‘Doctor Who’ still needs to redeem itself for the treatment of its first Black companion

There is a big problem in fandom circles concerning the harassment of Black actors (and Black women, especially). In fact, “harassment” feels like too mild a word for what these actors and actresses face. Some of them have been sent outright death threats.

Amandla Stenberg was harassed over The Acolyte, Moses Ingram was racially abused during Obi-Wan Kenobi, Leslie Jones was harassed over the Ghostbusters remake, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers received a deluge of online harassment for playing Juliet opposite Tom Holland’s Romeo in the West End, and the list goes on.

The rise of social media has made it easier for racism to spread and for trolls to directly bully people in the public eye. Things weren’t better twenty years ago, though—not in the slightest. When Freema Agyeman was cast as Martha Jones, the first Black lead companion in Doctor Who history, she faced a wave of racist abuse too.

(A note on Doctor Who’s companions: technically speaking, Noel Clarke’s Mickey was the first Black actor to play a companion on the show, but he was secondary to Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler and was recurring rather than a regular character. And, you guessed it, he was subjected to racist abuse as well.)

From the second Agyeman’s casting was announced, the worst parts of fandom were unleashed. At the time, the biggest ship in the fandom was Doctor/Rose, and the show itself presented the two characters as having an unconventional love story. But since Rose was leaving to make way for Martha—that’s just how Doctor Who works; one companion replaces another—shippers took their anger at their sinking ship out on Martha. Martha was in love with the Doctor too, after all.

There were racist dog whistles aplenty: fans decided they just didn’t like her for reasons they couldn’t explain. She was too whiny or had no personality beyond being in love with the Doctor, and so on. Some pointed to scenes where Martha was justifiably angry with the Doctor and wrote her off because of that. But one season later, when white woman Donna (Catherine Tate) came on board, fans loved it when she yelled at the Doctor. There were so many double standards. Rose could be in love with the Doctor, but Martha couldn’t; Donna could shout at him, but Martha couldn’t.

Agyeman noticed what was going on, and she was hurt. In 2021, The Independent reported Agyeman saying about the backlash she received, “What I didn’t anticipate—and maybe I was naive—was the racism from certain sectors of the fanbase.”

There was criticism leveled towards my contribution for other reasons, which I could handle. I could rationalize those away. I’m an artist, no one’s going to like your work all the time, people are entitled to their opinions, it’s all subjective. But the racism … yeah, I couldn’t rationalize that.

But one extremely disappointing aspect of all this was that the show itself didn’t do anything to defend Martha and by extension, the actress behind the performance. Throughout Martha’s first season on the show, the Doctor compares her negatively to Rose, and Martha is forced to prove herself over and over again. Martha is also subjected to specific traumas that her white counterparts never had to experience, like having to work as a maid in the extremely racist era of the 1910s.

Tellingly, she never received a genuine apology from the Doctor for treating her as second best or for ignoring the problems a Black person is likely to face while time-traveling in Europe. One particular poorly written line occurs in the episode “The Shakespeare Code,” when Martha challenges the Doctor on how she should manage walking around Tudor England as a Black person. “Not exactly white, in case you haven’t noticed,” she says, and the Doctor responds with the magnificently tone-deaf, “I’m not even human. Just walk about like you own the place. Works for me.”

Doctor Who has made great strides in recent years, but how Martha Jones was treated is still a bit of a stain on its legacy. So why not bring her back into the show and treat her with the respect she deserves? Ncuti Gatwa, the new Doctor and first Black man to play the role has indicated that he’s a bit of a Martha Jones fan. In an interview with Mashable this year, he picked Martha for his “Doctor Who squad,” musing on how the Tenth Doctor never properly saw her. Wouldn’t Gatwa and Freema Agyeman make an incredible duo on screen?

Of course, that’s just a start. What really needs to happen is that the “certain sectors” of the fandom who harassed Freema Agyeman need to apologize to her. Unfortunately, the widespread racism across geek culture and beyond indicates that might not happen anytime soon.