Previously: A mouthy bride-to-be showed up on the TARDIS and dammit if we didn’t love her almost instantly.
—
Smith and Jones
Marines: I’ve already said plenty that this is the series I’m most looking forward to revisiting because I suspect my feelings will be different on rewatch. I’m keeping my mind open, friends. The Rose-era has passed and onward we go.
Busy London street. Freema Agyeman is back, you guys, and she’s walking along. She gets a call from her sister who insists that their father is going mental and Freema has to do something about it. Next, her brother rings (and thankfully calls her Martha, getting that out of the way) and says that he didn’t even want a party and if their parents are going to fight about it, they can just give him the money. I tried this tactic for my Quinceañera and I’m still waiting on that money, bro.
Kirsti: I got money AND a party for my 21st, but I think the money was because my parents felt bad that my little brother’s 18th the year before had cost a ton and my 21st cost like $50 because none of my friends really drank…
Mari: Martha’s mum calls next and says that her father is going to make the whole family look ridiculous at this party. And finally, dad calls and insists that he can bring whoever he’d like. Namely, his young, leggy new girlfriend. Thus endeth the phone tag of family drama.
The Doctor walks right up to Martha and says, “like so.” He takes off his tie in demonstration and then just walks away.
Martha looks bemused as thunder rumbles and the haunting vocals so common on the series soundtrack start up.
K: Look, I know the Doctor’s pretty and all, but if a strange man stopped right in front of me and started undressing in the middle of the street, I would not be standing there looking bemused…
Mari: Martha is takes a lot in stride that would make me throat punch-y.
Speaking of, Martha walks toward the hospital and on the way in, a man in all black wearing a biker’s helmet walks into her. She gives a good natured, “oi! Watch it mate!” but her smile falters when the person turns back and presumably glares behind the helmet. Inside, Martha puts her stuff down at her locker and grabs her white lab coat. There’s some static electricity action when she touches the locker again so this has already been a weird day for Martha Jones.
K: On the day I watched this episode, I’d spent THE ENTIRE FUCKING DAY getting electric shocks from everything I touched. So needless to say, I overrelated to that moment.
Mari: We cut to Martha and a group of other students doing rounds, starting with an older lady who is suffering from a salt deficiency, which none of the students picked up on. In the hall Dr. Teacher is still talking about the importance of salt and the group passes the Mystery Biker. Another one gets out from the elevator. They are taking that douchey wearing sunglasses indoors to another level.
Dr. Teacher greets the next patient, John Smith. It’s the Doctor who says that he’s still feeling rather blah. Dr. Teacher asks Martha to check him out and see what she can find. Martha starts by asking him what was up with taking off his tie on Chancellor street. The Doctor insists it wasn’t him because he was in bed all day. She asks if he has a brother then and the Doctor replies, “not anymore.” Dr. Teacher basically tells her to cut the chit chat. Martha listens to the Doctor’s heartbeat…s.
Mari: Dr. Teacher asks if she’s having trouble locating the heart. Martha wobbles and suggests stomach cramps, which Dr. Teacher points out is a symptom and not a diagnosis. She also forgot to check the patient’s chart. Dr. Teacher grabs it and it shocks him. Martha said the same thing happened to her at her locker and all the students have similar tales of aggressive static electricity. Dr. Teacher says it’s the thunderstorm rolling in, as lightening is just static electricity. He asks who proved that and the Doctor provides the correct answer: Benjamin Franklin. Then he mumbles some about his good friend Ben and kite burn. Dr. Teacher suggests getting John Smith a visit from psychiatric. Martha looks back and smiles at the Doctor.
In the break room, Martha is on the phone again, this time with her sister who wants to grab lunch together. Martha comments on the pouring weather, but it isn’t raining outside where Sister is, around the corner. Sister tries to explain the very weird situation of how it’s only raining right over the hospital. Martha sees the Doctor wander by the break room but just watches him walk away. She only stops her chattering when both her sister and a Concerned Student point out that the rain is going up. As Martha looks outside the window, lightning crashes and the whole building starts to shake. When it stops, Concerned Student says it’s nighttime now, which is weird, because it was just lunchtime. Martha says it isn’t nighttime. They are are the moon.
