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Some Doctor Who Meta on the Doctor and Susan
Since the end of the most recent season of Doctor Who, my family has been marathoning through Who old and new, and had I but world enough and time, that might generate a lot of meta. As it is, here's one essay on the Doctor and Susan. Basically, I'll argue that the issue of Susan, teased in this latest season, should be addressed. It's time, and it has important story potential. (Content warning for dysfunctional parenting.)
In the beginning, it was:
Spoilers for TV canon through the most recent season
Note on pronouns: I have trouble thinking of the Doctor as "they," so I'm generally defaulting to "he" unless talking about Thirteen. I'm not arguing this is best; it's just me.
The Doctor Abandoned Susan&
He abandoned her in quite a good adventure, "The Invasion of the Daleks," penned by Terry Nation and filled with Nation-ish writing that stylistically presages Blake's 7. The episode itself does not frame it as abandonment. It frames it, as the Doctor does, as the grandfather giving the loyal granddaughter a little push out of the nest so that she can spread her wings and fly into adult life with the man she loves without sacrificing her happiness to take care of her old grandpa. By locking her out of the TARDIS, he spares her the guilt of choosing to leave him and the regret of choosing to stay. It must be said Ian and Barbara abet his choice.
This is, of course, bullshit--not in DW canon (yet) but from a more modern perspective. What actually happens is that the Doctor abandons a teenager in his care in post-apocalyptic England with a man she is in love with (and he her) but whom she's only known a short time. He literally locks her out and expels her from her only home, as well as the only family she appears to have contact with. He doesn’t even leave her any means to return to her family on Gallifrey, should she choose to.
This would traumatize Susan because--however content she might end up with her life on Earth--it breaks her trust in the most trusted person in her life. It has to. He shows himself to be untrustworthy. And he doesn't even realize he's done anything wrong (nor do Ian and Barbara), which means Susan--at least initially--probably doesn't realize it either, which leaves her with a potentially even heavier weight of blaming herself for her own traumatization not being "reasonable." (Yes, some of this is coming out my research for my book on cutoff.)
The Doctor says he'll come back one day, but we don't know whether he does or not. We can read "The Five Doctors" as suggesting they reconnect. However, "The Five Doctors" is... not good character writing, doesn't address Susan's life on Earth, and doesn't really line up with any other continuity we've seen. I'm inclined to think Susan looks older in it because Carol Ann Ford was older, and there was nothing they could do about that.
In terms of doing the psychological work, the show has never addressed the Doctor abandoning Susan. The One-Susan stuff (including "The Five Doctors") doesn't acknowledge it as abandonment, the rest of Old Who doesn't allude to Susan at all that I know of, and New Who stops at a few sad comments about the Doctor's dead family and--most recently--Fifteen mentioning her and clearly wanting to find her. (I'll come back to this; it's awesome.)
I do think they met in later years. Occam's razor says that the Time Lord speaking to Wilf through the Time Lock is probably Susan. She and Ten exchange a look, but it reads to me as mostly "the Time War sucks," since that's what the series was dealing with. I think she eventually found her way to Gallifrey and they encountered each other. I don't think they really examined what happened. (She may have processed it on her own but not with him.)
Why Did the Doctor Abandon Susan?
The script intended the Doctor to give her a nudge out of the nest. It's written that way, and well acted, some of Hartnell's best. But to get more psychological, I think the most plausible dynamic is similar to Giles and Buffy in the Buffy episode "Once More with Feeling." (Skip the next paragraph if you want to skip Buffy spoilers.)
In "OMWF" Giles sings convincingly about how he has to leave Buffy because she is relying on him too much and it's "standing in the way" of her learning to stand on her own as an adult. The problem with this is that, at that time, Buffy is deeply traumatized, mourning her recently dead mother, thrust into being the sole guardian of her also traumatized and grieving teenage sister, and semi-suicidal. If she is leaning on Giles too much, the proper response is "Buffy, it's not my job to lecture Dawn about her choices; it's your job as her guardian, so go do it," not buggering off to England and leaving her with no mature adult's support. So why does he really go? He goes, I think, because he's scared. He doesn't want to be the father/mother figure; he doesn't want the responsibility. He doesn't know how to handle all the trauma--of which he certainly has his own share. So he does what we've all done sometime; he invents a plausible rationalization to comfort himself that doing the wrong thing is right, that craven is courageous.
