Martha Jones
Dr. Martha Smith-Jones (née Jones) was a British physician and a companion of the Tenth Doctor.
She met the Doctor when she was a medical student at Royal Hope Hospital in London when the hospital was transported to the Moon by the Judoon troops, after which she began travelling with the Time Lord.
Unlike other companions, she not only became infatuated with the Doctor but also declared her feelings to him. She decided to stop travelling with him as he could not return her affection, but continued to have a number of adventures, both with and without him, thanks to her work with UNIT and Torchwood.
Martha also went on to marry Mickey Smith, and the two broke out on their own to become alien fighters despite having ties to Torchwood from two different Earths. She encountered the Doctor again before he regenerated, saving her life one more time.
Biography
Early life
Martha Jones was born on 14 September 1984 (PROSE: The Torchwood Archives) to Francine and Clive Jones. According to another account, she was born in 1986. She had an older sister named Tish, a younger brother, Leo, and a niece, Keisha Jones, who was Leo's daughter. (PROSE: The Frozen Wastes) Francine chose the name Martha simply because she liked the sound of it. (PROSE: Wooden Heart) When she was a child, Leo pushed the swing so hard that she flew off the seat and broke her arm. Going to the hospital and looking at X-rays fascinated her, which was when she decided she wanted to become a doctor. (PROSE: The Frozen Wastes) Martha grew up with her mother when her parents divorced and was often forced to play peacekeeper in continual family arguments. Tish and Leo also lived with them, with Martha sleeping in their home's smallest room. (PROSE: Wooden Heart) Martha devoured Annette Billingsley's The Troubleseekers, a thirty-two book series, around the age of eight; they were the first books that she ever read. She later read Harry Potter and His Dark Instruments. (PROSE: The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage) Martha had three trumpet lessons in Year 6 of primary school. (COMIC: House Pests)
When Francine invited guests to dinner, Martha and her sister were expected to "perform" for the guests by handing out nibbles while Francine bragged that Martha was going to be a leading surgeon. Martha hated the attention and it caused friction between her and Tish, who embraced the attention.
Prior to meeting the Doctor, Martha attended a Mika concert in Denmark. (PROSE: The Pirate Loop)
At university, Martha was friends with Holly. After Holly's mother died, they lost touch. (AUDIO: The Last Diner)
In 2007, she lost her cousin Adeola Oshodi, who worked for Torchwood One, in the Battle of Canary Wharf. (TV: Army of Ghosts) She would note that they had shared a resemblance. (PROSE: Made of Steel)
With the Tenth Doctor
First meeting
Martha first met the Tenth Doctor on 4 June 2008, (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters) on her way to her job as a student doctor at the Royal Hope Hospital in London, where she was studying under Mr Stoker. Without introducing himself, the Doctor merely took off his tie and said, "Like so, see?", before walking off. Unbeknownst to Martha at the time, he was demonstrating the nature of time travel. She met him again at the hospital, where he was posing as a patient named John Smith, not realising that the man she saw earlier was a future version of him; she also listened to his heartbeat, discovering that he had two hearts, but stayed quiet about it.
Later that same day the hospital was transported to the Moon by the Judoon. Calm while those around her panicked, Martha worked with the Doctor to track down the Plasmavore, "Florence Finnegan", for whom the Judoon were searching. During this encounter, the Doctor was quickly impressed with Martha's reasoning and intelligence, such as when she deduced that opening the windows wouldn't result in the air being sucked out; it would've happened already anyway if it were going to happen at all as the windows weren't airtight. Despite listening to his heartbeat, however, Martha was sceptical about him being an alien, until the Judoon's scanners confirmed that he wasn't human.
