"Susan Foreman"
- You may wish to consult
Susanfor other, similarly-named pages.
"Susan" was the assumed name of a Gallifreyan who was the original companion of the First Doctor, her grandfather. A descendant of Rassilon, Susan travelled with the Doctor and reunited with him in their fifth (TV: The Five Doctors) and eighth incarnations. (PROSE: Legacy of the Daleks; AUDIO: An Earthly Child, et al.) At different times in her life she was known as "Susan Foreman", "Susan English" and "Susan Campbell", but she was usually called simply "Susan". According to some sources, (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) her birth name was Larn (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade) or Arkytior. (PROSE: Roses)
Biography
Early life on Gallifrey
After she left Gallifrey with the First Doctor, records of her true identity were deliberately obscured. She was certainly the daughter of the Lord President, (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) and she was born with a different name than "Susan", (PROSE: Frayed, AUDIO: All Hands on Deck) which may have been Larn (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade, A Brief History of Time Lords) or Arkytior, from the Gallifreyan for "rose". (PROSE: Roses, A Brief History of Time Lords) She may have been a direct descendant of Rassilon or of some other founding father of Gallifrey. (PROSE: Lungbarrow, A Brief History of Time Lords)
Susan specifically identified the Doctor as her grandfather, (TV: "An Unearthly Child", "The Escape") as did Barbara Wright, (TV: "An Unearthly Child", "Hidden Danger") Ian Chesterton, (TV: "The Ambush", "Kidnap") Ping-Cho (TV: "The Wall of Lies") and the First Doctor himself, (TV: "The Brink of Disaster") while the First Doctor considered Susan to be his grandchild, (TV: "The Rescue", Marco Polo, The Sensorites, "Flashpoint") as did the Fifth Doctor, (AUDIO: The Toy) the Eighth Doctor (AUDIO: Relative Dimensions) and the First Elder. (TV: "Hidden Danger") The Eleventh Doctor later recalled coming to the Rings of Akhaten "a long time ago with my granddaughter". (TV: The Rings of Akhaten)
However, other accounts cast doubt on their biological relationship. One, related by the Tremas Master, described Susan as Lady Larn, a contemporary of the Doctor whom he had rescued from civil strife on Gallifrey. (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade) Another intimated that she was one of the last children born on Gallifrey before Pythia's Curse, (PROSE: Lungbarrow) with Patience's husband present at her birth. (PROSE: Cold Fusion) She was sent away from Gallifrey by the Other — her grandfather — to Tersurus during the Great Schism. She later returned to Gallifrey to search for him, where she met the Doctor, whom she recognised as her grandfather reborn. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)
Though she appeared like a teenager to human eyes, one account stated Susan was older than Ian and Barbara combined. (AUDIO: Here There Be Monsters) The First Doctor told Shivani Bajwa Susan was 73-years-old. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Horror of Coal Hill) However, according to the First Doctor, by the time she was on Maitland's ship with Ian and Barbara, she was a few years younger than the young human Carol Richmond. (TV: "Strangers in Space") Susan herself told Ping-Cho that she was "in [her] sixteenth year". (TV: "The Roof of the World") In Susan's application form for admission to Coal Hill Secondary School (dated June 21, 1963), the First Doctor initially wrote that she was 97 at the time of entry to school. However, he ultimately stroke that out and wrote she was 15. (PROSE: The Time Lord Letters) Upon seeing a picture of Susan, the hermit said she took after her mother. (PROSE: The Three Paths)
According to A Brief History of Time, when the eight-year-old Susan was taken for the selection process in the Drylands to stare into the Untempered Schism, she reacted by running away from what she saw in the Schism. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)
Susan often visited a garden on Gallifrey. Years later she had a dream about the garden where she was accompanied by Ian. (PROSE: The Mother Road)
Susan attended a ritual with the Doctor in Arcadia where the Master gave her a toy. The toy was, in reality, a communication node in which the Master intended to use to locate the Doctor if he ever left Gallifrey. (AUDIO: The Toy)
Departure from Gallifrey
The First Doctor and Susan left together when they purloined a faulty TARDIS from the repair shop beneath the Capitol. (TV: The Name of the Doctor, AUDIO: The Beginning)
The Doctor had brought the flying trunk containing the Hand of Omega with him and Susan had brought basic luggage from her house. Armed guards chased the fugitive Doctor and Susan into the repair shop, where the only place for them to hide was a line of TARDISes. Susan walked into one TARDIS, but the Doctor didn't follow her inside. After Susan heard voices outside, the Doctor urged her to go inside the cylinder next to it instead. (AUDIO: The Beginning) The Doctor was being advised by a version of Clara Oswald to steal the Type 40 with a faulty navigation system instead of the one Susan had walked inside, as it would be much more fun. This account also showed the Doctor already wearing Victorian era dress before he visited Earth. (TV: The Name of the Doctor) The Doctor speculated that the TARDIS was deregistered, and that was how it slipped through Gallifrey's transduction barrier and how they evaded the Time Lords. This account stated the Doctor and Susan already went by these names when they left Gallifrey. (AUDIO: The Beginning)
