MAG.E 3/MAG.E 3 (Disk 2 of 2).adf/123/123

Text File | 1992-09-02 | 6.0 KB | 119 lines

@5THE ORIGINS OF SUSAN
====================

@1The following text is a totally `un-doctored' version of the original message
that I posted off into the vast ether of Fidonet space. It proved to be the
inspiration and motivation behind @2`Qayamat and beyond...'@1

I`ve often heard people wonder whether or not Susan was really
was the Doctor`s Granddaughter.

Well I know it sounds a daft thing to say but Susan always did refer to him as
Grandfather, never Doctor, during all her episodes. If it was some sort of
deception they were playing on Ian and Barbara then surely she would have
dropped it at some during their many adventures together.

This would have been even more relevant during the `Five Doctors' when any need for pretence would
have been long gone. My conclusion is that Susan must indeed have been his
granddaughter.

If she was, therefore there must there have been a Mrs Doctor...?

No not necessarily! There are occasions when children grow up
calling people, who are not blood relatives, grandfather
(or grandmother). One of the two people I grew up calling grandfather
wasn't my mother's father (my grandmother remarried after the death
of *my* real grandfather.

Aha! I hear you cry `but there was still a Granny Williams in your case' and
you are quite correct. Let's stretch the imagination even further (and I
emphasise that this is just my own pet theory. I know it is my own theory
because it is the pet theory what I wrote myself... in about thirty seconds
time.)

Long before we first encountered the Hartnell Doctor on TV
he had been buzzing
around the time/space continuum having his (now) customary
adventures. We know
this much for a fact because when he regenerated after 3 years, into
Troughton, he continually had to refer to his `500 year diary' to find out
what happened in his earlier Hartnell era. It's therefore safe to say that he
must've had at least a couple of hundred years of adventures before the BBC
(and us) caught up with him.

So one of his companions before we met him was a mother or father (perhaps
both) with a very young child (Susan) in tow. Probably while he was visiting
Earth in the year 2020AD. The Doctor didn't particularly like the idea of a
young child being inside the TARDIS but in the circumstances there was no
other option. He decided to tolerate them for the moment but get rid of them
as soon as he could find a suitable time/planet/situation in which to leave
them.

The parent tries to mollify the young Susan's distress about her sudden and
bewildering change in environment by telling her that Hartnell is her `other'
grandfather, the one that most kids never get to see. The reason, the parent
tells her, that Hartnell is so bad-tempered towards her is that `all
grandfathers are old and get grumpy at times - it goes with the job'.

The young Susan quite like this explanation and equates Hartnell's
disagreeableness with the fact that he is her grandfather and from that point
in (relative) time calls him `Grandfather'.

Although Hartnell disapproves of the child running around the TARDIS, and
generally getting in the way, he eventually comes to respect the parent and,
albeit grudgingly, admits *only to himself* that he quite likes Susan too.

>Many adventures later and Susan's parent is killed. On the parent's death-bed
Hartnell promises to look after Susan as `his-own' until such time as `she
would have surely left your (parental) care in order to cleave to another'.

Hartnell continues to have adventures, companions come and go, Susan remains.
Although Hartnell tries to keep her involvement with `alien' cultures to an
absolute minimum, Susan often escapes from the TARDIS and observes the
Doctor's conflicts and the way he resolves them.

Ten years later, due to a slight mechanical failure, Hartnell and the TARDIS,
temporarily, get stuck in 1962. It takes the best part of a year for the
renegade Doctor to remedy the fault in the TARDIS (well, although it has been
playing-up occasionally over the last two hundred years, this is the first
time that it has actually refused to start!)

Susan is now a teenager and somewhat resentful about being the `only-kid-on-
the TARDIS-block'. Her human hormones are now starting to
`kick-in' and she is
starting to need some company, apart from Hartnell.

Hartnell is eventually persuaded and he ventures outside of the `Foreman's
Scrap Metal Yard' in order to enrol Susan for the local school. He, inwardly,
hopes that, having broken out of the social confines of the
TARDIS, Susan will
eventually meet up with some people of her own age and `human' race and then
he can fulfil his promise to look after Susan as `his-own' until such time as
`she would have surely left your (parental) care in order to cleave to
another' in other words, until she got married!

Having done that Hartnell returns to fixing his TARDIS. Because he is a
renegade he has no access to current Gallifreyan technology so he has to
guess/fudge/and short-circuit a lot of what is there in his, already, old-
technology TARDIS.

In the meantime, at school, Susan is coming out as a very *Un-Earthly* child
because she is talking about microchips, currently, in a world of transistors
and valves, and talk of travel to planets when the nearest thing that `Man'
can hope to go to is the Earth's moon!...

And there we go.... `Boom-de-boom, boom-de-boom, boom-de-boom, ahh-wee-oooh!'
and the BBC's theme music continues straight into the first episode of Doctor
Who in 1963. Ian and Barbara follow Susan into the `Foreman's Scrap Metal
Yard' and the rest is history... or NOT!!!

Hehehee... This is my original theory, what I wrote,
originally, just now, and
I know this is original because it's what I've written just now! Well I
actually wrote some of it ten minutes ago. OK, Monty-Python mode off!

This *could* have been how Susan entered the Who equation. I actually *have*
just typed this `premise' in `off-the-top-of-my-head' while I've had an hour
to relax. I *write* for a living but not, usually, Sci-Fi stuff.

Steve Williams