The Susan Diaries (short story)

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The Susan Diaries was a two-part short story published in the It's the end, but... column of Doctor Who Magazine in 2002. A parodical account of Susan's life after The Dalek Invasion of Earth [+]Loading...["The Dalek Invasion of Earth (TV story)"], it showed her as resentful and vengeful towards the Doctor for abandoning her as well as retroactively placing her at the forefront of several later television stories.

The story is notable as one of the very few to address Susan's potential ability to regenerate and the first to actually depict incarnations of Susan other than the one played by Carole Ann Ford. In fact, The Susan Diaries features no fewer than ten different versions of the titular Gallifreyan with many of these being established guest characters retconned with this alternative identity.

Summary[[edit] | [edit source]]

Part One[[edit] | [edit source]]

Demolition workers assigned to clear the cellar of a Shoreditch secondary school in the 1990s discover a book about the French Revolution filled with corrections and rude words in the margins. They also find stuffed in its pages a large collection of notes produced in several different formats including handwritten, typed, printed and quasi-holo-daguerrotyped. The latter being a process as yet unknown on Earth, the workers' astonishment continues to mount as they read what they found.

On 26 December 2164, Susan expresses her disbelief that her grandfather has dematerialised without her after "his senile old brain" came to the conclusion that she fancied David, whom she terms a "mindless sporran-basher with an even stupider accent than Yartek". Susan resolves to punch the Doctor very hard if she ever sees him again, though admits the possibility is unlikely given she has been stranded on a third-rate planet.

On 25 November 2183, Susan writes that Mr Tyler came round to help with the babysitting as David was at a another meeting. Later, she is kidnapped by a flying triangle while out shopping. She returns to London the next day with her memory of the previous twenty-four hours wiped. Susan angrily suspects the Doctor's involvement.

David dies on 10 April 2213, with Tyler moving in with Susan soon afterwards although she knows he won't last much longer either. On 6 February 2221, Susan regenerates into a new form.

Finding Earth boring by 2279, Susan decides to do a bit of contract space-piloting. With the pay "lousy" in her opinion, she begins "raking it in" with an extra-cirricular business. All is well until 19 February 2281, when Susan reports that Dymond has crashed his ship into the Empress resulting in the downfall of their entire Vrax ring. Having heard from others that the person who foiled Dymond and Tryst was named the Doctor, Susan calls her grandfather a dead man.

Susan regenerates again by 27 May the same year in order to recover from Vrax withdrawal. She attends a rehabilitation clinic where she meets a nice scientist. The two wed due to what Susan calls "a slight indiscretion", with Susan giving birth to twins on 2 January 2282. Six years later, Susan is unimpressed by the twins requesting a computer for their birthday, referring to them as "mathematical little toads".

In 2294, Susan is overjoyed to learn that someone has kidnapped her boys. Knowing of the "silly cow" at Space Control, she is satisfied that she will never see them again but calls up while impersonating the President just to make sure. Susan orders Space Control to call off the rescue ships and orders a crate of champagne for herself in celebration. However, the Doctor returns the twins home a week later while Susan is out, causing her to vow to murder him if she ever lays eyes on him again.

Susan regenerates for a second time in 2476 and enters into politics, noting the good money. In 2537, she is elected Earth President. Armed with a "cushy" job, lots of power and "a rather dishy general" for a chief adviser, Susan reflects that she is well-placed to make her grandfather suffer should their paths cross again. She is pleased, therefore, on 5 May 2540 when he is dragged before her and accused of working for the Dragons. Susan sends him away on the next shuttle to the moon, celebrating her victory by getting "hammered".

The Doctor reappears in Susan's office a week later on 12 May, almost causing her a hearts attack. With the presence of the Dragon prince and the already-perilous political situation with them preventing her from enacting a revenge she feels just, Susan sends her grandfather off on a dangerous mission in search of a planet. To ensure its failure, she contacts the Daleks to inform them of the co-ordinates as soon as the Doctor's party sets off.

Part Two[[edit] | [edit source]]

The incarnation of Susan who worked as a secretary.

By 2701, Susan has once more become fed up with Earth and relocates to a new mining planet. On 20 September 2841, she bags a job as a secretary to a big mining tycoon. By 2850, Susan believes "Morgy" to be on his way out, with Susan herself being responsible for telling the Praesidium he was the one who murdered the President. She regenerates again to cover her tracks, subsequently returning to Earth and buying her way into the Galactic Federation with the Spectrox profits.

Having used her wealth to be become the Earth delegate to new Federation planets, Susan visits Peladon in 3049 and is annoyed to find everyone talking about the Doctor, whom she apparently just missed. With King Pel saddened over a recent rejection, Susan spends the rest of the trip "cheer[ing] him up" which she considers to be a "duty" of her position. Later, on 29 March 3050, Susan gives birth to a girl, sending the "little brat" back to Peladon.