Their initial trip in the TARDIS was the first time the Doctor had ever piloted a TARDIS. (PROSE: The Exiles, AUDIO: The Beginning) According to one account, the Doctor chose to travel through time, rather than just space. During that first bumpy flight, Susan could not sleep and began to explore the TARDIS interior. She found a mirror in the wardrobe room that reflected the image of a young man. He stepped out of the mirror, bared a pair of fangs at her, told her she was "not the one", and disappeared. The Doctor speculated that she had seen an echo through the vortex of something happening in another time. (PROSE: The Exiles)
According to another account, the Doctor and Susan were thrown onto the TARDIS control panel as the TARDIS was seemingly being torn apart. When the Doctor was able to reach for the button marked "flight stabiliser", Susan collapsed shortly after the engines were stabilised. The Doctor tended to Susan as she slept, and used his jacket as a makeshift pillow for her before she reawakened. Susan then explored the TARDIS as the Doctor tended to the ship's controls. She tripped over a rigger's work case and brought it back to the Doctor when the TARDIS had run out of power. Inside the work case, the Doctor found an artron cell and attached it to the drive system to power an emergency landing. After finding a nearby world, the TARDIS appeared to take over and brought them to the Moon. (AUDIO: The Beginning)
Long after she had stopped travelling with her grandfather, she described herself as "an accidental passenger" and "a hanger-on" in this first journey from Gallifrey. (AUDIO: Here There Be Monsters)
Meeting humans
According to one account, the Doctor and Susan's first destination was a vivarium beneath the surface of the Moon. Before walking outside, they were confronted by Quadrigger Stoyn, who had become an unwitting passenger and had part of his face burned when the TARDIS took off. Stoyn's job was to take apart the TARDIS' engines before it was sent to be vaporised, but the TARDIS had run out of power, stranding them. The Doctor took the dematerialisation circuit so Stoyn wouldn't leave them behind and they explored the strange location. The Doctor, Susan and Stoyn were taken out of the tank and realised they were in a massive cavern filled with vivariums carefully-preserved specimens. The Archaeons had been seeding primitive planets such as the Earth with life by firing red lightning from the Moon, creating an established order out of the chaos and nurturing the early lifeforms under controlled conditions.
While checking to see if the TARDIS was a threat, the Archaeons began taking it apart. They took the TARDIS' temporal stasis capacitor while it was still attached to the power source. This caused the stasis field to breach, freezing the Doctor, Susan, Stoyn and the Archaeons in time, allowing the TARDIS to recharge itself. 450 million years later, humans had evolved on the Earth until they established a lunar colony, Giant Leap Base. A group of humans from Giant Leap Base broke the stasis field, taking the Doctor and Susan on board their lunar rover, where they came to.
According to one account, the Doctor and Susan learnt about the Earth's history through a "first contact induction video" Susan had been provided while on board the rover. With the dematerialisation circuit still in the Doctor's possession, the Archaeons had sent nematodes, which didn't affect the Time Lords, to kill all of the humans on the rover. When the Archaeons, found the life they had "seeded" had become disorderly and "run rampant", no longer matching their carefully-planned vision, they "purged" the humans on the lunar base and on the Earth with lightning. The Doctor, who was blamed for the disruption of the Archaeons' experiments, was brought back to the cavern. Meanwhile, the humans retaliated against the Archaeons with missiles. After the Doctor went inside the TARDIS, evading the distracted Archaeons, Stoyn tried taking Susan with him, but she refused and ran inside the TARDIS.
With the dematerialisation circuit in place, the Doctor and Susan left without Stoyn, as the Doctor felt that he was just as willing to abandon them. Another barrage of missiles breached the atmosphere of the Archaeons' cavern, destroying their weaponry; the Archaeons were pulled outside, though Susan saw Stoyn struggle to reach the rover. Afterwards, the Doctor continuously watched the video about the Earth's history and evolution inside the TARDIS, marvelling at the planet's abundance. He promised it would be his next destination. Instead, his next stop was a place with a blue sun and air like wine. It took several trips before he reached the Earth again. (AUDIO: The Beginning)
According to another account, the first time "Susan" and her grandfather met humans was on the planet Iwa. They were separated. In his search for Susan, the Doctor found a human medical colony. The principal work of the facility, called "the Refuge", was to rehabilitate patients identified as "Future Deviants". By undergoing dream therapy, it was hoped that such individuals would not become criminals.
The Doctor soon learned the residents were besieged by fox-like aliens 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. This meant that he was now wearing the garb of a doctor. When they assumed that he was sent by Earth to help them, he agreed. Not wishing to give them his real name, he referenced his new clothes to derive a title: "the Doctor".