As the oxygen in the hospital ran out, Martha gave her last breaths to resuscitate the clinically-dead Doctor, who had thwarted Florence's plan. The Judoon returned the hospital to Earth. That evening, after another family argument at her brother Leo's party, a recovered Martha was approached by the Doctor, who revealed that he was a Time Lord and invited her to join him on what he initially described as a "single trip" through time and space in the TARDIS. (TV: Smith and Jones)
Travels with the Doctor
The Doctor took Martha to 1599 where they met William Shakespeare, who flirted with her and called her his "Dark Lady". The three of them used a "spell" to defeat a trio of witch-like Carrionites who were using Shakespeare's play Love's Labour's Won as a spell to bring other Carrionites to Earth; Martha's use of the word "Expelliarmus" when Shakespeare was unable to think of the right word to end on proved vital in defeating them. The Carrionites, along with the play, were sealed away. (TV: The Shakespeare Code)
Martha's next trip was to New New York, where they landed in the Undercity. Learning the Doctor had also visited New Earth with Rose, Martha worried she was a "rebound" companion. Martha was kidnapped by a couple driving through the Motorway who wanted a third passenger to use an express lane; the three of them were later almost killed by the Macra, but escaped when the Doctor opened up the Motorway. After the two were reunited, Martha witnessed the death of the Face of Boe and heard his final words, "You are not alone". Before they departed New Earth, The Doctor told Martha about his home planet and the Last Great Time War. (TV: Gridlock)
The Doctor extended Martha's trip in the TARDIS yet again, going to 1930 New York City, where the two of them became entangled in a mystery and found the population of Hooverville being transformed into pig slaves (TV: Daleks in Manhattan) as part of the Cult of Skaro's plans to build a race of human-Daleks. (TV: Evolution of the Daleks) Martha and a group of Hooverville residents were abducted and nearly converted into human-Daleks, (TV: Daleks in Manhattan) but the Doctor created a loud noise and allowed the humans to escape. After the Doctor was escorted back to the Daleks to help them, the Doctor handed Martha his psychic paper and Martha went with Tallulah and Frank to the top floor of the Empire State Building, pretending to be engineers and an architect, and realised the Daleks had taken over the Empire State Building while working with Mr Diagoras and placed Dalekanium on the mast to power their experiment. While the Doctor got in the way of the lightning strike hitting the mast, Martha and Frank connected metal rods from the outside of the building to the lift shaft as the lightning struck the building, killing the pig slaves inside the lift which were chasing after the Doctor. (TV: Evolution of the Daleks)
After the Cult of Skaro's defeat, the Doctor returned Martha home to twelve hours after she had left. He overheard a TV news story about a man promising to "change what it means to be human", and escorted her to the presentation of Prof. Richard Lazarus' rejuvenation device. Uncovering the disastrous effects of Lazarus' work, the Doctor, Martha, and her sister Tish helped to kill the monster Lazarus had become. Afterwards, the Doctor offered Martha one more trip, but she refused. She no longer wanted to be just a passenger, and so the Doctor invited her on board the TARDIS, as a full-time companion. (TV: The Lazarus Experiment)
Following a Calamity Lamp, the TARDIS landed on the planet Loam inside the head of a High Goliax, which was being controlled by a child called Kipe. Martha was separated from the Doctor when Kipe ejected her from the head. She was caught in a winged flying chariot piloted by Sugarpea, the planet's former prime minister who was responsible for having her world demolished after being unable to pay a loan to the Krib bank, who hoped to save the world. Martha, Sugarpea and Sweetleaf went to the Museum of Politics, but Sugarpea locked the others inside to sacrifice her life to end her debt to the Krib. She used a loophole in her contract with the Krib to become dictator of Loam, and nullify the planet's debt after being punished by the death penalty. Martha followed her to the Krib and reunited with the Doctor, but was unable to save Sugarpea. The Doctor and Martha ran through a space portal to a High Goliax head while followed by "giant leggy things that used to be the insides of a computer", which the Doctor went on to explain were the minds of the High Goliax finding their way home after being ripped from their skulls centuries before. After the children inside the High Goliax heads were evacuated, Martha told the planet's Prime Minister that it would be "a good time to welcome your new immigrant population". (COMIC: The Woman Who Sold the World)
They answered a distress signal in the 42nd century Torajii system: a ship falling towards the sun. The sun was a sentient being possessing the crew members and killing them off, and Martha herself was nearly jettisoned entirely from the ship when she took refuge in an escape pod. She later played an instrumental role in saving the ship when the Doctor found himself possessed as well. During this adventure, Martha had a brief romance with one of the ship's crew, Riley Vashtee. He wanted her to stay but she chose to remain with the Doctor. (TV: 42)
The Doctor and Martha visited the Great Solar Shield, which was used to partially block sunlight from 21st century Earth to ease the effect of global warming. A race called the Silhouettes began leeching energy from the Shield and its crew. The colour in Martha's shirt scared off the Silhouettes, who instead began heading for Earth. The Doctor realigned the Shield's prismatic mirrors to refract a rainbow towards the Silhouettes, scaring them off. This caused the Silhouettes to flee and the Great Solar Shield's crew were returned to Earth in the TARDIS. (COMIC: Sunscreen)
To escape the Family of Blood, who were hunting him, the Doctor used the Chameleon Arch to turn himself into a human with no memory or knowledge of the Doctor, containing his true self inside a fob watch. Before doing so, the Doctor recorded a video of instructions for Martha to follow so she might reference them in the future. He then became John Smith, a teacher at an English public school in 1913, where Martha took a job as a maid at the school to keep an eye on him, hiding the TARDIS in a shed. Martha watched helplessly as Smith fell in love with the school nurse, Joan Redfern, as he had not mentioned falling in love in his instructions. exclaiming he "had to go and fall in love with a human and it wasn't [her]". When the Family of Blood tracked them down after student Tim Latimer opened the fob watch, wreaking havoc on the town and school, Martha convinced John Smith to sacrifice his human life and love by reverting to the Doctor. He defeated the Family of Blood, left a heartbroken Joan and rejoined Martha in the TARDIS. (TV: Human Nature/The Family of Blood)
When the Doctor used a time machine to follow time assassins from 27th century Mars to 21st century London, Martha received a phone call from the Doctor in the past telling her that he had saved the Mayor of London's lineage from being destroyed, but the assassins had found him. Assisted by DI Moloch, Martha attacked a time assassin controlled laboratory to reverse the controls of the time machine that brought the Doctor back in time. After returning to the 27th century, the Doctor destroyed the unsafe time machine to prevent anyone else from fiddling with it. (COMIC: Bus Stop!)
