Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants Read Online Free PDF Page B

she left the Doctor. As one might expect, the accounts are contradictory.
    Only one thing has been consistent in these accounts; Susan and David marry and have children. In the novelisation of The Five Doctors , author Terrance Dicks mentions that she has three children. This idea was revisited by John Peel when he wrote Legacy of the Daleks which sees a reunion between Susan and her grandfather, now in his eighth incarnation. In this book we learn that she and David had helped rebuild England after the Dalek invasion, and adopted three war orphans, who they named Ian, Barbara and David Junior. The reason for the adoption is that Susan is not able to conceive with David. She also ages slower than humans, and often has to wear make-up to disguise her younger appearance. During the course of the story, she is taken captive by the Doctor’s nemesis, the Master, and brought to the planet Tersurus. She leaves that planet in his TARDIS, believing she has killed the Master.
    This interesting, grittier side of Susan has never been further explored, since she never returns to the novels. However the audio production company Big Finish offer their own version of events post- The Five Doctors . Again she reunites with the Doctor in his eighth incarnation, and again she is a mother. Only this time she and David have their own biological child, a son called Alex. Their son has only one heart, and Susan asks the Doctor to take Alex to Gallifrey to be better educated. She helps the Doctor repel a second Dalek invasion of Earth, which costs Alex his life in To the Death . She is left alone to deal with her son’s death.
    A curious detail is related by Susan when she tells the story Here There Be Monsters . In this story she claims that at the time of her travels with Ian & Barbara her actual age was more than theirs combined, even though she was still a baby by Gallifreyan standards (and the Doctor was only a child!). It is an interesting idea, but does not fit with anything ever revealed in fifty years on television.
    In one further account, the entire universe is rewritten by a planar shift; an event so catastrophic that it destroys Gallifrey and rewrites the Doctor’s entire timeline. In the final story, Matrix Revelation written by Dale Smith in 2006, it is revealed that Susan was copied into the Matrix, the repository of all Time Lord knowledge, when Earth’s history was rewritten. It is there that she is eventually reunited with her grandfather, now in an alternative fifth incarnation.
    One final piece of apocrypha should be mentioned, although technically it is fan theory, it does open up a whole universe of possibilities. In The End of Time , a mysterious Time Lady appears to guide Wilfred Mott into helping the Doctor. It is quite clear, at the end of the story, that both she and the Doctor recognise each other. It is never made clear who she is, but it has been inferred by some that she may be Susan; when Wilf asks the Doctor who the woman is, instead of answering he looks past Wilf, towards Donna, Wilf’s granddaughter ... As ever with Susan, it is an intriguing possibility.
     
    As one might expect, the rest of the First Doctor’s companions are dealt with in a much more straightforward manner in the Expanded Universe, mostly with writers content on filling the back-stories of those characters who on television, tended to have a past that was, barring a few hints, largely a blank slate. Another thing writers of the apocryphal material liked to play with was ‘what happened after so-and-so left the Doctor?’ with varying degrees of success.
     
    Like on TV, Ian & Barbara’s Expanded Universe appearances are mostly coherent. We learn more about Ian’s past than Barbara’s, discover a couple of new bits of information from their journeys with the Doctor, and we learn that they do indeed get married – long before it is confirmed in The Sarah Jane Adventures on television. They even have a son...
    We discover that Ian was