Will Doctor Who's Susan Still Be The Twist At The End? A Christmas Carole?

This will be the last one for a little bit, I promise.

I may have written more of these Doctor Who posts on Substack than is technically healthy. But no one has been canceling their subscriptions, which is very kind. A few have been adding them. This is the last one for now, though.

So, in The Legend Of Ruby Sunday, the possibility of Susan Twist being Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, was a trap. But would Russell T Davies have all of that lead-up without any actual conclusion? Was it all just a red herring? Maybe not.

We have seen what RTD likes to do with actors’ names, specifically Susan Twist, who he probably knew from her work on Mancunian soap opera Coronation Street. But what if there really is a Susan Twist at the end?

“They’ve had me investigating shoplifting in Catford”, that’s what Rose Noble said of her role at UNIT. There is a Catford town in south east London. But… “CA t FORD”?

Carole Ann Ford. The actor who played Susan back in 1963 in Doctor Who and who is very much with us still. A tiny tease of what is to come?

We were told in The Devil’s Chord that Ruby, left at the Church on Ruby Road on Christmas Eve, has a song in her heart, something that makes her special - or wrong -according to The Maestro.

What if that song is a Carole? The episode after the upcoming Empire Of The Dead will be the Christmas episode Joy To The World.

Fleabag's Sian Clifford is to play a character called Kind Woman in next week’s finale. What kind of woman? And does she look a bit like a younger Carole Ann Ford?

Next week’s Empire Of The Dead promises "The Doctor has lost, his ageless enemy reigns supreme, and a shadow is falling over creation. Nothing can stop the devastation… except, perhaps, one woman."

A kind woman? Unless, of course, she Kinda a Woman, and it’s all about Snakedance. No, not even Russell T Davies would go there. Although…

“There is the Toymaker, the God of Games. There is Trickster, the God of Traps. There is Maestro, the God of Music. There is Reprobate, the God of Spite. There is Mara, the God of Beasts. And the threefold deity of Malice and Mischief and Misery. There are gods of skin and shame and secrets, There is Incensor, the God of Disaster, and her children called Doubt and Dread. And standing on high is the mother and the father and other of them all. For the god of gods has returned and his names are many. His name has been Set and Seth and Sithifer. And his one true name for evermore is Sutekh!”

Plenty for Big Finish to dig into there. And yes, the Mara of Kinda and Snakedance! So you never know.

But for the last time, it’s never the Rani.