The Girls Who Deserved Better: Dissecting the Female Companions of RTD's Doctor Who

Change is a funny thing. Some people adapt to change quite well while others may be stubborn and refuse to accept any changes.

Doctor Who is a show where change is inevitable. It would have to be comfortable with making changes for a show that boasts nearly fifty years of history. Doctors change, companions come and leave, the TARDIS gets several makeovers, the production values change, and, yes, even head writers change.

Russell T. Davies can be credited with resurrecting Doctor Who in 2005 after being off the air since 1989 (not counting the 1996 television film that the BBC co-produced with US-based companies Universal and FOX, of course, but that mess is best left forgotten). For a new generation of fans, the Davies-produced years became their introduction to the series. This was the case for me when I began watching the show a year after its re-debut. During Davies’ run, we saw two Doctors, three full-time companions (and several one-off or part-time ones), the return of old villains and the creation of new ones, a time war, and a whole slew of problems.

Now, it’s easy to forget the shortcomings of Davies’ era when we’ve got a new head writer in the form of Steven Moffat to pin all of our frustrations on. It’s easy to re-imagine that period of the show’s history as a magical time where everything was perfect utopia. It’s like having that one roommate you would passive-aggressively whine about when they don’t pick up their mess and you spend their whole tenure wishing someone else could take their place, even though you got along with them at times. However, when they move out and you get another roommate who is okay too, but bothers you in different ways, you’re left with this idealization of how your previous roommate used to be.

It’s like that.

For me, Russell T. Davies is the mess that refuses to leave my mind. All of Moffat’s faults do not absolve Davies of his, which is why I think we all need a refresher. I’m an equal opportunity critic, which is why I remain agitated at all of the criticism of Amy Pond and River Song as if Steven Moffat is the only writer on this show to drop the ball where his female companions are concerned.

To start, one of Davies’ most glaring faults was the treatment of companion Martha Jones.

Martha arrived after the forced departure of Rose Tyler, the revival’s first companion and thus the first companion of that new generation of viewers. Rose Tyler had two years to burrow her way into the hearts of the audience (and the Doctor’s), so the one to follow her would ultimately be stepping into some hefty shoes. With all of that on the line, you would think Davies would want to make a seamless transition that’s not only in line with this show’s history, but also shows us that life goes on and, look, here’s another brilliant companion in a long string of past delightful companions to fall in love with.

No.

He had to do everything in his power to make sure that Martha Jones felt unwelcome. He wanted to drive the point home that Martha just isn’t as good as Rose. This is where my problem lies.

Martha Jones is brilliant. She’s every bit as capable as the job of a companion requires and then some. She’s brave, selfless, and independent. Here is a woman, a medical student, who walked a war-ravaged Earth alone for a year, away from everyone she loved, because she had a job. She supports the Doctor time and time again – such as the time she had to take care of him while he was human in 1913 and stuck in a boarding school where she grew used to racist remarks from the pupils (and the staff, even) or when they were stuck in 1969 and she had to go out and get a job while he was the freeloader. Throughout her tenure aboard the TARDIS, Martha showed an incredible amount of patience and endurance. It was her selflessness and her strength of character that enabled her to survive throughout her multiple ordeals. Her series really became about her saving the Doctor in many ways rather than the reverse.

So why then was she treated so abysmally?

Davies set the tone early on near the end of “Smith and Jones” when the Doctor points out more than once that she’s in no way “replacing” Rose, so she only gets “one trip and then back home.” This wouldn’t be such a problem if the whole “one trip” nonsense didn’t stretch on for six episodes. Rose got an immediate invite and a TARDIS key three episodes later. In “The Runaway Bride,” the Christmas special that aired between series two and three, even Donna was quick to be invited along with the promise of multiple adventures (and this was just before Martha). So, again, why the different treatment where Martha was concerned?

Add to that, you’ve got the continuous references of Rose that kept cropping up with the sole purpose of holding Martha up to an unfavorable light. When the Doctor and Martha are particularly cozy on a bed together and their minds are raking over the questions that their trip has brought so far, the Doctor says, “Rose would know” before asking Martha if she had any ideas. In the following episode, the Doctor takes Martha to the same planet he once took Rose. However, while Rose got the scenic tour, Martha gets the slums. It’s not just the Doctor who continues this pattern. In “The Last of the Time Lords,” the Master remarks that Martha is “useless” compared to his companions of old that could open the heart of the time vortex (i.e. Rose, in case you were slow on the uptake).

Okay, we get it, Davies. Rose is just so superior to Martha in every way. What a genius move to get the audience to subconsciously resist Martha and long for the days of Rose again. Based on how much unnecessary hate that I’ve seen leveled at Martha seeped in internalized racism and silly reasoning, it looks like your plan succeeded. Well done.