Regenerating again in 4598 and embarrassed at the ugliness of her new incarnation, Susan leaves Earth once more to live inconspicuously as a medical student on Necros. She becomes displeased that everyone makes fun of her as well as the fact that her head of department falsely believes she fancies him, with Susan angrily pointing out in her notes that she may be old but is not blind. All turns out well, however, as she is blasted by a group of Daleks in 5000, forcing another regeneration.

In her new incarnation, Susan is, in fact, blind. She spends a few months on Deva Loka during which time she encounters her grandfather again. Susan revels in calling him an idiot but bemoans that her blindness prevents her from hitting him with her big stick. After the Doctor leaves, Susan convinces some colonists to return to Earth and stows away with them.

Susan regains her eyesight with another regeneration in 5226, only to discover that Earth is about to be hit by bombardments of solar flares. She resolves to leave, waking up millennia later in 27593 on Nerva. Vira puts a bag of jelly babies under her nose and informs her of Noah's death, which Susan is happy will negate the chances of Vira finding out how she secured her place on the Ark. Later, she patches a communicator through to Sontar and suggests to a Field-Major that Earth is currently ripe for invasion. Four days later, Susan volunteers to be the first person to return to Earth after Nerva's crew fixes the transmat, musing as it activates that she hopes her idiot grandfather remembered to stabilise the temporal circuits.

The Doctor, evidently, did not as Susan appears in 16th century Italy, prompting her to reiterate her intentions to kill him. She poses for a "poncey" artist who paints her picture seven times before emigrating to Spain whereupon she is kidnapped by a bunch of "immortal weirdos" who fly sailing ships around the galaxy. Acting on information that the Doctor is aboard another ship, Susan voluntarily transfers from her ship to Captain Striker's but later learns the Doctor went back to Captain Wrack's ship on the very same ferry she had taken. Lamenting the fact she has been stranded on an Edwardian vessel, Susan is transported to 1906 England with the rest of the crew once the affair is over.

Deciding it's time to get in with the rich crowd again, Susan regenerates into a young girl and gets herself adopted by a rich imperialist who owns half of India. Her adoptive father promises to take her there someday, a promise which is finally fulfilled on 2 May 1926 when their voyage begins. Susan encounters an officer aboard the ship on the first day whom she quickly judges to be a "tedious microbe". Around a month into the journey, on 4 June, the Doctor re-enters Susan's life but she becomes increasingly fustrated that every time she gets an opportunity to strangle him they get caught in a time loop. She reflects the universe must hate her, albeit not as much as she hates him.

Susan returns to England in 1940 and regenerates again into the body of a young girl, and finds her hatred for her grandfather even stronger in this new form. The following year, she is knocked out during an air raid. The eleven-year-old wakes up in hospital with no memory of her identity. The nurses offer her no clues, nor does the diary on her person which she cannot make sense of. She dismisses its contents as fiction, possibly a story she was writing for her teacher at school.

Her bout of amnesia long since past her, the young woman once known as Susan graduates from university in the summer of 1958 and starts working as a history teacher in London in September of that year. She returns to her make-believe diary to record this achievement, also noting that she has agreed to meet the science master in the basement at morning break, calling him "a bit of a dish".

Characters[[edit] | [edit source]]

Worldbuilding[[edit] | [edit source]]

Notes[[edit] | [edit source]]

  • The Susan Diaries was originally published in a fanzine prior to its appearance in Doctor Who Magazine. Nicholas Pegg had made reference to its existence in his column in DWM 303 a couple of years before this, leading to "quite a few requests" from readers to reprint it.
  • This story gives Susan at least four children: an unspecified number with David Campbell, plus Thalira and Romulus and Remus Sylvest. While the comedic stories Doctor Who? 136 [+]Loading...["Doctor Who? (DWM 136 comic story)"] and Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? [+]Loading...["Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? (audio story)"] had previously depicted her with biological children, the novel Legacy of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Legacy of the Daleks (novel)"] had stated that Susan had failed to give David any children with the couple adopting three orphans. In 2009, the Big Finish story An Earthly Child [+]Loading...["An Earthly Child (audio story)"] introduced Alex Campbell as Susan's biological child, with Alex reappearing several times since.
  • The introduction to part two compares the authenticity of Susan's journal to that of Hitler Diaries while the last line of the column jokingly teases that The Secret Diary of Adric, aged 13 is forthcoming in the next issue.
  • This story dates the final scene of The Dalek Invasion of Earth [+]Loading...["The Dalek Invasion of Earth (TV story)"] to 26 December 2164, exactly two hundred years after its real world first broadcast. Furthermore, Susan is kidnapped and taken to the Death Zone on 25 November, the date that The Five Doctors [+]Loading...["The Five Doctors (TV story)"] was transmitted in the United Kingdom.
  • The framing device of a humorous secret diary would appear in numerous Doctor Who Magazine fictions following this one, namely The Secret Diary of the Master [+]Loading...["The Secret Diary of the Master (short story)"] and entries in the series The Blogs of Doom. In many ways, The Susan Diaries is played more straight than these later stories, never contradicting details of the original television stories it reveals the secret undersides of.

Continuity[[edit] | [edit source]]

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