The Doctor took Martha to Antarctica in 1915 to see the aurora australis. They met Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition near where the Endurance was trapped in the ice. When the biologist Robert Clark had begun turning into a Skith after being in contact with a whale whose DNA was altered by the Skith, a group including the Doctor, Martha, and some of Shackleton's crew followed Clark to the Skith ship Oppressor One. The Skith imprisoned the group and prepared to study and dissect them, but after Shackleton got through to Clark, Clark released them. Martha brought most of the group apart from the Doctor and Shackleton back to the Endurance in the TARDIS, and watched as the Doctor and Shackleton sent the Oppressor One into the sun. Martha reversed the controls of the TARDIS to head back to the Oppressor One and rescue the Doctor and Shackleton. (COMIC: The First)
Stranded in 1969
At some point, while dealing with "four things and a lizard" in 2008 London, the Doctor and Martha met Sally Sparrow, who seemed to know them, however Martha and the Doctor did not know her yet. Sally gave the Doctor and Martha a folder full of photographs and other documents; claiming that they would need it in the future. (TV: Blink)
Some time later, after a brief adventure on a planet filled with fictional characters, (PROSE: The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage) Martha and the Doctor travelled to an old house in Wester Drumlins in 2007, where Weeping Angels sent them back to London in 1969, with the TARDIS stuck in 2007. (TV: Blink)
With her and the Doctor stranded, Martha took a job as a shop girl at a London clothes shop called Face Fashion. During one of her shifts, she was visited by the Thirteenth Doctor, who was hoping to figure out why she had been bought back to this time and place. After the Doctor took her for tea and ultimately revealed her identity to her, Martha and the Doctor investigated the sudden appearance of the Autons in London. The Tenth and Thirteenth Doctors were eventually forced to meet and, with the help of Martha and the Thirteenth Doctor's friends, they discovered the Nestene Consciousness below the River Thames. Luckily, a Weeping Angel had followed them, and it sent the Consciousness back in time, ending a new invasion after it had barely began. (COMIC: A Little Help from my Friends)
When Billy Shipton was sent back to 1969, he was welcomed by Martha and the Doctor. From there, the Doctor, with Billy's aid, helped Sally Sparrow recover the TARDIS in the future, finally enabling them to leave 1969. She briefly appeared in the video message the Doctor had made for Sally, complaining that the Doctor promised her all of space and time but she had to work in a shop to support him, before apologising for bursting in. (TV: Blink)
Further travels with the Doctor
The Doctor and Martha landed at Research Base Truro, where they found the dead bodies of aliens after something "terrible" had happened. Unknown to them, the aliens had killed each other after assuming the Doctor was among them following the death of Kraarn in an electrical accident. (COMIC: Death to the Doctor!)
