doctor who ladies: martha jones
The incomparable Martha Jones.
None of the Doctor’s Companions are less than extraordinary, but I feel Martha underwent some of the hardest trials of the recent Companions. While all the Companions have faced great danger and sacrifice, Martha had The Year That Never Existed. She had a year of knowing her family’s fate rested in the hands of an insane Time Lord, a year in which she traveled the world under deep privation, risking being killed at any time by any anonymous member of the Master’s forces, all to relay a story, an idea, to spread the legend of the Doctor so he could eventually save everyone. She did it alone, without any real hope of support or thanks or even a guarantee that it would work, under threat of death for herself, her family, and the Doctor, never knowing if this day her mother would die, or if her sister would be assaulted, or her father beaten and humiliated. If Jack would die yet again or the Doctor suffer more torture, and all of it, every bit of the fate of the world was lying in her hands.
This was not the harrowing experiences of Rose’s absorption of the time vortex, the tragedy of Donna being the most important person in the universe and then losing it all, of Amy and Rory’s whole lives being intertwined with the Doctor, of Clara going beyond the bound of death. Martha’s courage was not a dramatic statement, but a hard slog of devotion with no payoff for her other than a return of the status quo. And still she was able to gain the strength to move on with her life and make a differences for a long time down the road.
The incomparable Martha Jones, fellow Whovians.
