Original Doctor Who star ponders 'emotional' return (Carole Ann Ford, 2024)

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Rambles under the cut -- tldr: we woz robbed

It may forever amaze me somewhat that RTD knew he had X amount of episodes and basically two guaranteed seasons for his Disney commission. And what does he do? He teases Susan in Season 1, and then decides to bring her back for another teasey cameo in Season 2… which we’re led to believe was a hook for Season 3. A third season he knew from the outset might not be guaranteed. Maybe he was quietly confident that the show would get a third season (it likely will do, in whatever form that takes and whenever it happens), but it baffles me he didn’t design his two-season commission to include, explore and then resolve all the stuff he teased (including “the Boss”).

Things like the Master in the gold tooth I can take or leave – that seemed more of an optional extra, to be picked up (heh) at any point in the future – but things like the Boss and Susan were deliberately new elements seeded into RTD2 and then just… not wrapped up by the end of the commission of episodes they got.

It may now be the case that we never get a follow-up on ‘the Boss’, nor even Susan. Which would be a real shame. And if, say, Netflix decide to join forces and we do get an RTD Season 3, it likely won’t air until 2028 or something, by which point years have passed and the ‘seeds’ of Susan were sown during episodes potentially exclusive to a different streaming platform and during a different Doctor’s tenure.

It’s not unusual for things to be seeded in one era and then not be followed up until later down the line, but this all feels somewhat messy and unplanned. It feels like RTD was definitely going down the route of bringing back Susan, to tie in with the whole “Gallifrey / last of the Time Lords / family” slant to his era and now we’re effectively in limbo and left with unsatisfying teases that are yet to pay off (if they ever do). To think we could’ve had a Season 2 finale which didn’t faff around with two Ranis and a terrible CGI Omega, and instead could’ve been a more grounded affair with all the themes of RTD2 being tied up, including resolutions (or revisits) of the Doctor’s own family ties. Ah well.

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Basically this sums up the arrogance of RTD & the blind faith from Auntie Beeb. One other thing to ponder, which is not the nicest thing but we must consider it, Carole Ann Ford is 85.

I also think, as you mentioned before, it would have been better to remove Susan sadly. Two seasons of 15 talking about her & then a tease of her only for him to leave, if Susan does return it won’t have the same impact as it would have had if Ncuti’s Doctor had continued into S3 & finally got a reunion with her.

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Well, one would imagine that perhaps with confidence in heavy doses on the BBC side, a deal for two series & a spinoff, and then bolstering overconfidence from folks on the Disney side to you… it’s unfortunately possible for a big creative to think that it’s all going to be easy cut-and-dry for a third run.

You are of course right though that it’s not at all how it should’ve been structured arc wise. That said, I don’t think Susan and the Boss are as big a problem as people make it. Let’s be honest: the majority of people could’ve survived those things hanging over into uncertainty if they feel that Series 15 had paid off at the end well enough.

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Fair, but it’d still be frustrating.

I guess I’m a little impatient, perhaps, given that I watched through RTD1 and was ultimately frustrated when they could never get the logistics (or the want) for Nicholas Courtney to appear in the new series while he could. And Susan has been on my wishlist for years, way above the likes of (checks notes) the Rani and the Meep. But hey. Maybe it’s on me for getting excited by the mention of her as far back as The Devil’s Chord, and the Doctor pondering maybe finding her again one day at the end of Empire of Death, and then getting excited over seeing Carole in Season 2… only for it to be yet another “wait and see” sign hung on the door. (Even if Season 2 had ended the way it was originally meant to, I’d honestly still be frustrated about this long-game stringing along.)

But that aside, as @monkeyshaver said, unfortunately Carole isn’t getting any younger, and we’ve already gone twenty years without her making at least a cameo in the 2005+ version of the show… ah well.

Maybe she’ll return, at last, properly, in Season 3 or a special or in whatever form the future holds – and maybe I won’t be quite so bitter about the Gatwa era dangling the carrot multiple times – but right now, it just strikes me as strange that RTD was given a concrete commission of however many episodes we got, finally brought in Carole, and still just left her as a bait on a hook. Instead of tying her into the ‘family’ themes of his grand return, he instead faffs on with bringing back the Rani, of all things, as well as characters like Mel and then doing absolutely nothing with them.

My frustration lies in the fact she’s been used as bait. Remember when Lis Sladen came back in Series 2, had her own focused episode, and just appeared and made an impact. We didn’t need endless bait or hooks or teases – suddenly we just had an episode in which she returned, and they dealt with the emotional ramifications of it. I wish we’d had something similar for Susan. If they were gunna throw her into the Eurovision episode as the face that brought 15 back to life, then IMO she should’ve been part of the focus (if not the main focus) of the finale directly following it. It would’ve been much more narratively satisfying, I think. As it stands, even if Susan does come back later on down the line, her Season 2 appearances will still be somewhat of a detached oddity now – “remember when she appeared as a random ghostly vision to the Doctor out of nowhere.” Unless the Doctor, in Season 3, actively goes looking for her based on the fact he ‘recently’ recalled seeing her during the events of Season 2, I guess.

