Background
Susan was the first ever on-screen companion of the Doctor and she stayed on Earth after the Dalek Invasion in the 22nd century. Susan is the granddaughter of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Her last name of Foreman is an alias taken from the junkyard, owned by an "I. M. Foreman" at 76 Totter's Lane, where she and the Doctor lived (in the TARDIS) during their time in London in 1963. The original outline for the series did not intend the pair to be related, but writer Anthony Coburn created the family tie. According to founding producer Verity Lambert, “...Coburn felt there was something not quite proper about an old man travelling around the galaxy with a young girl for a companion.”
The Doctor explains in "An Unearthly Child" (the very first episode of Doctor Who and a title often used for the first four-part serial) that he and Susan are exiles from their own people. Susan adds, "I was born in another time, another world". Susan claims to have coined the name for the TARDIS, the Doctor's time machine, though later episodes seemed to indicate that it was a widely used term among Time Lords. (The non-broadcast pilot version of "An Unearthly Child" contained different dialogue, including a statement that Susan was born in the 49th century.)
Susan's age isn't given. In The Sensorites (1964), the Doctor, when encountering an unconscious young human woman, remarks that "she's only a few years older than Susan," suggesting that Susan is the age of a normal secondary school student.
Read more about this topic: Susan Foreman
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)