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I love the new series, but I have to admit I an not very familar with the very early Doctor Who stuff.
I know the First Doctor travelled with a young woman he called his Granddaughter.
What I am not clear on, was she really his grandchild?
Therefore, is she a Time Lord too?
What does DW mythology/canon say about this particular aspect of the Doctor's past?
In the current series, they repeatedly point out that the current Doctor is the Last of the Time Lords, so I was curious how the whole Granddaughter fits into it???
There has been nothing in the entire run of the show to indicate that Susan was anything but the Doctor's granddaughter. He left her on a post Dalek invasion earth. She showed up again in the Ten Doctors.
Susan was, indeed, the Doctor's granddaughter, at least as far as the TV shows are concerned. She was left on 22nd Century Earth after a Dalek invasion after she fell in love with a Human. She turned up again in "The Five Doctors" in the early 80s. She was, indeed, a Time Lord.
The revived series has established on a number of occasions, though, that the Doctor had a family of his own. In "The Empty Child," Doctor Constantine lamented that before the war, he had been a father and a grandfather, and now he was neither, but he was still a doctor; the Doctor replied that he knew what Constantine felt like. In "Fear Her," he told Rose that he had been a dad once. In "The Doctor's Daughter," he indicated that he had had a family, and that they had all been killed (presumably in the Time War). And in "The Beast Below," the Doctor talks about an insight he gained on children from having been a father, and gives Amy a look when she asks him if he'd ever had children.
In the novels and audios, I know that the novel Lungbarrow revealed that
She was actually the granddaughter of the Other, the Doctor's earlier incarnation from ancient Gallifrey before he was reincarnated as the Doctor, and that the First Doctor encountered her in Gallifrey's distant past, where both recognized that she was his granddaughter in spite of the Doctor having not had any grandchildren
Most of what Lungbarrow depicts about Time Lords and their lifecycle has since been contradicted by the revived series. It's up to you to decide if you buy what it reveals about Susan's origins.
There was an Eighth Doctor audio where Susan appeared and we met her son -- the Doctor's great-grandson, by extension. Again, whether or not you consider it canon is up to you.
As for Susan's ultimate fate?
Well, the Doctor is the last of the Time Lords, apart from the Master and Jenny. Apparently, the rest of the Time Lords were wiped from history after being trapped in the Time Lock. That means Susan was amongst the dead.
And for my money?
Remember the mysterious Woman from The End of Time? The one who appeared to Wilf, and then was forced to cover her face by Rassilon before revealing herself to the Doctor -- thereby giving him the idea of how to cut the link and send the Time Lords and Gallifrey back to the Time War without killing the Master?
RTD has said that he intended for the Woman to be the Doctor's mother. But I don't buy it. My interpretation is different. I'm convinced that the Woman was Susan.
Susan was, indeed, the Doctor's granddaughter, at least as far as the TV shows are concerned. She was left on 22nd Century Earth after a Dalek invasion after she fell in love with a Human. She turned up again in "The Five Doctors" in the early 80s. She was, indeed, a Time Lord.
I wholeheartedly agree that she was the Doctor's granddaughter, and hence by implication Gallifreyan. Whether she was actually a Time Lord is less certain. Did she attend the academy? Did she graduate? We simply don't know.
Its always made me nuts that other than an appearance in The Five Doctors, theres never been another reference to her in all these years. Its almost like theres some sort of clause in DW Producers contracts.
In general, up until the continuity obsessed eighties, there were very few references to earlier stories at all. I do believe though that in 'Planet of the Daleks', the Doctor talks with some Thals about the events of 'The Daleks', and mentions Susan, Ian and Barbara.
Remember the mysterious Woman from The End of Time? The one who appeared to Wilf, and then was forced to cover her face by Rassilon before revealing herself to the Doctor -- thereby giving him the idea of how to cut the link and send the Time Lords and Gallifrey back to the Time War without killing the Master?
RTD has said that he intended for the Woman to be the Doctor's mother. But I don't buy it. My interpretation is different. I'm convinced that the Woman was Susan.
It always made more sense to me that seeing his child made him do the right thing, rather than his parent. There was a line near the end of Battlestar Galactica's "Razor," where Adama is telling his son that he could see himself, in different circumstances, committing brutal acts in the name of survival. "Now, you don't have any children, so you might not understand this, but you see yourself reflected in their eyes. And there are some things that I thought of doing with this Fleet, but I stopped myself, because I knew that I'd have to face you the following day."
Susan was, indeed, the Doctor's granddaughter, at least as far as the TV shows are concerned. She was left on 22nd Century Earth after a Dalek invasion after she fell in love with a Human. She turned up again in "The Five Doctors" in the early 80s. She was, indeed, a Time Lord.