We get a longer shot of the hospital and groups of people looking out the windows, freaking out when they notice they are on the moon. And my goodness do these extras commit to the bit:
K: Seriously. The overreactions were astonishing. And kind of hilarious…
Mari: I think the man in the last one is my favorite.
Chaos spreads in the hospital and Martha runs through it all, directing people back to bed. (K: I was very distracted by how high her heels were. My notes say “NO DOCTOR WOULD WEAR SHOES LIKE THAT”, because all the doctors I know who work in hospitals wear, like, chef’s clogs.) She ends up in a room where we see the Doctor step behind a hospital curtain. She makes to open a window but the same nameless lady from earlier stops her because they’ll lose their air. Martha says that the windows aren’t exactly air tight so if it were going to get sucked out, it would’ve happened already. The Doctor pulls back the curtain and says that’s an excellent point. Brilliant, really. The Doctor asks Martha if there is a veranda anywhere and if she fancies going out. Martha says okay, but the Doctor adds on, “we might die.” “We might not,” she sing songs back. The Doctor proclaims this a good answer.
Is it possible I like her more than before already?
K: I like Martha Jones more every time I watch series 3. She’s fabulously nonplussed about everything that’s happening.
Mari: They find the veranda and step out, amazed that they have air to breathe. Martha gets a little choked up when she thinks about the fact that she’ll be missing her brother’s 21st birthday and how her mom will react. She snaps out of it, though, and doesn’t want to go inside because she’s on the flipping moon and it’s beautiful.
She asks the Doctor what he thinks is happening and he turns the question around. Martha says it’s definitely extraterrestrial, which would’ve sounded mad a few years ago, but not after the spaceship crashing into Big Ben and the Cybermen invasion. Martha gets sad as she mentions her “cousin” Adeola who worked at Canary Wharf and never came home. I couldn’t remember if they at all addressed the fact that they recycled an actress. They went with “cousins.”
K: What up, ret con?
Mari: My sister and I get comments all. the. time about how we must be identical, which is one of those things that only strangers seem to be able to see because we happen to think we rarely look anything alike. Anyway, some of our favorite stories regarding this are 1- being offered a “twin discount” on merchandise and 2- one time seeing a man who freaked out because we were “identical” and he knew we had to be related and asked if we were cousins. Identical cousins.
K: It’s totally a thing. My little brother and the youngest of my three cousins – who’s still older than me – look so much alike that they’ve been known to look at photos of the other as a kid and be like “I don’t remember going to Disneyland/the Big Pineapple/Niagara Falls/a Scouts jamboree in Broome”. And we’re all “Uh, yeah, because YOU DIDN’T.”
Mari: Why would you assume identical COUSINS, though?
Martha tells Mr. Smith that they’ll definitely find a way home. The Doctor confesses that his name’s not really Smith. He’s the Doctor. Martha says she will be too if she passes her exams. The Doctor tries to explain that it’s just “the Doctor” and nothing else, but Martha says she won’t call him that.
Mari: The Doctor throws a pebble out away from himself and it hits a forcefield. Martha says that if it’s a shield sealing the air in, it will run out. Why would anyone suffocate 1000 people in a hospital? Just a space ship flies over head and the Doctor cheekily tells Martha to ask the aliens herself.
The Exquisite Extras come to the window again to gawk and have emotions.
Three cylindrical ships land and soon, aliens are marching out. The Doctor recognizes them on sight: Judoon.