I'd say this is roughly the Doctor's dynamic with Susan. He speechifies convincingly about how it's time she had her own life, but the problem is she's a childlike teen whom he’s leaving all alone, completely dependent on near strangers, though good people. Like Giles, he is really leaving her, I think, because he's scared. He worries their lifestyle isn't good for her. And it's true that it's not fair for her to be uprooted to the point that she has no stable, consistent people in her life but him. More specifically, for the past two years, he's been putting her in deadly dangerous situations that involve some fun but also a lot of terror that--unlike the majority of later Companions--she truly does not seem to enjoy (if her horrified screaming is any indication). He knows this is not good parenting.
Here we arrive at the question of how genuinely stuck they are on a broken TARDIS that can't get Ian and Barbara home. Can the Doctor really not figure out how to navigate it, or is that an excuse to keep traveling? Given that the a) the Doctor is not a psychopath, but b) that he's clearly gleeful at being able to travel around see things, and c) he's not above fibbing to get his way, I think it's some of both, and probably also some of the TARDIS being tired of sitting in London.
But even if we assume that he can't fly the TARDIS very reliably and, thus, that "One day I shall come back" is as specific as he can be about maybe seeing her again, he had other options. He could have stayed on post-Dalek Earth for a while and let Susan get to know her boyfriend better and grow up a bit. That might not be fully fair to Ian and Barbara, but if/when he did figure the TARDIS out, he could always return them to shortly after they left in the 1960's. It's also reasonable to say that his first responsibility is to Susan, and staying on Earth a while might actually give him some downtime to work on the TARDIS out, fix it, or whatever is needed. Once he did get a better handle on the TARDIS, he could more reliably have made smaller trips on his own without utterly leaving Susan.
I don't think he thinks of that, though, and that's probably because it's his instinct to make snap decisions and run. I think it’s also fair to say he wants to be off. He just doesn't like to be stuck in one place and, to some extent, he's choosing (even if unconsciously) to prioritize his own predilections over Susan's needs.
A Dive into the Doctor's Psyche
Taken as a whole, the Doctor's personality is an interesting mix of responsible and irresponsible. He's always been inclined to jump in and help people, even at personal risk, and, while she was with him, he did a good job parenting Susan. She's a good kid and generally well adjusted. At the same time, he’s been blowing off typical Time Lord responsibilities ever since half-assing his way through the Academy (arguably ever since running away from the Untempered Schism as a kid), and given his long run of Companions, the vast majority of whom are only with him for a few years at most, it's fair to say he's not great at long-term relationships.
As he gets older, though, the balance shifts toward more responsible. One is, of course, the youngest we see him and arguably the least inclined to act responsibly. He hasn’t yet taken a responsibility as rescuer of the universe. He's not very powerful yet; he barely knows how to fly the TARDIS. He hasn't even heard of the Daleks till knocking about with Ian, Barbara, and Susan!
(Side note: I think it’s makes sense that the Doctor would actually be quite slow by Time Lord standards in figuring out the TARDIS. He has an improvisational mind that may hesitate to devote energy to fully mastering the details of something, as Romana would. The vast skills we see him/her deploy in later regenerations really are the product of years and years and years of learning on the job.)
Three may have learned a great deal about following through on commitments by working with UNIT. By the time he's Four, the Time Lords are calling on him to help out with universe-saving things, and he answers the call. By the Time War, he's willing to take on himself the really hard decisions. After that, the Doctor basically internalized that he/she is one of the more powerful single entities in the universe, and that inherently comes with a lot of responsibility.
With this responsibility (and certainly after the Time War), he becomes more introspective, but he is not by nature an introspective person. The show signals this by devoting very little time to having the Doctor confront his own thoughts and feelings. Throughout all of Old Who, it's rare to go there at all. Even in New Who, those moments are usually brief and often in the form of the Doctor uttering a clipped line about something from his/her past he/she clearly doesn't want to dwell on.
This changes with Fifteen, who--or the first time we've seen--is able to talk about Susan by name and rather casually (noting to Ruby she went to school over yonder), which indicates to me that he's reached a turning point in his own mental processing. Fifteen is by far the psychologically healthiest Doctor we’ve ever seen. He's pretty well in touch with his feelings AND able to express them quite openly AND talk about them fairly extensively AND can do so without always looking like his heart is actively breaking.
This past season certainly teases that he’s (finally) ready to revisit what happened with Susan. That’s no guarantee that the writers will come back to this, but I hope they do. I think it's time. There are lots of ways they could contrive to get Susan back--for an episode or in a more recurrent way. It would be good to see them talk about their relationship because, I think, it needs repair.
