Jo and Donna and Martha and everyone that traveled with the Doctor once upon a time in a different TARDIS are gone too.

But Rose is still there. Luke, Maria, Rani, and Clyde are still there. Their families, their kids. The TARDIS opens to them, and shows them the universe. She takes them only where she chooses to, and it's always exactly where they need to go.

She always takes them home, to the garden that once belonged to Donna Noble.

The Doctor finds new companions. Some of them come home to Earth after awhile, but they're not stuck dreaming of the universe. You showed me the furthest reaches of the galaxy, Sarah Jane said. You showed me supernovas, intergalactic battles, and then you just dropped me back on Earth. How could anything compare to that? We get a taste of that splendor, but then we have to go back.

These new companions, they return to Earth and their lives there, but every now and then, they swing by that old house that the Noble family has lived in for generations. They say hello to this old/new box, and she invites them in.

They don't have to say goodbye to the universe. She's right there in Chiswick, waiting for them.

And sometimes—on rare occasions, when they need it, or when he (or she, or they) does—she takes them to the Doctor.

[canadianfangirl]

To all the “What about Martha?” people, I would like to gift you this…

SPOILERS FOR THE NEW DOCTOR WHO SPECIAL BELOW THE CUT!

You know that the FIRST thing Donna is gonna do with her UNIT access, now that she remembers her, is look up our dear Dr. Martha Jones and have her round for tea. And Martha’s going to bring Mickey, incase you forgot that those two got together (I didn’t). And the three of them are absolutely going to DRAG The Doctor.

They’ll regale each other with “War Stories”, like how Donna and the Doctor fought fat. Or when Martha helped Shakespeare save the world with Harry Potter. Or how Mickey and Rose were trapped on a spaceship and Ten showed up 10 minutes late, drunk with his tie around his head, after snogging a historical figure.

Martha is going to meet Rose. And yes, Rose will absolutely love her new Auntie, but Martha will just adore the ground Rose walks on. She’ll help Rose with her toys, telling her stories about all the different creatures she recognizes. She’ll give her hair tips, and take her shopping, cause that’s what Aunties do.

Mickey and Shaun will bond, they’ll share a pint and laugh. Maybe Wilf will join them. Sometimes they’ll talk about what it’s like to be amongst the stars, other days they just sit and watch the football game.

Jack shows up at some point, because of course he does. No one remembers calling him, he just showed up on the front step with a bottle of wine, and arms full of presents for Rose, because he has 15 years worth of spoiling to make up for.

Meanwhile The Doctor gets to see some of his favourite people again. Sometimes they have big family dinners, where they have to go eat in the TARDIS just to fit everyone. Sometimes they just pop round for tea, and a chat.

And they’ll go on adventures, of course they will. Because they can do that now. They can go on an adventure, and then go back to their lives.

The Doctor gets to have a family, and a normal life, and it’s wonderful.

[lisa-cuddys]

“Turn Left” is such a unique and phenomenal Doctor Who episode! It is so powerful and brilliantly performed! It is carried almost entirely by the companion, and the Doctor is barely in it. But it is still one of the best episodes of the show. At the heart of the story is not the alien standoffs and space adventures (even though it takes place in a parallel universe), but the very real human horrors and tragedies that do happen in real life, and that’s what makes this episode so heart-wrenching and raw. The plot is the story of Donna and her family and how horribly wrong her life and the life of the entire universe goes in a world where Donna and the Doctor never meet and never save each other.

It starts on such an optimistic note, showing how happy both Doctor and Donna are together, having adventures and exploring some new planet and having a blast, but Donna meets a trickster who asks if she wants to find out her future, but Donna is so content and at the height of her character development at that point, so she is already confident and HAPPY, and  doesn’t want to know, because she already has everything she needs to be happy at that very moment  and nothing else matters.

“I can see a man, the most remarkable  man…”, the trickster instantly sees and realizes how important this stranger’s presence is in Donna’s life and makes Donna reveal how she met the Doctor and how it changed her life. So, Donna gets tricked and it ends up creating a parallel world where Donna makes one wrong turn, accepts a different job and never meets the Doctor on Christmas, and he ends up dying because Donna wasn’t there, so there was no one to stop him. And things spiral from there, every single alien invasion and global disaster that happens afterwards, result in the world collapsing without the Doctor (with Donna by his side). And Donna keeps meeting Rose who jumps from another dimension and tries to make Donna believe that there was a different world where things were better because she did meet the Doctor and they were able to stop this nightmare from happening. But Donna doesn’t believe Rose at first.