Dr. Teacher is in his office when the lady with the supposed salt deficiency from earlier walks in and says she need his help. Dr. Teacher is way too distracted by they fact that he’s suddenly in space but Lacking Salt insists. Just then, the Helmets Inside Twins walks in and she calls them her boys, because she doesn’t like to get her hands dirty and she needs Dr. Teacher’s blood to survive. The Helmets Inside Twins grab Dr. Teacher as Lacks Salt villain gloats about how she’s only salt deficient because she’s so good at absorbing it. And now she needs a fix. She pulls out a little bendy straw from her purse and it’s probably one of the most evil ways someone has ever pulled out a bendy straw.
K: YUP. I think part of the reason why she’s so creepy is that she looks human. And helpless. And the fact that she’s neither of those things = NYARGH.
Mari: The Judoon march into the hospital and the Exquisite Extras panic some more, hiding in brilliant places like behind chairs. Once inside, one of the Judoon takes off his helmet and reveals a very rhinoceros looking creature. (K: RHINOS WITH ABS BAHAHAHAHA.) He shouts at everyone in a language we can’t understand and the rest of the Judoon raise their guns. A doctor steps forward and welcomes then in peace. Lead Judoon pushes him up against a wall and holds up a device to his mouth as the doctor says he was trying to help. The Judoon plus his little device into his space suit and apparently it taught him all of the English language after just recording, “please don’t hurt me, I was just trying to help.” Nifty.
Next, Lead Judoon holds up a blue light to the doctor’s forehead and identifies him as human. The Lead Judoon marks Definitely Human with a black x on the back of his hand and instructs the other Judoon to catalog all the suspects. We see the Judoon aggressively shining blue lights in people’s faces and marking their hands with Space Sharpies.
Martha and the Doctor are watching from one floor up. The Doctor explains that Jadoon are like police-for-hire and they must’ve brought the hospital to the moon because it’s neutral territory. They have no jurisdiction over Earth. Martha wonders if they are under arrest for trespassing on the moon, and while that’s wrong, the Doctor likes that line of thinking. It’s much worse though, especially for him, if the Judoon are looking for something non-human. Martha thinks must be joking about being non-human, but he just cocks one beautiful eyebrow at her.
K: He does give good eyebrow. Also, he passes comment in there somewhere about how he likes it when hospitals have “a little shop” and my notes say “LITTLE SHOP OF FEELS” because the last time he rambled about a little shop in a hospital was New Earth. *cries*
Mari: The Judoon move upstairs and Definitely Human is trying to calm everyone down, since they are just cataloging people. There’s a man who doesn’t listen though and breaks a vase over one of the Judoon’s heavily protected head, so I’m not sure what this man was going for here. Lead Judoon charges him, proclaims him guilty and kills him all on the spot.
The Doctor is trying to go through patient records on a hospital computer but the Judoon have locked it all down. The Doctor gets rambly about how he wasn’t looking for trouble, just wandering past when he noticed the suspicious activity building up around the hospital. He thought it was something going on inside but it turns out, the Judoon were hovering above it. The Doctor loses it again (his hair is really stressed out in this scene) when the computer goes completely blank. Martha asks what they are looking for and after the Doctor describes a patient admitted in the last week with unusual symptoms, Martha suggests asking Dr. Teacher.
K: I have two notes at this point: 1. The dialogue includes “Judoon platoon upon the moon” which RTD included solely because he knew how much of a struggle it would be for Tennant and his Scottish accent. And 2. This scene never fails to make me laugh because Tumblr created this:
That hair definitely screams “six days on Tumblr”.
Mari: In Dr. Teacher’s office, Martha finds the Helmets Inside Twins and Lacks Salt, still slurping through her bendy straw. Martha quickly hauls butt out of there and runs right into the Doctor. He’s restored the back-up on the computer. Martha tops him with an, “I’ve found her.” The Helmets Inside Twins come busting out of the office; the Doctor grabs Martha’s hand and tells her to run.
Well, that seems familiar.