I wholeheartedly agree that she was the Doctor's granddaughter, and hence by implication Gallifreyan. Whether she was actually a Time Lord is less certain. Did she attend the academy? Did she graduate? We simply don't know.
I think the revived series has made it very clear that the term "Time Lord" refers to any and all members of the Doctor's species, not to an elite few Gallifreyans.
I think the revived series has made it very clear that the term "Time Lord" refers to any and all members of the Doctor's species, not to an elite few Gallifreyans.
I think the revived series has made it very clear that the term "Time Lord" refers to any and all members of the Doctor's species, not to an elite few Gallifreyans.
I've never seen The Invasion of Time, but Wikipedia's article on it does not refer to any factions from Gallifrey not being referred to as Time Lords. I'd certainly call them Time Lords.
And, frankly, as far as I'm concerned, if the new series contradicts the original series in its terminology, it's the new series that's definitive.
She's his Granddaughter. I don't care for Lungbarrow, seems like fanwank and a terrible attempt to prevent the Doctor from ever having sex. I'm glad the new show completely ignores it. The Doctor has had children and grandchildren, the same way has every other living thing.
Yes, she was his grand daughter, I've watched everything from the First Doctor, including the reconstructions, and every time she references him and he references her, it seems like a family relationship to me. Also, at the time Doctor Who first aired way back when, no one had any other evidence to think that she wasn't his granddaughter. I'm sure everyone back then thought of the literal interpretation that she was indeed his granddaughter, it certainly seemed to be what was presented to us.
As for regeneration, for that, I think might be different. Time Lords can regenerate, and regenerations can be given and taken away. We don't know if Susan ever went through the Academy and went through the process of becoming a "Time Lord" Perhaps regenerations are only given for those that enter the Academy? I guess we don't really know. It makes you wonder if the other inhabitants on Galifrey, those primitives, could regenerate or not, we were never told if they could. So, it is left up to you to decide if you think she can regenerate or not.
I think the revived series has made it very clear that the term "Time Lord" refers to any and all members of the Doctor's species, not to an elite few Gallifreyans.
I think the revived series has made it very clear that the term "Time Lord" refers to any and all members of the Doctor's species, not to an elite few Gallifreyans.
Again, I'm not sure what makes you think that the term "Time Lord" only refers to an elite sect of Gallifreyans. There's certainly no evidence that it only refers to the elites in the revived series -- they've made it very clear that the name of the species is "Time Lords." And the Doctor in "The Sound of Drums" did not say, "some of the children of Gallifrey." He said that children of Gallifrey, period, were taken to the Academy at age 8.
I guess the question here is, how strictly does the new series adhere to classic doctrine?
I think they've been pretty good about staying consistent to the original show, but Sci is right that they've had several opportunities to refer to Time Lords as Gallifreyan, but didn't. I speculate that maybe someone on staff didn't like the sound of "Gallifreyan" for some reason and chose to simplify things with a generic "Time Lord" even when the alternate was a better choice.
Alternatively, this might be a clue about the Time War. Perhaps by the end of the war, all Gallifreyans were drafted into service and became Time Lords, wielding weapons of temporal destruction in the quest to stop the Dalek onslaught.
In addition, in The Sunmakers, we're informed specifically that the Time Lords are the oligarchic rulers of Gallifrey. By definition, that means that they are a minority of the total population.
I believe The inference in The Invasion of Time isn't that these others are "primitives" that had lived that way all their lives. Rather, they were members of Gallifreyan society that had chosen to live that way, eg. they rejected Time Lord society.
However,I would point out that many things changed by the Time War. The End of Time seems to suggest,by the singular colors of their robes,that the Time Lord chapters had put aside their differences. It isn't a far stretch to think that, in view of the threat the Daleks themselves posed, the Shobogans joined the Time Lords to defend Gallifrey much the same way that they had banded together against the Vardan/Sontaran threat.
Of course, there are other possibilities. Perhaps the term "Time Lord" simply came to be applied to all Gallifreyans some time long before the Time War -- we don't know how much time passed for the Doctor and the Time Lords between the original series and the start of the Time War, after all. And another possibility is that "Time Lord" was always an alternate term for the entirety of the Gallifreyan species, albeit one that some of those Gallifreyans who were not part of the ruling elite agreed with or wanted.
And, of course, a third possibility is that we have to just accept that Doctor Who is inconsistent about whether "Time Lords" refers to the entire species or to only its ruling elites, and that the current definition is "the entire species" and that this retcons out prior information that contradicts it.
