Profiles Susan Foreman by Tony J Fyler

She was the original Unearthly Child – the first key, the first curiosity that led two teachers to a junkyard in Totter’s Lane and led us on a journey into time and space. As such it’s perhaps fitting that we still, several decades later, know very little about Susan Foreman as a character.

Certainly of course, Foreman’s not her name. Whether Susan ever was her name before she and her grandfather arrived in London in 1963 seems dubious in the extreme. But just like ‘the Doctor’, it’s a name she appears to have chosen, and by which she’s identified during the whole of the life we see and hear her lead.

Susan, in common with all the original Tardis team, goes on a journey through her time in our eye. When we meet her, she’s agreeably odd and quirky, and according to the story we’re initially fed about the Doctor and his granddaughter, they are ‘exiles,’ cut off from their own planet and people for reasons they’re not keen to share. But it’s Susan, as much as Ian and Barbara, who first forces the Doctor’s hand, with an immature, foot-stamping ultimatum – she’d rather leave the Tardis and him than the 1960s and the teachers who’ve become embroiled in their remarkable reality. The ultimate teenager, the proto-adult, stuck between being protected by humans who are in so many ways more clueless than she is, and being protected by her grandfather, who is clever, but sometimes needs to be reminded to be kind, Susan exists in a kind of awkward limbo – she’s bright, precocious, highly skilled in some areas, and at least has a fairly strong telepathic propensity, meaning she regularly reminds us that she’s not quite what she seems to be, not quite the gawky earthly child she looks like, but so much more, while at the same time going through a kind of Time Lord puberty, never sure of where she belongs if not by the side of her grandfather.

It’s a loyalty of course that becomes co-dependence – they’ve been through so much together, both before we meet them and afterwards, that the thought of leaving him to go on alone without her, without the last prop of his life on their home planet, is almost literally unthinkable, at the expense of her own happiness. By the time her grandfather shuts the doors on her, it’s a complete reversal of her first on-screen temper tantrum. Rather than leaving the Tardis and him rather than get a thing she wants (the kind treatment of the Coal Hill teachers), it’s her grandfather who has to do the difficult thing, because he knows by then that she never will – she’ll help him with every breath that’s in her, and at the expense of her own happiness, which he can see lies with a very earthly man. She cries to get back in, to be allowed to help him again, like she always has since they fled their homeworld. But he knows what she can see but can’t allow herself to feel: she’s grown up enough to deserve her own adventures now, and they begin in the eyes of a new man, not an old one.

Susan Foreman is very often the oddest of glue that keeps the initial Tardis team together – she’s an alien as mysterious to the teachers as her grandfather is, with a shared history, and the shared if imperfect, growing knowledge of science and history which brings those teachers to her home in the first place. But she, far more than the Doctor, is actually fond of human beings, she’s the one who forces him to get to know them, to try, against his high-minded and haughty instincts, to care about them as individuals, rather than as players in a drama of history and exploration. What started in a junkyard becomes a grand spirit of adventure, the Doctor eventually says. The reason it does anything of the sort is Susan Foreman.