The mad dash goes on as the Doctor and Martha try to avoid Judoon and escape Helmets Inside. The Doctor pushes Martha into a radiology room and locks the door with his sonic screwdriver. He tells Martha to press “the button” on his command but she doesn’t actually know how to operate the x-ray machine. The Doctor tells her to figure it out while he rigs the machine with the help of the screwdriver. Helmet Inside busts the door down and the Doctor screams, “NOW!” The Button was actually a huge yellow one. Martha presses it and the Doctor x-rays Helmet Inside to death.
Martha asks WTF and the Doctor says he increased the radiation by 5000%, but it’s totally safe for her to come out because he’s absorbed it all. All he has to do is expel it. He starts hopping around to get all the radiation into his left shoe. He takes it off and tosses it. Martha calls him completely mad.
Mari: Your commitment is strong.
Martha and the Doctor bend over Helmets Inside’s body and the Doctor explains that it’s just a slab of leather. A drone. Martha tell him about Lacks Salt drinking and her nefarious bendy stray, but the Doctor is now distracted because his sonic screwdriver is all burnt up. Martha calls him firmly to get his attention and he smiles big at her and notes that she called him Doctor. “Anyway,” she says and goes on about Lacks Salt drinking blood. The Doctor briefly wonders why Lacks Salt would be taking a snack break just then, but quickly figures out that this creature is an internal shapeshifter. She wasn’t drinking blood, but assimilating it. We cut to a Judoon shining the blue light at Lacks Salt. She registers as human and gets her Space Sharpie mark.
The Doctor and Martha are hiding from the remaining Helmets Inside. The Doctor sighs about how the slabs always travel in pairs. Martha asks if the Doctor doesn’t have some back-up, perhaps a partner. Maybe a sassy companion with a toothy-grin or something. I added that last part. (K: Totally fair.) The Doctor huffs. He can’t believe that in the midst of all this Martha is asking personal questions. “Humans,” he says, which Martha likes because she isn’t convinced the Doctor isn’t one. Except the Doctor walks right into a Judoon who catalogs him as non-human. Martha takes a moment to wonder at that but then they have to start running again.
They head down to a floor the Judoon are finished with and the Doctor has to lock a door by hand and you just know it kills him. On this floor, people are slumping and starting to feel the effects of the oxygen deprivation. Martha says she’s fine because she’s running on adrenaline. The Judoon are fine because they have big lung reserves.
Next stop is Dr. Teacher’s office. The Doctor confirms that Dr. Teacher has been drained of his blood and Lacks Salt is definitely a plasmavore. She still isn’t safe, though, because the Judoon are liable to execute everyone in the hospital. He stands to leave but Martha takes a second to close Dr. Teacher’s eyes.
Outside the office, The Doctor asks himself where she would go next and conveniently looks up to see a sign pointing to MRI.
The Judoon finally make it onto this floor, yelling for the nonhuman. The Doctor tells Martha to stay behind and buy him time. She asks how. He tells her that what he’s going to do means nothing and is a matter of saving lives. He kisses her.
The Doctor runs away and Martha is left a little swoon-y. BOOOOO. DISLIKE. And not for any ship-y reasons but because Martha has gotten such great characterization in this episode as her own sort of smart and kind and wonderful person and I don’t think we needed to add weak in the knees over the Doctor too. BUT WHATEVER. IT’S EARLY YET.
K: YES. AGREED. It’s definitely early days, but I can remember being super pissed off when I first saw this episode because I really didn’t want a companion who was going to be all swoony over the Doctor. Especially not so soon after losing Rose. On rewatch, it’s more like “Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy? Why would you turn a great female character into A Swoony Love Interest?” Sigh.
Mari: Down in the MRI lab, the Doctor finds Lacks Salt rigging the MRI machine. He pretends to be all, “so have you seen those space rhinos recently?” but Lacks Salt is not amused. She orders the remaining Helmets Inside to hold him down. Back with Martha, she tries to stop the Judoons advance by saying she knows who they are looking for. They scan her and first identify her as human but detect trace elements of alien. Sexy. The Lead Judoon pushes her against the wall and gets all up in her face with his rhino breath and asks what she is.
