20 Things Doctor Who Wants You To Forget
12. Are You My Mummy?
The one thing that the Doctor is most reticent to talk about is his family. The Second Doctor admits to Victoria that he does not really want to remember them, instead he lets them ‘sleep in (his) mind.’ The memories are clearly too painful for the Doctor as we later learn when Donna asks him why he never mentions his children: ‘when they died, that part of me died with them. It’ll never come back. Not now.’
Aside from his granddaughter, Susan, the only other member of the Doctor’s family to have appeared in the show is his mother, played by Claire Bloom in The End of Time. She is only credited as the ‘woman in white’ but in his book, The Writer’s Tale, Russell T Davies confirms that she was meant to be the Doctor’s mother. She is never referenced again, but in Hell Bent the Doctor arrives at the barn where he once slept as a child (Listen) and meets an old woman he recognises who is caring for ‘the boys’.
Steven Moffat says he has no idea who the woman is, leaving it to fans to speculate as to whether she and the woman in white are one and the same – the Doctor’s mother. The Eighth Doctor said he was ‘half-human, on his mother’s side’, but apart from that we know nothing about her or any of his family. And that’s the way he (and it seems the show’s producers) would like it to stay.