Actress Carole Ann Ford, who played the Time Lord’s granddaughter Susan in “Doctor Who,” has spoken about scenes she shot for this year’s season finale that were scrapped.
Ford appeared in the TARDIS in visions during “The Reality War” but wasn’t really seen much in the episode.
Originally, the plan was to end on a party scene with Gatwa presumably continuing on with the role. Photos from said party scene were released by Disney+ but the scene never made it into the episode as it was presumably ditched due to the reshoots in February.
Now, speaking with Cult Box, Ford confirmed she shot the original party scene with the intention of further exploring her and her link to the child Poppy:
“You didn’t see the episode, which was to sort of introduce my coming back, where I was holding hands with a beautiful little tiny black child [Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipp], 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 our 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, 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?'”
That didn’t happen in the final episode, of course, as showrunner Russell T Davies decided on a less open-ended conclusion. This resulted in the closing off of the Poppy storyline, making the child now the daughter of Belinda and a human man. The time shifting to save Poppy leads to Gatwa’s Doctor regenerating into Billie Piper.
The BBC and Disney+ aren’t expected to announce their plans to part ways until after the spin-off “The War Between the Land and the Sea” airs next year. Until then, the show’s fate is in limbo.
