Susan Foreman
- This article is about the granddaughter of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. You may be looking for the Susan of the 1960s Dalek movies, or for any one of a number of other Susans.
Susan Foreman, later Susan Campbell, was the adopted name of the Doctor's granddaughter. She was, according to several accounts, the Doctor's first traveling companion. During the Doctor's initial incarnation, she was also a resident of London for several months in 1963, during which time she was the student of Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. Though she appeared a teenager to Human eyes, she was in fact older than both Ian and Barbara combined. (CC: Here There Be Monsters) Nevertheless, she was clearly the junior of the Doctor, who himself was quite a young Time Lord at the time. (DW: Time Crash) Her life at Coal Hill School eventually brought Ian and Barbara into the Doctor's TARDIS. (DW: An Unearthly Child) She was thus the conduit by which the Doctor began a long history of traveling with Humans. Ultimately, her grandfather forced her out of the TARDIS on 22nd century Earth as a way to encourage her transition to adulthood.
Biography
Early life on Gallifrey
On her home planet of Gallifrey, the future "Susan Foreman" was born with another name, (TN: Frayed) later revealed to be Arkytior, which meant "rose" in High Gallifreyan. (DWM: Roses) She had very strong memories of some of the topography of Gallifrey, which almost exactly matched the description the Tenth Doctor once gave Martha Jones. (DW: The Sensorites, Gridlock)
Generally, the Doctor consistently maintained that Susan was his biological granddaughter — or at the very least that it was likely, because he had a family in the sense that Humans would understand. (DW: An Unearthly Child, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Five Doctors, Fear Her, Smith and Jones)
However, there were other accounts, arguably apocryphal, which cast doubt on the biological relationship between the two. One, related by the Master, described Susan as Lady Larna, a contemporary of the Doctor whom he had rescued from civil strife on Gallifrey. (RT: Birth of a Renegade) Another intimated that she was one of the last children born on Gallifrey before Pythia's Curse, and that she was the actual granddaughter of the Other, while simultaneously recognizing the Doctor as her effective grandfather. (NA: Lungbarrow)
Departure from Gallifrey
The Doctor and Susan left Gallifrey together (NA: Nightshade, DWM: Time & Time Again) in a stolen TARDIS. (ST: The Exiles, DWM: Echoes of Future Past, DW: Planet of the Dead) Their initial journey was the first time the Doctor had ever piloted a TARDIS. He immediately opted to travel through time rather than just space. During that first, bumpy flight, Susan was unable to sleep, and so began to explore the TARDIS interior. She discovered a mirror in the wardrobe room which reflected the image of a young man. He stepped out of the mirror, bared his fangs at her, told her she was "not the one", and disappeared. The Doctor speculated that what she had seen was an echo through the vortex of something happening in another time. (ST: The Exiles)
Long after she had stopped traveling with her grandfather, she described herself as "an accidental passenger" and "a hanger-on" with regards to this first journey from Gallifrey. (CC: Here There Be Monsters)
Becoming "Susan"
The first time "Susan" and her grandfather encountered Humans was on the planet Iwa. Immediately after landing, the duo became separated. In his search for Susan, the Doctor encountered a Human medical colony. The principal work of the facility, called "the Refuge", was to rehabilitate patients identified as "Future Deviants". By providing dream therapy, it was hoped that such individuals would not become criminals. The Doctor quickly learned that the residents were besieged by aliens with a fox-like shape who could disintegrate and reconstitute their bodies. Taking him inside their compound, the humans stripped him of his clothes and burned them, citing possible contamination by the foxes. They gave him new clothes drawn from their own supply — which meant that he was now wearing the uniform of a doctor. When they assumed that he was sent by Earth to help them, he agreed with them and, anxious not to give them his real name, referenced the clothes he was then wearing to derive a title: "the Doctor".
He agreed to help them with their "fox problem" on the condition that they would help him find his granddaughter. Together, they discovered that "Susan" had become trapped in the colonists' "dream chambers", medical devices that put patients into a deep sleep that linked them all together in one communal dream. While inside the dream chamber, the Doctor's granddaughter met a Human colonist named Jill, who promptly gave the young girl the name "Susan", after Jill's own mother.