He agreed to help them with their "fox problem" if they would help him find his granddaughter. They discovered "Susan" had become trapped in the colonists' "dream chambers", medical devices that put patients into a deep sleep and linked them in one communal dream. 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. They helped the colonists broker an uneasy peace with the foxes. They left the colony, deciding to retain the names they had gained there. The Doctor was deeply impressed by humans during this initial encounter. He told Susan they should find a way to settle amongst them for a while so that he could study them and they could maintain a low profile on the run from the Time Lords. (PROSE: Frayed)
The Doctor and Susan travelled to Quinnis where she was interested in a local type of fish. She met Meedla who told her why Bridgetown was on stilts, due to the dangerous ground. When the Doctor was asked to make rain, she spent most of the time running backwards and forwards to the TARDIS. She found out that Meedla was a bird of omen who delighted in the misfortune of the town. After they found the TARDIS after it had been swept away in a flood the Doctor gave her the Blitzen fish that she was interested in. (AUDIO: Quinnis)
At one point Susan had to adventure out of the TARDIS to find medical help for the Doctor when he became ill. When she landed on Rua she discovered that she couldn't find any antibiotics because they had superseded such medicines using nano-technology. She was later chased by a robot, but was, in fact, policeman Kendrick. Because of her expertise in nanotechnology, she helped Kendrick to stop the Butcher but she became upset when Kendrick killed the Butcher. (AUDIO: The Sleeping Blood)
Giving humans a try
Sometime after this first meeting with humans, but before taking up residence at 76 Totter's Lane, the Doctor and Susan began to study humans more closely, with the French Revolution in France being their first visit to Earth. (PROSE: Just War)
One of their first trips to Earth was to the British coastal town of Keelmouth in 1933. There, they vacationed at a bed and breakfast called "Bide-a-Wee". Another of its guests was a time traveller named Prentice. He had used his technology to displace Keelmouth in time; the village was in 1933, but the surrounding world was in 1999. The Doctor and Susan had to convince Prentice to reverse the effect, because his retirement fantasy was not fair to the people he had trapped alongside him. (PROSE: Bide-a-Wee)
Susan was saved from drowning in a boating accident by the then-retired Brigadier near his house. (PROSE: The Gift)
The Doctor and Susan went to ancient Rome, Antioch, and Jerusalem. (PROSE: Byzantium!)
On 16 August 1979, the dematerialisation circuit was fried while the TARDIS was orbiting Earth. The TARDIS was taken on board a Slarvian transport, and the duo learned that the snail-like species planned to conquer Earth by hatching their eggs all over the planet. Their plan failed because the Slarvian ship crashed into the English Channel, making the threat localised to England. With the help of the humans Linda Grainger and her grandfather Edward, Susan and the Doctor stopped the Slarvian eggs from hatching. (PROSE: Childhood Living)
At an unknown point before her schooldays, the Doctor took Susan to see the Rings of Akhaten. (TV: The Rings of Akhaten)
During their travels, she and the Doctor met Noël Coward, (AUDIO: The Sleeping City) visited London during the Blitz in 1941 and Rome during the time of Augustus. (AUDIO: The Alchemists) They also observed a Zeppelin attack during World War I. (TV: Planet of Giants; AUDIO: The Alchemists)
Shortly before they settled on Totter's Lane, they unwittingly travelled to Paris in the 22nd century. They became embroiled in political intrigue in the run-up to an election in the city of Urrozdinee. Departing after the incumbent had been killed, they never quite understood that the city they had visited was what had once been known as EuroDisney. (PROSE: Urrozdinee)
The Doctor and Susan visited Peking during the Boxer Rebellion and used smoke bombs to escape. (AUDIO: The Flames of Cadiz)
They also visited Dido (TV: The Rescue) and sailed around the Caribbean on board a pirate galleon. They witnessed the assassination of U.S. President William McKinley as well and travelled to Cassuragi. (PROSE: Byzantium!)
The Doctor and Susan travelled to Berlin in January 1933 where they went to see Fitz Haber in a scientific institute. Susan found Berlin confusing. The Doctor visited the scientist she met Pollitt in a local cafe, but was drugged by him. After the Doctor was kidnapped, Susan enlisted the help of the SA to locate them. She was later interrogated by Pollitt thinking the Doctor was involved in extracting into gold and wanted to know the secret. (AUDIO: The Alchemists)
On one occasion, they went to central Europe in the 16th century. On the way out of the TARDIS, Susan noticed what looked like a meteorite. She tossed it out, thinking it unimportant, but soon came to realise 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, where they found it had been shaped into a golem. It was definitively alive. It was also on a murderous rampage. The Doctor and Susan trapped 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 and Romana I returned to retrieve the golem, hoping to take it back to the Liciax homeworld. (PROSE: Life from Lifelessness)
At another time, they accidentally landed at the BBC's Paris studios in 1955 because transmissions there had disabled their dematerialisation circuit. They met a radio comedian named Max Wheeler, the star of a programme called Anyway, As I Say. His recordings were plagued by a distinctive background "hum" caused by ghostly aliens known as the Shakers. These aliens could 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. In 1955, the Shakers were unaware that the war had ended and were unable to clearly understand who their enemies were. Unfortunately, the audiences' laughter during the performance of Anyway As I Say was, because of its precise harmonics, resonating them out of their "homes" in the walls of Broadcasting House, reawakening them to their murderous task. The Doctor and Susan used 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. The only course of action was for Susan and the Doctor to alter the harmonics of the canned laughter and kill them with it. (PROSE: Losing the Audience)
The Doctor and Susan made a short trip to the planet Tacunda. There, they uncovered a jewel called a "Blessing Star". This crystal 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 TARDIS to 20th century Earth. He was successful, it completely fried the navigational system, stranding the Doctor and Susan in I.M. Foreman's junk yard in Totter's Lane, London. (PROSE: The Rag & Bone Man's Story) Susan and her grandfather took up residence in London so the Doctor could effect repairs. (PROSE: Time and Relative) One account placed the Doctor and Susan's arrival in London before March 1963. (PROSE: Time and Relative) Another had Susan say they came here in June, four months before October. (AUDIO: Hunters of Earth)
Before starting school
Susan had a number of adventures before she formally started classes.
