A new series, a new companion, and a Doctor still walking around with a hole in him. “Smith and Jones” has the unenviable job of following the emotional wreckage of Doomsday and convincing us to fall for somebody new, and it pulls that off with enormous confidence. It’s fast, funny, tightly plotted, and it introduces a companion who arrives fully formed and quietly brilliant. Martha Jones is going to be very good indeed.
Meet Martha Jones
We meet Martha mid-crisis, and the crisis is entirely domestic: she’s walking to work fielding phone calls from a family in open warfare. Her mum Francine and dad Clive are freshly divorced, her dad has turned up to her brother Leo’s birthday do with a much younger girlfriend, her sister Tish is refereeing, and everyone wants Martha to fix it. It’s a lovely bit of efficient character work, because before she’s said a word about aliens we know Martha is the competent one, the person the rest of them lean on. Freema Agyeman is instantly likeable in the part, playing her as warm and quick and just a little tired of being everybody’s designated grown-up. The Joneses are a fun, noisy creation in their own right, closer to a sitcom than the Tylers ever were, and the show clearly intends to keep them around rather than use them as scenery. Introducing six new characters inside a season opener’s subplot and having all of them land is a real piece of craft.
And then she goes to work, where she is a medical student, on the wards, doing rounds. That’s the big shift from what came before. Rose Tyler was a shop girl swept off her feet by wonder, and Martha is a trainee doctor with a skill set that the show immediately puts to use. When something impossible happens, her reaction isn’t awe, it’s triage. She checks pulses, she counts, she keeps her head. After watching the Doctor carry two people who mostly needed protecting, there’s real pleasure in a companion who is straightforwardly useful. Her first encounter with him is a great gag, too: a stranger in the street who yanks off his tie to demonstrate something baffling and wanders away, before turning up on her ward as a patient called John Smith with a suspiciously theatrical cough. Tennant is on sparkling form here, clearly enjoying being the mystery for once.
Rain that falls upward
Then the rain starts falling upward, the building shakes, and the entire Royal Hope Hospital is standing in a crater on the Moon. It’s a fantastic sequence. The patients crowd to the windows to look at the Earth hanging in the black, someone opens a window to see if there’s air, and the Doctor grins like a lunatic because he’s the only person delighted to be here. The reveal is pure Doctor Who: enormous, absurd, and played completely straight. What stops it being empty spectacle is the clock the episode quietly starts running underneath. There is a finite amount of air in a sealed building, and the show keeps cutting back to it, patients getting short of breath, a ward running down its oxygen, a junior doctor doing sums about how long they have left. It’s a smart bit of tension, because the wonder of standing on the Moon curdles very quickly into the extremely practical horror of suffocating on it. Martha is the one keeping her head while everyone else works that out.
The culprits are the Judoon, rhinoceros-headed intergalactic police stomping through the corridors in black armour, scanning every human they find and marking them with a cross. They’re a superb creation, and the joke of them is beautifully specific: they aren’t evil, they’re bureaucrats. Earth is outside their jurisdiction, so rather than break galactic law they’ve simply relocated the entire building to neutral territory and started processing. They catalogue, they compensate, they follow procedure to the letter, and they’ll execute you on the spot without malice if the paperwork says so. The Doctor’s exasperation at their thickness is very funny, right up until you remember he has two hearts and their scanners are looking for exactly that.
The plasmavore and the straw
The fugitive they’re hunting is hiding in plain sight: Florence Finnegan, a sweet elderly patient with a taste for a nice glass of something. She is in fact a Plasmavore, and the something is blood, drunk through a bendy straw, which is a detail I found far more disturbing than it has any right to be. Her murder of the hospital’s insufferable consultant Mr Stoker is genuinely chilling, and her pair of leather-clad Slabs make for blunt, silent muscle. Part of what makes her so effective is how thoroughly unbothered she is. She isn’t a raving monster, she’s a tidy, polite old woman who simply regards the people around her as refreshments, and she keeps the sweet-little-lady act going right up until the second she no longer needs it.
Her plan to beat the scanners is where the episode really clicks: she drinks the Doctor’s blood, so that the Judoon will read Time Lord physiology as human and let her walk. It works, and it leaves the Doctor drained and apparently dead on the floor with the oxygen running out, which is where Martha earns her place. She works out what he’s done, gets to him, and performs CPR on a man with two hearts, doing it twice over while her own air runs out, refusing to stop. It’s a properly heroic beat, and it’s built entirely out of her competence rather than luck. Note what the Doctor does once she’s saved his life: barely a thank-you, a quick grin, and straight on to the next problem. He isn’t being unkind, he’s being careful. Letting himself properly notice how good she is would mean letting someone in again, and he is plainly nowhere near ready for that. The resolution is elegantly circular: with alien blood in her veins, Florence now scans as non-human, and the Judoon’s rigid procedure, the very inflexibility that made them a threat, turns into the instrument of her execution. The Doctor also has to stop her parting gift, an MRI rigged to fire a magnetic pulse strong enough to fry every brain on the near side of the planet. Big stakes, neatly cleared, hospital returned to Earth in the rain.
This is a new kind of companion dynamic from the start. Where Rose fell into the Doctor’s world by accident and grew into it, Martha walks in already capable, and Donna’s warning at the end of The Runaway Bride that he needs someone with him hangs over every scene of a man still visibly bleeding underneath the charm.
Rating: 4/5. A confident, hugely entertaining reset that solves the impossible problem of following Rose by not trying to replicate her. The Judoon are great, the Moon reveal is a showstopper, and Martha is the best-introduced companion the revived show has had. A hospital on the Moon, a blood-drinking granny with a straw, and rhinos with clipboards. If this is what “one trip” looks like, I suspect the Doctor is going to have a hard time sticking to it.