Eventually the newly-named "Doctor" and "Susan" were reunited, and they helped the colonists broker an uneasy peace with the foxes. They left the colony, both deciding to retain the names they had gained there. Furthermore, the Doctor was deeply impressed by Humans during this initial encounter. He told Susan that they should be able to find a way to settle amongst them for a while, both so that he could study them for a while, and so they could maintain a low profile on the run from the Time Lords. (TN: Frayed)
Giving Humans a try
Sometime after this initial encounter with Humans, but before taking up residence at 76 Totter's Lane, Susan and her grandfather began to study Earth and Humans more closely. However, the precise order in which these events occurred was unclear.
One of their first trips to Earth was to the British coastal town of Keelmouth in 1933. There, they vacationed at a B&B called "Bide-a-Wee", and discovered that another of its guests was a time traveler named Prentice. He had used his technology to displace Keelmouth in time, with the result that the village was in 1933, but the surrounding world was in 1999. Prentice's aims weren't precisely evil — he just wanted to retire in a place where it was always a small British village in 1933 —but the Doctor and Susan nevertheless had to convince Prentice to reverse the effect, because his retirement fantasy wasn't fair on the people whom he had trapped alongside him. (ST: Bide-a-Wee)
On another occasion, Susan was prevented from drowning by the then-retired Brigadier, following a boating accident near his house. (ST: The Gift)
On 16th August 1979, the dematerialisation circuit was fried while the TARDIS was in orbit of Earth. The TARDIS was then taken on board a Slarvian transport, and the duo discovered that the snail-like species was planning to take over Earth by hatching their eggs all over the planet. They were unable, however, to execute their plan because the Slarvian ship crashed into the English Channel, making the threat more localized to England. With the help of the Humans Linda Grainger and her grandfather Edward, Susan and the Doctor were able to stop the Slarvian eggs from gestating. (ST: Childhood Living)
At some point fairly close to when they eventually settled on Totter's Lane, they unwittingly traveled to Paris in the 22nd century. They became embroiled in a bit of political intrigue in the run-up to an election in the city of Urrozdinee. Departing after the incumbent had been killed, they appeared to never quite comprehend that the city they had visited was what had once been known as EuroDisney. (DWA: Urrozdinee)
Soon after this, they made a short trip to the planet Tacunda. There, they uncovered a jewel called a "Blessing Star". This crystal fundamentally altered the laws of probability around the holder, essentially making their dreams come true. The Doctor tried the device, wishing that he could pilot the Ship to 20th century Earth. He was successful at piloting the ship for one of the only times in that incarnation's existence. Unfortunately, it completely fried the navigational system, effectively stranding the Doctor and Susan in I.M. Foreman's junk yard in Totter's Lane, London, England. (ST: The Rag and Bone Man's Story)
Life in London
Several months before March 1963, Susan and her grandfather took up residence in London, because the TARDIS had been damaged and the Doctor needed to effect repairs. (TN: Time and Relative) During this time, they had several adventures — though, as with earlier events, an accurate chronology of events was unclear.
Before starting school
Susan had a number of adventures before she formally started classes.
Once, the Doctor and Susan got lost at night in the dense fog. They met a girl named Joan Calder who provided them temporary shelter at her home. There, they met her mother and grandfather. During the visit the house suddenly burst into flames and, on the Doctor's instruction, Susan broke a mirror in the house. When she did so, the elder Calder crumbled into ash and the fire abated. Although the Doctor never was able to adequately explain the event, it was related to the fact that the house had in fact been leveled during the London Blitz two decades earlier. The Doctor postulated that Susan's action likely saved the lives of Joan and her mother. (ST: Ash)
Just prior to starting classes at Coal Hill School, Susan and her grandfather took a couple of trips to the European mainland.