The Doctor and Susan got lost at night in the dense fog. They met a girl named Joan Calder who sheltered them at her home, where they met her mother and grandfather. During the visit, the house burst into flames. On the Doctor's instruction, Susan broke a mirror in the house. 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 levelled during the London Blitz two decades earlier. The Doctor postulated that Susan's action likely saved the lives of Joan and her mother. (PROSE: Ash)
Life as a schoolgirl
Info from Time and Relative needs to be added.
Susan was enrolled at Coal Hill School (TV: "An Unearthly Child") in Shoreditch. (TV: The Day of the Doctor, AUDIO: Hunters of Earth) One account had her enrol there in March 1963, (PROSE: Time and Relative) while according to another account, Susan said she had been at Coal Hill since the start of the autumn term. (AUDIO: Hunters of Earth)
Susan took the last name "Foreman" from I.M. Foreman, the name on the gates of the junkyard where the Doctor had hidden his TARDIS. [source needed] She eagerly sampled the cultural fads of British teenagers. She came to love pop groups such as John Smith and the Common Men. (TV: "An Unearthly Child") She had a John Smith and the Common Men album aboard the TARDIS. (AUDIO: 1963: Fanfare for the Common Men)
She was also interested in beat poetry. This interest led to 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, Operation Proteus. They discovered the project was being run by an alien named Raldonn, who was mutating humans to turn one into his own species so that he would have a co-pilot to help him fly his ship back home. Unfortunately, his efforts relied on a lethal virus that threatened all London. After reversing the effects of the virus, the Doctor and Susan returned to the TARDIS in Totter's Lane, whereupon she was taken and then returned to his side without their knowledge. (COMIC: Operation Proteus)
Susan was taken from her time stream to the year 2082 by the Threshold. They had been hunting time travelling humans to send to their clients, the Lobri, who fed on humanity's base emotions until they could break free of their psychic plane of existence. Because time travellers 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 realise until after they had captured her that Susan wasn't human, and did not use her as they believed she would be unsuitable. The Lobri's "realm" either rejected or destroyed alien and non-human visitors. Despite this, claiming to be "more human" than he looked, the seventh incarnation of Susan's grandfather went into the dimension to rescue all his companions from the Threshold's sinister scheme. Susan went with him and somehow survived, implying there was more than Gallifreyan genetics in her heritage. The Doctor was only successful in this effort because Ace sacrificed herself by blowing up the Lobri and herself with Nitro-9. Grieving the loss of Ace, the Doctor wiped his remaining companions' minds of the event and returned them to their proper times. Susan was returned to the side of her grandfather as they walked back to Totter's Lane after the incident. (COMIC: Ground Zero)
At Rosa's that October, Susan and sixth form student Cedric Chivers heard a DJ on the radio read a message to them from a future incarnation of the Doctor saying "it's blowing in the wind," and "it's all in the beat". The following day, a mob of Coal Hill students and bikers attacked and chased Susan. The following day, while crossing Mayfield Terrace, Cedric was influenced by a German weapon that had been buried in the terrace during World War II that used radio waves to make young people hate and attack anyone who was different to them. He joined a mob led by Mavis but stopped when Susan dropped her transistor radio.