An energy stream from a distress beacon forced the TARDIS down to a planet, where a girl called Cora had been attacked in the woods by a beast. After returning Cora to the village, Martha had discovered the villagers had similar bite marks on them and were anaemic. The bio-mechanical beast, Viktor, tried taking both the Doctor and Martha to the Thane's castle, but Gideon freed the Doctor. Martha realised that the Thane had unwittingly given the villagers septicaemia from his biopsy device. When the Doctor and Gideon arrived, Martha tried and failed to stop the Doctor from destroying the neuropathic generator that was pacifying the Khamirae villagers, but also prevented them from transforming into beasts. After the Doctor destroyed the generator, Gideon and the rest of the villagers began transforming into bestial forms. When the Doctor knocked out Gideon, he realised that the Thane and Viktor were using DNA samples from the villagers to extend the Thane's lifespan so they could continue watching over them after repeated cloning of the Thane degraded his pattern. Martha held off the attacking Khamirae as the Doctor repaired the generator at the cost of Viktor's life. The Doctor suggested to the Thane to lower the output of the generator every so often so the Khamirae could control their transformations. The Thane refused to clone himself any further and decided to spend the remainder of his life letting the Khamirae come to terms with who they truly were. (COMIC: Universal Monsters)
While the Doctor tried tracing an etheric beam in a town centre, Martha relaxed at a coffee shop. She watched people walk past, and noticed the same identical old woman appearing to walk past in different directions and in and out of different shops. Martha followed the old woman into an antiques shop, where she discovered twenty identical women, who were members of an alien species using etheric antennae to report to the fleet commander. Martha threatened the disguised aliens with one of their guns, and they stumbled into one another, causing one of them to drop its antennae. The aliens lost their etheric energy and were unable to contact their fleet. They were enveloped in a green light and vanished. (PROSE: Needle Point)
The Doctor and Martha travelled back in time to the creation of Stonehenge to figure out why it was there. They waited inside the TARDIS as it materialised for a few moments at the same time each year and had a series of snapshots taken with the TARDIS scanner for the Doctor and Martha to look at as the stone structures were set up over time. The Doctor found it fun but not very instructive. Though the Doctor and Martha refused to go outside the TARDIS, parking the TARDIS at the same spot each year during dawn at the summer solstice had unwittingly influenced the construction of Stonehenge. (PROSE: The Secret of the Stones)
Martha was relaxing on the beach of a planet when she heard a voice call her name in the jungle. She saw faces in the water, on the ground and on the tree bark and leaves, all staring at her. Martha ran back to the beach, and the Doctor pulled her by the hand. The Doctor explained that the environment collapsed, causing one hundred years of acid rain, dissolving the planet's people and their civilisation, somehow making them into a collective mind that was part of the planet for millions of years. Because they had run out of stories, the world intended to make the Doctor and Martha join them as they had new stories to tell. The Doctor rushed Martha back to the TARDIS before the falling acid rain could hit them. (PROSE: The Planet That Wept)
The Doctor and Martha visited a fanatically religious planet about to be struck by an asteroid, (AUDIO: The Last Diner) and helped a group of miners in Nevada who had been forced to mine silver to repair an alien spaceship. (AUDIO: Silver Medal)
Following a short pit-stop in Cardiff, and unknowingly picking up Captain Jack Harkness, the TARDIS took Martha and the Doctor to the end of the universe, and the planet Malcassairo. Martha was taken back by Jack's immortality before the two discussed the circumstances of Jack's last encounter with the Doctor, becoming increasingly jealous of Rose and concerned that she was going to be abandoned just as Jack was one day. After fleeing from the Futurekind, they stayed at Silo 16, where they encountered the last humans in the universe, who were assisted in reaching Utopia by Professor Yana, and Martha briefly befriended his assistant Chantho. An observant Martha noticed that the Professor had a watch similar to the Doctor's biodata module, prompting him to open it. The human Yana was transformed back into the Doctor's Time Lord nemesis, the Master, and escaped in the TARDIS. (TV: Utopia)
Martha, Jack, and the Doctor used Jack's vortex manipulator to travel back to 21st century Earth, arriving the day after Harold Saxon was voted Prime Minister. Mr Saxon was in fact an alias of the Master, who had been living on Earth for months since his departure from Malcassairo; the Doctor explained that, before the Master fled Utopia, he sabotaged the TARDIS by fusing the coordinates with his sonic screwdriver so that it could only travel between 21st century Earth and the end of the universe, adding that he could've only landed up to 18 months prior to the day they picked Jack up from Cardiff. The Doctor also constructed three perception filters using TARDIS keys in order to avoid detection, the three of them declared Earth's most wanted. The Master, who had been manipulating Martha's family since she became a full-time companion, had Francine, Clive, and Tish arrested, although Leo escaped, Martha calling and warning him before the Master could find him. As her family, Jack, and the Doctor were all taken prisoner aboard the Valiant, Martha teleported back to Earth with a mission to defeat the Master. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