Susan may have done her work. She may never have held his actions strongly against him. She may fully understand why he did it. She may have forgiven him long ago. But she can't trust him. That has nothing to do (necessarily) with her own psychological state; the ball is in his court. He has shown her that he'll bail on her and fairly permanently: he’s certainly never been a major active part of her life again. That's a big break in familial trust, and he would need to spend time and effort re-earning her trust to repair that break.
It could start with acknowledging that the way he left failed her as a parent. He would need to resolve not to fall into the same pattern again, and then he would need to show that consistently over time. One way might be by keeping open lines of communication and actually following up consistently if she calls. It would be interesting to see the show address some of that work of rebuilding.
A Semi-Digression on Ruby
As an abandoned child, Ruby echoes Susan, and this seems intentional. The Doctor is clearly somewhat triggered in the scene where Ruby meets her birth mother. In a moment of self-serving rationalization unusual in Fifteen, he offers that Ruby shouldn't try to approach her mother because, if her mother wanted contact, she would have sought it out. There are so many reasons this conjecture might be faulty, and the episode, to its credit, immediately shows us it is. Ruby's mother is stunned but overjoyed to meet her. It seems clear to me the Doctor is transferring a "Susan" avoidance onto Ruby and her mom. He's trained himself for so long to stay away that he's made it second nature to assume that he should. (He's also, doubtless, still raw from thinking he might have actually found Susan and being wrong.)
There's potential for some very impactful storytelling around the similarities between Ruby and Susan. But I think this past season missed its greatest potential, ironically, in the same way "Invasion of the Daleks" misses the psychological ramifications of the Doctor's choice: by denying Ruby, like Susan, the narrative space to be traumatized by a traumatic event.
All we see of Susan post-abandonment is her walking off, melancholy yet apparently somewhat resigned/content with David and leaving her TARDIS key behind. (Again, "The Five Doctors" doesn't do character development.)
On the other hand, Ruby gets a whole, if short, season to go through search for her birth mother, and she gets the mostly amazing episode "73 Yards" to confront further abandonment issues, as she is subjected to a phenomenon that causes affected people to fiercely, permanently ostracize her, including her adoptive mother.
But Ruby is a bit of a perfect victim. Her suffering never leads to bad behavior. She's always the perfect role model. We can tell Ruby's disappointed and frustrated by not being able to connect with her birth mom (and very happy when she can). She's also plainly wounded by the ostracism in "73 Yards," especially from her adoptive mom. But none of it--not even decades of extreme ostracism--is shown to be traumatic. If an emotional trauma is defined as wound severe enough to produce an emotional "scar" that interferes, in some significant way, with healthy emotions or behavior, Ruby shows no such scars. She may be abstracted in dating relationships, but basically she is always living a good life, behaving well, and often being heroic. She shows so little maladjustment in "73 Yards" that it's frankly implausible: a young woman who already has a lifetime of questions and sadness over being abandoned as a baby will be significantly harmed by a lifetime of inexplicable, irremediable, extreme ostracism by her adoptive family as well. Even if she intellectually gets that it's some weird phenomenon, not anything she did, it would still mess her up, and it doesn't.
I think this depiction of Ruby reflects a 2020's preoccupation with modeling good conduct that feels rather Victorian (or 1960's?). There's a sense that a narrative is remiss if it doesn't show its characters as good role models all the time, as if people (especially girls) might get the wrong idea and be influenced to engage in unhealthy behaviors! I like Ruby. She has a lot of personality and range, but her near perfection makes me nostalgic for Companions like Rose, who feels like a real person with both admirable qualities (ex. loyal, loving, and courageous) and failings (ex. being self-centered and dismissive to Mickey).
Susan was in a similar narrative bind to Ruby. She had to be the good role model, and while, at the time, that was consistent with lots of screaming and needing rescuing, it was not consistent with ever being Bad. Susan was a Good Girl. Therefore, she would not show Bad behaviors. But trauma almost inevitably produces some maladaptive behaviors that can read as Bad. This means, Susan could not show trauma, which suggests she never suffered any, which supports the idea that her grandfather really did nothing amiss in deserting her.
Allowing Ruby to show some trauma could have opened up a space for interesting exploration of the Doctor's culpability for leaving Susan--or even just of the complexity of the situation. By denying Ruby any trauma, it not only leaves Ruby herself somewhat superficial as a character but also forecloses that particular opportunity for resonance with Susan's situation. We're left with two Good Girls being perfect role models, with the implication that the Doctor did nothing wrong with Susan because literally nothing bad came of it.