The story is filled with so many raw and devastating moments that showcase how terrible everything is in this “what if…” world where the Doctor doesn’t exist. Donna and her family end up refugees and lose everything and everyone they knew.

Donna is still shouting at the world but nobody is listening.

Donna and the Doctor not meeting results in not just the Doctor’s death, but also deaths of multiple companions and friends, like Martha, Sarah Jane and the Torchwood team.

Rose tells Donna all of this, but Donna, wonderful and amazing Donna, in this world she thinks of herself even less than she did before meeting the Doctor in her own reality. She literally throws it in Rose’s face how she can’t fathom why Rose is telling her about these big events and how it all could have been saved by the Doctor, she can’t understand why Rose is telling Donna about this, why her, she’s just nobody and can do literally nothing. That’s the pain in that moment when Donna is laughing through tears at even the possibility of her own worth and importance. And she gets angry when Rose tries to get her to come with her to prove that what she’s saying is true, that stars are going out and Donna could help stop this from happening. But Donna just thinks Rose is messing with her.

And things keep getting worse and worse. The metaphorical and literal darkness engulfing the life Donna ends up in until there is not a single glimmer of hope left. The family Donna shares a place with, ends up getting sent into “labor camps” just because they are not English, and it is horrific because the same things happened before and Wilf knows it, and he already grieves this family who have become friends, because he knows what is going to happen to them and where they are really getting sent to… His heartbroken and tearful “It is happening again”, Donna running after the truck taking them away screaming “Where are you taking them???” all drive home the point of how hopeless things are.

When Donna tells Sylvia that she tried looking for a job but was rejected for “not being qualified” and adds a defeated "I guess I have always been a disappointment", she is getting the worst response from her own mother, a quiet “yeah…”

But the breaking point for Donna comes when her own grandad doesn’t fight for her anymore and ready to sell his most prized possession he never lets go of, his telescope, to make them some money for a living. Donna starts to believe in Rose’s words, when she and Wilf see the stars in the sky literally going out. That’s when Donna gives up and is ready to believe the impossible, that what Rose was saying about the Doctor is true.

And when she sees the TARDIS and hears about the Doctor’s brilliance, her first response is so heartbreaking! She honestly can’t understand how someone so extraordinary and smart and special would even want to spend time with her or need her at all. That’s how little Donna thinks of herself, and not just little, she thinks of herself as nothing, completely worthless person no one sees or hears or believes in. But the Doctor thought she was brilliant and that gives her hope.

But here comes another tragedy that in order for this terrible reality to be unwritten, Donna needs to literally kill herself…How truly horrible and awful is that? And how truly cruel it is for Donna to hear what she needs to do after being told that there is a whole life for her with the Doctor, a different better world where Donna Noble is worthy and full of potential for remarkable things. How awful it was to be given a glimpse of hope amongst all misery, being told that the world needs the Doctor and Donna Noble to stop the stars from going out, and then have it taken away because the only way out is dying….

But brave and remarkable Donna Noble does it anyway. And she does go back to her own reality and defeats the trickster and here we get the foreshadowing of the DoctorDonna because the trickster sees the incredible power in Donna “You are so strong. What are you? What will you be?”

Sylvia in the parallel world says to Donna “You think you’ll meet a man…”, and Donna does, just not the kind of man Sylvia implies. The kind of man who will  save her, and she will save him, and together they will stop the stars from going out and save this world and reality itself. That’s how powerful meeting the Doctor was for BOTH himself and Donna. It is a different kind of love that will save both Donna and the Doctor, and the world around them.

When Donna and the Doctor are reunited, it feels different because she already knows what it’s like to lose him and she rushes to hug him and catches him by surprise. He doesn’t know what it’s like to lose her (yet) but he will soon find out…and probably remember this hug as the last happy memory that he will cherish for millions of years and she will have to forget.

And the very next moment is a foreshadowing of not only the metacrisis DoctorDonna but also Donna millions of years later becoming the Doctor’s home. And when Donna once again dismisses her own importance, the Doctor instantly and without hesitation reminds her that SHE IS BRILLIANT, and she smiles at him because that’s exactly what she needed to hear and that is what he always tells her. Donna has seen the world without him and the world where she felt like nothing, and the Doctor wasn’t there to show her how wrong she was. But now all is right in the world again, the puzzle pieces are back in place, at least for a short while.

