Susan Foreman

Template:Doctorwhocharacter Susan Foreman is a fictional character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. She is played by actress Carole Ann Ford.

Susan is the granddaughter and a companion of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Her last name of Foreman is an alias taken from the junkyard, owned by an "I.M. Foreman" at 76 Totter's Lane where she and the Doctor lived in during their time in London in 1963. Although it was never explicitly stated that she was the Doctor's biological granddaughter, they certainly treated each other as family. The production team of the programme did not originally intend for the pair to be related, but writer Anthony Coburn created the family tie as he was disturbed by the possible sexual connotations of an old man travelling alone with a teenaged girl.

The Doctor explained in "An Unearthly Child" (the first episode of the serial 100,000 BC) that Susan and himself are exiles from their own people, and Susan added, "I was born in another time, on another world" (presumably Gallifrey). It is not known if Susan is her real name or another alias to make her appear more human. Susan also claimed to have coined the name for the TARDIS, the Doctor's time machine, though later episodes seemed to indicate that it was a widely used term among Time Lords.

While Susan's origins were never made explicit in the television series, the spin-off media have made use of the backstory in the Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow by Marc Platt. The canonicity of this backstory, however, is uncertain. For more on this, see the Other (Doctor Who).

What is certain is that the Doctor and Susan had been already travelling for a time before they decided to settle in London to make repairs on the TARDIS. Susan began to attend the Coal Hill School in Shoreditch, where her advanced knowledge of history and science attracted the attention of schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. Attempting to solve the mystery of the "unearthly child", Chesterton and Wright followed Susan back to the junkyard, where heard her voice coming from what appeared to be a police box. When they investigated further, they discovered that the police box exterior hid the much larger interior of the TARDIS, and were whisked away on an adventure in time and space with the Doctor and Susan.

Susan continued to travel with the Doctor and her two teachers until the 1964 serial, The Dalek Invasion of Earth. During the events of that story, Susan fell in love with David Campbell, a freedom fighter in the 22nd century. However, Susan felt that she had to stay with and take care of her grandfather. The Doctor, realising that Susan was now a grown woman and deserved a future away from him, locked her out of the TARDIS and left after a tearful farewell. Carole Ann Ford had expressed a desire to leave the series as she felt the character of Susan was too limiting.

Ford reprised the role of Susan on television in the 20th-anniversary special The Five Doctors, and played an alternate version of Susan in the Big Finish Productions Doctor Who Unbound audio plays Auld Mortality and A Storm of Angels. The character of Susan reappeared in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel, which took place after the events of Dalek Invasion. At the end of that novel, Susan came into possession of the Master's TARDIS after he tried to capture her, and was once again able to roam time and space.

In The End of the World the Doctor stated that his homeworld had been destroyed and that he was the last of the Time Lords. Whether this includes Susan, however, is uncertain, although in Father's Day the Doctor said his "whole family" died, and in The Empty Child he implied that he was no longer a father or grandfather.