The Year That Never Was
Martha knew what she had to do: spread the word of the Doctor. She first travelled from England to rebel camps in Europe, where she met the Brigadier's son Erik Calvin, and was later interned in a concentration camp in Japan. Throughout her travels she also visited the ruins of New York City, and fusion camps in China. (PROSE: The Story of Martha)
In America she visited the last diner and was reunited with Holly. To her surprise she was also reunited with her mother, claiming to have escaped the Valiant, however found her scepticism of the Doctor undermined her stories. She was encouraged when a large group gathered to hear her at the diner, however to her horror a rocket hit the diner before she entered, with Holly the only survivor. (AUDIO: The Last Diner)
Martha, Holly and Francine travelled to Nevada to meet the Hope, the largest resistance group in America who were in contact with aliens. Martha disliked their system of competition to earn food, to their leader Jessie's annoyance, and told a story about her and the Doctor visiting a mine in the area a century earlier. After the camp's satellite camouflage was compromised, she helped perusade them to leave to a new camp and then set off to Las Vegas with Francine and Holly. (AUDIO: Silver Medal)
Martha grew suspicious of Holly's behaviour on their way to Las Vegas and confided in Francine whilst they rested at a hotel. She became concerned about Francine's health, though she insisted she was fine, and they were attacked by Toclafane, exposing Holly as an agent of the Master in disguise. She and Francine were cornered by the Toclafane and their leader Miss Beecham, whose certainty Martha was there enabled her to see through the perception filter. To Martha's horror, Beecham revealed Francine was a clone, with the original still a prisoner, and killed her. Beecham subsequently interrogated Martha, wanting to know if she was building a way to kill the Master which Martha realised meant she was trying to replace him. Refusing to give in, Martha hid when the Master's forces arrived to capture Beecham for her treachery and was rescued from hanging over a ledge by the real Holly. She and Holly resolved to continue travelling together in America. (AUDIO: Deceived)
After a year travelling around the world, she met fellow resistance member Tom Milligan. She had spent a year on Earth telling everyone to think of the Doctor at a specific time so the Master could be defeated. This plan worked; the Doctor, who had been previously aged several hundred years by the Master using his laser screwdriver combined with the research of Lazarus, returned to his original form and the Master was shot by his wife, Lucy Saxon. As a result of the destruction of the Master's paradox machine, only Martha, her family, and the people on board the Valiant retained their memories of that year under the Master. Although the Doctor wanted her to stay with him, Martha felt her family needed her more. She also needed to get out of what she saw was an unhealthy relationship of her hoping the Doctor would finally notice her, and she stayed on Earth to complete her training as a doctor. To keep in touch, Martha gave the Doctor her superphone, saying that she would call him when she needed him. (TV: Last of the Time Lords)
UNIT career
Work with Torchwood
Martha was later recruited by UNIT, something that she and Captain Jack believed happened because the Tenth Doctor put in a good word for her. She visited Torchwood Three in Cardiff as a UNIT officer, and soon became embroiled in their investigation of a medical organisation called the Pharm, acting as an undercover agent. Mayflies were put into her body when she was discovered and captured, prompting Owen Harper to twice save her life. Once with an alien surgical device to remove the Mayfly, and soon after by taking a bullet meant for her. (TV: Reset)
Martha witnessed Owen's return as an undead being through the resurrection gauntlet and gave him a posthumous physical. "Death", a force possessing Harper, made the gauntlet attack Martha which aged her considerably, but she reverted back again after Owen defeated the Death being. (TV: Dead Man Walking)
Martha also mended Harper's injured hand when, in a fit of self-destruction after Jack decided to relieve him of duty at Torchwood, he deliberately wounded it. She left once Owen Harper was returned to duty and resumed her work at UNIT. (TV: A Day in the Death)
Martha attended both Owen and Tosh's funerals. (AUDIO: Lost Souls)
When Ianto woke up as a woman, Jack sent several emails to Martha, who promised to look into it. (PROSE: Almost Perfect)
Back at UNIT, she became engaged to her boyfriend, Thomas Milligan, though he left Britain for a while to go to Africa. (TV: The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky)
She phoned Captain Jack when stationed at the CERN Facility in Switzerland when the Large Hadron Collider was scheduled to be activated. Some of the staff had gone missing, including her old friend Julia Swayles. The Torchwood Three team went to Switzerland to investigate and discovered that the person who was responsible was Dr Harrington. (AUDIO: Lost Souls)
Reunion with the Doctor
Martha called the Doctor when UNIT were about to attack the ATMOS factory which secretly formed a key part of a Sontaran invasion plan. She was working under the "by-the-book" Colonel Mace, who was in charge of the operation, and met the Doctor's companion Donna Noble. Contrary to the Doctor's expectations, the two got along very well, though Martha warned Donna how her own relationship with the Doctor had come at the expense of the wellbeing of her family, and advised her not to repeat her mistake.
