Spring Break TV: Doctor Who

[thepresidentrix]

Funny story: during my Spring Break, I killed my dvd player with my mind. It was just a cheap little dvd player from Target, probably about a year and a half to two years old, and one afternoon I made the fatal mistake of looking at it and thinking, 'Huh, it's been a while since I had a dvd player break down on me.' And the very next day, my dvd

Comments

[tempestsarekind]

Martha-haters make no sense to me, either. As you say, not loving her is fine, not every character pings with people in the same way, but... My guess is that a lot of the most rabid Martha-haters were either ardent Rose fans of a sort that were very OTP about Ten/Rose (in which case any mention of Martha "daring" to love the Doctor was greeted with OMG YOU HUSSY GET YOUR HANDS OFF HIM--I remember reading a lot about how selfish Martha was to be imposing her feelings on him instead of helping him to get over Rose, which...what???), or people who were totally burned out about the very idea of the companion having romantic feelings about the Doctor, which amplified the few comments Martha made about the subject into this huge thing she was alllllllways going on about.

I was always astonished that for the latter group, Martha's one sentence in an episode about having feelings for the Doctor somehow invalidated every other thing she did in the episode. I remember reading a lot of posts about how Martha wasn't doing anything in the first half of the season, it was this whole LJ fandom meme. Like, everyone had just agreed that this was true, despite the evidence.

Re: the post--doesn't sound like one of mine, to be honest. My two pet theories about the companions' roles are 1) "you don't have to work for it [that is, the Doctor's approval/affection] if you're lonely"; and 2) Rose got the Doctor, in Ten, who wanted to pretend he was whole and healed, while Martha got the one who had to be honest about pain and loss and Gallifrey. That Martha's essentially the one who holds the Doctor up while he's falling apart. And Donna gets the benefits of that. But I don't know that I've ever written a whole post on the subject, and I definitely haven't tied it to the endings the companions have had.