The famous actress who played the first ever ‘Doctor Who’ companion, Susan, has now talked about what her scenes in the newest season were meant to show. It is clear by now that the newest season of Doctor Who ended in a huge mess—leaving the show stuck in an unclear situation that has only gotten more confusing.
One of the first early signs of this mess, even before the content of “The Reality War,” was when Disney+ advertised the episode with an image from a scene that was not actually in it, making fans think that Ncuti Gatwa leaving the show was not what was first planned.
Now, someone very unexpected has basically confirmed that this is true: the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford. While talking recently with fellow Doctor Who companion Katy Manning at Club Parramatta in Sydney, Australia (via Cultbox), Ford shared new information about that scene seen in the Disney+ image of the still-alive 15th Doctor dancing in a club with his companion Belinda Chandra.
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, 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?’
Ford explained
The child seems to be Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps, the actress who played Poppy—first shown as a standalone character in Gatwa’s first season in “Space Babies.” Poppy then became very important in the 2025 finale “Wish World” and “The Reality War,” where she was wished into life by another Earth as the Human-Time Lord child of a married Doctor and Belinda.
In the version of “The Reality War” that actually aired, Susan was not there at all, and Poppy—who was close to being completely erased when reality was reset—was saved by the 15th Doctor’s sacrifice, which began his regeneration to change reality enough so Poppy could stay alive as Belinda’s fully human daughter and make it so Belinda’s story in the earlier season was secretly about needing to get home to a child she did not have before.
What would have happened next is now unclear, both because Doctor Who still has not been confirmed for another season and because of how much this story was changed in the end. Ford did not say how it was supposed to continue.
Anyway, that was unfortunately not to be—for reasons I know and will not disclose.
the actress ended
Ford’s only scene that season—the first time she had shown up in Doctor Who since the 1993 charity special Dimensions In Time—was just a vague vision seen by the 15th Doctor during “The Interstellar Song Contest.”
While what Doctor Who was planning for Susan or Poppy is still unknown, the only thing that is clear is that this season did not go how it was first meant to.