On one occasion, they went to central Europe in the 16th century. On the way out of the TARDIS, Susan noticed something that resembled a meteorite. She tossed it out, thinking it unimportant. However, she soon came to realize that it was in fact a part of a Liciax ship. When she tried to find what she had carelessly discarded, it was gone. With the help of a man named Lovey, they traced it to Prague. There, they discovered that it had been shaped into a golem, but also that it was definitively alive. It was also on a murderous rampage. The Doctor and Susan had to trap it in the attic of a Jewish synagogue, placing it under a security system to which only they knew the access codes. Some 450 years later the Fourth Doctor's fourth self and Romana returned to retrieve the golem with the hopes of transporting it back to the Liciax homeworld. (ST: Life from Lifelessness)
At another point, they accidentally landed at the BBC's Paris studios in 1955, because transmissions there had disabled their dematerialisation circuit. There they met a radio comedian named Max Wheeler, the star of a programme called Anyway, As I Say. His recordings were being plagued by a distinctive background "hum" being caused by ghostly aliens known as the Shakers. These aliens had the ability to subtly kill people with sonic resonance — the thing manifesting itself as a "hum" on BBC broadcasts. During World War II, the British saw the Shakers as a useful ally. They recruited the Shakers into the French resistance. But in 1955, they were unaware that the war had ended and were unable to clearly understand whom their enemies were. Unfortunately, the audience laughter during the performance of Anyway As I Say was, because of its precise harmonics, resonating them out of their "home" inside the walls of Broadcasting House, reawakening them to their murderous task. The Doctor and Susan had to use canned laugh tracks to force the Shakers out of the walls. Though she and her grandfather tried to explain the current reality to them, the Shakers continued to kill indiscriminately. Thus, the only course of action was for Susan and the Doctor to slightly alter the harmonics of the canned laughter and kill them with it. (ST: Losing the Audience)
Life as a schoolgirl
Against his better judgment, the Doctor enrolled Susan at Coal Hill School in Shoreditch, where Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright were teachers. Susan adopted the last name "Foreman" from the name of the junkyard where the Doctor had chosen to hide his TARDIS. She eagerly sampled the cultural fads of British teenagers. She came to love pop groups such as John Smith and the Common Men.
She was also interested in beat poetry. This interest led her on two adventures with her grandfather, only one of which she remembered. After witnessing a man explode into a protoplasmic mass at a beat poetry reading, she and her grandfather traced the unusual death to a British government project known as Operation Proteus. They discovered that the affair was being run by an alien named Raldonn, who was mutating Humans in order to turn one of them into his own species, so that he could then have a co-pilot to help him fly his ship back home. Unfortunately, his efforts at mutation relied upon a lethal virus that threatened the whole of London. After reversing the effects of the virus, the Doctor and Susan went back to the TARDIS in Totter's Lane, whereupon she was taken and then returned to his side without their knowledge. (DWM: Operation Proteus)
Susan had been taken from her time stream by the Threshold to the year 2082. They had been hunting time traveling Humans to send to their clients, the Lobri, who needed to feed on humanity's base emotions until they could break free of their psychic plane of existence. Because time travelers could survive the journey to the Lobri's "realm", the Threshold had been particularly interested in the Doctor's former companions, like Peri, Sarah Jane, and Ace. Unfortunately, the Threshold didn't realize until after they had captured her that Susan wasn't, in fact, Human. An older version of her grandfather had to rescue all his companions from the Threshold's sinister scheme. He was only successful in this effort because Ace sacrificed herself by blowing up both the Lobri and herself with Nitro-9. Grieving the loss of Ace, the Doctor wiped his remaining companion's minds of the event, and returned them to their proper time. Susan was thus returned to the side of her grandfather as they walked back to Totter's Lane after the incident with Operation Proteus. (DWM: Ground Zero)
Susan then continued her life as an ordinary teenage girl at Coal Hill School — despite the fact that she was in fact older than both Ian and Barbara combined. (CC: Here There Be Monsters) There, she tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to fit in with the rest of her classmates. (TN: Time and Relative) This was especially difficult during lessons, as there was an obvious imbalance in her knowledge. For instance, she understood advanced physics and chemistry beyond the abilities of her teachers, yet did not know how many shillings made a pound. This may have been more a problem for her teachers than for her, however. Susan called her five months on Earth "the happiest of (her) life". When her two teachers, Ian and Barbara, followed her home one night to find out more of her mysterious home life they found the TARDIS. (DW: An Unearthly Child)
Travels with Ian and Barbara
The Doctor kidnapped Ian and Barbara and took a reluctant Susan too. (DW: An Unearthly Child) Susan acted as an intermediary between her teachers and the Doctor who did not trust each other at first. After a detour they landed on Skaro where they met the Daleks. (DW: The Daleks) In 1289 Asia she met Ping-Cho, a Chinese girl her own age. (DW: Marco Polo)
Susan displayed less knowledge about the workings of the TARDIS than her grandfather and was even naive to dangers that existed on the planets they visited. Also while she showed knowledge beyond earth science she did not display the advanced knowledge that was seen in other people of Gallifrey.
