Susan Foreman
From WhoniverseWiki
| Susan[1] Foreman[2] | |
|---|---|
| Character | |
| Companion of | The First Doctor |
| Created by | Verity Lambert (Producer) |
| Played by | Carole Ann Ford |
| Gender | Female |
| Species | Gallifreyan |
| First Appearance | An Unearthly Child |
| Native Place | Gallifrey |
| Native Time | The Gallifreyan Old Time[3] |
| Alias | Susan Campbell[4], Susan Chesterton[5] |
| Occupation | 22nd Century Peacekeeper; Time Traveller |
| Member of | The Peacekeepers |
| Known Friends | John Brent, Gillian Roberts[6], Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright |
| Known Enemies | The Daleks, various enemies of the Doctor |
| Known Relatives | The Doctor (grandfather),[7] The Other (grandfather)[8], David Campbell (husband)[9], Patience (possible Grandmother)[10] |
| Base of Operations | A stolen TARDIS[11], formerly 22nd Century London[12] and the Doctor's TARDIS |
This article is about the granddaughter of the First Doctor. The granddaughter of the Doctor in the Dalek Movies can be found under Susan Who.
Contents |
Description
Susan Foreman is the Doctor's Granddaughter. She likes 20th Century Earth. Whilst on Earth in 1963 she became a fan of pop group John Smith and the Common Men.[13] She was surprised and horrified at the concept of forced marriage when she first came across it.[14]
She normally has an enormous appetite and is scared of rats[15]
Whilst she lived in 1963, Susan kept a diary.[16] She loved the works of William Blake.[17]
She enjoys walking in the dark, because it is mysterious.[18]
Abilities
Susan can read very fast, is a brilliant scientist compared to people from 1963 and can calculate things in five dimensions.[19] However, she still hasn't learnt four-dimensional physics[20] and cannot pilot the TARDIS.[21]
Susan has extensive latent telepathic abilities[22] and two hearts[23]. She can regenerate[24], and has been taught by the Doctor how to place herself in a recuperative coma[25].
Susan ages much more slowly than human beings, and is not able to have children with David.[26] She cannot get drunk unless she chooses to.[27]
Susan never wears a watch, and appears to be able to sense the passing of time instinctively.[28]
Susan is one of the few companions of the Doctor who have been able to persuade the TARDIS to reconfigure items of its internal architecture for her.[29]
History
Note: Like many recurring characters, we do not know the precise order in which Susan experienced all her adventures. Placement of some stories in the timeline and the history section is speculative.
Early Life
Susan has a number of holes in her memory, especially concerning her origins.[32]
She may have been the granddaughter of Patience and the Morbius Doctor, who was apparently taken to safety by the first Doctor soon after she was born.[33]
Susan grew up during the time of Rassilon as the granddaughter of The Other. She was born at the moment when the Pythia's Curse made Gallifreyans barren. Her mother died giving birth to her and her father died piloting a Bow-ship. When her grandfather threw himself into the Loom, she was forced to live on the streets and sold books to survive. One year to the day afterwards, she met the first Doctor. Believing him to be her grandfather, she joined him in his travels through space and time.[34]
During this period, she may have coined the word "TARDIS" from the initials "Time And Relative Dimension In Space"[35]
Early Travels
Susan's first encounter with humanity took place on the colony world of Iwa. The TARDIS landed on the colony world whilst it was being threatened by an alien species referred to as the Foxes. During their brief stay on the planet, Susan was given the name Susan by one of the colonists.[36]
At some point during their travels, the Doctor and Susan visited Venus at least once. They became friends with the philosopher Jilet Mrak-ecado of the clan Poroghini. They also saw the planet's metal seas.[37]
The Doctor and Susan's first visit to Earth took place during the era of the French Revolution. During this visit, they escaped from a Parisian military post using explosives from an artillery shell that had accidentally been left in a dark corner of the building.[38]
Susan made a number of other visits to Earth during these early travels. It is impossible to place these events in their proper order, but they include meeting Archimedes[39], Harry Houdini[40] and visiting Rome, Antioch, and Jerusalem.[41] They were once caught in a Zeppelin raid.[42]
They also visited Jabalhabad, India, in 1843, whilst they were touring India by elephant. They met Siger Holmes in the Officers' Mess at the British Army cantonment there.[43]. On a visit to Tudor England they met Henry VIII, who put them in the Tower of London after the Doctor threw a parson's nose at him.[44]
At some point during their travels, Susan gave the Doctor a birthday card.[45]
Towards the end of this period, the TARDIS materialised in 1996, where it took the form of a pillar box.[46] It also visited Quinnis in the Fourth Universe[47] and the planet Olleril.[48]
Coal Hill
The Doctor and Susan arrived on Earth in late November 1962, materialising in Foreman's Yard. Susan didn't want to stand out whilst they were trapped on Earth, and decided to enrol in a school. The Doctor forged records for her, and obtained an Eleven Plus exam paper, which she failed because she tried to argue with the questions. Because of this, the Doctor made her attend a Secondary Modern School (Coal Hill) instead of a Grammar School.[49]