But while I do think this past season missed the boat a bit, there's still a lot of good work to be done (including with Ruby) to address the Doctor and Susan, and I hope we’ll see some of it.
In the beginning, it was:
Spoilers for TV canon through the most recent season
Note on pronouns: I have trouble thinking of the Doctor as "they," so I'm generally defaulting to "he" unless talking about Thirteen. I'm not arguing this is best; it's just me.
The Doctor Abandoned Susan&
He abandoned her in quite a good adventure, "The Invasion of the Daleks," penned by Terry Nation and filled with Nation-ish writing that stylistically presages Blake's 7. The episode itself does not frame it as abandonment. It frames it, as the Doctor does, as the grandfather giving the loyal granddaughter a little push out of the nest so that she can spread her wings and fly into adult life with the man she loves without sacrificing her happiness to take care of her old grandpa. By locking her out of the TARDIS, he spares her the guilt of choosing to leave him and the regret of choosing to stay. It must be said Ian and Barbara abet his choice.
This is, of course, bullshit--not in DW canon (yet) but from a more modern perspective. What actually happens is that the Doctor abandons a teenager in his care in post-apocalyptic England with a man she is in love with (and he her) but whom she's only known a short time. He literally locks her out and expels her from her only home, as well as the only family she appears to have contact with. He doesn’t even leave her any means to return to her family on Gallifrey, should she choose to.
This would traumatize Susan because--however content she might end up with her life on Earth--it breaks her trust in the most trusted person in her life. It has to. He shows himself to be untrustworthy. And he doesn't even realize he's done anything wrong (nor do Ian and Barbara), which means Susan--at least initially--probably doesn't realize it either, which leaves her with a potentially even heavier weight of blaming herself for her own traumatization not being "reasonable." (Yes, some of this is coming out my research for my book on cutoff.)
The Doctor says he'll come back one day, but we don't know whether he does or not. We can read "The Five Doctors" as suggesting they reconnect. However, "The Five Doctors" is... not good character writing, doesn't address Susan's life on Earth, and doesn't really line up with any other continuity we've seen. I'm inclined to think Susan looks older in it because Carol Ann Ford was older, and there was nothing they could do about that.
In terms of doing the psychological work, the show has never addressed the Doctor abandoning Susan. The One-Susan stuff (including "The Five Doctors") doesn't acknowledge it as abandonment, the rest of Old Who doesn't allude to Susan at all that I know of, and New Who stops at a few sad comments about the Doctor's dead family and--most recently--Fifteen mentioning her and clearly wanting to find her. (I'll come back to this; it's awesome.)
I do think they met in later years. Occam's razor says that the Time Lord speaking to Wilf through the Time Lock is probably Susan. She and Ten exchange a look, but it reads to me as mostly "the Time War sucks," since that's what the series was dealing with. I think she eventually found her way to Gallifrey and they encountered each other. I don't think they really examined what happened. (She may have processed it on her own but not with him.)
Why Did the Doctor Abandon Susan?
The script intended the Doctor to give her a nudge out of the nest. It's written that way, and well acted, some of Hartnell's best. But to get more psychological, I think the most plausible dynamic is similar to Giles and Buffy in the Buffy episode "Once More with Feeling." (Skip the next paragraph if you want to skip Buffy spoilers.)
In "OMWF" Giles sings convincingly about how he has to leave Buffy because she is relying on him too much and it's "standing in the way" of her learning to stand on her own as an adult. The problem with this is that, at that time, Buffy is deeply traumatized, mourning her recently dead mother, thrust into being the sole guardian of her also traumatized and grieving teenage sister, and semi-suicidal. If she is leaning on Giles too much, the proper response is "Buffy, it's not my job to lecture Dawn about her choices; it's your job as her guardian, so go do it," not buggering off to England and leaving her with no mature adult's support. So why does he really go? He goes, I think, because he's scared. He doesn't want to be the father/mother figure; he doesn't want the responsibility. He doesn't know how to handle all the trauma--of which he certainly has his own share. So he does what we've all done sometime; he invents a plausible rationalization to comfort himself that doing the wrong thing is right, that craven is courageous.
I'd say this is roughly the Doctor's dynamic with Susan. He speechifies convincingly about how it's time she had her own life, but the problem is she's a childlike teen whom he’s leaving all alone, completely dependent on near strangers, though good people. Like Giles, he is really leaving her, I think, because he's scared. He worries their lifestyle isn't good for her. And it's true that it's not fair for her to be uprooted to the point that she has no stable, consistent people in her life but him. More specifically, for the past two years, he's been putting her in deadly dangerous situations that involve some fun but also a lot of terror that--unlike the majority of later Companions--she truly does not seem to enjoy (if her horrified screaming is any indication). He knows this is not good parenting.
