Well.

It finally happened. 

Russell T Davies lured Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter in the first era of Doctor Who, back into the on-screen show in The Interstellar Song Contest, written by Juno Dawson.

That sets up an interesting potential dichotomy. At the time of writing, we don’t know how much history will be given to the on-screen Susan, should she happen to be reunited with her grandfather in the two-part finale of Season 2. 

In the on-screen universe, the Doctor locked her out of the Tardis on 21st century Earth, so that she could go and make a life with David Campbell, London freedom fighter, in the wake of the Dalek Invasion of the planet. Barring an appearance in The Five Doctors which advanced her character nnnnnot at all, but did advance her reputation of falling over things and twisting her ankle, that has been it for Susan on screen since the day after Christmas, 1964. 

The Fifteenth Doctor referenced her heavily in his first season, even pointing out to Ruby Sunday that the two of them were there in Shoreditch in the early Sixties, living a life just a little way down the river. 

The Further Adventures of Susan

But listeners to Big Finish audio stories know she’s had a rather fuller life and history than the on-screen Susan ever achieved. She had a son, the Doctor’s great-grandson, Alex Campbell. David, her husband, died. She was an active voice in the rebuilding of the Earth in the wake of its Dalek devastation, met up with her grandfather several times during his Eighth incarnation, and ultimately lost Alex too during one of those adventures.

Then, back in 2020, Big Finish started a new strand of Susan adventures. Susan… during the Time War. A potentially risky premise, taking Susan back to Gallifrey, the first box set included adventures with Ian Chesterton, the Eighth Doctor, the War Doctor’s friend and nemesis (fremesis?) Commander Veklin, Daleks, Sensorites and more besides.

Susan finding her way home to Gallifrey and using things like her psychic intuition to help with diplomatic missions was ostensibly a fairly thin idea, but the gusto of the scriptwriting and casting, and fans’ abiding love for both the character and for Carole Ann Ford made it a success.

Which means now there’s a second (and a third) box set of Susan’s adventures in the Time War. But whereas the first set allowed her some touchstones of familiarity in the Eighth Doctor and some friendly Sensorites, in sets two and three, Susan finds herself matched up with the unpredictable young War Doctor, an incarnation with whom she has no experience, and with whose ethos of winning the war she has only limited sympathy. 

The Death of an Earthly Child

Susan’s War 2: Family Ties contains just two stories, but they work well in tandem to give a taste of quite how different Susan’s grown-up approach to the universe and the war is from that of any of the incarnations of her grandfather.

The Lost Son, by Sarah Cassidy, takes Susan and a moderately reluctant Veklin (Beth “Gift of the Character-Gods” Chalmers) to Materos, where a prince – a genetically rare event in the lives of the planet’s inhabitants – has apparently been kidnapped by the Daleks.

The story builds explicitly on Susan’s Big Finish history, and particularly on her traumatic loss of Alex in not entirely dissimilar circumstances. But things on Materos are – Shock! Horror! – not entirely as straightforward as they seem, and dynastic and revolutionary tensions surface, while Susan herself is put through the ringer first by visions of Alex, and secondly by extraordinarily cruel temptations to believe he is really, truly still alive out there.

[We interrupt this review to point out that in other box sets temporally placed during the Time War (Cass) an alternate timeline version of Alex actually is still alive and well and helping his great grandfather. You absolutely don’t need to know that, as it’s beyond the remit of what Susan knows here. We now return you to your regularly scheduled review…]

What you end up with in The Lost Son is both an interesting story of Time War missions and diplomacy, and an object lesson in the strengths and emotional intelligence of grown-up Susan the Time Lady, as opposed to young Susan the practical Time Tot.

You also get some solid world-building, as Cassidy invests Materos with not only some unique planetary properties that make it a believably exotic location for adventures, and a gorgeously intricate biological system that has an essence of First Doctor era ambition in terms of the weird and the wonderful ways in which the universe could work if you could only imagine it.

Plus, Chalmers as Veklin is priceless whenever she appears in Big Finish, and she keeps up that reputation for snarky, bored-kid-wondering-if-we’re-there-yet attitude here, mixed with a nose for answers to things that don’t smell right and an uncomplicated determination to kick things until they do the right thing.

And, above and beyond all that, Cassidy delivers an almost agonising paeon to the pain of mothers who have lost children. While the central political and humanitarian mission centres around a kidnapped prince and the implications of his loss, Cassidy raises Alex from the grave to accuse Susan of all the crimes with which mothers of dead children relentlessly whip themselves – that they were not there enough, that they were not interested enough, didn’t care enough, didn’t love their children enough, otherwise why would they ever be dead?!

It’s a harrowing, skin-stripping listen, but it is ultimately cathartic for Susan, the buried and simmering self-recriminations burned away by having them vocalised and by her having to defend herself against them in that weaponised form. For that alone, The Lost Son would be worth the price of admission to this box set.

Henry V in Space and Time

Peter Anghelides goes a different route in terms of the family tie it explores, with Susan and the still relatively fresh-faced War Doctor investigating the apparent disappearance from all historical records of a figure who, so Susan’s friend Andolar (Tania Rodrigues) says, was a key ally of the Time Lords.

The two take Andolar with them into the youth of Maxor (Sebastian Humphreys), to see what has become of the ally’s timeline. There’s a delicious resonance of Shakespeare’s Henry V about Maxor, in that he appears to be an indolent, swinish, arrogant youth, and, no matter what they do (including Andolar spending a decade or more as his replacement tutor), he does have a knack of getting himself killed before the greatness of which Andolar is convinced ever gets the chance to flower.

Anghelides writes the solution to this almost Groundhog Day conundrum like the pro he is, and when it is delivered, it will make you glow and grin with the pleasure of a story that could probably only be satisfactorily delivered within the universe of Doctor Who. 

But the ties of family here are strained almost to breaking point as Susan comes to terms with the spiky certainties of her new old grandfather, in some ways as condescending as the original, but with a significantly greater capacity for brutality, both in personal terms and in regard to the greater good of the timeline.

New Time War Tales

While The Lost Son successfully establishes Susan’s difference from the Doctor and how it can be used to effectively tell Time War stories, The Golden Child effectively throws that approach into conflict with the blunt force trauma tactics of the War Doctor, and the result strikes sparks of chemistry, a Doctor still thinking of Susan as a naïve child, and a Susan determined to show this non-Doctor Doctor a different way. 

The result is a box set that shows two different angles on Susan’s War, the emotionally rich and the chemically confrontational, and both of them work splendidly.

Before we find out more about Susan’s role in the upcoming on-screen finale (assuming she has one), give Susan’s War 2: Family Ties a listen, and find out what she did between the Then of Yesteryear and the Now of the RTD2 era. Tony Fyler 

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