Susan Foreman beyond the TARDIS
Susan Foreman arrived in Doctor Who as a mystery with a school timetable. She was clever, alien, and just slightly out of step with 1960s London, yet the most important fact about her was delivered almost casually: she was the Doctor’s granddaughter. The television series gave viewers only fragments of her life before and after the TARDIS, leaving a wide stretch of family history, Gallifreyan identity, and personal choice for other storytellers to explore. Learn more about Torchwood.
The expanded universe has taken that opening and built several different versions of Susan’s missing years. Audio dramas, novels, comics, short fiction, and anniversary productions have considered what it meant to grow up with the Doctor, lose him, and then create an existence away from his shadow. For Australian fans, these stories can be especially rewarding because they turn a familiar classic-era figure into a continuing character rather than a historical footnote.
A granddaughter with an unfinished past
Susan’s television appearances establish a compelling contradiction. She knows far more about time and space than the humans around her, but she is also a teenager trying to attend school, make friends, and understand the emotional distance between herself and her grandfather. The Doctor’s secrecy protects her from danger, though it also keeps her dependent on him.
That tension gives expanded-universe writers a strong foundation. Susan can be portrayed as a young woman learning Gallifreyan history, a survivor of displacement, or an adult who has spent years deciding whether “the Doctor’s granddaughter” is an honour or a burden. Her story does not need to duplicate the Doctor’s travels. It can focus on memory, inheritance, and the cost of being connected to someone who is always leaving.
In many later stories, the question is less “Where has Susan been?” than “Who is Susan when the Doctor is not present?” That shift is important. It allows her to have friendships, political beliefs, romantic attachments, and mistakes that are not simply devices for bringing the Doctor back into the plot.
The spaces between televised adventures
The novels were among the first places where fans could imagine a larger life for Susan. Some stories treated the early TARDIS years as a period full of unrecorded journeys, while others explored the consequences of her departure from the Doctor. The best of these books preserve the atmosphere of the original series: strange civilisations, moral uncertainty, and a sense that history can change direction without warning.
Audio drama adds a different texture. Carole Ann Ford’s return to the role gives Susan’s later appearances emotional authority, particularly when the scripts acknowledge the grief and resentment beneath her reunion with the Doctor. Her voice carries the experience of someone who remembers the First Doctor intimately, rather than meeting him as a legend from an old television serial.
Big Finish productions also benefit from sound’s ability to suggest the past without explaining everything. A door opening on a Gallifreyan corridor, the noise of a damaged spaceship, or a pause before Susan says the Doctor’s name can imply decades of untold history. For collectors in Australia, digital editions have made these releases easier to access than the days when importing boxed CDs meant waiting for international postage and paying a painful conversion rate in Australian dollars.
What the expanded universe can reveal
Susan’s untold stories often fall into several broad areas, though they overlap in practice.
| Story area | What it can explore | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Gallifreyan childhood | Family, education, politics, and Susan’s early relationship with the Doctor | Gives her an identity beyond being a companion |
| Life after 1964 | Her adjustment to Earth, grief, and changing human society | Shows the personal consequences of being left behind |
| Time-travelling adulthood | Susan’s own choices, allies, and ethical boundaries | Separates her adventures from the Doctor’s formula |
| Encounters with the Doctor | Reunion, disagreement, and inherited responsibility | Makes their family bond emotionally complex |
| Future descendants | Susan’s place in Time Lord history and legacy | Expands the family story beyond a single generation |
The family angle is particularly fertile because Doctor Who has traditionally treated relatives as rare and significant. The Doctor’s parents, children, and grandchildren exist at the edges of the mythology, often mentioned without detailed explanation. Susan therefore becomes a bridge between cosmic lore and domestic feeling. She makes the Doctor seem less like an eternal wanderer and more like a person who has made choices that affected a family.
Some writers also use Susan to challenge assumptions about Gallifrey. She may understand customs the Doctor rejects, or question whether his romantic idea of freedom ignores the people who need stability. Her perspective can complicate the Time Lords without turning her into a simple representative of Gallifreyan orthodoxy.
Susan and the wider Doctor Who family
Susan’s return in The Five Doctors confirms that the relationship with her grandfather remained unresolved. Expanded stories can sit before, after, or around that televised reunion, using continuity as a set of emotional landmarks rather than a prison. This is one reason audio and prose are so valuable: they can explore what the television budget, production schedule, and changing cast could not accommodate.
