Two Premieres for the Price of One
SCI FI’s July 6 season premiere consists of two distinct episodes: “The Runaway Bride,” the 2006 Christmas special, and the actual season 3 premiere, “Smith and Jones.” The first looks back, as the Doctor (David Tennant) deals with losing Rose (Billie Piper). “Smith and Jones,” in turn, has him taking on a new companion, Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman, last seen as Adeola in “Army of Ghosts”).
When last we saw the Doctor, he'd just been forced to seal the fissure into the parallel universe into which Rose had escaped. But a bizarre cliffhanger followed: he turned from his goodbyes to see a woman in full wedding gown, standing in the middle of his TARDIS!
In “The Runaway Bride” the Doctor tries to get Donna (played by acerbic comedian Catherine Tate), back to the church on time. He stuffs her in a taxi, but it’s been commandeered by a robot Santa (from the previous Christmas special). This leads to a glorious chase scene in which the TARDIS barrels down a crowded motorway to rescue the befuddled bride.
It turns out Donna was infected with huon energy (attracting her to the TARDIS) in a plot involving her own fiance, Lance (Don Gilet). Lance has been promised power by the Empress (Sarah Parish) of a spidery race called the Racnoss. She's the last of the Racnoss, but at the Earth’s core is a ship in which her progeny lie dormant, which she can now awaken to overrun the planet. The Doctor is forced to foil the plot by destroying the base. This leads to Donna’s memorable warning that he needs to find a new companion – “because I think sometimes you need somebody to stop you.”
Enter Martha Jones
In “Smith and Jones” has checked himself into a hospital to investigate strange technology he’s discovered there, meeting along the way a quick-witted medical student named Martha Jones. Shortly thereafter the entire hospital is ripped right of central London and relocated inside a force-field bubble on the Moon. There a platoon of anthropoid rhino mercenaries called the Judoon begin cataloging everyone in the hospital – looking for someone who appears human but isn’t.
Noticing Martha’s sharp mind, the Doctor recruits her to help him figure out what the Judoon are after. He’s decided the Judoon aren’t after him but another alien in the hospital, with the ability to shape-change internally to seem human. Martha, though intrigued by her strange new friend, initially takes a dim view of him calling himself the Doctor, saying the title has to be earned. She’s also skeptical of his claim to be an alien, until the Judoon scanners register him as nonhuman and the rhino-thugs start chasing them.
Learning that the alien, a little old lady named Florence (Anne Reid), accomplishes her internal metamorphosis by drinking a target’s blood, tricks her into drinking his own alien blood – this causing her to be revealed to the Judoon at the cost of the Doctor’s life. But in the meantime she’s reconfigured the MRI machine to fry the Moon and half the Earth. Martha manages to revive the Doctor in time for him to shut down the machine, and the Judoon technology sends the hospital back to Earth.
A New Companion and a New Feel
It was only two seasons, but it seemed like the Doctor and Rose had been together for much longer when Billie Piper left the show at the end of the last season closer, “Doomsday.” This had a great deal to do with Piper’s delightful ability to convey simultaneously both courage and uncertainty, as when she stammeringly demanded that the Sycorax leave Earth in “The Christmas Invasion.” Her chemistry with both the Ninth (Christopher Eccleston) and Tenth (Tennant) Doctors was tremendous – possibly rivaled only by Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), so it’s only fitting that the two got to meet in season 2’s instant classic, “School Reunion.”
Replacing Piper was a tall order, but the right woman right was already on set, playing a small role in “Army of Ghosts.” In “Smith and Jones” Agyeman shows the attributes she’d develop more fully over the course of season 3. Brasher than Rose, her directness means she can’t hide from herself both that she’s taken by the Doctor and that he’ll never respond in kind. She’s smart but not overconfident, bright-eyed but skeptical, totally reliable but unwilling to accept things purely at face value.
The juxtaposition with “The Runaway Bride” puts things in perspective: you’d get tired of Donna pretty quick (though amazingly she’s been hired back as the companion for all of season 4, so I may have to eat my words). But Martha is easygoing and multilayered. Like Rose she’s got a dysfunctional family, and as before the mother, Tish (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), will figure in the season-long plot undertow culminating in this year’s big confrontation.
A Strong Start to a Stellar Season
The bottom line is that Doctor Who continues to improve. The new series has had its share of twee moments and arbitrary resolutions, and there’s been a slightly alarming tendency to invest the Doctor with alien abilities. But the bedrock principles of Doctor Who – the necessity of solving crises with intellect rather than violence and redeemability of all souls – have been unshaken. When the Doctor picked up a huge gun in “Dalek” back in season one, it was proof something had gone wrong. Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant, along with Russell T. Davies’s crack creative team, deserve immense credit for deepening the character of a Doctor scarred by the Time War and a life of outliving everyone he’s loved.
Martha is the 36th Doctor Who companion, depending on definitions. But say “companion” to a lot of fans of the new series and they’ll think only of Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler. Freema Agyeman demonstrates in “Smith and Jones” that she has what it takes – not, as the Doctor warns her, that she’s replacing Rose, but that she’ll carve out a place in the TARDIS all her own.
She convinced me by examining the Doctor’s offer to travel with him (she’s the only companion I can think of who’d walk up to the TARDIS and observe, in both amazement and disbelief, “Your ship is made of wood!”) and then deciding it was something she could get excited about. After examining Freema’s work so far in season 3, I’ve come to the same conclusion about her.
