#I AM NORMAL ABOUT HER | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spif-lol · 3 months

Text

I am one of the many Doctor Who fans who has been hoping to see Susan back in the show, and gets excited every time there is any mention of her (like in Rings of Akhaten, The Pilot and the latest season). What The Legend of Ruby Sunday has finally made me realise however, is that it's not Susan herself that I'm obsessed with - but the idea of her. I love Carole Ann Ford and Susan has lots of moments in those early episodes that I adore - particularly in her first episodes and in the Sensorites - but mostly her character falls a little flat for me. The writing is too messy (as is it's right) and she often gets infantalised to a ridiculous degree, becoming the original dr who companion damsel in distress, spraining her ankle or given some other narrative reason for the group to separate for the plot to work. I love it when she gets moments to shine, and her weird alien teenage girl moments (she is so weird it's awesome), but more than that I realise that I am just obsessed with how the Doctor interacts with her and what she means to him.

Susan is a necessary character to humanize the First Doctor, a person who is otherwise pretty callous and unconcerned with anything except scientific discovery and his own safety and comfort (at least at first). The Doctor would never have even been on Earth and been discovered by humans if not for Susan's interest in the Earth and convincing him to let her attend school in London. Susan is the source of the Doctor's childlike wonder at the universe. When the Eleventh Doctor talks about needing another person with him to be able to See the beauty of it, I think of Susan. Because that is what she is to him! And more than that! The Doctor is tired and world weary in those early episodes, mentioning him and Susan being unable to go to their home planet, and while episodes since especially New Who have offered many other reasons for better or worse that the Doctor left Gallifrey and became a renegade, it's pretty clear that a major reason for it is simply Susan. I can see the First Doctor being able to put up with a lot of Time Lord empire bullshit for his own sake, but for Susan? Who, biological granddaughter or not, he cares for and wants to protect and provide joy for? He leaves Gallifrey for her. And shows her the wonders of the universe. And discovers that joy for himself, and meets people who help him change into a kinder and more just person, the Doctor we recognise who vows to respond to anything wrong in the universe and be there to help.

The only problem is, it quickly becomes obvious that in spite of Susan's childlike wonder, she doesn't enjoy travelling aimlessly without a place to call home besides the TARDIS. She loves the TARDIS and even named it! But that's not enough for her. She says that she wants to belong somewhere, and she is attached to the Earth. And the Doctor knows this, and it hurts him. He never imagined that it would be Susan of all people who would want to leave him first, even before Barbara and Ian get to go home. So when Susan finds love among the resistance fighters during the Dalek Invasion of Earth, he makes the incredibly presumptuous decision that Susan has to leave the TARDIS and stay with this man she's just met. He literally locks her out of the ship and gives her his famous goodbye speech over the monitor. He promises to come back to her, one day, and tries to ease her worries about him. He clearly cares for her but knows that she would never leave him for her own sake. So he makes the decision for her, and flies away without his granddaughter.

And Susan has haunted him ever since. In the First Doctor's era it is repeatedly explicit that he sees his granddaughter in the young girls who he ends up taking on the TARDIS with him. One must wonder whether Susan was in a similar situation to Vicki when he decided to take her with him, stranded and parentless and in danger. Dodo isn't in a situation that needs rescuing from, but simply wanders onto the TARDIS, and the Doctor marvels at her likeness to Susan. He dotes on these companions the way he did Susan, and after the Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve when his latest companion has seemingly left him for good he muses to himself in the TARDIS about how everyone leaves him and no one understands him 'not even Little Susan or Vicki' - lumping his surrogate granddaughter in with the real one while listing the rest of the companions separately (because he never expected those other humans to understand him).

