Desperately Tweaking Susan

 By Danny Nicol

University of Westminster

The first episode of Doctor Who, “An Unearthly Child” (1963), is considered by many to be the finest in the programme’s long history.  It introduces us to the Doctor and TARDIS through the intermediary of the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan Foreman.   Susan attends a London secondary school.  Her teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, are mystified by her scientific and historical knowledge as well as by the gaps in her knowledge.  On a pretext they try to visit her home, only to stumble into the TARDIS and be whisked away through time and space - with scant hope of return since the TARDIS is erratic.  Before this, however, Susan reveals that she and her grandfather are from another time and world.  Tulloch and Alvarado have analysed how the episode skilfully presents Susan as “familiar but different”. (1)

The Doctor kidnaps Susan

A popular narrative is that, in “An Unearthly Child”, the Doctor kidnaps Ian and Barbara in order to preserve the secret of his and Susan’s scientific advances.  A close reading of the script however indicates that his prime objective is actually to stop his granddaughter from leaving him:

SUSAN: I want to stay!  But they’re both kind people.  Why won’t you trust them?  All you’ve got to do is ask them to promise to keep our secret quiet.

DOCTOR: It’s out of the question.

SUSAN: I won’t go, Grandfather.  I won’t leave the twentieth century.  I’d rather leave the TARDIS and you.

DOCTOR: Now you’re being sentimental and childish.

SUSAN: No, I mean it.

DOCTOR: Very well.  Then you must go with them.  I’ll open the door.

BARBARA: Are you coming, Susan?

(The Doctor, instead of flipping the switch to open the doors, dematerialises the TARDIS.)

SUSAN: Oh no, Grandfather!  No!

From the outset, therefore, the story of Susan and the Doctor is one of domination.  The male Doctor knows best: he decides Susan’s future regardless of her own wishes.  This sets a pattern for the rest of her time in the TARDIS, including her departure.

Susan’s demotion

Given her centrality in the opening episode and its emphasis on her other-worldliness and advanced knowledge, one might expect Susan to emerge as a central figure in Doctor Who and that the show would make maximum use of her alien attributes.   In fact Susan is routinely relegated.  David Butler observes that Susan has considerable dramatic potential and appeal but that this is allowed entirely to stagnate after “An Unearthly Child”. (2)   In fact Ian and Barbara constantly outshine her in terms of agency:   

• “The Keys of Marinus” (1964) sees Ian and Barbara engaging in daring adventures to find the missing keys to a computer which controls a planet’s conscience.  Susan by contrast mainly tags along with her grandfather. 
• “The Aztecs” (1964) centres around Barbara being mistaken for a god.  She uses this status to try to abolish the Aztec practice of sacrifice, whilst Ian competes in an ultra-masculine feud to the death with an Aztec military commander.  By comparison Susan’s role is essentially passive, being threatened with arranged marriage and having to be rescued.  
• “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (1964) features exceptional agency on the part of Ian and Barbara. Ian stops a Dalek bomb which is aimed at the Earth’s core.   Barbara penetrates into the heart of Dalek headquarters in a bid to destroy their control panels.  Both of them act entirely on their own initiative.  Susan by contrast arrives at the Dalek HQ in the company of her grandfather and newly-acquired boyfriend David Campbell, and plays a useful role only by obeying the Doctor’s instructions to the letter.

Susan’s untapped potential

Susan was therefore regularly eclipsed by the Doctor’s two human companions.  Her nadir comes in “The Reign of Terror” (1964) where she is terrified by rats in a prison in revolutionary France.  By contrast Susan’s finest hour comes in “The Sensorites” (1964) where she uses telepathic power to communicate with an alien species.  Her gift for telepathy is clearly greater than the Doctor’s.  But instead of using Susan’s telepathy to restore and rebuild her as a character, Doctor Who immediately undercuts her agency, by having the Doctor veto her attempt to journey alone to the Sensorites’ planet in order to reason with them.  In the ensuing argument, as Joan Frances Turner observes, the more Susan protests that she is no longer a child the more aggressively her grandfather infantilises her. (3)

Susan is not even allowed to determine her own departure: torn between new love David Campbell and concern for her grandfather at the close of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, the decision is made by the Doctor, who locks her out of the TARDIS and tells her that her future lies with David.  Agency is thereby once again whipped away from her.  Tellingly, any difficulty which might arise in the marriage from Susan not being human is entirely ignored, the programme having played down her alien nature for much of the time. 

