The Problem of Susan

Hey! Neil Gaiman shout-out!  

Susan's certainly a problematic character in certain respects. Part of it is that she was there from the beginning, when they were making up the mythos of Doctor Who as they went along before they codified many of the tropes that would come to define the show. Consequently, she doesn't always mesh with the lore of later stories.

1.) What was her relationship to the Doctor? Biological granddaughter or something else, with Grandfather simply being a honorific?

2.) Did she really name the TARDIS?

3.) Did she really never tell David Campbell that she was an alien? I recall one story where she concealed her apparent youth with makeup, when it became clear that she wasn't aging at the same rate. That's a stretch, but she managed to hide the fact that she has two hearts?

4.) The new series tends to use "Time Lord" to mean anyone who hails from Gallifrey, but my takeaway from Classic Who was that it was rank acquired when one completed the Academy. Was Susan a Time Lady?

5.) How old was she? Older than Barbara and Ian put together, or the teenager she appeared to be? There is evidence to support either point of view.


My preferred answers


1.) Something else. New Who seems to lean pretty definitively towards biological descendent, but I think I prefer the idea that she was a descendent of the Other and recognized some kinship with the Doctor.

2.) Paul Cornell's Discontinuity Guide suggests that she was the first to coin the phrase and it caught on, but I tend to lean towards the explanation in the audio play The Beginning, where Susan realizes, "Hey! You can spell TARDIS out of the initials!" and the Doctor essentially responds, "Um. Obviously. Did you really think you're the first one to realize that?", which goes over Susan's head completely. I also like an explanation from the first Time Shadows anthology, where Susan explains that there are no analogous words in English for the words that describe the TARDIS, so she named the TARDIS by coming up with a best approximation translation. I think that one's particularly elegant, because it answers the question of why a Gallifreyan vessel is named with an acronym that happens to make sense in English.

3.) This seems pretty firmly established, but the logistical problems of maintaining a masquerade like this for someone with whom she was so intimate are enormous.

4.) I don't see anything to suggest that she graduated from the Time Lord Academy.

5.) This is a tricky one. No hard evidence either way. I'd lean towards older, but there is the same amount of evidence for younger.