The 2nd Doctors era is when it starts to get really interesting (to me), as the Doctor regenerates and reinvents himself as softer and sillier from the start. He has distanced himself from the First Doctor's callousness with two new companions who fill a similar role to Ian and Barbara, with the latest Susan (Dodo) having left when they joined. For the First Doctor it would've been time to take in another surrogate granddaughter, but instead we get Brand New Companion Archetype Jamie McCrimmon - a historical companion who learns about the world from the Doctor and fights to protect him and quickly becomes the Doctor's best friend. The Second Doctor's TARDIS teams are oddly domestic, with a lot of emphasis on what it's like living on the TARDIS, sleeping, eating, Jamie and the Doctor bickering like an old married couple, all in a very different tone to the eeriness of the earlier TARDIS teams who almost always got accidentally kidnapped on the TARDIS and see it as a place to transport them back to their own time. Jamie is the first companion that has no intention to leave the Doctor, and is seemingly content with the wandering life he leads. Then they meet another teenage girl, whose father invented time travel, accidentally summoned Daleks and got murdered and left her stranded on Skaro, with the only option for safety being going with the Doctor and Jamie. Poor Victoria. She does love the Doctor and works quite well as a companion. They go to great lengths to look after her, protect her, keep her comfortable. But like the original Susan, she gets tired and scared and wants to belong somewhere. When a family offers to take her in Jamie argues with her that she belongs with them but the Doctor tells her that it is Her decision and hers alone, already accepting that she is going to leave him. And she does. Not long after they meet Zoe, who I have lately come to think of as The Ultimate Susan. She is a child genius, who the Doctor is very paternal and protective of, but who is as smart as him and often able to do things he can't (similar to Susan). She's brave and a thrill seeker and knows martial arts and can match the Doctor in wits and she finds the same joy in dangerous mysterious creatures and planets as the Doctor does (much to Jamie's chagrin, as they egg each other on). With her and Jamie he finally has not just temporary travelling companions, but family, people who want to stay.

And they would've stayed forever. Except the Doctor reached a point where he couldn't escape the Time Lord's anymore, and Jamie and Zoe got caught up in the consequences of his defiance of their ways. If you haven't watched the War Games I am begging you please watch it it is the best Doctor Who finale of all time and it is also heartbreaking. About halfway through the Doctor realises what is coming and spends the rest of the story trying to soften the blow. Trying to convince Jamie and Zoe to leave him, to stay behind. But they don't understand, they're treating it as if it is any normal adventure and they can make a quick escape. They get taken with him to Gallifrey, and do everything they can to get to stay with the Doctor, but the Time Lords send them home. Once they have bid the Doctor farewell, the Time Lords reveal that they are removing Jamie and Zoe's memories of everything but their first meeting with him. It is devastating. Even if the Doctor could somehow find his way back to them things would never be the same. In any case the Doctor is exiled to Earth and his own memory robbed of how to fly the TARDIS.

After this the Susan analogues stop, though there are companions who resemble one facet of her or another. He has a protective, almost paternal relationship with Jo Grant. He travels with another Gallifreyan who is as smart as him but less experience in Romana. As the Fifth Doctor he suddenly becomes Team Dad to three young people who've lost parents and family and planets, but he is detached from them in a way that One and Two never were. He is very professional with them, not really equipped to be family to them. And in a lot of ways he fails them - Adric dies, Nyssa gets sick and stays behind to fix a broken medical system, Tegan is traumatised by all the death and violence and loss. It's interesting to me that it is in the Fifth Doctor's era that we have the only onscreen reunion with Susan, in the anniversary special The Five Doctors. He is clearly very happy to see her, but again there's that distance. She follows him devotedly until she sprains her ankle (which is still hilarious and such a terrible thing to do to that character again). She gets to stay behind safe in the TARDIS with Turlough of all people until the denouement and then she has to say goodbye and go back to her own time. There's a lot going on in that episode - including Two being taunted by spectres of Jamie and Zoe :( - so I can't blame them for not doing a proper reunion between the Doctor and Susan, but it does feel like a missed opportunity. For a brief moment in that episode grandfather and granddaughter are reunited and everything is right with the universe.

The Doctor's relationships with companions get more complicated from there on out. He strangles Peri in a crazed post regenerative state - another young girl with family problems he accidentally takes along with him. He has a very lighthearted relationship with Mel, who leaves him to travel with an amoral smuggle piloting a grocery store which is also a ship which is also a planet in space. Very cool. There is Ace, who is the closest the Classic Doctors has to a paternal relationship since Zoe or maybe Leela, but him and Ace have something way more tense going on. She's a chess piece in an ancient struggle between the Doctor and another powerful being have going on. He takes her to places that evoke her worst memories to try to - test her? Strengthen her? Learn more about her? Anyway, they have more of a student teacher thing going on, than granddaughter grandfather.

Most of the stuff we know about Susan's life after leaving the First Doctor is noncanonical to extracanonical at best. She has kids with the man the Doctor left her with. She (maybe) outlives them. She gets kidnapped by the Roger Delgado Master and turns his own weapons on him, burning him to a crisp just in time for his meeting with the Fourth Doctor in The Deadly Assassin. She has a very sweet reunion scene with the Eighth Doctor in an audio I don't remember and need to listen to more of. She gets recalled to Gallifrey and fights in the Time War. Susan is just the name she picked, her birth name was Arkytior (which translates to Rose). She (supposedly) dies or is lost in the Time War when the Doctor is forced to obliterate his own people to stop them and the Daleks from tearing apart the universe in their battle for power across time.