This story showed how intertwined the Doctor and Donna’s fates are. How them not meeting literally becomes their own undoing and results in a threat of the whole universe blinking out of existence. How their accidental Christmas meeting became their salvation. How without Donna the Doctor would die, and without the Doctor Donna’s life would become a nightmare. How one little detail can change so much.

“Turn Left” is such a masterpiece of drama and had such outstanding acting in it too, specifically by Catherine Tate. She carried this episode on her back (pun intended). 

And this episode is one more proof that Doctor Who is not just silly space adventures and camp and fun escapism, it is also impactful and meaningful stories about ordinary people capable of so many profound and extraordinary and truly great things, and all they need is for someone to believe in them and remind them they can do anything and be brilliant and fantastic.

[sadcoms]

AU where Rose stayed with the Time Lord Doctor after Journey’s End and they start to argue more like they did in S1 because the Doctor is doing his “I never would” thing and Rose is now saying “but sometimes you HAVE to” which causes him to start down another Davros-inspired spiral about how he’s “turned her into a weapon” and she’s like...actually travelling across dimensions trying to fight eternal darkness brought about by a ton of genocidal aliens will do that to you regardless!

Because Rose was never for pacifism-above-all-else. The episode before Dalek Harriet Jones straight up says she’s a very violent young woman because Rose (not unreasonably) wants the Slitheen to be blown up after they murdered countless people. Same with the Nestene Consciousness - but the Doctor says he has to give it a chance, and that is what she mirrors back at him in Dalek. This is usually why the pair works, because if one doesn’t have mercy on or compassion for someone the other one usually will (eg Cassandra). That’s why Ten is even willing to give Davros a chance, though it’s exacerbated by a lot of guilt around the Time War, especially when it kicked off in-part because of what he did, and failed to do, in Genesis of the Daleks.

And that is what Davros never got - that Rose had already seen the Doctor’s soul and loved him anyway; that part of their souls are the same because they helped each other grow. And it’s the same for all of the companions this era, whether it’s Jack saying he never doubted the Doctor would kill him, or Donna seeing him murder the Racnoss and still regretting not travelling with him, or Martha (somehow) forgiving the Doctor for the year that never was and for everything he burdened her with.

Because I think what Davros and the Doctor came to see as him turning people into weapons was actually just people willingly taking on the burden he carried. Again, a lot of people sort of write Tentoo and Rose off as the dalek genocide couple, but what exactly was the alternative? Let them destroy the universe? The Doctor is a coward, any day, and that makes complete sense as a reaction to already bearing two genocides on his shoulders, but it’s also that cowardice that makes other people step up and be brave, which usually means sacrificing themselves, and the Doctor carries that too. That is why Martha gets the direct parallel to the Doctor with the Osterhagen key - both are willing to burn their planets to save the rest of the universe, and Martha already spent S3 being more like the Doctor than he was because he was so broken by grief. By Season 4, the Doctor is already so self-destructive and so self-loathing that only he, the "true" Time Lord, can be the arbiter of genocides and who can’t be. Even when it comes to Martha, or to another exact replica of himself.

(Never mind that he makes essentially the same decision the Metacrisis Doctor and Martha did again in End of Time when he sends Gallifrey back into hell, but hey, he got there in the end.)

And it’s one of the reasons why the Doctor’s so reliant on the Master. I’m not sure he would have gone to get his ‘reward’ had some of that weight of destroying Gallifrey again not been shared with another Time Lord. Ten does, ultimately, put humans on a pedestal and does his best to protect them even when they are willing to share his burden (note that Tentoo destroying the Daleks means Donna doesn't have to take on any of the burdens Rose or Martha did, so she stays the least militarised companion). He simultaneously wants that other Time Lord judgement while needing humans as another perspective.

All of this to say that, I think most people understand that Ten being with someone but especially with Rose would have stopped him going Time Lord Victorious, but they don't necessarily understand why. TLV comes from his desire to save everyone, because all the loss he's seen and has caused is too much. Not only does having Rose help soothe that, but she also specifically could have helped ground the Doctor back to where he was morally in the first two series, which is quite different from where he is by S4.

(Also The Next Doctor would have been an absolutely wild story for Rose and the Doctor to have gone on next. They arrive thinking they might have a fun Christmas and then they have to confront the fact that the Battle of Canary Wharf is still following them and how when they lost each other they lost everything. And how the villain in that is defeated by the Doctor showing her herself, which is what Davros tried to do the Doctor.)