On Monday, Susan bought Cedric a Bob Dylan LP because of the man on the radio. They were chased by street gangs who chanted "aliens out", and Cedric brought Susan to his uncle Colonel Rook's warehouse, where Cedric revealed he was spying on her and told her that the Doctor and Susan could be used to fight a war. The Doctor deduced the workings of the weapon and devised a means of using Susan's radio and other pieces in the warehouse to transmit a blocking signal that negated the effect of the weapon. To buy the Doctor more time, Susan used her psychic powers to slow down the oncoming mob. After his life was saved, Rook decided against coercing the Doctor and Susan to fight in the war and told them that their "secret" would be safe. Afterwards, Susan received a premonition of something coming for the Doctor in his future that he couldn't escape. (AUDIO: Hunters of Earth)
Susan continued her life as an ordinary teenage girl at Coal Hill School. She tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to fit in with her classmates. (PROSE: Time and Relative)
This was especially difficult during lessons. There was an obvious imbalance in her knowledge compared with her classmates. She understood advanced physics and chemistry beyond the abilities of her teachers, yet did not know how many shillings made a pound; she thought the United Kingdom was on the decimal system, which only the United States had in 1963 and hadn't yet been introduced to the UK. Her teacher Ian claimed Susan would gradually tell of her knowledge to ensure she didn't embarrass her teachers. (TV: "An Unearthly Child")
During this time, she used the Blessing Star, hoping it would help her fit in. Instead, it made her extraordinarily lucky, which only further emphasised the differences between her and her fellows. In a fit of pique, she buried the Blessing Star in I.M. Foreman's junkyard — an act that would inadvertently help England win the 1966 World Cup. (PROSE: The Rag & Bone Man's Story)
Travels with Ian and Barbara
Susan's individuality may have been more a problem for her teachers than for her. Susan called her five months on Earth "the happiest of [her] life". When Ian and Barbara followed her home one night to find out more of her mysterious home life, they found the TARDIS. The Doctor kidnapped Ian and Barbara and took a reluctant Susan too, travelling to Earth in the Stone Age. The Doctor was taken by Kal, who had seen him produce fire. The others tried to rescue the Doctor but were taken to the Cave of Skulls. The Old Mother released the Doctor and his companions and they escaped into a nearby forest. Za was injured by an animal when he tried to chase after them. Ian and Barbara took care of Za, but the group were still sent back to the cave. Ian produced fire for the tribe and devised a way of scaring the cavemen by setting the skulls on fire. The group escaped to the TARDIS, which took off again. (TV: An Unearthly Child)
When the TARDIS landed on Skaro, the Doctor lied about the fluid link needing more mercury, when there was nothing wrong, so he could explore a nearby city. The Daleks imprisoned the Doctor and his companions inside the city, confiscating the fluid link they brought along. Susan helped the Daleks write an agreement for the Thals, but once they arrived, the Daleks ambushed them, killing the Thal leader, Temmosus. Having escaped, they assisted the Thals in their attack on the Dalek city. The Daleks' power supply was damaged in the attack. The Daleks died and their plans to flood the atmosphere with radiation failed. (TV: The Daleks)
With the fluid link retrieved, the Doctor left Skaro for Earth, using the fast return switch. The spring in the switch was damaged, causing it to be stuck. The TARDIS was sent to the beginning of a solar system and everyone was knocked out in the trip. The TARDIS tried warning the crew about the atoms forming around them when they came to, but the Doctor assumed that this was Ian and Barbara's sabotage of the ship. Susan had been affected the worst by what had happened. Once Barbara figured out what was going on, the Doctor fixed the spring, ending the fault. (TV: "The Rescue", The Edge of Destruction)
Still heavily damaged and malfunctioning, the TARDIS found its way to Earth but did not make it to Ian and Barbara's time, instead, landing in the Plain of Pamir in 1289. There, the Doctor and his companions met Marco Polo. Polo took the TARDIS and its keys on his caravan the breadth of Cathay to hand to Kublai Khan as part of a bargain for his return to Venice. During this time, Susan formed a strong friendship with a young girl named Ping-Cho. Along the way, the Mongol warlord Tegana, also part of Polo's caravan, tried to take the TARDIS for Nogai as part of his plan to assassinate Kublai. In the chaos of Tegana and Polo's duel in Peking, the Doctor and his companions escaped in his repaired TARDIS. (TV: Marco Polo)
She wanted to help the person she saw in an airlock. She was taken to the Endurance to be examined. She was told by Myla that they were escaped slaves. She told Myla that the Doctor could create a filter for radiation storms so they could go after Arran. She was taken to engineering as it was the safest place on the ship. She was later chased through engineering by the apparently dead Shift. The Shift hunted her as her blood carried a lot of information. She was rescued by Ian. She looked after Benya whilst Toban and Ian repaired the engines. She realised that the interference was Morse code and found the Doctor. He and Susan piloted a small ship to lure Arran back to the Endevour. (AUDIO: The Age of Endurance)
The Doctor landed on an island on Marinus. Arbitan asked them to search for the keys to the reprogrammed Conscience of Marinus to regain control over the Voord, as all of his other followers and family members failed to retrieve them. Arbitan trapped the TARDIS in a forcefield, preventing the Doctor and his companions' escape.
They used Arbitan's travel dials to reach Morphoton. Barbara released Arbitan's daughter, Sabetha, and the rest of the city from the Morpho's mind control, and retrieved the first key. While Ian and Barbara searched for the second key, Susan and Sabetha were trapped inside a mountain cave. Ian, Barbara and Altos rescued them and found the third key deep inside the caverns guarded by Ice Soldiers.
In Millennius, Ian was framed for murder. The Doctor stood as the defence at Ian's trial, but he was sentenced to death. While Susan was held hostage by Kala, the Doctor learnt from her that one of the conspirators in the murder, the prosecutor Eyesen, was ready to collect one of the keys. Ian was spared execution. The guards captured Eyesen and the last key was found in the mace that killed Eprin.
The Doctor and his companions returned to Arbitan's island, where Arbitan had been murdered. Ian handed the Voord a fake key, which destroyed the Conscience, along with the Voord. They were able to leave in the TARDIS once more. (TV: The Keys of Marinus)
The Doctor and his companions arrived in an Aztec temple in Mexico. They went through a one-way passage that prevented access to the TARDIS. Barbara posed as the Aztec god, Yetaxa, with the others as her servants, to find a way back. For interrupting the first victim's human sacrifice, Susan was sent to a seminary.