Here we arrive at the question of how genuinely stuck they are on a broken TARDIS that can't get Ian and Barbara home. Can the Doctor really not figure out how to navigate it, or is that an excuse to keep traveling? Given that the a) the Doctor is not a psychopath, but b) that he's clearly gleeful at being able to travel around see things, and c) he's not above fibbing to get his way, I think it's some of both, and probably also some of the TARDIS being tired of sitting in London.
But even if we assume that he can't fly the TARDIS very reliably and, thus, that "One day I shall come back" is as specific as he can be about maybe seeing her again, he had other options. He could have stayed on post-Dalek Earth for a while and let Susan get to know her boyfriend better and grow up a bit. That might not be fully fair to Ian and Barbara, but if/when he did figure the TARDIS out, he could always return them to shortly after they left in the 1960's. It's also reasonable to say that his first responsibility is to Susan, and staying on Earth a while might actually give him some downtime to work on the TARDIS out, fix it, or whatever is needed. Once he did get a better handle on the TARDIS, he could more reliably have made smaller trips on his own without utterly leaving Susan.
I don't think he thinks of that, though, and that's probably because it's his instinct to make snap decisions and run. I think it’s also fair to say he wants to be off. He just doesn't like to be stuck in one place and, to some extent, he's choosing (even if unconsciously) to prioritize his own predilections over Susan's needs.
A Dive into the Doctor's Psyche
Taken as a whole, the Doctor's personality is an interesting mix of responsible and irresponsible. He's always been inclined to jump in and help people, even at personal risk, and, while she was with him, he did a good job parenting Susan. She's a good kid and generally well adjusted. At the same time, he’s been blowing off typical Time Lord responsibilities ever since half-assing his way through the Academy (arguably ever since running away from the Untempered Schism as a kid), and given his long run of Companions, the vast majority of whom are only with him for a few years at most, it's fair to say he's not great at long-term relationships.
As he gets older, though, the balance shifts toward more responsible. One is, of course, the youngest we see him and arguably the least inclined to act responsibly. He hasn’t yet taken a responsibility as rescuer of the universe. He's not very powerful yet; he barely knows how to fly the TARDIS. He hasn't even heard of the Daleks till knocking about with Ian, Barbara, and Susan!
(Side note: I think it’s makes sense that the Doctor would actually be quite slow by Time Lord standards in figuring out the TARDIS. He has an improvisational mind that may hesitate to devote energy to fully mastering the details of something, as Romana would. The vast skills we see him/her deploy in later regenerations really are the product of years and years and years of learning on the job.)
Three may have learned a great deal about following through on commitments by working with UNIT. By the time he's Four, the Time Lords are calling on him to help out with universe-saving things, and he answers the call. By the Time War, he's willing to take on himself the really hard decisions. After that, the Doctor basically internalized that he/she is one of the more powerful single entities in the universe, and that inherently comes with a lot of responsibility.
With this responsibility (and certainly after the Time War), he becomes more introspective, but he is not by nature an introspective person. The show signals this by devoting very little time to having the Doctor confront his own thoughts and feelings. Throughout all of Old Who, it's rare to go there at all. Even in New Who, those moments are usually brief and often in the form of the Doctor uttering a clipped line about something from his/her past he/she clearly doesn't want to dwell on.
This changes with Fifteen, who--or the first time we've seen--is able to talk about Susan by name and rather casually (noting to Ruby she went to school over yonder), which indicates to me that he's reached a turning point in his own mental processing. Fifteen is by far the psychologically healthiest Doctor we’ve ever seen. He's pretty well in touch with his feelings AND able to express them quite openly AND talk about them fairly extensively AND can do so without always looking like his heart is actively breaking.
This past season certainly teases that he’s (finally) ready to revisit what happened with Susan. That’s no guarantee that the writers will come back to this, but I hope they do. I think it's time. There are lots of ways they could contrive to get Susan back--for an episode or in a more recurrent way. It would be good to see them talk about their relationship because, I think, it needs repair.
Susan may have done her work. She may never have held his actions strongly against him. She may fully understand why he did it. She may have forgiven him long ago. But she can't trust him. That has nothing to do (necessarily) with her own psychological state; the ball is in his court. He has shown her that he'll bail on her and fairly permanently: he’s certainly never been a major active part of her life again. That's a big break in familial trust, and he would need to spend time and effort re-earning her trust to repair that break.