The fact that the only two black companions were the ones who felt the most unwelcome in the TARDIS was never lost on me. While both Martha and Mickey Smith eventually wizened up and left on their own accord, that doesn’t erase all those times where they felt like second best, where they felt inadequate or less loved. The implications of it all are extremely uncomfortable.

Maybe the treatment of Martha boiled down to this incarnation of the Doctor and his dependency on certain people. He likes being needed; he needs to be needed. Rose and Donna were both looking for something similar. Martha, who didn’t feel stuck in her life so much as overwhelmed, didn’t need him to validate her self worth, so she left.

Of course, Martha wasn’t the first female companion to be mistreated by the writing and she wasn’t the last either. For as much time as Davies spent building up Rose Tyler to a status of sainthood, he damaged her character in the process to the point of no return.

When we first met Rose Tyler, she’s a nineteen-year-old dropout who feels stuck in her life – from her retail job, to living with her overbearing mother (a favorite trope of Davies’), and her boyfriend that she’s known since childhood. When the Doctor drops in at that particular moment in her life, he’s a breath of fresh air for her. Davies’ version of this show is all about taking ordinary people, showing them the extraordinary, and making them see the hidden potential within themselves. Sounds great in theory, right?

Instead, Rose Tyler takes a turn for the worse in her second series where her story stops being that kind of narrative and morphs into unsettling co-dependency issues with the Doctor. As time progressed, Rose had little to no regard for anyone in her life other than the Doctor, even being fully prepared to be separated from her family forever if it meant being with the Doctor, someone she knew had a history of leaving behind companions (but no, she insisted, she was special and not like the other ones). Rose’s entire arc boiled down to the Doctor and how she affected him. It stopped becoming about her in the end and this is what bothered me.

Rose had potential. Rose had a lot of potential. She was compelling, she had flaws, she made mistakes, and she had triumphs. Of course, that’s not to say falling in love completely absolves you of individuality or character (a criticism that’s frequently – and ironically – leveled at Martha). It doesn’t. But was Rose’s story from series two and beyond really about her own personal, individual growth as a character. I would argue no. Bringing her back in series four also did more harm than good. “Journey’ End” explicitly states that the dimension cannon she had been building to get back to the Doctor with the help of the Torchwood in the alternate universe was responsible for the universes beginning to collapse, which then enabled the Daleks to seep through and start wrecking havoc. This is explicitly stated in the episode, no hemming and hawing about it. Does the Doctor get angry? Nope. He smiles at her like it’s the most adorable thing in the entire cosmos. How sweet of you to tear apart universes which had a lot of negative ramifications (deadly ones) on other people just to see me again! And you have a gun too! Of course, I’m not going to yell at you for that, even though I reamed Martha for merely associating with people with guns despite the fact that I helped get her that job at a place I don’t like. This all makes perfect sense. Rose is so special, she defies consistent characterization.

And do I even need to detail the wrongs Davies did with his third and final full series companion, Donna Noble?

There’s her ending, for starters. Donna’s narrative was very similar to Rose’s in that she felt stuck in her “average” life, living with her overbearing mother. Traveling with the Doctor was an escapism tool; it gave her a purpose in life. So, Davies decides to erase all of that positive character development by sticking her in the exact same place where we met her for what exactly? To provide the Doctor with more angst so he could bemoan about how they break his heart and leave him?

I see.

And that’s not even touching on the fact that this ending was against Donna’s will. She had no choice in the matter, no agency. Our last image of the Donna we knew was her screaming, “No!” multiple times as the Doctor erased all of her memories of him. It’s upsetting, to say the least.

The issue of Donna’s sexuality has also been an uncomfortable theme in the show. Donna’s relationship with the Doctor was famously platonic. While the Doctor’s previous relationships with Rose and Martha had romantic tones to it, the writing emphasized that the Doctor and Donna are just friends. They aren’t married. And they emphasized this again and again and again just to make sure the audience got the point. This was the joke. Donna’s not like “those other girls.” Donna wasn’t allowed to have sexuality. When she makes a comment in “The Doctor’s Daughter” about distracting their jail guards with her “feminine wiles,” she’s quickly rebuffed by the Doctor while the much younger, blonder, fitter Jenny does the distraction. Even Captain Jack, a man who has been known to flirt with anything and everything regardless of sex or species, had to be forced into a hug with Donna for comedic effect.

There are no women on this show that haven’t been done a disservice by the writing in some way or another. These aren’t things that have been limited to Amy and River in series six or even to full time companions (one-off/recurring women of color and older women have also had shoddy treatment). This isn’t a new occurrence. There’s no point in putting one up on a pedestal as a beacon of perfection.