[transgenderdoctorwhomst-old]

the Doctor being a vampire. like, drinks blood and has fangs and stuff. likely needs solid food too but blood is an important part of their diet :)

nine keeps blood pouches stashed in stasis fridges around the tardis. sips one like a juice box in front of rose and has asked for donations from her and jack for convenience. he steals blood from rich assholes and politicians sometimes.

ten has an insane guilt complex about it and will not touch roses leftover blood. he feels bad about acquiring it and asking for it, and does not tell martha about needing blood until like, she catches him taking a big sip of slightly old blood destined for medical waste disposal he snagged from a hospital. (this is not healthy for him. she will be forcing him to accept donations from her). donna finds out because river makes him drink some of her blood for basic sustenance. and then donna demands he go stock up at "vampire planet." 10 is constantly blood malnourished.

eleven just decides to bite people for a quick snack sometimes. he cheerfully relays his vampirism to amelia but reassures her he only "eats bad people" or "gets snacks from his friends". amy will randomly shove her arm at him when he's clearly hungry and hasn't realized. he tries to bite rory once and rory nopes out (and then performs a blood draw on himself and lectures the doctor about being sanitary). clara will not let him get away with not drinking her blood, it's almost a problem.

i havent seen 12 recently, share your opinions on him

13 does not mention any of this to her companions. the master tells them about it. 13 is like "haha yeah" and never brings it up again. they don't know where she's getting blood or when. (she is ordering it off space amazon)(the tardis is also stealing blood that won't be used from hospitals for her wife)

i havent seen 14 or 15 but i just know donna is making unit deliver blood regularly to her house for 14 because he's too sad and wet to ask for any right now

[leonardcohenofficial]

hello i would love to hear your general thoughts re: tenmartha if you feel like sharing them

okay so many thoughts about dr. martha jones and the doctor but one of the main ones is that despite popular (misogynoir-driven) belief, martha's character as written is much stronger than people give the series credit for. i think so much of her very strong character development and arc (based in her growing into her self-sufficiency, which was always there from the start and demonstrated in her constant analysis and questioning in the search for the most info to make the right decisions) is overshadowed by fandom racism, too much focus given to the unrequited crush storyline (which is also key to her arc, but is also something that she very distinctly and importantly gets over!), and general "she's not rose" sentiment. i think it's really interesting that unlike rose or donna whose narrative arcs need them to become super-human, martha essentially becomes the doctor's equal by the end of her run, if not surpassing him given the fact that as a human, she doesn't have those same otherworldly powers as him.

while i think the narrative of season three ultimately lets her come out on top, i think there is a big cost to that, for both martha the character and for the viewers. even separate from fandom racism there are so many moments of racism in the series that i don't think actually do anything to further the storytelling (literally fuck the whole human nature/the family of blood storyline) and that puts a damper on much of that whole year for me despite loving the characters. i also understand why the doctor (via the writers) is constantly comparing martha to rose, but the moments where martha calls him out on it—while they are certainly there—aren't always enough. i think that fact that martha also begins as fairly dependent on the doctor's validation (which like. makes total sense, she has no idea how all this works and is getting thrown into insane scenarios with no info from the jump) gets reduced to calling the character "needy" which just simply isn't true. this is also something that i think people focus on a bit too much rather than seeing how that particular character trait shifts throughout her season.

all this to say, when tenmartha is good, it's fantastic. freema agyeman and david tennant's chemistry is so on point, and that saves a lot of otherwise mediocre-to-bad writing. from the jump martha is shown to be so SO fucking smart, self-reliant, willing to take risk, and uninterested in the doctor's bullshit; when the doctor isn't just whining in the post-rose hangover or treating her like crap, he recognizes how powerful she is AND how much potential she has to continue to hone her skills, which is why he trusts her so inherently and ends up leaning on her so much during that season. the fact that he manipulates her emotionally to me is equal parts hard to watch and based writing-wise in a lot of the aforementioned -isms AND interesting character development from him because we haven't really seen that type of messy fucked up (human) behavior from the doctor. and then martha leaves on her own terms, which no other companion has gotten to do (clara's storyline feels different in that regard to me). she realizes she doesn't need him, arguably becomes his equal (or surpasses him) in terms of skill, and makes it out alive. imho that's a pretty big accomplishment.

[sallysellsseashellssundays]

Absolutely insane how much emotional/physical pain Ten suffered in S3, there's everything to do with the loss of Rose which is a repeating theme throughout but also...

The Runaway Bride: Turn Left tells us he would have died at this point if not for Donna

Smith and Jones: plasmavore sucks his blood and he has to be resuscitated

The Shakespeare code: the Carrionite stops one of his hearts, luckily he has two!

Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks: the Doctor gets hurt with the lightning strike, tempts the Daleks to kill him

42: the sun possesses him, he's in such a great deal of pain he actually thinks he's going to regenerate

Human Nature/The Family of Blood: experiences great pain when using the Chameleon Arch as he changes his biology in a similar way as when he regenerates

I think it's probably the only series where he's seen to be in actual pain/hurt/very close to death for most of the episodes, I genuinely can't think of many from S1/S2 except maybe Dalek when Van Statten has captured him...it's a good thing he had Martha who was studying to be a doctor because 😲😲😲 and it's such a testament as to how affected he was by losing Rose that he really seemed to lose sense of himself, he became far more reckless to the point that Martha called him out on it in Evolution of the Daleks even though she hadn't known him for long then, and he genuinely did not seem to value his own life as much as before, he kept putting himself in incredibly dangerous situations that he wouldn't have survived had it not been for Martha and Donna

[variousqueerthings]

thing about rose, for me, is that she wasn't there first -- this in a "she was first in nu!who in the sense that this was the first person to travel with nine, and the first person since the timewar, and the last person that nine was with, to the point that ten was born out of that experience/modelled on her."

and in that framing, I am a big fan of her haunting of the narrative, because it start outs with her placing herself inside the doctor's ribcage and rebooting their ability to want to feel things, but unfortunately rose is still a human, like every human the doctor travelled with before, it's just that the doctor forgot how to steel themself against that inevitability because of the circumstances around meeting rose

this is The thing that I find tragic about martha, because I think she could have been that person, if she'd been the first person post-timewar to travel with the doctor, but because she's coming in during bleeding-heart times, she's got to deal with triage instead. and yes, there are wonders, and yes, there are good times, but for a lot of it, it's shrapnel, and I think if it hadn't been, she would have had a very different attitude towards *waves hands* space and time travel and aliens and the universe (one where she wouldn't be the person trusted with something like the osterhagen key)

and donna had a sense of that Space the doctor was in post-rose (she canonically stopped the doctor from dying in runaway bride) and stepped away from it, and didn't get back to the doctor until some of that hole-in-chest had been bandaged up, which martha did a great job of, but didn't get to really benefit from, and I think that's the sad thing about martha jones, is that she absolutely got a taste of the beauty and the splendor, but never without all the violence and heave weight that was put onto her

which, again, she seems to have been very aware of, considering she joined UNIT and Torchwood. her eyes were barely ever rose tinted (no pun here) during her whole journey in the story. martha really is in my opinion the most tragic companion (that I've met so far, I know Adric straight up dies, but maybe he had some fun times before that?), because yes, donna loses her memories and rose is in a parallel universe, but that's more tragic for the doctor -- they've both built lives

in donna's case there's probably a lot of imperfection in that life, but clearly a lot of joy as well, with her and her husband and her kid and her mum, and I'm sure she'd have preferred to be the donna who saw the universe and was splendid, but martha never gets to forget, and has to continue her life one step out of sync of everything she could have been

which, maybe her life is pretty flipping fantastic, but we really don't know, which is the biggest thing I side-eye about the first nu!who era. that whole weird ending with the sontaran and mickey is like... anti-character work, it answers nothing and it makes very little sense

all I know about her at the end is that she more than anyone saw the doctor's life and became a soldier (still a doctor as well, but...) because that was the work she saw needed doing, and she's the kind of person who does what needs doing. but is she... okay? youknow?

but going back to the original point, is that framing martha through the lens of rose is all well and good in the sense that rose is the reason the doctor is at that emotional point when he meets martha -- although donna absolutely had a very big hand in that as well -- but once we've established that, martha's arc is martha's arc, and it's dull to me to frame it as the "rebound" arc or even particularly about alloromanticism (including -- and this is why i get why people do it in fandom -- some shit said by rtd, which is just less interesting than what I get out of it, so shhhh)

she's got so much going on, and her relationship with the doctor changes the trajectory of her life, and it's in many ways a more interesting and far less straightforward trajectory of bad-to-better that many companions get -- it's a wonderfully complicated narrative that (and again, I get that some of this comes from within deliberate framings of the text, even though I think it's more than open enough to do more with, death of the author and all that -- but certainly not all of this is text either, some of it is ignoring what is actually there) is done a disservice by not going through the real messed up fascinating extraordinary shit that's going on during her era + arc in s4

but also... is she ok? I want to know. it's one of my top three burning questions, since we're getting a bit of best-ofs of the noughties DW era, some of your crimes can be righted by a simple bit of martha mr davies

[tangerinelabyrinth]

"The Doctor didn't treat Martha badly at all."