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I have to be extremely careful what I say here, but yes, the scripts for the next run were very much going to pick up on Susan, and the ending as originally planned would’ve set that up in a certain sense.

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I know I’m in the minority here but like as much as its a total disrespect to CAF and I am annoyed on her behalf, RTD didn’t get the chance to retcon her BF stuff (yet) thankfully. That said, I’d bloody warmed up to the fact it was happening so when it didn’t it just made the finale even more of a let down than it already was lol

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I agree. It’d sting for Carole Ann Ford, but narratively I think it would’ve been better. (Hell, you could maybe even keep the brief bits she filmed from Interstellar and use them later – they could be inserted anywhere when the Doctor is in peril.)

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I know that, and fair enough. But we’re now in a situation where a Season 3 will be years after Season 2, with a new Doctor, and so many unknowns. Might not even be with RTD. If it is with Russell, he might want a change of approach himself and just drop Susan altogether. All of which is why I think he’s silly for not having done a grand Susan return and resolution within that initial commission of episodes, instead hinging her multiple foreshadowy teases on a ‘maybe’.

(Tangentially related – if RTD does ever revisit “the Boss” (and I think he intends to, given it was mentioned again in the finale), it’s funny to think the first mention was in 2023 and we may not see more of that play out until 2027 or 2028 on screen. Similar with Susan – if she reappears in a 2028 episode, it’ll have been 4 years since RTD’s initial mention/tease of her in his new era. That’s a long time in TV terms.)

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Well… I don’t have to be careful what I say. This promotional picture never happened in the episode.

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According to leaks, this was from the original ending to the season, and it would have switched to Susan somewhere in the crowd, and she calls Poppy “Mother” in the scene. Presumably setting up for more about her season 3.

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I’m so glad this didn’t happen.

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We woz robbed of Susan, but thankfully spared of this. Every cloud, I guess.

(@shauny maybe some of this would’ve been better suited in the thread for The Reality War? Sorry!)

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Yes the good thing is the only bit of Susan we missed out on was a terrible cameo scene with some really dodgy lore dump which is supposed to blow everyone’s minds and make them wait for the next series.

So whilst we did miss out on Susan stuff because of Ncuti leaving, we didn’t miss out on any good Susan stuff, in fact we were spared. I hope Poppy is never mentioned again because I think it would have been awful for that to be the Doctor’s daughter, and Susan’s mother. Just a terrible idea, thankfully gone now.

But yes, RTD definitely should have used Susan in the finale. Leaving it til Season 3, which was not commissioned, was a strange choice.

Nah, that thread is so chocked-full anyway. This is all about Susan’s return.

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While I think that absolutely sucks, I still would have preferred it over what we got. I’m just so tired of all the Susan teasing that goes nowhere. I don’t think it’s intentionally emotionally manipulative of fans and their expectations, but it still feels emotionally manipulative to me

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I just saw into the future.

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Nicholas Briggs has already drafted up three boxsets for The Fifteenth Doctor Adventures, including the grand return of Poppy and Susan.

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Nah I feel like RTD put a big red pen through the entire Poppy idea when he made her Belinda’s real human daughter.

Part of me thinks he knew it was a bad idea to make her the Doctor’s daughter, and was quite relieved to be able to rewrite it all…

(By the way I’m not inferring this entirely from the leak, it’s also in The Legend of Ruby Sunday when the Doctor tells Kate that he hasn’t had a child yet but he has a grandchild - that was 100% a tease about Poppy)

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I’ve said before and I’ll say it again - I don’t see the need to explain Susan or why she exists

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There was kinda something that he wanted to square up between her existence and the whole Timeless Child thing. AIUI it’d been on his mind ever since that, and was straight in the plans from the moment he was asked about coming back. He had a path there, and then he realised it would make sense of other stories of hers. But oh well, here’s to the entire series worth of scripts that remain out of the light of day at the moment.

@shauny unfortunately it kinda has, yeah. He could shift it though, he’s got the leeway there (just as is the case with the fourth wall shattering near the end of the episode - because that wasn’t quite meant to be entirely done yet…) deliberately, but for the moment, fobbing Poppy off on Belinda was a matter of: well, Ncuti is going and we need to change certain things… so I need her to appear to have closure, and the Sunday family already has a baby to take in. Right. Has to be Belinda.

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I personally would’ve liked to see her have one last hurrah on the main show before she well passes away.

Considering she’s the og companion

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I really hope not!

Poppy will be too old to reprise the role by the time it returns anyway.

I think one of the best moments in The Reality War was the bit where the Doctor and Belinda forgot Poppy, it was so sad and so cleverly done (with the swapping of the shrinking coat until it disappeared), it should have ended then.

I still don’t really understand how the original would have gone from there. I want the original script!

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Whether this is something he wants or not, I’m inherently against the idea. I don’t think it adds anything to either character if it’s “squared up”. I think the lore doesn’t need additions here and it’s fine for Susan to just exist as their granddaughter whatever that even means for a Time Lord/Timeless Child. For me not everything needs an explanation

I want this! I want this more than anything! I just do NOT want any lore additions from the appearance - just the character drama of The Doctor and her having not seen each other in a very long time and them having a sweet reunion

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