MRI Lab. The Doctor is still pretending to just be a confused man and in this way manages to get Lacks Salt’s evil plan. It isn’t very hard because Villain Gloating. Essentially, she’s rigging the MRI machine to send out a magnetic blast that will fry the brains of every living thing on the moon and also the 1/2 of the earth facing the moon. She’ll grab the Judoon ships and make her escape. The Doctor scales up the, “OMG you are an alien??” bit and then casually mentions the fact that the Judoon are upping their scans since there are no signs of human life. Lacks Salt says she’ll need to assimilate again and brings out her nefarious bendy straw.
Martha is cleared by the Judoon and handed some sort of coupon book for her trouble. IDK.
In the MRI lab, the Judoon walk in as Lacks Salt is slurping from the Doctor’s neck. She releases him and he falls over. The Judoon scan the Doctor and proclaim him to be dead so the case is closed. Martha says that Lacks Salt killed him, but the Lead Judoon says they have no authority over human crime. Seems weird, then, that the Doctor thought they would execute a whole hospital full of them for harboring fugitives. (K: Shhh, don’t poke the plot holes.) Anyway. Martha insists that Lacks Salt is an alien and then she realizes– Lacks Salt drank the Doctor’s blood to assimilate, but he isn’t human at all.
She grabs one of the Judoon scanning things and aims it at Lacks Salt. She registers as non-human. The Judoon charge her for killing a princess on another planet and Martha marvels at the fact that the Doctor gave his life so that Lacks Salt would be discovered. Lacks Salt confesses to the crime but runs back and plugs in her lethal MRI machine. The Judoon execute her and her parting words are that everyone is going to burn with her. Lead Judoon calls it a case closed but Martha directs his attention to the scanning machine that is making all kinds of suspect sound effects. The Judoon checks it out and quickly determines that his kind are getting the hell out of Dodge.
Martha yells at them as they retreat but then heads back inside to perform CPR on the Doctor, even though he’s presumably been dead for some solid minutes. Martha remembers that he’s got two hearts and does the compressions on both. Though the air supply is quickly dwindling, she takes a last breath and breathes into the Doctor’s mouth.
K: Martha using her last breath to ensure the Doctor lives was almost enough to make up for that swoony moment earlier. ALMOST.
Mari: And he’s back. The Doctor chokes as Martha suffocates. He makes his way toward the rigged MRI machine. Though he’s sonic screwdriver-less, he manages to pull the correct cord and disconnect the machine.
We next see him struggling to carry a fainted Martha down a hospital corridor.
Things look real grim since the oxygen is all gone. The Doctor gets to a window in time to see the Judoon taking off. He quietly begs them to reverse it and sure enough, soon after they launch, it’s raining again. A bright flash of light takes us back to Earth where the hospital reappears, just as it was.
K: Except presumably with some seriously fucked up infrastructure that would be a bitch and a half to fix. Like, you know, electricity. And plumbing.
Mari: Definitely Human is telling a puffed up version of his story to an officer when Martha’s sister runs over to her, bursting with questions and demands to know what happened. Martha is sort of dazed by it all, and more so when she sees the Doctor, across the street, walking toward the TARDIS. When she looks back again just a second later, he’s gone.
K: Definitely Human mentions Mr. Saxon, so we can get our ongoing-plot-device shots!
Mari: We jump from Martha getting ready to the birthday party falling into the early predicted shambles. There is much yelling as Mum insults New Girlfriend and New Girlfriend accuses Martha of lying about being on the moon and Dad putting his foot down as New Girlfriend stomps away. As her family all takes off in opposite directions, Martha is left alone on the corner, but when she looks up, the Doctor is standing across the street. He smiles shyly at her and ducks into an alley.
