Doctor Who - What's The Twist At The End?
Susan Triad Technology.... Sue Tech?
It’s not the Rani. It’s never the Rani. But what is going on with the many characters being played by Coronation Street actress Susan Twist in the latest Doctor Who? Well, feel free to watch me join up some dots.
Initially, we thought she could be playing Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter - in fact I was the first person to suggest this - and she was mentioned in The Devil’s Chord, played by the very-much-still-alive Carol Ann Ford. And that casting Susan Twist would be a great pun by wordplay-loving Russell T Davies. But could this have been an intentional red herring?
Also in The Devil’s Chord, we saw the Doctor and Ruby travel to the past, then come back to the present day to discover it an apocalyptic wasteland. This was a reprise of a similar scene when the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith encountered the alien/Egyptian god Set or Sutekh, travelled back to their present day, to find the entire Earth was a desert.
It was an important scene in Doctor Who which underlined that there were actual consequences and stakes, fighting someone in the past as well as in the present or future. And yes, that is also Michael Sheard, better known as Mister Bronson from Grange Hill, Hitler from Indiana Jones, and also noted for playing several characters over the decades in Doctor Who… a bit like Susan Twist has now. He was in The Ark with William Hartnell in 1966, The Mind Of Evil in 1971 with John Pertwee, as well as both Pyramids Of Mars in 1975 and The Invisible Enemy in 1977 with Tom Baker, he was in Castrovalva in 1982 with Peter Davison and in Remembrance of the Daleks in 1988 with Sylvester McCoy where he reprised his Grange Hill headmaster role.
He died in 2005, just as the new Doctor Who revival was happening. Could this be where the idea of one actor playing multiple roles across time have come from?
Susan Twist will be playing Susan Triad of Triad Technology, the company behind UNIT’s current technology upgrade as seen in The Giggle. S Triad is an anagram of TARDIS and RTD loves anagrams as well (Torchwood for Doctor Who?). But more than that, far more than that… Susan Traid Technology… Sue Tech. Sutekh. And she has waited since Egyptian times. The One Who Waits.
Expect the upcoming scheduled new Tales Of The TARDIS reprise of old stories with new bookends, this time with the Fffteenth Doctor Ncutu Gatwa and Ruby Sunday, to be Pyramids Of Mars. Which will allow British viewers to catch up.
Pyramids of Mars by Robert Holmes and Lewis Greifer, directed by Paddy Russell, was broadcast in 1975 when I was two years old, but I caught it on repeat. Set in 1911, archaeology professor Marcus Scarman unearths the ancient tomb of Set/Sutekh in Egypt, releasing a buried alien of the house of Osirans instead, who possesses Scarman, ordering him to destroy a jewel in a pyramid on Mars, keeping him prisoner. We get robot mummies, trips to Mars and more. And yes, the scene in which Sarah Jane Smith suggests they should just leave 1911 in the TARDIS, and the Doctor shows her the destroyed nineteen eighties, unless they do something. In the end, that means using the TARDIS to trap Sutekh in a time tunnel until he dies of old age. He literally was the One Who Waited until his death.
Unless, of course, I am entirely wrong. Usually am. But not long to wait now…
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