Susan haunts New Who a little bit, much in the same way the other Time Lord companions do. The Doctor is the Last of the Time Lords, the Lonely God. What happened to Romana, Susan, the Rani, the Monk, any of them? The Master manages to escape unscathed to return and menace the Doctor, surprising no one. The Doctor mentions to companions in his most vulnerable moments that he's been a father before, that he didn't just lose his people but his own family to the Time War. When a daughter is made from his DNA in the aptly named The Doctor's Daughter, he is horrified by her, a Time Lord who has never been to Gallifrey, doesn't know the history or the weight of any of it - in stark contrast to Susan, who is the source of description of Gallifrey and the reason New Who depicts it with a sky burnt orange. When the Time Lords appear in the End of Time a mysterious older woman appears to Wilf as a guardian of sorts for the Doctor - we never find out who she was meant to be but perhaps she was someone close to the Doctor, his mother, Romana, even Susan?

There are only three explicit references to Susan in New Who before Ncuti's era, and all of them are very surface level. Eleven references visiting an alien bazaar with his granddaughter 'a long time ago', we get a glimpse of her on Gallifrey in the Doctor's timestream as Clara witnesses them about to steal a TARDIS, and Twelve has a picture of Susan on his desk next to one of River, and gives it a meaningful glance when Bill asks him why he singled her out of his university class. This implies that Bill reminds him of Susan, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and she does fill a Susan role in a lot of ways, but she is more like an Ace than anything, embodying that complex mixture of student and best friend like she did. They have a bit of fun that season with the Susan parallels, with Bill introducing the Doctor to her housemates as her grandfather to avoid awkward questions, the Doctor going back in time to get pictures of Bill's mum for her, plus there's the whole meta plot of the Doctor living on Earth and spending time in a school the way Susan wanted to all those years ago. Bill becomes like family to him, and even meets the First Doctor (as a memory) in Twelve's final outing. She represents the wonder at the universe and kindness and curiosity that keeps the Doctor going. Thirteen channels that energy into her attempt at a fresh start and a new family in her era, whilst being simultaneously detached and repressed from everything. I know a lot of people expected the Solitract to turn into Susan in It Takes You Away (I am personally partial to the frog), and multiple grandparent grandchildren relationships are very relevant in her era (Graham and Ryan, Yaz and her nani). Lots of emotional growth for the people around her, but she's very cut off from any of it, until the Timeless Children has her rethink her own history and reveals a new family member from her past who we eventually meet in Flux! She ends her era surrounded by companions who have pondered their own history with her, and made a lot of peace with it. Then the Fourteenth Doctor revisits a companion from his past and meets her daughter!! Who is also part time lord, and full of that same wonder and cleverness and he immediately becomes protective and paternal towards her, even dubbing her his niece and implied to go on trips in the TARDIS offscreen with her. She is our first ever companion legacy character (alongside Kate, who almost counts but not quite though the Doctor does also have a nice relationship with her), and the Doctor settles down and treats her and Donna's family as his own. I want to see more of her! I wish the Doctor would travel with her onscreen! She's the closest to a Susan we have in New Who and I love her dearly.

And now the new season is talking about Susan, and the Doctor's family, more than ever before. The Doctor travels to the 1960s and talks about how his granddaughter is somewhere out there, multiple episodes lend relevance to parenthood and family, and (spoilers) the latest episode treats it as a major plot point that the Doctor thinks the Mysterious Entity/Villain of the week UNIT is investigating is in fact his granddaughter Susan (for some reason). The search for his companion's mum is contrasted with the potential return of the Doctor's granddaughter, and it briefly mentions the fact the Doctor abandoned her back in the day, vowed to return to her, and in fact never did. Almost none of his companions even KNOW he ever had children, let alone a granddaughter. It feels like we are being set up for a Susan return, and I am loving the fact that she is being explicitly discussed now that the Doctor is capable in being vulnerable in a way that he has never been since the earliest of Classic Who.

All of this to say that I will be happy to see Susan again if she returns, but I will always be enamored with her as a character and how essential she is to who the Doctor is forever. His ties to Earth, his sense of justice, his ability to see the wonder of the universe - it all comes back to her.

#doctor who #doctor who spoilers #susan foreman #i am normal about her

15 notes · View notes