Written by Tom
Ian jams the Daleks’ bomb from being to get anywhere near the Earth’s core. Susan and David knock out the energy generator which allows the Daleks to move around, immobilizing them. The Doctor gets into the Dalek control room and, with Barbara’s help, instructs the Robomen to turn on the Daleks, leading to a full-on revolution. The Daleks’ bomb explodes, though is far away from the Earth’s core to stop it destroying the planet. (It merely uses a volcanic eruption that takes down both a forest and a city, while still remaining safe enough that you can apparently stand just outside the entrance to the Dalek’s mine it was in and survive the blast.) After seeing David and Susan profess their love for each other, the Doctor decides to leave Susan on Earth, figuring that this is a better place for her to grow up than he could provide.
While the serial in general has been a bit wobbly at getting the whole “action sequence” concept to work, the dispatching of the Daleks in this serial was actually pretty satisfying to watch. The plot might be surprisingly reliant on items introduced this episode to work (such as the incredibly convenient Roboman Control Unit that everyone just so ends up being near) but it’s still satisfying to see the two things added to the Daleks during this serial (their static electricity dishes and the Robomen) be turned against them at the end. There’s also something very funny about the Doctor and Barbara putting on Dalek voices while commanding the Robomen, despite there being no indication that that’s actually needed. It’s one final leaning into the fact that the show sees the Daleks as these slightly ridiculous creatures which run mostly on iconography, setting their final end into motion by essentially parodying them.
Alas we then get to Susan leaving the show, and it’s worse than we thought it was going to be. Ever since the Sensorite serial, the show has been pretty staunch that Susan’s relationship with the Doctor has been a problematically paternalistic one that’s stopping her from reaching her full potential as a person. As such, having her go off to marry someone is actually quite a clever ending for her, showing her moving on from the Doctor’s paternal gaze and taking on an adult role within a family of her own, rising into a full female equivalent of him. The issue with this though, as we’ve discussed before, is that she has to be the one to make the decision to get married herself, otherwise her leaving doesn’t become her growing into someone more in control of herself as much it becomes her exchanging one male she’s subservient to for another. She has to be the person to propose.
Well, turns out that not only was Susan not the person to propose, she actually didn’t want to stay with David, her plea for him to not make her choose between him and the Doctor functionally being a plea for him to allow her to stick to the status quo. This is when the Doctor then stands in and forces her to stay with David despite her stated wishes. Inherent in this are supposed to be emotional complications – Susan’s relationship with the Doctor is one that would mean that she’d never pick her needs over his, and so this is meant to be the Doctor pushing her to make a positive decision that she should make but never would do on her own. The last job of the parent is to make the child move on from them. But here come face-to-face with another limitation of the serial’s scripts. A grandfather trying to push his granddaughter into making the difficult decision to leave him is a dramatic story, but it needs to be a longform narrative in which two people work through some complicated emotions. Producing a love interest out of nowhere in episode three, having a sentence every episode where they claim to love each other, then have the grandfather change the locks to the house in order to force the granddaughter away isn’t that story. The perfunctoriness of it then feeds into its emotional resonances of the scene. To all intents and purposes, the Doctor abandons his granddaughter with someone she doesn’t know that well in a post-apocalyptic hellhole against her wishes because their relationship is toxic and he can’t be arsed anymore. There’s no conversations or interactions between the two, he just sees his first opportunity to be shot of her and takes it. It truly is the final indignity made against a character no-one writing the show had any interest in serving properly.
Indeed, let’s be brutal here – Susan was a terrible character that the writers didn’t even try to get right. As originally introduced in “The Unearthly Child”, Susan was a plot device to get Barbara and Ian to meet the Doctor. Once that job was done, everyone immediately ran out of ways of using her. To be fair, the idea of her being an Unearthly Child was always going to be straightjacket over her – defining a character as not belonging within modern day British society and then doing a show that goes everywhere but modern day Britain immediately makes her one gimmick surplus to requirements. Without this gimmick, she thus became “the young girl” of the bunch and thus the useless one prone to screaming, injuring herself and needing everything explained to her. The TARDIS serial does try to keep her oddness going by making her threaten to stab everyone with scissors, and the Sensorite serial tries to remind us of her oddness by turning her into a telepath for six episodes, but these are nine episodes fighting against over forty where she was useless at best and an active impediment to everyone else at worst. It also perhaps doesn’t help that Carole Anne Ford actually isn’t that good at conveying such things as “being scared” or “confused”. A flawed character was even half-arsed material that was ill-suited to their actress. Of course she never worked.
The stink of ageism and sexism does hang over Susan’s treatment. Of course the young woman who got exclusively written and script-edited by middle aged men became the useless and weak one. Of course the youth character has no idea how the world works, no backbone to speak of, and is scared of absolutely everything. It’s not so much that Susan couldn’t have worked as a character, it’s that almost no-one tried to make her work.
There is a sense in which this is thematic. It’s interesting that the show essentially leaves Susan and David, i.e. the young characters, to rebuild society now that the war is over. Meanwhile the Doctor, who’s more getting the young people’s way than he is helping them through his presence, takes a backseat and removes himself from the situation. If we read the first years of Doctor Who as being a show about ways of rebuilding societies after major historical events – and that’s exactly what we do here – then this is one of the most instructions we get: allow the younger generations to do the rebuilding for themselves. The older generations don’t understand the needs of the youth well enough to serve them (just see how the show writes Susan for evidence of that) and would be most helpful by getting out the way and letter the younger generations get on with it. That’s what the show does – it separates Susan from the old white men keeping her back and instead places her within a new society of young people where she might actually get some decent material.
In this context though, you’d expect the show to carry on following Susan rather than the Doctor, Ian and Barbara. Doctor Who and Team TARDIS are now connected to society’s old guard and are explicitly limited in how effective they can be as agents of social change. Change is coming though. As well as Susan’s departure from the series, the next few weeks are going to feature David Whitaker stepping down as script editor, Dennis Spooner is taking over the position, and Maureen O’Brien added to the main cast. Looks like the show is about to reinvented once again.
FNORD 