Right, What's all this then.

After kissing her (Which meant nothing) shows up to where she is and asks her if she wants to take a trip in the Tardis only to yell at her that's she's not replacing Rose shortly after she agrees.

Dismissive about her concerns about her race and traveling to the past.

Weirdly casual about sharing a bed then talks about Rose and how she would know what to say to him and do in this situation.

Takes her to the same places he took Rose. (This one's complicated too me but it obviously hurt her feelings, so we are putting it in here)

 When Martha was just happy to see him because they had been separated and he was like, "You can kiss me later" or something along those lines. (But absolutely zero mixed signals there.)

Says he is going to leave and comes back and let's not mention Picks up her underwear in her apartment (like why)

TAKES HER BACK TO 1913 AND HAS HER TAKE CARE OF HIM WHILE HES HUMAN AND FALLS IN LOVE WITH A WOMAN WHO IS RACIST TO HER!!! THEN INVITES THE SAME WOMAN TO TRAVEL WITH THEM!!!! And all she gets is a thanks.

Gets them stuck in 1969 and has her work in a shop to support him.

Finished explaining the perception filter and then ran back to add "It's like when you fancy someone, and they don't even know you exist."

Hinted at that he gets her the job at UNIT only to be upset when she works at UNIT. (This reasonably could be because she ended up more like a solider than he wanted but still)

It goes without saying that while all of this is happening, Martha continues to hustle through every episode she is in and saves not only The Doctor but the entire world! The Doctor is 100 percent fine with not reciprocating her feelings and is perfectly fine to still not be over Rose. That isn't the issue here; the problem is that he just treats Martha like she's nothing and it's a burden to travel with her (even though he asked her to travel with him and had multiple opportunities to leave if he wanted) after she constantly proves herself and saves him multiple times. Its infuriating to me and it makes me more upset when people don’t see how much differently she is treated than Rose and Donna and paint Martha as this aggressor who also plays a role and is responsible for how he treated her when that's not the case at all. I understand that a large part of Martha's story was that The Doctor didn't see her but why? And why is this used almost as an excuse for his behavior? 

I could more in depth, but I don't think I have the right words to properly articulate and describe all my feelings, but this is what I got.

[scienceandfandoms]

I was talking on Discord and accidentally spent an hour giving my thoughts on how well each new Who companion could take care of a baby. Note that I think most everyone on this list is capable of taking care of a baby for some amount of time. As such I'm adding how long I think they could do so/additional stipulations in bold. Also of note that a lot of these depend on when in their timeline we mean. I split some ratings based on this. Also also this is just for fun

So without further ado... How well New Who companions would do taking care of a baby (under the cut)

Rose Tyler: When we meet her she is so so young to be caring for an infant for a significant amount of time. But by the end of her time on screen? Sure. In EU content she's even got a kid. Rating: a few days at the start, long term at the end

Mickey Smith: Era specific. Definitely not for early Mickey. But once he's matured after spending time in Pete's World he could probably do it. Rating: maybe for an afternoon at the start, long term at the end

Captain Jack Harkness: Has had children canonically. This does not, however, fill me with confidence. Probably knows how to keep them alive more or less though unless their death would save the world haha who said that. Rating: inevitable heartbreak/10

Martha Jones: I'd trust her to do so at the start if she had to bc of her medical training and being slightly older/with her shit together. My confidence has only increased with time. Rating: most competent so far, could probably handle it long term if she had to right at the start

Donna Noble: Has successfully, canonically, on screen raised a spectacular daughter who is also a companion. A large portion of her time on screen in The Star Beast is dedicated to how good of a mother she is. Rating: companion I would trust the most with a baby for any amount of time

River Song: Another one that depends in part on place in the timeline and I'm not even gonna get into the thing where the Library makes her a parent or something at the end of that episode bc that feels forced af to me. But I feel like she'd lack confidence in her ability to care for a kid of any age, but take to it surprisingly well if she really had to do it. Rating: earlier in her timeline just no. Later in her timeline she could probably manage long term

Amy Pond and Rory Williams (they're a couple so doing them together): at the beginning they're also quite young (not even counting Amelia era Amy). They could do it but I think Rory would be picking up a lot of the slack for the same reasons I think early Martha could do it. Dubiously canonly they DID raise a kid (though it's unclear if it was from infancy), and in general there's so many timeskips they're a lot older and more mature by their departure and I think they'd be fine. Rating: carried by Rory to squeak out mid-long term success early on, but in a better position long term later in their lives