All in all, it is little wonder that Carole Ann Ford who played Susan was so dissatisfied with the production team’s unwillingness to develop Susan that she left the series.  Furthermore neither Susan’s later appearance in “The Five Doctors” (1983), the show’s twentieth anniversary special, nor her roles in several ‘Big Finish’ audio adventures, really serves to transform the character. 

The politics of Susan

Why did the Doctor’s granddaughter come to be portrayed as such a wet blanket?   Susan might fit into Richard Wallace’s category of a “screamer”, on his reading the most recognisable type of Doctor Who companion and one of the least effective representations of women that the programme has to offer. (4)  A political analysis would place Susan’s period in the TARDIS in the context of a time in the early 1960s in which feminism was only just emerging from its 1950s torpor.  In the 1950s gender relations were organised along patriarchal lines.  Women were still largely connected with the domestic sphere and men with the world of work.  It was only in the 1960s that social and political changes threatened these traditional roles. (5)  It was during that decade that “second wave” feminism emerged as a form of politics aiming to transform the unequal power relations between men and women. (6)  Susan and the more feminist Barbara may be seen as representing those two different phases, with Susan more confined to the ‘traditional’ role. 

Sometimes the frustrations of the show’s treatment of Susan have spilt out into fan fiction.  The present author, for example, has concocted several adventures in which a pro-active Susan (now serving in the post-Dalek British government alongside her husband) solves murders in time and space along with the Doctor’s later companion Romana.  As well as showcasing her telepathic skills, Susan uses her intelligence to find the killer of an intergalactic magnate, solve the case of an exploding Prime Minister on a faraway planet, hunt down the perpetrator of the killing of the Guardian of the Solar System at a hotel run by Sergeant  Benton, and identify a murderer in a political whodunit set in post-Dalek Britain.  It was not difficult to combine familiar "Susanisms" with unfamiliar derring-do.  Fanfic provides scope to flag up a programme’s shortcomings in a creative and constructive way: establishing a non-sexist Doctor Who canon is, however, a taller order.

Echoes of Susan

Doctor Who’s failure to make the most of Susan might be dismissed as a sexist aberration of the programme’s early years, of little relevance to modern Doctor Who.  In fact, as Alyssa Franke and I argue on the pages of the Journal of Popular Television, the contemporary programme undercuts the Doctor’s more recent companions Donna Noble and Amy Pond by consigning them to the rather Susan-ish fate of happy domesticity after their time in the TARDIS. (7)  In the last series, the number of “Yaz-lite” episodes is cause for concern, echoing the “Susan-lite” episodes of the past.  So too is the exclusion of the Doctor for the first time from the main emotional engagement of the series – the evolving granddad-grandson relationship between companions Graham and Ryan – an exclusion which coincides unhappily with the advent of the first woman Doctor.  Doctor Who’s disservice to Susan Foreman as a character was immense, and in so doing the show did a substantial disservice to itself.  The programme’s makers need to be more vigilant that the lessons are fully learnt.

Notes

(1)   J Tulloch and M Alvarado, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (St Martin’s Press, 1983) pp.24-26.

(2)   D Butler, “How to Pilot A TARDIS”, in D Butler (ed.) Time and Relative Dissertations in Space (Manchester UP, 2007) p.40.

(3)   J Turner, “I’m from the TARDIS and I’m here to help you: Barbara Wright and the Limits of Intervention”, in D Stanish and L Myles (eds.) Chicks Unravel Time (Mad Norwegian Press, 2012) p.78.

(4)    R Wallace, “‘But Doctor?’ A Feminist Perspective of Doctor Who” in C Hansen (ed) Ruminations, Peregrinations and Regenerations (Cambridge Scholars, 2010) p.104.

(5)   K Milestone and A Mayer, Gender and Popular Culture (Polity, 2012) p.33.

(6)   J Hollows, Feminism and Popular Culture (Manchester UP, 2000) p.3.

(7)   A Franke and D Nicol, “‘Don’t Make Me Go Back’: Post-feminist retreatism in Doctor Who” Journal of Popular Television Vol. 6 No. 2 pp.197-233.

Was Doctor Who too political?

 By Danny Nicol,

University of Westminster

In a famous article in 2004 Alan McKee asked whether classic era Doctor Who (1963-89) had been political.   He argued that one should analyse fans’ views of whether they saw the programme as political.  He discovered that they did not see it as such, at least not in the sense of state-level politics (“Is Doctor Who Political", European Journal of Cutural Studies vii/2 (2004: 201-217).  By contrast in 2018 there were complaints of Doctor Who being too political, indeed “too preachy”. 

