Dancing with the Doctor by Lorna Jowett

Author:Lorna Jowett [Jowett, Lorna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Performing Arts, Television, General, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Fiction, Science Fiction, Space Opera, Sociology, Rural, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9781786721464
Google: TaWmDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-06-30T04:33:51+00:00

Time will tell how female characters Lethbridge-Stewart and Osgood are depicted in the audio adventure, but despite Big Finish being careful to avoid it, other headlines continue to refer to ‘Kate’ as ‘the Brigadier’s daughter’ first (see Caron 2015), as do some of those involved in bringing the story to audiences: ‘“it is wonderful to see the return of UNIT under the Brig’s daughter,” says executive producer Jason Haigh-Ellery’ (Big Finish 2015).

Other official paratexts offer more information about Martha’s adventures with the Tenth Doctor, including Doctor Who: Infinite Quest (2007), an animated story produced for Totally Doctor Who, the CBBC Doctor Who bolt-on programme. Infinite Quest aired in a sequence of minisodes of around three and a half minutes, and the final story, subsequently released on DVD, is around the same length as a standard live-action TV episode. Here Martha and the Doctor (voiced by Agyeman and Tennant) undertake a ‘quest’ to retrieve parts of a data chip, travelling to several planets and having various adventures featuring pirates, lizard-aliens and an ice planet. As might be expected, the story, the Doctor and Martha are consistent with established conventions from the main series, but without dwelling on Martha’s unrequited romantic feelings, perhaps because these are not seen as appropriate or interesting for a child audience. Yet when Infinite Quest is referred to in another paratext, Martha’s blog (on a MySpace page set up under the name Martha Jones), it functions almost exclusively to provide an opportunity for her to explain her unrequited love and more firmly establish her in a subordinate, painful position. She recounts some of the Doctor’s exploits (‘I […] saw him destroy Baltazar’s ship with a spoon’), concluding, ‘No wonder I felt the way I did. […] I love him and that’s what makes this all so hard’ (Jones 2007).

Like ‘Devil in the Smoke’, Martha’s blog may give a female character her own voice, but it uses that voice to continue, and even exacerbate her gendered position, in this case as an emotional, needy, overlooked companion who serves the Doctor without any hope of her love being reciprocated (see also Chapter 3). The blog does take the opportunity to address the Tenth Doctor’s lack of thanks for any of Martha’s sacrifices. Recounting events from ‘Blink’, she notes: ‘And then he thanked me, which is also a first!’ and emphasises how during this adventure she ‘had to get a job’ while the Doctor ‘stayed on the sofa’. Martha’s sense of her own worth is validated by her mention of working in a shop being ‘a step down from being a nearly-Doctor’ yet simultaneously undercut by her admission that ‘it was a bit of a laugh really.’ The enjoyable part of this experience may even have been because she ‘got on great with the other girls’, certainly a different environment than the TARDIS.

And the blog ends with Martha again disclaiming any credit for her heroism:

If Martha Jones became a legend then that’s wrong, cos my name’s not important. There’s someone else.

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