Susan was to be punished for denying marriage to the Perfect Victim of the Aztecs' sacrifice and Ian to be executed when he was framed by the High Priest of Sacrifice, Tlotoxl, for attacking the High Priest of Knowledge, Autloc. Autloc's faith in Yetaxa was shattered, and he left for the wilderness. The Doctor, Ian and the Doctor's accidental fiancée, Cameca, distracted Ian and Susan's guard to escape. They worked on a pulley system to open the doorway back to the TARDIS. As they departed, the sacrifice of the Perfect Victim continued as planned. (TV: The Aztecs)
The Doctor landed inside a spaceship in the 28th century, where two crewmembers were suspended in a state resembling death and another, John, had had his mind opened and turned insane, following an attack on their minds by the Sensorites. The Sense Sphere, which the ship had been trapped around, had its aqueducts' water supply poisoned with atropine by survivors of a previous human expedition whose ship had been destroyed.
The TARDIS' lock was taken by the Sensorites, leaving the Doctor and his companions trapped on the spaceship. After the Doctor and his companions resisted the Sensorites, the Doctor, Ian and Susan agreed to go down to the Sense-Sphere, where the Doctor worked out the cure for this "disease", which had also afflicted Ian, while the Sensorite scientists treated John. When the Doctor and Ian had gone to the aqueduct to investigate with broken weapons, Susan held a telepathic link with Barbara to help her way through the aqueduct. The Doctor, Ian and Barbara found the human expedition and pretended to be a welcoming party for them and that the "war" against the Sensorites was won. The expedition were taken into custody on Maitland's ship. Maitland's ship was free to leave and the TARDIS crew had regained their lock. (TV: The Sensorites)
When the Doctor thought he had landed the TARDIS on 1960s Earth, Susan was sceptical as Barbara, Ian and herself found 18th century furniture in a nearby building. In fact, they had landed in revolutionary France. She noted that this was one of he grandfather's favourite eras of history. Whilst there she was suspected of being a traitor to the revolution and was sentenced to death. On the way to their execution, Susan and Barbara were rescued. However, in the protection of her rescuers, she became ill and learned how primitive medicine was in revolutionary France. The Physician that treated her reported her as an escaped prisoner. Back at the prison, and the Doctor facilitated her second escape, by impersonating an official. (TV: The Reign of Terror)
At some point during her travels with the Doctor, Ian and Barbara, they visited Bob Dovie at 59A Barnsfield Crescent in Totton, Hampshire on 23 November 1963. (AUDIO: The Light at the End)
When she found out that they had landed in the Library of Alexandria she looked it up in the TARDIS Library and discovered its fate. (AUDIO: The Library of Alexandria)
When in Seville she helped the Doctor impersonate a cardinal to help Ian get out of prison before he was sentenced to death. With Barbara she rescued him from the flames. (AUDIO: The Flames of Cadiz)
They later landed in a flotilla of ships on the planet Hydra where they were captured by Amyra Kaan and Pan Vexel for being stowaways. She was interested in the plight of the Hydran's when she heard how they were invaded by the Voord. When the Fortitude sank she spent the following weeks grieving for her Grandfather and Barbara's deaths, as well as talking to the captured Voord Nebrin. When Ian and Susan found the TARDIS, Ian forced her to pilot it to take it away from the Voord. Tarlak wished to know how she knew of Yartek and the Marinus mission. When Tarlek found out that the Doctor wished to stop his invasion, he commanded for Susan to be converted into a Voord to stop the Doctor in his plans. (AUDIO: Domain of the Voord)
When the TARDIS landed on the doomed planet Sarath, Susan was taken to hospital after she was injured in a building collapse. When she entered a healing coma, Susan was replaced by an android duplicate as part of a plan by the city's supervising A.I., Monitor, to ensure his own survival, but the original Susan recovered in time to escape incineration. After the truth about the Android and Monitor's plan was revealed, the android's connection to Susan allowed her to resist and disrupt Monitor's control, allowing him to be destroyed. With the last few survivors of the planet needing a controlling computer to take the last ship to Mirath, the android volunteered to take on the role, despite knowing that the society on Mirath would be unable to sustain her. (PROSE: City at World's End)
In a London devastated by the 22nd century Dalek invasion, Susan fell in love with the freedom fighter named David Campbell (TV: The Dalek Invasion of Earth) or Cameron. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) The Doctor realised Susan would never leave him of her own free will; she thought him dependent on her. Rather than let her choose 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 a home which she confided to David she had never really had. (TV: The Dalek Invasion of Earth)
Ian came to believe that locking Susan out of the TARDIS was the bravest thing that he ever saw the Doctor do. (AUDIO: The Revenants)
Adult life
Susan married and had a family with David. She actively participated in the rebuilding of Earth after the Dalek invasion. (PROSE: Legacy of the Daleks, AUDIO: An Earthly Child)
About twenty years after being left on Earth, Borusa captured Susan with 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), along with Tegan Jovanka and Vislor Turlough, and briefly met Sarah Jane Smith and the Brigadier. She accompanied the First Doctor back to their time streams and was returned to the point she'd been kidnapped by Borusa. (TV: The Five Doctors)