This post argues that this may have been the case, but only in the sense that episodes with a highly political content were rather unwisely bunched together instead of being more adroitly “diluted” by “less political” stories.  Furthermore it could also be contended in the programme’s defence that the issues which featured in these highly-political episodes were, for the most part, very familiar to those who follow the show.

The opening episode, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” (2018), tackles the Doctor’s regeneration into the first woman Doctor (Jodie Whittaker), as well as introducing the new companions – Yaz Khan (Mandip Gill), Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole) and Graham O’Brien (Bradley Walsh). Whilst the Doctor’s gender change was something new, the possibility had already been flagged up by the earlier transformation of arch-enemy the Master into Missy.   Nor is diversity of companions anything new: although Yaz is the Doctor’s first Asian companion, Ryan is the Doctor’s fourth black one; and the experiment of an older companion in Graham had already been made with Wilf Mott’s (Bernard Cribben’s) one-off role as companion in “The End of Time” (2010).

In their first adventure in outer space, “The Ghost Monument” (2018), the Doctor and her companions become embroiled in a cut-throat competition between two humanoids each determined to win a race.  The episode becomes an allegory against over-competitiveness, the lesson being that individuals are stronger when they work together.   This message is nothing new.  Indeed it was the theme of the very last serial of classic-era Doctor Who, “Survival” (1989), which enlisted British comedians Gareth Hale and Norman Pace as shopkeepers to underscore the story’s normative stance that too much competition is a ruinous thing.

The team then journey to 1950s Alabama for “Rosa” (2018), in which an alien time meddler tries to disrupt history so that the famous Rosa Parks bus incident does not occur.  Anti-racism is a well-worn theme of Doctor Who and the story is somewhat reminiscent of “Remembrance of the Daleks” (1988) where the Doctor has to fight a group of British racists who are none-too-subtly in league with the Daleks.   The similarity of “Arachnids in the UK” (2018) to the classic-era story “The Green Death” (1973) was widely noted.  Both have the theme of corporate irresponsibility towards the environment - and human life. 

“Kerblam!” (2018) envisages an Amazon in outer space.  It continues Doctor Who’s well-worn anti-corporate theme, since Kerblam! is evidently not a nice place to work.  Yet the tale also seems to criticise “extremist” methods of achieving egalitarian ends.  This again is nothing new: the same message was apparent in “The Monster of Peladon” in 1974.  “Demons of the Punjab” (2018), set at the time of the India-Parkistan partition, condemns religious intolerance yet also dwells on the limits of time-travellers’ legitimate interference in the course of history.  Both these themes are central in “The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Eve” (1966) which concerns conflict between Catholics and Protestants.

Towards the latter half of the series there were several episodes with less overtly-articulated political themes.  “The Tsuranga Conundrum” (2018) involves gender-swapping, with the Doctor and Yaz being the all-action heroes whilst Graham and Ryan serve as birthing partners for a pregnant man.  “The Witchfinder” (2018) also takes up the theme of gender discrimination but the message is softened by being comfortably removed to the seventeenth century.  “It Takes You Away” (2018) is a morality tale about mortality and grief with perhaps the least overt political content of the series.  The series finale, “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” (2018), concerns faith and doubt – arguably more religious than political.  The New Year special, “Resolution” (2019), takes up a pervasive theme of the series: that family is not about DNA or sharing a surname but is about how one treats those one holds dear.  Indeed by the end of the adventure the Doctor refers to her companions as “extended fam”.

The episodes with the most overt political content, therefore, ended up being substantially bunched together.  Herein lay the production team’s only real mistake.  Jane Esperson, a writer for Battlestar Galactica, has commented that the thicker the metaphor and the more distractions there are for the viewer, the more the writer of a science fiction programme can “get away with” by way of political messages.  Crucially, therefore, writing political science fiction involves an element of skill, in order to “get away with it”.  To be sure, “political” Doctor Who is something to celebrate: it allows the programme’s writers to create dystopias and flag up what is worrisome within our country.  It enables them to draw attention to the gap between the nation as it is and the nation as it ought to be.  It permits them to circumvent - at least to an extent - the BBC’s political conservatism.  But political messages need to be spread elegantly like caviar not smothered on like marmalade.  A degree of subtlety is required so that viewers enjoy the politics of Doctor Who rather than feel that the show is ramming its politics down their throats.