Not long after UNIT took control of the factory, Martha was kidnapped by two Sontaran-controlled soldiers and connected to a cloning pool to be copied. She was put to sleep but kept alive; her clone needed her clothes and access to her memories while helping the Sontarans. (TV: The Sontaran Stratagem)
Martha's clone died soon after the Doctor rescued Martha and broke the connection, but Martha was able to convince the clone to help them. Before the clone died, it said Martha had many things she wanted to do and she should do them. While chatting with the Doctor and Donna after the Sontarans' defeat, Martha turned down the Doctor's offer to travel again with him. As soon as she had made her refusal clear, the TARDIS dragged them into the Time Vortex. (TV: The Poison Sky)
Martha walked out of the TARDIS onto the planet Messaline, remarking that even though she did not want to travel with the Doctor any more, she still loved the first step on a new planet. The Doctor was grabbed by human colonisers and his hand put in a Progenation machine, which created his "daughter", Jenny. Soon after, they were attacked by the Hath, which resulted in Martha becoming separated from the Doctor and Donna by a cave-in, and taken by the Hath. After helping the injured Hath Peck, and earning the Hath's trust, they showed her a map of their location. Martha, alongside Hath Peck, went onto the planet's surface in order to meet up with the Doctor and Donna. She slipped into a pit of killer quicksand, but Hath Peck saved her life by sacrificing his own.
Martha found the Temple and was reunited with the Doctor, Donna, and Jenny. It was here they discovered what the humans and Hath were fighting over: the Source, a terraforming device which would make the planet's surface habitable. As the Hath and the humans appeared, the Doctor released the Source. General Cobb was enraged and shot at the Doctor, but Jenny leapt in the way of the bullet, and was killed instead. When the Doctor said that there was a possibility she would come back to life, Martha shook her head and confirmed she was dead. The Doctor returned Martha to Earth. She said a fond farewell to Donna and him, and went off to reunite with her fiancé, Thomas Milligan. (TV: The Doctor's Daughter)
Fighting the Daleks
Martha moved to New York after a promotion to the post of Medical Director on Project Indigo, a teleport device using recovered Sontaran technology. Whilst she was working at UNIT HQ in New York City, Earth was transported to the Medusa Cascade.
When Daleks attacked the base, General Sanchez ordered Martha to use Project Indigo to escape and contact the Doctor. Sanchez also gave her an Osterhagen Key and ordered her to use it should the need arise. Project Indigo, which had never been tested, teleported Martha to her home in London, where she was reunited with her mother. Martha later theorised that her emotions controlled it, sending her home.
Harriet Jones had created a low-level signal and contacted Martha, Torchwood and Sarah Jane Smith to assist Earth and defeat the Daleks. Together they contacted the Doctor and summoned him to help them to fight the Daleks. (TV: The Stolen Earth)
Unsure of whether the Doctor would come, Martha decided to use the Osterhagen Key. Leaving her mother, she teleported to Germany and a secret UNIT base, one of several Osterhagen Project activation points. Martha and two other UNIT operatives in other locations prepared to activate the Osterhagen Project, but first contacted the Crucible, warning the Daleks and Davros that she would use the key to destroy Earth rather than let it fall into their hands, giving them the chance to escape unharmed. They transmatted her to the Crucible, however, where she rejoined the Doctor, alongside Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith, Jackie Tyler, Jack, and Sarah Jane. After the arrival of Donna and the Meta-Crisis Tenth Doctor, they defeated the Daleks and their plans, and the Doctor's companions assisted the Doctor in piloting the TARDIS, towing Earth back to its solar system. (TV: Journey's End)
Return to UNIT
After Earth was returned to its proper place, Martha exited the TARDIS with Jack Harkness, who offered her a job with Torchwood. (TV: Journey's End) She ultimately turned it down, feeling that there was too much sadness "baked into the bay" after the deaths of Owen and Tosh. (AUDIO: Dissected)
Around the time of Torchwood's Christmas party, Martha separated from Tom, hence why she did not attend. (AUDIO: Dissected) In 2009, Torchwood phoned Martha for her help identifying how to defeat the Vam. (PROSE: Risk Assessment)
On her last day at a victim-retrieval station in Hereford, Martha agreed to perform an autopsy on Jonathan Dee for Gwen, although she was initially sceptical about the body coming under UNIT's jurisdiction. She reconnected with Gwen, telling her that she and Tom had broken up and that she missed the excitement that she got travelling with the Doctor. After blowing up the station to kill the chameleon, Martha took up Gwen's suggestion of faking her death and going freelance, (AUDIO: Dissected) eventually asking Mickey to join her. (TV: The End of Time)