Whilst in 1963, Susan forced the Doctor to take her to the theatre.[50]
Susan made friends with John Brent and Gillian Roberts whilst at school. In April 1963, Susan and the Doctor encountered a being called The Cold, which threatened to destroy humanity. Susan's friendship with John and Gillian led her to urge the Doctor to help humanity defeat it, his first deliberate intervention in history. However, Susan had to reveal her alien nature to her friends, losing them in the process.[51]
At the end of this stay on Earth, Susan would describe this period as "the happiest five months of my life", even though she never realised that the UK had yet to implement decimal coinage. Her teachers believed her to be 15 at the end of this period.[52]
Further Travels
Towards the end of 1963, two of Susan's teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright got curious about Susan and followed her home. Investigating the junkyard, they encountered the Doctor and, hearing her voice from inside a police box, assumed that he had locked her in there. They forced their way in, only to find themselves inside the TARDIS. The Doctor reacted to their intrusion by setting the TARDIS on a journey, effectively kidnapping the two teachers.[53]
The Doctor and Susan soon came to trust their two new travelling companions, after dangerous encounters with a tribe of cavemen and the Daleks. After these two adventures, the TARDIS's Fast Return Switch got stuck. In order to warn its crew of impending danger, the ship tried using its telepathic field to send a message to the crew, affecting their behaviour towards each other. After these events, the travellers became firm friends.[54]
The travellers enjoyed a number of adventures together, as the Doctor tried to return Ian and Barbara home. These included spending several months travelling with Marco Polo, being trapped on the colony world Avalon, where nanobots had created a society where magic worked, a quest to find the keys to the Conscience of Marinus, and a trip to the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, where Barbara was proclaimed a goddess, and Susan was almost forced to marry an Aztec.[55]
They continued travelling, visiting the Sense Sphere, where Susan's telepathic abilities enabled her to communicate very well with the telepathic Sensorites and Revolutionary France again. They also spent some time in 1st Century Judea, where Ian and Barbara were trapped inside the beseiged town of Masada. After this, they travelled to the city of Arkhaven on the planet Sarath. The planet was about to be rendered uninhabitable, but some of its inhabitants were due to escape in a giant rocket. During their time there, the planet's official Church created an android duplicate of Susan. The duplicate contained many of Susan's memories, and was able to successfully pilot the rocket to a new home for the surviving refugees. They also spent some time in the town of Salem, where Susan's telepathic abilities unwittingly intensified the hysteria surrounding that town's infamous Witch Trials. Susan spent two weeks being forced to live with Reverend Parris and his daughter during this period before the Doctor rescued her.[56]
The TARDIS subsequently got back to Ian and Barbara's time, but the crew were shrunk to a miniscule size. The TARDIS then arrived in an alternative version of Earth's future, and the Doctor shut down some time travel experiments. However, he believed that his actions might draw the attention of his own people, and resolved to leave Susan somewhere she would be safe from them. This happened when the TARDIS materialised on 22nd Century Earth. The planet had been occupied by the Daleks, and the Doctor foiled the invaders' plans to turn Earth into a giant spaceship. During these events, Susan fell in love with a freedom fighter named David Campbell. The Doctor deliberately locked Susan out of the TARDIS so that she would be able to marry David without feeling that she ought to stay with him.[57]
Married Life
Susan's marriage to David lasted for 32 years. The couple were unable to have children, but adopted a number of war orphans. David and Susan both joined the Peacekeepers, an organisation dedicated to clearing up after the Daleks and keeping everybody else safe from the things they left behind. Susan did not age physically, but as the years passed, she used make up, wigs, and the like to disguise the fact.[58]
At some point, Susan was taken by the Time Scoop to play the Game of Rassilon alongside four incarnations of her grandfather.[59]
Susan's marriage ended at the same time her grandfather, now in his eighth body, returned to see her. Susan, David, and the Doctor were caught up in a power struggle in post-Dalek England. The Master was supplying one side in the conflict with weapons from a Dalek factory that had been left behind. Susan only met up with the Doctor in a final confrontation with the Master, who callously killed David, taking Susan captive in his TARDIS. Susan, enraged at this, used his TARDIS's telepathic circuits to attack him. This forced him to regenerate, although his new form was malformed. Susan then stole his TARDIS, leaving him stranded on the planet Tersurus.[60]
References
- ↑ Lungbarrow suggests that this is her real name, but Frayed suggests otherwise.