Her position also connects her with other companions. A meeting with Ian and Barbara can emphasise how much Susan has changed since Coal Hill School. Encounters with later travellers can produce a different effect, because they may know the Doctor as a myth while Susan knows him as family. She can recognise the habits behind the heroic image: the impatience, the evasions, and the instinct to run towards danger before anyone has agreed to help.
For readers who enjoy the changing eras of the programme, the modern Doctors guide offers useful context for the different versions of the Doctor whom Susan’s stories may echo. Her character works best when writers respect that history while allowing her to react to it. Susan should not merely approve every incarnation; family members are often the people least impressed by a public reputation.
From companion to protagonist
The most interesting expanded-universe treatment makes Susan the centre of the story. She should have objectives that would remain meaningful even if the Doctor never appeared. Perhaps she is protecting a community, investigating an old Gallifreyan crime, or trying to understand why her family has hidden part of its past. A protagonist with that level of agency can still be recognisably Susan without copying the Doctor’s style.
This approach also changes the emotional scale of Doctor Who. The Doctor often sees planets and centuries at once; Susan can focus on a single group of people who will live with the consequences. Her alien perspective and human upbringing let her move between those scales. She may understand an advanced civilisation’s politics while still noticing the loneliness of one child in a crowded refugee settlement.
The result is a character who can carry mystery without being defined by it. “The Doctor’s granddaughter” becomes a starting point, not a complete biography. In some stories, Susan’s greatest act of independence is refusing to follow the Doctor into another crisis. In others, it is choosing to travel again on terms that she sets herself.
Australian fandom and the appeal of lost history
Doctor Who has a long and distinctive life in Australia, where fans have encountered the programme through changing broadcasters, DVD releases, streaming services, and convention culture. In Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and smaller cities, classic Doctor Who discussions often mix memories of television screenings with the practical realities of finding imported books or audio releases. A Susan story can therefore feel like a shared piece of archival recovery, something fans compare across eras and formats.
Australian audiences also tend to be comfortable with the language of “having a go” at an idea, especially when discussing continuity. A novel may contradict an audio, or a television return may quietly override an earlier assumption, yet fans can still value the emotional truth of each version. That flexibility suits Susan, whose life has been reconstructed from gaps, hints, and competing accounts.
There is a market reality behind that enthusiasm. Australian readers may pay more for niche releases after shipping, GST, and exchange-rate changes, while local retailers cannot always stock every limited edition. Digital audio, library borrowing, second-hand books, and fan reviews help broaden access. A well-made review can tell someone in Perth or Hobart whether a Susan release is worth importing instead of expecting them to gamble on an expensive parcel from overseas.
Classic science fiction also benefits from being viewed alongside film history rather than in isolation. The era’s design language, pacing, and ideas about the future can be placed beside material from a wider film history archive, helping explain why Susan’s original presentation still feels distinctive. She belongs to television history, yet her stories share the speculative ambitions of mid-century cinema.
Why Susan’s relationships matter
Susan’s relationship with the Doctor should retain affection, but affection alone is not enough. Their bond includes abandonment, protection, argument, and the awkwardness of relatives who know each other too well. A strong story can let Susan admire his courage while condemning the decisions he made on her behalf.
Her relationship with humanity is equally important. Susan was introduced as someone who could pass as a schoolgirl while remaining fundamentally alien. Later writers can ask whether that disguise became a genuine belonging. Does she think of Earth as home because of the people she met, or because the Doctor left her there? The answer may change over time.
Her relationship with Gallifrey can be just as unsettled. Susan has inherited a culture she may barely remember, and the Doctor’s version of Gallifrey is only one interpretation. Stories that give her access to Gallifreyan archives, survivors, or political movements can show her developing a personal view of her ancestry. She need not become a Time Lord diplomat; she might instead reject the entire idea that bloodline determines duty.
The future still available to Susan
The expanded universe has shown that Susan’s story does not have to end with a single departure or reunion. It can move through different ages, genres, and formats while retaining the central mystery of a young woman who travelled with the Doctor before the universe knew his name. Her history remains open because the original programme left enough space for imagination.
That openness is valuable in a franchise built on renewal. A new audio season could explore Susan as a parent, teacher, activist, researcher, or traveller. A novel could place her in a future where the Doctor is remembered inaccurately. A comic could contrast her quiet domestic life with a sudden temporal disturbance. Each approach would add something if it treated her choices as important in their own right.
For GallifreyArchive readers, Susan’s appeal lies in that balance between recognition and discovery. She is one of Doctor Who’s earliest characters, yet much of her inner life remains unwritten. The expanded universe has begun to fill those spaces, revealing a granddaughter who is more than a link to the First Doctor: she is a survivor, a traveller, and an unfinished chapter in the family history of time.