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
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
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
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.
