Carole Ann Ford Adds to Season 2 Finale Speculation

Posted in: BBC, Disney+, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: doctor who

Carole Ann Ford confirmed that scenes for a different ending to the Doctor Who Season 2 finale were filmed that would have set up Season 3.

Article Summary
Carole Ann Ford confirms she filmed Doctor Who Season 2 finale scenes to set up Season 3.
Susan was meant to return in “The Reality War” finale, continuing her cameos from earlier in the season.
The axed ending featured Susan watching Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor at a party, hinting at a family reunion.
Changes happened due to Season 3 uncertainty and Gatwa’s exit, with finale scenes reshot and altered.

One of the worst-kept secrets of recent Doctor Who has been verified. Carole Ann Ford, who played the Doctor’s granddaughter and first companion way back when the series premiered in 1963, confirmed that she had filmed an unused scene for the recent Season Two finale, “The Reality War,” that would have been the original planned ending that would lead to a third season. Ford was interviewed by fellow Doctor Who actress Katy Manning at Club Parramatta in Sydney, Australia, earlier this month and spilled most of the tea.

BBC / Disney+

Susan originally showed up in a telepathic burst when the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) was trapped in space during “The Interstellar Song Contest,” imploring him to wake up before he froze to death. Eagle-eyed viewers would have noticed that Ford was filmed in the TARDIS set. She popped up again on a TV set in “Wish World” trying to alert the Doctor that he was under the Rani’s spell in an alternate reality. Things come in threes in Screenwriting 101, and viewers might have expected her to show up in the finale to pay off the teases of her first two cameos, but that didn’t happen. However, she did film that third appearance for “The Reality War” as a kind of cliffhanger to tease the third season arc that Russell T Davies was originally planning. A still from the original ending showing The Doctor and Belinda (Varada Sethu) at a party, possibly to celebrate reality being restored and the world saved, was even released and ended up on the Disney+ landing page as if they couldn’t even be bothered to hide that the finale had been altered. That party scene is not in the broadcast version.

BBC / Disney+

“You didn’t see the episode which was to sort of introduce my coming back,” Ford told Manning. “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 supposed to be. And we were watching by 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?'”

“Anyway, that was unfortunately not to be — for reasons I know and will not disclose,” she said, shutting down further discussion.

Those reasons were probably that a third season was not greenlit, and Gatwa decided to leave the show. “The Reality War” was reshot with new scenes that turned Poppy into Belinda’s human daughter and therefore not The Doctor’s daughter. Everyone who cared already knew this based on all the information that was out there, including the mother of the young actress who played Poppy, confirming it on social media.

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