- ↑ Foreman is almost certainly a false name taken from Foreman's Yard
- ↑ According to Lungbarrow, although Cold Fusion suggests that she is from a more recent era of Gallifreyan history
- ↑ She adopts this name after The Dalek Invasion of Earth, as seen in Legacy of the Daleks
- ↑ She adapts this alias in The Witch Hunters
- ↑ John and Gillian are seen in Time and Relative
- ↑ This is first established in An Unearthly Child. However, Lungbarrow lays out a slightly more complicated relationship between them, and in The Empire of Glass, the Doctor hints that the term doesn't strictly apply to beings like him and Susan.
- ↑ According to Lungbarrow
- ↑ According to Legacy of the Daleks
- ↑ Pages 96 and 172 of Cold Fusion hint at this relationship
- ↑ Following Legacy of the Daleks
- ↑ Between The Dalek Invasion of Earth amnd Legacy of the Daleks
- ↑ As seen in the first episode of An Unearthly Child
- ↑ As seen in Marco Polo and The Aztecs
- ↑ As seen in The Reign of Terror
- ↑ Time and Relative consists of extracts from that diary.
- ↑ Or so the Doctor says when he meets Blake in The Pit
- ↑ This is the reason she gives for declining a lift home with Ian and Barbara in the first episode of An Unearthly Child
- ↑ As seen in An Unearthly Child
- ↑ In The Witch Hunters, the Doctor says that she might learn about it when she's older
- ↑ The Doctor says this in The Witch Hunters
- ↑ As seen in The Sensorites, The Witch Hunters, and Legacy of the Daleks
- ↑ Time and Relative and City at World's End
- ↑ This is stated in City at World's End and Time and Relative
- ↑ City at World's End
- ↑ According to the Doctor in Venusian Lullaby, and confirmed in Legacy of the Daleks
- ↑ She says this in The Sorcerer's Apprentice
- ↑ As seen in The Time Travellers.
- ↑ According to the Doctor in Legacy
- ↑ This story's place in the list is somewhat arbitrary
- ↑ It is unclear whether this is before or after Legacy of the Daleks
- ↑ According to Time and Relative
- ↑ As seen in flashbacks on pages 96 and 172 of Cold Fusion. However, it is not explicitly established that the child is Susan.
- ↑ All this is from the Doctor's memories in Lungbarrow. The details of her birth and her parents are not seen in the flashback, so it is possible that the Other lied about her parents.
- ↑ She claims to have coined the word in the first episode of An Unearthly Child. Given that we see Time Lords other than Susan and the Doctor use the word later in the series, it seems most likely that this happened when she was living in ancient Gallifrey
- ↑ This trip is seen in Frayed. It is implied that Susan acquires her name during these events. However, the Other called her Susan in Lungbarrow, which is clearly before this story. It is also clear that this is her first encounter with monsters such as the Foxes.
- ↑ Susan mentions the metal seas in Marco Polo. The rest is mentioned in Venusian Lullaby
- ↑ This is mentioned in An Unearthly Child - Susan comments that something in a book about the French Revolution isn't right, The Reign of Terror, and Nightshade. The Doctor describes these events in Christmas on a Rational Planet.
- ↑ According to City at World's End
- ↑ According to The Sensorites
- ↑ As mentioned in Byzantium!
- ↑ As mentioned in Planet of Giants
- ↑ This is mentioned in All Consuming Fire
- ↑ As mentioned in The Sensorites. Although in Tragedy Day, the Seventh Doctor claims that he has never met Henry.
- ↑ The card is seen in Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible and Vampire Science
- ↑ The Little Things (Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury).
- ↑ As mentioned inThe Edge of Destruction and 64 Carlyle Street (More Short Trips)
- ↑ As mentioned in the flashback in Tragedy Day
- ↑ This was five months before Time and Relative. She is still at Coal Hill by the time of An Unearthly Child.
- ↑ According to Ash (Short Trips: A Universe of Terrors)
- ↑ As seen in Time and Relative
- ↑ These facts are established in the first episode of An Unearthly Child
- ↑ An Unearthly Child
- ↑ An Unearthly Child, The Daleks, and The Edge of Destruction respectively.
- ↑ Marco Polo, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, The Keys of Marinus, and The Aztecs respectively
- ↑ The Sensorites, The Reign of Terror, The Last Days (Short Trips), City at World's End, and The Witch Hunters respectively.
- ↑ Planet of the Giants, The Time Travellers, and The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
- ↑ As seen in Legacy of the Daleks
- ↑ As seen in The Five Doctors. Susan appears to have aged since she left the Doctor, so she could have been taken from when she was married to David and made up to look older, or she could have been taken from a period after she left 22nd Century earth. Either way, she makes no mention of this adventure during Legacy of the Daleks.
- ↑ As seen in Legacy of the Daleks