Clara Oswald: Clara has experience with children, yes, but ones that are SCHOOL age. Clara is not equipped to handle an infant. You can't be clever at an infant. Unless you speak baby. Maybe she forces the Doctor to teach her to speak baby. I doubt it would help. Rating: I wouldn't leave a baby with Clara Oswald for more than an afternoon and even that much is a gamble

Nardole: Has been seen looking after babies before. Seems reasonably competent at it. Up there honestly. Rating: long term right from the start. Or at least from his second episode he's just kinda doofy in THORS and there's a significant time skip after that

Bill Potts: While not as young as someone like Rose, her position in life is still one that makes caring for a baby for a significant duration difficult. Could she do it? Yeah probably if she really had to. But I want her to live her life. Rating: living situation complicates anything more than short term early on, probably capable of long term with resources even then

Ryan Sinclair: Chibnall companions are kinda nothing to me. Sorry. Please don't come at me for not being a Chibnall enjoyer. But it can be hard to get a read on them to me. Ryan is pretty young though so I'm gonna say best not. Maybe if he was written by someone capable of developing a character. Rating: short term would probably be okay

Graham O'Brien: Also Chibnall. In a better position age wise. Loses points for all the ableism with Ryan so maybe if the kid isn't disabled I guess. Rating: another short term candidate I suppose

Yaz Khan: Also Chibnall. Also young. Still probably not. I'm sorry canon Yaz is kinda nothing to me I know a lot of people really like her. Rating: competent enough for short term probably

Dan Lewis: Maybe the Chibnall companion I'd trust with a baby the most? I mean he's not barely an adult, and his main crime is outing someone which isn't really relevant to a baby. I think it's a bit outside his wheelhouse but he'd manage it okay. Though if he never unshrunk his house that might make it a bit more difficult for anything longer term. Rating: congratulations you get short term with longer term conditional on the assumption you have somewhere to go with said baby

Rose Noble: She's 15. But on the other hand she could ask her mom for help so if that's an option she's fine actually. Rating: probably a great short term babysitter, has the resources to get excellent assistance if she were to end up with a baby in the long term

Ruby Sunday: Another Quite Young companion and her introduction literally does feature a baby in her care getting kidnapped. She does get that baby back though and it's shown that she helps her mom with childcare a lot so big babysitter energy. Rating: short-mid term on her own, longer term with assistance

[butchtwelfthdoctor]

thinking a lot about time horror and how it relates to doctor who recently. like idk if 'time horror' is a thing as such but you know what i mean right. starts off small. rose discovers she missed a whole year of her life & had no idea. martha lives through the year that never was, and then it never was. she's a whole year older and has lived through so much, so did her family, lucy saxon and jack, and no one will ever know. donna thinks she has years of married life with lee only to discover that that time wasn't real either. in one of teh audios ten spends 7000 years trapped inside his own head in a time dilation that only took ten minutes for everyone else.

amy and rory get it constantly - rory dying in angels take manhattan in that apartment building, in the broken tardis hallways when amy thinks rory spent his whole life waiting for her. amy waiting 36 years for the doctor in that parallel timestream. the girl who waits - the inherent tragedy of waiting for a time traveller. rory spending 2000 years as a plastic centaurion. he can only half remember it but it was very real while he was living it. the pandorica. eleven spending 200 years avoiding his own death. river knowing that every time she sees the doctor he may know her less and less.

clara lives and dies thousands of times. she sees the doctor live and age nine hundred years and then regenerate over the course of one evening. she is ripped from death to discover the doctor spent four and half billion years, an incomprehensibly long time, trapped in a loop in order to get her back, and he doesn't remember that but it happened. ashildr lives so long she forgets who ashildr is. bill waits ten years for the doctor to come back, watches him spend weeks raising his eyebrow, only for him to miss her by two hours. yaz waits ten months for the doctor not knowing where she is, and jack spends nineteen years trying to get into a jail cell beside her to break her out. jack harkness lives for billions of years too. he is changed in every way possible and becomes somewhat of a lonely god himself. he gets stranded in the past and has no choice but to keep living it, hoping he'll see the doctor again

we see sarah jane, mel, ace, teagen, who spent decades thinking they would never see teh doctor again - thinking they were abandoned, or in sarah janes case, that they never even got to say goodbye. by the time the doctor sees donna again, its been around a thousand years for him. fifteen years where she didn't remember and a thousand years where he very much did.

