‘Physician Who’ drops a bombshell: The unique companion is again

The Physician (Ncuti Gatwa) appears to be heading for a household reunion of some type on Physician Who — and it is about time.

In a shock twist, first revealed midway by way of his season 2 episode “The Interstellar Song Contest,” Physician quantity 15 has been having visions of the primary individual to journey within the TARDIS with Physician primary (William Hartnell): his still-mysterious granddaughter Susan, performed then and now by Carole Ann Ford.

Ford, age 84, is the final surviving member of the unique TARDIS group. Susan was the “Unearthly Child” for whom the first-ever episode of the present, broadcast on November 23, 1963, was named. Apart from a one-off look in a 1983 anniversary particular, she hasn’t been seen within the present since changing into the primary companion to depart the TARDIS — the very title of which, we have been informed, was Susan’s creation — in 1964.

Susan, a pupil at Coal Hill college, was the rationale her academics Ian (William Russell, who died in 2024 age 99) and Barbara (Jacqueline Hill, who died in 1993) strayed into that bigger-on-the-inside police field within the first place. Like the Physician’s newest companion, Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu), they have been successfully kidnapped.

Ford felt trapped herself; as promising a personality because the mysterious granddaughter sounded, she wasn’t given a lot to do week to week moreover scream and faint. So she was written out on the finish of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth,” the second serial to characteristic the Physician’s notorious enemies. Hartnell’s Physician locked her out of the TARDIS so she would begin a brand new life along with her Earthling beau David, and left with a speech about how he would come again someday.

Spoiler alert: The Physician did not come again. However that speech was reused at the start of “The Five Doctors” (1983), during which Ford’s Susan seems in a number of scenes alongside the second actor to play the primary Physician, Richard Hurndall (William Hartnell died in 1975) — Ford having made her peace with the present by then.

Technically, that journey happened earlier than Susan left the TARDIS — so in a timey-wimey form of approach, that is the primary time we have seen Susan in 61 years.

However to cite one other Physician, the second has been ready for.

How Physician Who led as much as the Susan reveal

Within the second episode of Gatwa’s first season, “The Devil’s Chord,” the TARDIS lands in 1963 to go to the Beatles on the suggestion of then-companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson). Off-handedly, the Physician tells Ruby that his earlier incarnation resides in a junkyard throughout London together with his granddaughter Susan.

“I put that in as a test,” Physician Who showrunner Russell T Davies informed Mashable in a pre-season interview. “She hasn’t been mentioned in the show since 1964, so I wondered how my bosses at the BBC would take that, and thought, ‘I’ll take it out if no one likes it.’ But everyone loved it.”

The success of that Susan check introduced us to the cold-open cliffhanger of “The Legend of Ruby Sunday,” the penultimate episode of season 1. That is when the Physician puzzled if the rationale for a number of appearances of characters performed by Susan Twist was that his granddaughter had survived the genocide of his individuals, the Time Lords, and regenerated herself.

In that very same episode, the Physician casually revealed extra about his household than ever earlier than. “If you’ve got a granddaughter, that means you’ve got kids,” Kate Lethbridge-Stewart mentioned. However the Physician denied it. “Not quite, not yet,” he mentioned, waving away the plain chronological difficulty with this all-purpose clarification: “Life of a Time Lord.”

Point out of his granddaughter seemed to be a fake-out; Susan Twist’s a number of characters have been the truth is created by the Physician’s outdated enemy Sutekh. “Did you think I was family, Doctor?” laughed the traditional god. However as we mentioned on the time, mentioning Susan could but imply Ford’s return to the present: “Could there be one final Susan twist at the end?”

Why is Susan returning now?

Carole Ann Ford alongside a Dalek, and Frazer Hines, who performed “Doctor Who” companion Jamie, in 2022.
Credit score: Tristan Fewings / Getty Photographs

In “The Interstellar Song Contest,” the Physician revealed that he’d seen Susan in his head after the Time Lord genocide. However the scene the place he’s frozen in area, near demise, is the primary time we see the imaginative and prescient too.

“Grandfather,” says Susan, in what seems to be a TARDIS very very like the Physician’s. “Come find me,” she provides, in one other imaginative and prescient in direction of the tip of the episode.

That could be all that showrunner Russell T Davies wrote for Ford, a minimum of; given her age, a regeneration could also be essential if and when the Physician finds her. But when he has shot scenes along with her on the TARDIS set, it is extra probably that Ford’s model of Susan will seem once more sooner or later in season 2’s last episodes, “Wish World” and “The Reality War.”

Extra regarding, within the meantime: the impact on Ford herself. “I don’t know if I could survive the excitement,” she mentioned of a then-theoretical return to the present at Luton Comedian-Con in 2024, in keeping with the BBC. “It would be intense beyond all intensity.”

Physician Who Season 2 premiered April 12 on Disney+ and BBC. New episodes air weekly on Saturdays at 3 a.m. ET.