also, so as not to keep clogging up other people's comment threads

[tempestsarekind]

I've thought about this quite a bit in the last few days (because my brain has totally gone on vacation from school, despite the batch of papers that needs grading), and basically, it boils down to this:

Comments

[skirmish_of_wit]

I totally agree. I really love Martha -- and at the end of S3 it's no wonder, after her year on her own, she realizes that she needs to BE on her own. She needs more than to be yoked into an inherently and irreversibly unequal relationship with the Doctor, because he won't let anyone close enough to move on an equal footing with him. On one level he can't -- what with being Last of the Time Lords and all -- but really it's just as much that he refuses to, after Rose. But he left Rose hanging, too, because it seems perfectly obvious from that last holographic goodbye that he wasn't ever going to say that he loved her, and that's what the tear was really about: poor isolated Doctor, always alone.

This is what drives me crazy about the whole "Rose would have known" thing, too -- maybe my recall of S1&2 is faulty, but what I remember is Rose doing stupid things like threatening the fabric of the time-space continuum by saving her father. Rose was the plucky but not terribly bright Everywoman; Martha's actually smart and caring and a freaking doctor herself, and I really hope that her independence is building up to a renegotiation of their relationship in S4 to something more satisfactory and complex.

[tempestsarekind]

Nothing would make me happier about this show than to be able to look back on S3 after next season and see it as a (perhaps painful) puzzle piece in their relationship, and in the Doctor's own process. When I watch the first half of S3, it seems so plain to me that it was really heading toward a good relationship, after some initial denial. And yet. So I would love it if the Doctor learns how to let himself connect to people again.

I agree about Rose. There were times when she did the right thing, but also times when she screwed up in a major way, and to suggest that Rose was *always* saying the right thing really isn't true. She was great at rushing in without thinking--and sometimes that was good, and sometimes it led to hanging from barrage balloons, and being chloroformed and stuffed into carriages, and nearly ending the world before the Doctor could stop her. Even the Bad Wolf was accidental, if I recall--she just wanted the TARDIS to take her back. And I never had a problem with that, until "Rose would know," which apparently had the effect of making Martha feel like her cleverness wasn't good enough.