Rapport?

About a year ago now, somewhere on my flist - probably on lifeonmartha - someone observed that the Doctor and Martha had a rapport in Blink much more like that which the Doctor tends to have with his companions, and that we ought to have seen more of that for Martha. I thought that was a great sentiment and I've shared it ever since ... but I'm beginning to wonder about it.

Notice that almost everything Martha says in that episode is a complaint to or about the Doctor: Working in a shop, what she says to Billy Shipton about the Doctor's babbling, keeping up with the four things and the lizard. It's easy to take that as the sort of friendly snarking that goes on in the console room all the time, but I think we have to consider the context too. And the context is that Martha's been pining for the Doctor for, at a guess, a length of time comparable to the original air history of Smith and Jones through Family of Blood, plus the additional months spent in 1913, plus - at least for my first two dialog examples above - most or all of the time spent TARDISless in 1969. It's reasonable to think frustration is beginning to show. Certainly by the next time we see her, she's about had enough: she's more than prepared to needle the Doctor right along with Jack about his preoccupation with Rose. I don't wonder that she left after the next adventure - I wonder whether she was already making plans as soon as the TARDIS took off from the Dahl Plas, or earlier.

I think maybe we have to hear Martha's tone in Blink less as the tone Sarah or Jamie used when complaining about the Doctor's steering, and more as Martha's own tone in Utopia when she said, "Oh, she was blonde! What a surprise!"

I think maybe we need to describe Martha's tone in Blink less as banter than as bitter.