One account suggested that she never told her husband that she was not human. (AUDIO: Here There Be Monsters) However, others contradicted this. (PROSE: Legacy of the Daleks, AUDIO: An Earthly Child)
Susan and David adopted three war orphans and named them Ian, Barbara and David Campbell Junior; Susan was not able to conceive with David. She worked as a peace officer who made Dalek artefacts safe. The years she spent on Earth caused problems for them. She did not age as fast as humans and was forced to disguise herself to look thirty years older. In 2199, she encountered the Master whilst investigating a Dalek artefact, and was captured by him to use as a hostage against the Eighth Doctor. Susan was taken in the Master's TARDIS to the planet Tersurus, where she revealed that she was also a Time Lord, startling the Master, and triggered a psychic scream that forced the Master out of the TARDIS. Believing that she had killed the Master after using his TCE to destroy his equipment and trigger an explosion, she subsequently took his TARDIS and left Tersurus. (PROSE: Legacy of the Daleks)
A conflicting account held that Susan was able to have a child with David. Her son, Alex Campbell, had only one heart. (AUDIO: An Earthly Child) She sent the Doctor a hypercube after his birth to tell him of what she had achieved with her life. (PROSE: Ghost of Christmas Past) When Alex was a teenager, Susan asked the Doctor if Alex could be educated on Gallifrey. The Doctor expressed doubts about David's acceptance 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 planet's recovery. She contacted the Guldreasi, a seemingly peaceful race that wanted to help Earth. About this time she met with her grandfather in his eighth incarnation and helped stop the Guldreasi enslaving the human race. (AUDIO: An Earthly Child)
Six months later, Susan had Christmas dinner with the Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller in the TARDIS. She was unhappy when the TARDIS suddenly dematerialised and to find the Doctor was planning on having Alex travel with him. The Doctor was able to return them to the right place and Alex then departed on a tour with Lucie. (AUDIO: Relative Dimensions) During the tour a plague spread over the Earth, infecting Lucie, though Susan and Alex's Gallifreyan heritage made them resistant. Susan was able to use her influence to get Alex and Lucie from Thailand to England. Soon after this, the Second Dalek Invasion of Earth occurred. Lucie sent a message to the Doctor when she was infected before the Invasion, but he failed to come till 2 years later. Susan kept her TARDIS Key, thinking she could detect the TARDIS with it. After a failed attack on Dalek operations in North America, she realised the TARDIS had arrived. The Doctor was in a Dalek Saucer when it was hit by torpedoes and found unconscious, however Susan realised he could be revived inside the TARDIS and found her way there. She was able to fly a Dalek Saucer to America with a bomb, Alex and Lucie, hoping to stop the Invasion. However, Alex was killed by the Daleks after which Lucie Miller destroyed the Daleks by detonating the bomb, at the cost of her life. Susan and the Doctor were saved by the Meddling Monk, but the Doctor, upset at the deaths, left, leaving Susan to deal with her son's death alone. (AUDIO: Lucie Miller / To the Death)
After the second Dalek invasion, Susan moved into Coal Hill School, which had been left abandoned and converted into flats. She had been sent several urgent hypercubes from Gallifrey, asking for her to join the Last Great Time War. The Eighth Doctor tried to remove most of the hypercubes, creating a number of distractions for Susan while he did so. Susan was able to work out his distractions and worked out what was happening. She locked him out of her flat, read the message and decided to join the fight, believing that she could help the Time Lords to defeat the Daleks. Susan travelled to the front lines in a TARDIS sent to pick her up. (AUDIO: All Hands on Deck)
Fate
While the Ninth Doctor twice implied that his "whole family" had died, (TV: Father's Day, The Empty Child) the Tenth Doctor once said that he was unsure if she was alive, as he simply had not checked. (COMIC: The Forgotten) The Eleventh Doctor reaffirmed this and said that Susan was "lost", and that he hadn't looked for her. (COMIC: Dead Man's Hand) While masquerading as the Doctor (TV: Death in Heaven) after the revelation of Gallifrey's survival at the end of the Time War, (TV: The Day of the Doctor) Clara Oswald stated that all of his children and grandchildren were assumed dead. (TV: Death in Heaven)
Legacy
The name "Foreman. S." was recorded on the Roll of Honours Board, which listed both dead and missing staff and students, at the renovated Coal Hill Academy. (TV: For Tonight We Might Die)
The Doctor kept a portrait of Susan in his cottage. (COMIC: A Matter of Life and Death)
The Seventh Doctor told Ace that he thought about Susan everyday. (AUDIO: Nightshade)
The Twelfth Doctor kept a framed photograph of Susan on his desk in his study during the years he spent as a lecturer at St Luke's University, along with a picture of his late wife River Song. (TV: The Pilot)
Undated events
At some point, Susan was taken to the Black Archive by UNIT to have her record as a companion of the Doctor taken. Her memories of the visit were subsequently erased and she was sent on her way. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
The Doctor allowed Susan to borrow the TARDIS for a trip to Venus, but she instead landed on Skaro, where she had an encounter with the Daleks. (COMIC: The Message of Mystery)
Alternate timelines