Saying goodbye to the TARDIS
In a London devastated by the 22nd century Dalek invasion, Susan fell in love with the freedom fighter David Campbell. The Doctor realised that Susan would never leave him of her own free will as she believed that he was dependent on her. Rather than let Susan make up her mind to stay with him or with David, he forced her hand and locked her out of the TARDIS, bidding her farewell and saying that one day he would return. Meanwhile she had a place where she could belong, and the home which she confided to David she had never really had.(DW: The Dalek Invasion of Earth)
Adult life
Susan married and had a family with David Campbell. She actively participated in the rebuilding of Earth after the Dalek invasion.
About 20 years after being left on Earth, Borusa captured Susan using a Time Scoop and placed her with the Doctor in the Death Zone on Gallifrey. She met her grandfather in his fifth incarnation (and, briefly, his second and third incarnations). She accompanied the Doctor back to their time streams. (DW: The Five Doctors)
Susan and David adopted three Dalek war orphans and named them Ian, Barbara and David Campbell Junior as Susan was not able to conceive with David. She later worked as a Peace Officer who made Dalek artifacts safe. The years she spent on Earth caused problems for David and her as she did not age at the same rate as regular humans and was forced to disguise herself to give the appearance of being 30 years older. In 2199 she encountered the Master whilst investigating a Dalek artifact, and was eventually captured by him. Susan was taken in his TARDIS to the planet Tersurus where she believed she killed him. Afterwards she took his TARDIS. The Eighth Doctor, whilst present on Earth at the time of these events, was not aware of much of Susan's part in the events. (EDA: Legacy of the Daleks)
A possibly conflicting account held that Susan was able to have a child with David. Her son, Alex Campbell, had only one heart. Susan asked the Doctor if Alex could be educated on Gallifrey, but the Doctor expressed doubt about whether he would be accepted when told that Alex had only one heart. After David's death, Susan became one of the leaders of the Earth council to help with the recovery of the planet after the Dalek Invasion, she met up with her grandfather in his eighth body and helped stop a seemingly peaceful race from enslaving the Human race. (BFA: An Earthly Child)
- Though likely conflicting, these two accounts were not in direct contradiction. It was possible to believe that Susan simply failed to mention her adopted children when she met her grandfather's eighth incarnation, as she was actively trying to get her grandfather to take Alex back to Gallifrey to further his great-grandson's education.
Fate
Whether Susan survived or even participated in the Last Great Time War is unknown. The Tenth Doctor once told Martha Jones that he had left Susan on a future Earth with a freedom fighter with whom she had fallen in love and was unsure if she was alive, as he simply hadn't checked. (IDW:The Forgotten)
See also
- John and Gillian, the Doctor's other grandchildren.
- Susan (Auld Mortality), an Alternate version of Susan.
Behind the scenes
- No televised episode has ever explored Susan's origins. The unbroadcast pilot episode features a line of dialogue in which Susan states she is from the 49th century. However, the final televised version broadcast as part 1 of An Unearthly Child contains no such reference.
- It's unclear why David Whitaker chose to change the character's name to Susan English for his novelisations. The later unofficial novel Campaign reinstated this use in tribute, but all other novelisations and original novels have retained the Susan Foreman name.
- The contradicting stories regarding Susan's origins predate the BBC Wales version of Doctor Who. The 2005 version establishes the fact that the Doctor had a family on Gallifrey and intimates, though never explicitly states, that Susan was in all likelihood his biological granddaughter. As of 2010 there has never been an indication given in any TV episode to suggest otherwise.
- Some fans of the revived series believe The Woman from The End of Time was actually Susan. This is mainly due to the fact that when Wilfred asks the Doctor who she was, the Doctor looks past him to Wilfred's granddaughter, Donna, and does not answer (The End of Time). However, this has never been confirmed, and even Russell T. Davies has stated that he doesn't know for certain who the Woman is (Doctor Who Confidential). Additionally, the Woman could have been any Time Lady from the Doctor's past, leaving her identity very much open to interpretation, although Susan, along with Romana and the Doctor's mother, are usually cited as the most likely answers.
- According to The Handbook: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Production of Doctor Who, among other young actresses considered for the role in 1963 were Anneke Wills and Jackie Lane, who both later played companions in the series. Director Waris Hussein is credited with recommending Carole Ann Ford for the part. According to the authorised scholarship of David J. Howe and friends, however, there is no evidence of Lane or Wills actually having read for the part, at least not for Rex Tucker, the original director assigned to the first serial. Lane doesn't even appear on the audition list that has survived in the archives, and Wills was marked as a no-show. (REF: The First Doctor Handbook)
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