Martha follows after him, into the alley, until she finds him standing super casually in front of his blue box. Martha says she never even got to ask what kind of species he is. “I’m a Time Lord,” he answers and Martha scrunches her face a bit as she replies, “not pompous at all…” The Doctor says that since Martha saved his life and he’s got a new sonic screwdriver, he was wondering if she fancies a trip. Martha says she can’t because she has exams and things to do. The Doctor says that if it helps, he can travel in time too. She’s dubious so the Doctor says he can prove it and rushes into the TARDIS. It disappears and reappears and when the Doctor walks out he’s holding his tie.
Martha asks why, if the Doctor traveled back into her timeline, he didn’t warn her not to go into work. He explains that crossing into established timelines is forbidden unless you are doing the always impressive taking-off-my-tie-trick. Martha examines the TARDIS and notes that there isn’t much room in there. The Doctor pushes the door open and we get the always excellent OMG TARDIS moment:
Mari: The Doctor knows the sale is made and shuts the TARDIS door. Martha asks if there is no crew or anyone else aboard. The doctor says it’s just him and sometimes he has guests, friends flying alongside him. He stumbles along an explanation of how he recently had a someone. Her name was Rose. “We were together.” (K: Excuse me while I cry forever.) He gets a little prickly as he tells Martha she isn’t going to replace Rose. It’s just one trip to say thanks and that’s it. He prefers to travel alone.
NO ONE BELIEVES YOU.
Martha takes this in good humor and reminds the Doctor that he was the one who kissed her. The Doctor insists that it was a genetic transfer. Martha jokes on that he did travel a long way to asks her out on a date. He tells her to stop it. She smiles and says that she’s only interested in humans. The Doctor says that’s good, but as he turns away, Martha’s face falls. BOOOO.
The Doctor presses a few buttons on the console and asks if she’s ready. She says no and he pulls the final lever anyway. Away they go on their bumpy ride and the Doctor welcomes Ms. Jones aboard.
I really enjoyed this episode and introduction to Martha. Despite the two small parts where it’s insinuated that Martha’s already catching feelings, it feels like she earned this spot on the TARDIS by being pretty great throughout this adventure the Doctor wasn’t expecting to have. She’s good-natured, smart, brave, selfless and just the right amount of reluctant believer.
I also liked seeing the Doctor fall back on this habit of having a someone around. We aren’t sure how much time has passed since burning up a sun to say goodbye, but here he is, taking a new companion and trying to convince probably mostly himself that Martha isn’t replacing Rose. Here he is, after however much time, kind of being a little weirder than usual, smacking computers and throwing his shoes into trashcans. Calm down, buddy. Let’s bring it back down into a normal range.
K: I feel like it’s showing what Donna said – he needs someone around to keep him grounded. Rose was that person for a really long time, and he’s not sure he’s ready to move on and deal with life without her. And it’s seriously affecting him.
Mari: As always, the villain and aliens all play out in the background with not much to do but exist around our main characters. The Judoon were more interesting than the plasmavore, and there was certainly nothing here as offensive as farting aliens or blow-job giving paving stones, so that’s always good.
K: This episode is definitely a good start to series 3. We’ve been through the emotions of having a new Doctor, and now we’re dealing with having a new companion. I think they did a pretty great job at making Martha her own character, and we learn a lot about her in a really short space of time – big messy family, doctor-in-training, not easily flustered, thinks on her feet. They didn’t shove her down our throats as a replacement for Rose, they let her stand on her own.
Sure, I wasn’t a huge fan of those icky MARTHA HAS THE SWOONS moments. But like Mari said, it could have been a thousand times worse.
Next time on Doctor Who: William Shakespeare and witch-like creatures in S03 E02 – The Shakespeare Code.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
I'm a 30-something librarian and I still live with my parents because I'm super broke. Leader of Team Heartless Cow. I have an inexplicable love for 90s television, eat too much chocolate, and read more than is good for me.