Here’s What Carole Ann Ford’s Doctor Who Return Originally Meant

At this point, talking about all the things that are controversial, or kind of bad, or just downright weird about the Doctor Who season 15 finale kind of feels like beating a dead horse. “The Reality War” is just not a great episode. It’s fully apparent that the ending we got wasn’t the ending Russell T. Davies initially set out to write, and it certainly seems as though Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor wasn’t originally meant to regenerate quite this early in his run. The stunt casting of former companion Billie Piper as… whatever role she’s meant to be currently playing is basically the definition of a last-second Hail Mary. And that’s before we even get to the fact that the show finally seemed poised to solve a 60-year-old mystery… before whiffing on it entirely. 

The endless questions surrounding Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter and original companion, have been a topic of fierce debate for many years: What became of her after she departed the TARDIS? Was she also a Time Lord? If so, who are her parents? And it seemed as though Doctor Who was finally ready to offer up some answers — even bringing back original actress Carole Ann Ford for her first appearance onscreen since the 1993 charity special “Dimensions In Time”. But her return ultimately amounted to little more than a glorified cameo, as a vision of Susan urged her grandfather go back and find her. What that means is anyone’s guess, as the character is never mentioned again in the season, despite featuring a two-part finale that was hyper-focused on convincing the Doctor he had a child. But now we know there was meant to be more to the story. 

The news comes courtesy of Ford herself, who was recently interviewed by former companion Katy Manning at Club Parramatta in Sydney, Australia. During their conversation, Manning asked about Susan’s origins and whether Ford knew who her character’s mother was. Her answer, which describes what appears to be “The Reality War’s” original ending, is a fascinating one. 

“You didn’t see the episode, which was to sort of introduce my coming back, where I was holding hands with a little — beautiful little tiny Black child, three years old. And we were watching through the window somewhere where the audience wasn’t supposed to know where we were supposed to be,” Ford said.  “And we were watching my newly embodied grandfather, who was now Ncuti [Gatwa], and watching him have a wonderful time singing and dancing in a party in a shop opposite where we were. And obviously, I, my character Susan, was longing to just go there and fling her arms around her grandfather and say, ‘Grandfather, how lovely to see you after all this time and how did you survive your floating about in space… and why have you changed?’”

Presumably, that child is Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps, the young actress who played the charming Captain Poppy, who was initially introduced in “Space Babies” before being reintroduced as a Human-Time Lord child on the alternate reality Earth of “Wish World.” In the aired version of the finale, Susan doesn’t appear at all, and it’s the act of saving Poppy — and altering reality enough to allow her to live as Belinda’s fully human daughter — that causes Fifteen’s regeneration. But clearly that wasn’t the way the story was originally supposed to go. So what changed? It’s possible we’ll never know. And Ford’s not telling.

“Anyway, that was unfortunately not to be — for reasons I know and will not disclose,” she said.

Was Susan’s return meant to play into a potential Gatwa third season? (There was plenty of chatter that this was something that was almost certainly happening — until there wasn’t.) Would the two have eventually come face-to-face for real? It’s impossible to know. The only thing that seems certain is that something shifted, and with Disney’s increasing reluctance to commit to the series beyond its established contractual obligations, it’s difficult not to assume that played a key role in derailing whatever this story was originally supposed to be.