[marlenacantswim]

BAM headcanons for your little guy????

i can always count on you, whoop <333

i'm thinking ab the tenth doctor real hard bc of that novel i just read, so imma drop some headcanons ab him and his companions, and probably 14 too bc i'm feeling it.

ten's got a little bit of a chew stim / oral fixation. this is inspired both by the number of times he holds objects in his mouth in the show, and him chewing the end of his stethoscope in Prisoner of the Daleks.

fourteen, meanwhile, learns he has a LOT of a chew stim once he's settled into his new life with the nobles. the discovery unfortunately comes at the cost of sylvia's second favorite spatula, which 14 absentmindedly chewed a hole into while making himself eggs one morning.

tentoo and rose celebrate the day she and nine first met as their anniversary. when they get married (through a lowkey traditional timelord wedding to "celebrate his heritage"), they make sure to hold the ceremony on that same day.

one january day, a few years into their relationship, rose is telling tentoo how worried and stressed she is about her job prospects. tentoo reassures her by saying "i think you're gonna have a great year :)" which suddenly unlocks the memory she'd had of meeting ten on new year's, 2005. since tentoo doesn't remember this, they both conclude that it must have been the actual doctor visiting her sometime after the metacrisis, and through her description of the events, tentoo silently realizes that ten was there because he was dying.

14 has a sleep pattern of about one or two nights of restless insomnia, followed by one night of deep, babylike sleep that lasts for 10 hours if uninterrupted. it's not uncommon, on these nights, to find him asleep in front of a project he's been working on, as he is the only one in the house who has not yet recognized this pattern.

as a time lord, he doesn't need to sleep this much in theory, but my mans is so tired, and for the first time like, ever, he has the space to actually catch up on lifetimes of lost sleep.

time lord dreams tend to be five-dimensional, but the trends can change with regenerations. for instance, nine's dreams were only ever three-dimensional, and always in black and white. ten's dreams have a wild range of possibilities, from so photorealistic he confuses them with real memories, to so abstract that the experience is more akin to being the subject of a picasso painting. he dreams every time he falls asleep, even if he's just taking a nap. 14's dreams are always photorealistic.

donna snores. not super loud, but enough to be obvious to anyone but her. ten always found the rhythmic sound soothing; pulsing white noise like that of the tardis. he'd often fall asleep in the same room as her because of it. all of this applies to 14 as well, to the extent that, some mornings, donna and shaun find him curled up into a ball asleep at the foot of their bed like a dog.

martha and the nobles keep very well in touch, to the occasional horror of 14 who has no idea how to read her and feels pathetically awful about how he treated her during her time as a companion. martha honestly still believes he's the most amazing thing, but she's gotta admit that watching him sweat bullets every time she addresses him feels kinda cathartic, so she has no qualms putting off that talk.

martha has also since pivoted back to the medical field, where she is doing quite well, thank you for asking.

since we see ten in the pjs from "The Christmas Invasion" again in "Smith and Jones", i choose to believe that he liked them so much that he simply kept them. i imagine the conversation with jackie went "howard won't miss these, will he?" "miss what?" "thought not. okay thanks, bye!"

i also imagine ten makes an active effort to sleep in the pajamas as often as he's able. he sleeps about thrice as much as nine ever did, all because he's obsessed with the fun ritual of wearing them to bed.

ten actually has a mild but sensitive allergy to cats. he never realized this, not because he didn't ever have the opportunity to, but because he was always too preoccupied to piece together that the reason his psychic functions felt fuzzy and the psychic paper used a misplaced modifier and the skin near his collarbone itched was because he was in the same room as a cat five minutes ago.

this is why it took him a second to piece together what exactly was off with rose in "New Earth": his ambient telepathy was too fuzzed over from the cat nurses to notice rose's brainwaves were wrong.

having a human brain, tentoo's memory faculties are still giga-impressive for a human, but not nearly as robust as his timelord counterpart's. he still remembers events, emotions, and concepts clearly, his biggest regressions being in the categories of exact terminologies and complex mathematical processes. the loss he's most distraught about is the vast majority of languages he once knew. he can still speak and understand all earth languages and gallifreyan fluently, but his knowledge of xenolinguistics is relegated to the occasional profound vocab word he remembers fondly.

a lot of these ended up being sleep-related for whatever reason; maybe i just want the man to rest </3