In a timeline where the Doctor never left Gallifrey and became a reclusive writer, Susan had a family and grandchildren of her own before she rose to become President of Gallifrey. After her attempts to visit her grandfather helped him break free of Quences' influence, Susan encouraged him to leave Gallifrey and travel while she assumed her position as President. However, unwilling to travel alone, the Doctor used his Probability Generator to create a duplicate of Susan who did travel with him. When the generator eventually began to break down, the Susan it had created ceased to exist. The original Susan eventually caught up with the Doctor and her "counterpart" when the Doctor's attempts to help history created a timeline where Earth would be destroyed in the Elizabethan era, but after Susan's counterpart convinced her to help, she was able to arrange for the attackers to be drawn away from Earth while she began to travel with the Doctor herself, her duplicate given a final energy boost before returning to Gallifrey to tie up loose ends before she ceased to exist. (AUDIO: Auld Mortality, A Storm of Angels)
When the TARDIS was drawn to and destroyed on a world where time was in a constant state of flux, Susan became the last survivor of the crew when the Doctor, Ian and Barbara were devoured by the Xesto, creatures that consumed time and all other possible futures. She escaped the creatures for some time by hiding in a Zero Cabinet, but was eventually driven to such despair that she accepted death as she had nothing else to live for. However, the nature of "death" on this world meant that Susan was subsequently left trapped outside of time itself, allowing her to eventually make contact with the "spirit" of her grandfather after he was consumed by the Xesto. Although she failed to help her past self devise a plan to escape that world, the Doctor eventually convinced the two Susans to make contact, the resulting explosion caused by their violation of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect allowing the future Susan to reach back in time and help the Doctor avert the original crash. (AUDIO: Tick-Tock World)
Personality
Susan loved her grandfather, as he did her. She was fond of 20th century England, so she enrolled in school there. Despite the Doctor's warnings, she still endangered their secrets. Susan understood contemporary technology and was familiar with historical events, but knew very little about ordinary things, like money. Despite these gaps, however, she was still very intelligent, to the extent that teacher Ian suspected she was not only smarter than him but holding back on her knowledge so that her teachers didn't feel stupid. (TV: An Unearthly Child)
Susan considered the Doctor to be a "great man". (AUDIO: Domain of the Voord) The Doctor once commented that Susan was "very precious" to him. (AUDIO: Masters of Earth)
Her sheltered life on Gallifrey resulted in her being quick to show fear, either by screaming or calling for her grandfather. She quickly befriended Ian and Barbara but did not accept their claims the Doctor had intentionally damaged his own TARDIS. (TV: The Daleks)
She also seemed to have a sense of humour, having mentioned a liking of memes when visiting the Library of Alexandria (AUDIO: The Library of Alexandria), which could take a turn to the morbid side, as seen with her excitement regarding using burning skulls to chase some cavemen off. (TV: An Unearthly Child)
When the fast return switch was stuck, it was Susan who suffered the worst from its effects, possibly due to her having the highest level of psychic sensitivity. She very nearly killed Barbara and Ian. At first, she sided with her grandfather, blaming the teachers for the problems. However, she soon recognised their innocence. (TV: The Edge of Destruction)
On Marinus, Susan travelled ahead of the others and was frightened by the jungle and the screams that emanated from it. Despite her earlier truthfulness, the others did not take this seriously. (TV: The Keys of Marinus)
On 22nd century Earth, Susan developed a relationship with David Campbell. The Doctor recognised this and decided it was best to leave her behind so that she could live a normal life. Susan was reluctant, but the Doctor seemed to convince her it was for the best. (TV: The Dalek Invasion of Earth) She had a son Alex whom she loved dearly. (AUDIO: An Earthly Child et al.)
Behind the scenes
Origins
In reality, this character was originally to have been a princess saved from a planet which wasn't the same world as the Doctor came from.[1] Thereafter, she was envisioned as a fugitive from the Doctor's home planet. It was Anthony Coburn who altered the character so that Susan became the Doctor's granddaughter, instead of being a biologically unrelated female teenager travelling with an old man. (The Tribe of Gum (script), "Doctor Who – The Beginning")
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 the first episode of An Unearthly Child, contains no such reference.
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 February 2018, there has never been an indication given in any TV episode to suggest otherwise.
Susan and Melanie Bush are the only televised companions not to have an on-screen origin story.
Name
Susan's name would have originally been "Suzanne", while she was being conceived as an alien princess. [2]
According to the Brief Encounter story Roses, Susan's real name is the Gallifreyan word for "Rose". This allows a subtle connection between the first companions of the 1963 and 2005 versions of Doctor Who.
David Whitaker chose to change the character's name to Susan English for his novelisations, though it's unclear why he did so. The later unofficial novel Campaign reinstated this use in tribute, but all other novelisations and original novels have used the Susan Foreman name.
Other matters
- 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 each 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)
- Carole Ann Ford's hairstyle as Susan was created by famed stylist Vidal Sassoon.
External links
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