Doctor Who: Remembering The First Doctor's Companions

7. Susan Foreman (1963-1964)

Unique among all companions, Susan has the distinction of being the only member of the Doctor's direct family that viewers have ever seen on screen. There are those who want to weave some sort of nonsensical tale about how she€™s not "really" his granddaughter, of course, but that's just plain silly. Granddaughter she is, because the show has never given us any other real reason to believe otherwise. Susan was a plucky young schoolgirl-type who had been displaced in both space and time. She could appear very intelligent during classes but also lacked certain basic understandings of what was going on in the world, including simple things like the UK not being on the decimal system. Susan's confusing and conflicting life was, in fact, the catalyst that started the show. Her two school teachers, Ian and Barbara (more on them later!), got nosy about her life and followed her into the TARDIS, thus beginning over 50 years of television history. Her time in the TARDIS came to an end rather abruptly and rather oddly, when the Doctor left her on a post Dalek-invasion Earth in the mid 22nd century. She€™d met, and apparently fallen in love with, a young man and the Doctor decided that she needed to leave the TARDIS and run her own life. He left her with a rather memorable and wonderful speech, one that completely prevented the audience from saying, "Hang on. She's fifteen and he's leaving her in what was recently a war zone with a man he barely knows and who is clearly quite a bit older than she is?!" Not looking good, is it?