Character Highlight: Susan Foreman (Doctor Who)

Back where it all started.  Susan’s far from my favorite companion – the conceit in the early years of always having one adolescent companion puts Susan in the “needs to be saved” column too often – but she’s special because she’s the first.  Even though we technically meet Ian and Barbara before we meet her, she’s the first to travel with the Doctor, and as Ian and Barbara struggle to come to grips with what’s happening, she bridges the cultural gap between her grandfather and her teachers.

There’s this idea of Susan as constantly screaming/crying, getting captured, and spraining her ankle as she flees the bad guys, and like the idea of most generally less-liked companions, it’s not strictly true.  Yes, she does all these things, and yes, the other three tend to come up with solutions to their assorted scrapes and crises far more often than she does, but she isn’t useless.  She can help, too, and even if she’s cast more as the student following the “lessons” of her teachers and grandfather, she is capable of her own initiative.

Susan is smart and curious, taking joy in seeing new things and sometimes letting that enthusiasm get her into trouble.  She’s friendly, kind, and entirely devoted to her grandfather.  She feels a tug-and-pull between the itinerant life she’s led traveling with the Doctor and the thought of something steadier, like what she has at Coal Hill School; she loves visit new places and meeting new people, but she also has moments when she desires a home that doesn’t dematerialize.

As I said, in early episodes she functions as a sort of go-between for the Doctor and Ian and Barbara.  Susan is a definite peacemaker, and she tries to help the Doctor and the two teachers understand one another, almost like she’s trying to get the two halves of her life to get along.  She educates Ian and Barbara on the rudiments of TARDIS travel and makes explanations for the Doctor’s more obstinate actions, and she tries to make the Doctor see that these humans can do and understand more than he thinks they can.

I like Susan best in the scenes when we’re reminded how, typical teenage girl or not, she’s an also alien from another planet.  I love references to her travels with the Doctor from before Ian and Barbara are brought along with them, and I like her little hints of alienness, like her ultrasensitivity to the psychic atmosphere that allows her to communicate using her thoughts in “The Sensorites.”  Speaking of “The Sensorites,” I also like that, in that story, Susan is the one to give us our first description of Gallifrey.  It’ll be years before we see the Doctor go back again, but as Susan remembers the sights of her home, we see how she’s wholly alien but thoroughly “human,” as we would say, with the same appreciation for beauty and longing for where she comes from.

And not for nothing, that very first shot of her remains a classic.  The pixie cut, the stylish ‘60s dress, holding a pocket radio to her ear and swaying with a far-away look in her eye, the soft twist of her arm to the music strange and beautiful.  Every inch an unearthly child.