Freelance work
Mickey agreed to go into freelance alien fighting, off the grid, with Martha and the two married, (TV: The End of Time) going on their honeymoon by the time the 456 incident began. (TV: Children of Earth: Day One)
One adventure saw Martha and Mickey battle a Sontaran, Jask. Unknown to them, Jask had them cornered and was about to shoot them from a distance. The Doctor stepped in and knocked out Jask, saving them as his final gift to them prior to his next regeneration. Martha spotted the Doctor. She and Mickey called out to him, but he walked away without saying a word. As the TARDIS left, Martha embraced her husband sadly. (TV: The End of Time)
At some point, Sarah Jane Smith and Martha started to occasionally meet up for coffee. They became friends. Sarah Jane told Martha everything about her son Luke Smith. In 2010, Luke Smith was starting to get nightmares and didn't feel well. Sarah Jane thought that Martha could help and wanted to call her. However Luke told her that he was alright and Sarah Jane didn't call Martha. A short time later Martha and her husband Mickey came to Luke's farewell party after which Luke wanted to go the University of Oxford. (PROSE: The Nightmare Man)
Martha called in the Eleventh Doctor to assist the Japanese branch of UNIT with investigating a mysterious beverage. This was Martha's first interaction with the eleventh incarnation of the Doctor. (COMIC: The Golden Ones)
In 2016 she was transformed into a Gargoyle due to the effects of a wormhole passing through San Francisco. Mickey aided the Ninth Doctor to close the wormhole, which returned Martha to her normal state. (COMIC: The Transformed)
Later life
Mickey and Martha attended Sarah Jane Smith's memorial on a "bright, cold Spring day" with their son August, where they discussed Sarah Jane with other guests, and helped fight the Jackals of the Backwards Clock to foil the Trickster's revenge plot. (WC: Farewell, Sarah Jane)
In 2022, Oliver Morgenstern and Rani Chandra both claimed that Martha was one of many former allies of the Doctor who had recently gone mysteriously missing, including Graham, Ryan, Luke, Clyde, and Jo. (AUDIO: Hysteria)
Undated events
Martha once had a date with Leonardo DiCaprio. (PROSE: The Frozen Wastes)
Martha's record as a companion of the Doctor was taken by UNIT in the Black Archive. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
Donna's World
In an alternate reality that was created by the Time Beetle, one of the Trickster's Brigade, Martha met Sarah Jane and Luke Smith (as well as Maria Jackson and Clyde Langer) instead of the Doctor when the Royal Hope Hospital was moved to the Moon by the Judoon. When the oxygen ran out, she gave the last oxygen tank to fellow student Oliver Morgenstern before dying, leaving him the only survivor. (TV: Turn Left)
Legacy
The Doctor felt some guilt regarding Martha while in his eleventh incarnation. (TV: Let's Kill Hitler)
Alice O'Donnell, a native of the year 2119, knew of Martha, Rose and Amy as a past companions of the Doctor due to her work in military intelligence. When the Twelfth Doctor took her back to 1980, O'Donnell voiced her doubt that Martha would have vomited following her first trip in the TARDIS as her colleague Mason Bennett had done. (TV: Before the Flood)
Shortly before his regeneration began, the Twelfth Doctor dreamt of Martha saying his name. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
Personality
Martha was an intelligent, brave and kind-hearted woman with a great sense of humour. When she was a prisoner of the Daleks, one of them confirmed that she possessed high intelligence. (TV: Daleks in Manhattan) The Doctor was impressed with her theory about having air on the Moon, and he asked her to join him in the hospital balcony to see if they could breathe. (TV: Smith and Jones) She rose to every challenge the Doctor gave her: watching after him while he was human, and walking the world for a year. (TV: Human Nature, Last of the Time Lords)
Martha was willing to accept and defend non-humans as friends. She greeted unusual looking species with wonder and even treated injuries. (TV: Utopia, The Doctor's Daughter) She quickly adapted pattern of speech and gesture to communicate more effectively with other species. (TV: Daleks in Manhattan, The Doctor's Daughter)
Martha quickly developed a crush on the Doctor and always wondered if he even noticed her. Martha was envious of Joan Redfern when the Doctor made himself a human named John Smith and fell in love with her. (TV: Human Nature/The Family of Blood)
In the Year That Never Was, Martha admitted that she loved the Doctor, but after the Master's defeat, she decided that holding on to the hope that he would return her feelings was not good for her. Her feelings for him, in addition to the enormous ordeal she had been put through, strained her relationship with the Doctor to the point that she decided to leave the TARDIS. (TV: Last of the Time Lords) She was later engaged to Tom, but eventually married Mickey Smith instead. (TV: The End of Time)
Her time walking the Earth gave rise to a more soldier-like and less naive side of Martha. Nevertheless, she retained her kindness, sense of adventure, and fierce determination to do the right thing. Despite their strained relationship, she remained loyal to the Doctor, and indeed took many of his teachings to heart. For instance, despite her work at UNIT, she very rarely carried a gun. She explicitly stated that by working inside UNIT, she might be able to change it for the better. (PROSE: The Story of Martha, TV: The Sontaran Stratagem, TV: The Doctor's Daughter)
Although she had cause to be jealous of Rose Tyler, Martha seemed genuinely happy for the Doctor when he and Rose were reunited. She got along very well with Donna Noble. After the Year That Never Was, Martha became a close friend of Jack Harkness and although she did not seem to return his overtures, she did not mind when he flirted with her. (TV: Utopia) She even kissed him when she left her temporary assignment to the Torchwood team, claiming that "everyone else has had a go." (TV: A Day in the Death)
Skills
Martha had a scientific mind. Her knowledge, analytical and problem solving skills were frequently on display. (TV: Smith and Jones, The Shakespeare Code, Daleks in Manhattan, The Lazarus Experiment, Human Nature/The Family of Blood The Doctor's Daughter, The Sontaran Stratagem, Reset) Her knowledge and logic allowed her to execute very complicated coordinated plans based on very little information from the Doctor. (TV: Last of the Time Lords) She was shown to competently speak German. (TV: Journey's End) She also proved handy with a gun. (TV: The Family of Blood, The End of Time) Of course, her medical skills were her most developed, especially after the experience she gained with aliens and other unusual medical situations, finding her working with organisations such as UNIT and Torchwood Three. (TV: The Doctor's Daughter, The Sontaran Stratagem, Reset, A Day in the Death)
Behind the scenes
Torchwood and SJA
Martha's last scene in Journey's End was interpreted as opening the door for a possible return to Torchwood. Although there were unconfirmed rumours that Agyeman was seen at a Torchwood filming location, she did not appear in the Children of Earth miniseries; she was referenced in dialogue as still being with UNIT. Her subsequent appearance at the end of TV: The End of Time again fuelled speculation of a possible future Torchwood appearance, which did not come about in the revived Torchwood.
Russell T Davies originally intended for Martha to appear in Torchwood: Children of Earth miniseries and Enemy of the Bane, the series 2 finale of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Freema Agyeman's casting in the ITV series Law & Order: UK resulted initially in her Torchwood appearance (along with an appearance by Mickey Smith) being reduced to a cameo, and then eliminated completely.
Later, her schedule also precluded Agyeman from appearing in Sarah Jane, resulting in Nicholas Courtney returning as the Brigadier instead. (REF: Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale - The Final Chapter) Had she appeared in these two productions, she would have been the first major character to play an important role in Doctor Who and both of its direct spin-offs (even including the Doctor, who to date has not appeared in Torchwood).
Other matters
- Freema Agyeman was the first black female companion on televised Doctor Who. The first one in other media was Sharon Davies.
- The arm tattoo sported by Martha is Agyeman's own real-life tattoo. Although Agyeman has been described as the first major Doctor Who cast member to be so adorned, in fact Jon Pertwee sported an arm tattoo in the television stories Spearhead from Space and Doctor Who and the Silurians.
- Martha seems to be a popular character for writers to have impersonated by someone else. Aside from the TV story The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky, in which a clone was created, The Forgotten, a comic story arc and two instalments of the BBC Writers' Comics online series all featured plotlines involving fake Marthas.
- The commentary for The End of Time revealed that her honeymoon mentioned in Children of Earth: Day One referred to her marriage with Mickey Smith, although this was never referenced on-screen.
- "Martha's Theme" is included in the Doctor Who - Series 3 soundtrack. Her name appears in three other tracks on the disc: "Only Martha Knows", "Martha's Quest" and "Martha Triumphant".
- It was proposed that Martha come from 1914.[1]
- Although Martha's birth year was given as 1986 in the short story The Frozen Wastes, her date of birth was stated to be 14 September 1984 in The Torchwood Archives. The 14 September 1984 birth date matches with the age of 23 as of her debut in Smith and Jones, given by Russell T Davies in a Doctor Who Magazine 373 interview and published in the 2009 edition of The Visual Dictionary.
Gallery
External links
- Martha Jones at Doctor Who
- Martha Jones on the Doctor Who website
- Martha Jones at the Doctor Who Legacy wiki
Footnotes
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