3. How Exactly Martha Jones Went Freelance
Let's flash back to The Sontaran Strategem. The Doctor comes back to Earth and meets Martha for the first time since Last of the Time Lords. She is working for UNIT, a fully-qualified doctor in her own right and engaged to that strapping lad from the year that never was. While she is the same old Martha, teasing the Doctor and pointing him in the right direction at the same time, she has changed. Donna asks the Doctor, sounding a bit horrified, Is that what you did to herturned her into a soldier? Martha is very good at her job and single-minded in her own efforts to be a doctor who saves the world. When we meet her again in The Stolen Earth and Journey's End, Martha's role in UNIT does quite literally save the world (and twenty-six other ones, too). She is still the single-minded UNIT operative, but she is very much like the Doctor in that pair of episodes. She recognizes the need to make sacrifices, nearly using the Osterhagen key, but she also possesses the wisdom in calling a bluff. She possesses what the Time Lords might have referred to as The Moment, the crucial point at which things can be tipped for good or ill, and could have become the destroyer of her own world, like the Doctor. She stalls the Daleks long enough for Captain Jack Harkness and Sarah Jane Smith to call a bluff of their own. The Doctor's parting admonition to her is, Save the world, one more time and she replies, Consider it done. There is no mention of Tom Milligan. In Torchwood: Children of Earth, Ianto suggests contacting Martha Jones and Gwen refuses to interrupt her honeymoon. She is left in peace that time. And then, we get to see her in the Doctor's farewell tour. She and Mickey are taking on a Sontaran and we discover that not only is this not a UNIT-sanctioned operation--You're the one who persuaded me to go freelance--but it is a husband and wife adventure. There must be at least one great story about how that all happened. I would like to see a book about that romance. I would like even more to see a book about how impromptu her decision to leave UNIT was. I would especially like to see more of this freelance work.