And the Doctor does respect Martha, which we see when he hugs her, thanks her, tells her she's a star, saves her from falling into the sun, trusts her to look after him in 1913, and trusts her to save the world.
I agree with all of the above—it's part of why I loved S3. But then the respect seems to vanish at critical moments that makes the friendship ring hollow. He trusts her to defeat his arch-nemesis in a year-long propaganda war carried out in hell on earth, but he's unwilling to acknowledge that he doesn't, in fact, think she's second-rate. And in the context of the conversation, it's pretty clear that Martha's not talking about being second-rate romantic material. If it were Four, it wouldn't throw me, but it's unusual for Ten to be so unresponsive.
This is everything the Martha fans keep insisting never happened, and it is right there on the screen.
Yes, yes, it is. I even read it back blow-by-blow. I'm not missing the other scenes you're referencing, either; that's what I meant about their bonding quite nicely in 3.01-3.07, as well as their easy camaraderie in Blink. But it's precisely what makes LotTL and elements of FoB so jarring. It's as though somehow, at the worst moments, dramatically, her feelings are less real than his. That's practically the definition of absent respect. It's not just Martha who gets this, either; the end of LotTL is very similar to the end of GitF, where there's just as little follow-through (i.e.: zero).
We do see the people around him struggling with his flaws.
We do sometimes, and when we do, it's brilliant. But when we don't, it's kind of bizarre. He abandons Rose and Mickey on a ship full of killer androids with no expectation of being able to get back to them—yet nobody mentions to him that this was fairly astonishing, ever.
He leaves Jack behind for… reasons that can't have been too compelling, because he's over it at the end of LotTL despite that Jack hasn't changed any, and we never get any explanation. Good, fine. He's ditched companions before (Tegan and Peri, that is—SJS, not so much), and Jack's not exactly defenseless. Yet "what happened to that Jack feller, anyway?" never comes up in S2. It's just plain weird.
He condemns the Family to a series of eternal tortures, which certainly is playing God, because the universe isn't safe with them alive and he doesn't have the stones to execute them. Good, fine. Makes sense, given that he's already had to make that call re: the Daleks, and then proven in PotW that he just doesn't have enough killer juice left to do it again. I don't blame him. But because it's never given any other exploration, it falls flat; unlike Nine's inability to use the delta wave in PotW, it was actively boring.
He forgives the Master… for something he's not in any position to forgive. Really, unless you actually are God, I don't know how you could be in a position to forgive somebody for murdering somebody else, never mind somebody else's planet. So it looks rather presumptuous. Good, fine; the Doctor has been known to do presumptuous things, and with his age, you'd expect him to. But why does nobody have anything to say about it? At first it looked like Francine was going to do just that; I actually cheered when she delivered the "those things still happened" bit. But then she sees the error of her hatred and turns away to be comforted in Him. Or something. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Ten stopped her from becoming a murderer. I just wished he'd listened to her, too.
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I agree with all of the above—it's part of why I loved S3. But then the respect seems to vanish at critical moments that makes the friendship ring hollow. He trusts her to defeat his arch-nemesis in a year-long propaganda war carried out in hell on earth, but he's unwilling to acknowledge that he doesn't, in fact, think she's second-rate. And in the context of the conversation, it's pretty clear that Martha's not talking about being second-rate romantic material. If it were Four, it wouldn't throw me, but it's unusual for Ten to be so unresponsive.
This is everything the Martha fans keep insisting never happened, and it is right there on the screen.
Yes, yes, it is. I even read it back blow-by-blow. I'm not missing the other scenes you're referencing, either; that's what I meant about their bonding quite nicely in 3.01-3.07, as well as their easy camaraderie in Blink. But it's precisely what makes LotTL and elements of FoB so jarring. It's as though somehow, at the worst moments, dramatically, her feelings are less real than his. That's practically the definition of absent respect. It's not just Martha who gets this, either; the end of LotTL is very similar to the end of GitF, where there's just as little follow-through (i.e.: zero).
We do see the people around him struggling with his flaws.
We do sometimes, and when we do, it's brilliant. But when we don't, it's kind of bizarre. He abandons Rose and Mickey on a ship full of killer androids with no expectation of being able to get back to them—yet nobody mentions to him that this was fairly astonishing, ever.
He leaves Jack behind for… reasons that can't have been too compelling, because he's over it at the end of LotTL despite that Jack hasn't changed any, and we never get any explanation. Good, fine. He's ditched companions before (Tegan and Peri, that is—SJS, not so much), and Jack's not exactly defenseless. Yet "what happened to that Jack feller, anyway?" never comes up in S2. It's just plain weird.
He condemns the Family to a series of eternal tortures, which certainly is playing God, because the universe isn't safe with them alive and he doesn't have the stones to execute them. Good, fine. Makes sense, given that he's already had to make that call re: the Daleks, and then proven in PotW that he just doesn't have enough killer juice left to do it again. I don't blame him. But because it's never given any other exploration, it falls flat; unlike Nine's inability to use the delta wave in PotW, it was actively boring.
He forgives the Master… for something he's not in any position to forgive. Really, unless you actually are God, I don't know how you could be in a position to forgive somebody for murdering somebody else, never mind somebody else's planet. So it looks rather presumptuous. Good, fine; the Doctor has been known to do presumptuous things, and with his age, you'd expect him to. But why does nobody have anything to say about it? At first it looked like Francine was going to do just that; I actually cheered when she delivered the "those things still happened" bit. But then she sees the error of her hatred and turns away to be comforted in Him. Or something. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Ten stopped her from becoming a murderer. I just wished he'd listened to her, too.