It could start with acknowledging that the way he left failed her as a parent. He would need to resolve not to fall into the same pattern again, and then he would need to show that consistently over time. One way might be by keeping open lines of communication and actually following up consistently if she calls. It would be interesting to see the show address some of that work of rebuilding.
A Semi-Digression on Ruby
As an abandoned child, Ruby echoes Susan, and this seems intentional. The Doctor is clearly somewhat triggered in the scene where Ruby meets her birth mother. In a moment of self-serving rationalization unusual in Fifteen, he offers that Ruby shouldn't try to approach her mother because, if her mother wanted contact, she would have sought it out. There are so many reasons this conjecture might be faulty, and the episode, to its credit, immediately shows us it is. Ruby's mother is stunned but overjoyed to meet her. It seems clear to me the Doctor is transferring a "Susan" avoidance onto Ruby and her mom. He's trained himself for so long to stay away that he's made it second nature to assume that he should. (He's also, doubtless, still raw from thinking he might have actually found Susan and being wrong.)
There's potential for some very impactful storytelling around the similarities between Ruby and Susan. But I think this past season missed its greatest potential, ironically, in the same way "Invasion of the Daleks" misses the psychological ramifications of the Doctor's choice: by denying Ruby, like Susan, the narrative space to be traumatized by a traumatic event.
All we see of Susan post-abandonment is her walking off, melancholy yet apparently somewhat resigned/content with David and leaving her TARDIS key behind. (Again, "The Five Doctors" doesn't do character development.)
On the other hand, Ruby gets a whole, if short, season to go through search for her birth mother, and she gets the mostly amazing episode "73 Yards" to confront further abandonment issues, as she is subjected to a phenomenon that causes affected people to fiercely, permanently ostracize her, including her adoptive mother.
But Ruby is a bit of a perfect victim. Her suffering never leads to bad behavior. She's always the perfect role model. We can tell Ruby's disappointed and frustrated by not being able to connect with her birth mom (and very happy when she can). She's also plainly wounded by the ostracism in "73 Yards," especially from her adoptive mom. But none of it--not even decades of extreme ostracism--is shown to be traumatic. If an emotional trauma is defined as wound severe enough to produce an emotional "scar" that interferes, in some significant way, with healthy emotions or behavior, Ruby shows no such scars. She may be abstracted in dating relationships, but basically she is always living a good life, behaving well, and often being heroic. She shows so little maladjustment in "73 Yards" that it's frankly implausible: a young woman who already has a lifetime of questions and sadness over being abandoned as a baby will be significantly harmed by a lifetime of inexplicable, irremediable, extreme ostracism by her adoptive family as well. Even if she intellectually gets that it's some weird phenomenon, not anything she did, it would still mess her up, and it doesn't.
I think this depiction of Ruby reflects a 2020's preoccupation with modeling good conduct that feels rather Victorian (or 1960's?). There's a sense that a narrative is remiss if it doesn't show its characters as good role models all the time, as if people (especially girls) might get the wrong idea and be influenced to engage in unhealthy behaviors! I like Ruby. She has a lot of personality and range, but her near perfection makes me nostalgic for Companions like Rose, who feels like a real person with both admirable qualities (ex. loyal, loving, and courageous) and failings (ex. being self-centered and dismissive to Mickey).
Susan was in a similar narrative bind to Ruby. She had to be the good role model, and while, at the time, that was consistent with lots of screaming and needing rescuing, it was not consistent with ever being Bad. Susan was a Good Girl. Therefore, she would not show Bad behaviors. But trauma almost inevitably produces some maladaptive behaviors that can read as Bad. This means, Susan could not show trauma, which suggests she never suffered any, which supports the idea that her grandfather really did nothing amiss in deserting her.
Allowing Ruby to show some trauma could have opened up a space for interesting exploration of the Doctor's culpability for leaving Susan--or even just of the complexity of the situation. By denying Ruby any trauma, it not only leaves Ruby herself somewhat superficial as a character but also forecloses that particular opportunity for resonance with Susan's situation. We're left with two Good Girls being perfect role models, with the implication that the Doctor did nothing wrong with Susan because literally nothing bad came of it.
But while I do think this past season missed the boat a bit, there's still a lot of good work to be done (including with Ruby) to address the Doctor and Susan, and I hope we’ll see some of it.