Susan Foreman

Susan Foreman is the first known companion to travel with the Doctor. Susan appears to have taken her surname from the Owner of the Junkyard the TARDIS lands in during the 20th Century, I.M. Foreman. Susan is the Doctor's granddaughter, and has been travelling with him since he left Gallifrey.

Character Description
Susan appears to be a typical teenage girl, and insisted – despite the Doctor’s reservations – to go to school at Coal Hill School. Her grandfather is proved right in his reservations as her knowledge is noticed by her teachers – her comments to Barabara Wright about the inaccuracies of the French Revolution text book being just one such incident. She, like all teenagers, loves pop music, but despite in general passing as an ordinary teenage girl, Susan’s alienness is hinted at in the fact that she read the thick French Revolution text book in just one evening.

Amongst Susan’s character traits are her ability, under certain circumstances, to communicate telepathically – as seen when the travellers meet the Sensorites. She’s an adventurer, and braves the petrified jungle and mutated Thals to get the anti-radiation drugs the travellers need while they are on the planet Skaro.

When Barbara and Ian Chesterton first meet Susan, she’s enjoying ‘normal’ life, and over their adventures together she grows up. Initially Susan has a crush on Ian, although this passes, and she grows to see Barbara as her mature confidente. Ultimately Susan falls in love with freedom fighter David Campbell on Earth in the 22nd Century.

Throughout her travels Susan mentions other planets she has visited – the ‘metal seas of Venus’, the planet Esto (where plants communicate telepathically) – and talks of her own planet. She tells Ping-Cho that her home is “as far away as a night star”. She also describes her planet to the Sensorite leader. She is obviously home-sick.

The Doctor realises that Susan will never leave him of her own free will, as she believes that he’s dependant on her. So, in an emotional move, he locks her out of the TARDIS and promises that one day he’ll return. On this goodbye he leaves her to finally find a place she can belong, and the home which she confides to David she has never really had.

After he grandfather left her on Earth with David, Susan settled down to marry and be a wife in the new order. She was, with others of the rebel group, a founder of the reborn human race on Earth. Finally she had the home, and family, she’d never known before.

Susan crossed paths with her grandfather again, 20 years after they’d parted company. Borusa collected Susan in a time scoop, and placed her with her grandfather, in his first incarnation, in the Death Zone on Gallifrey. After Borusa was defeated by The Five Doctors Susan was returned to her home.

Quotes
Ian: She lets her knowledge out a bit at a time so as not to embarrass me... she knows more science than I’ll ever know. She’s a genius.

Barbara: I don’t know how you explain the fact that a teenage girl does not know how many Shillings there are in a pound... she said she thought we were on the decimal system.

Susan: I love your School. I love England in the twentieth century. The last five months have been the happiest of my life...

Susan: I was born in another time. Another world.

An Unearthly Child

Susan: I like walking in the dark, it’s mysterious.

The Daleks

Susan: It’s ages since we’ve seen our planet. It’s quite like Earth... but at night the sky is a burnt orange, and the leaves on the trees are bright silver.

The Sensorites

Susan: I never felt that there was any time or place that I belonged to. I’ve never had any real identity.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth