Remember in part two of "The End of Time" there was this Time Lady who kept appearing to Wilf and who the Doctor saw at the end of the story? Just who the heck was that? There are so many, many possibilities. She was unofficially referred to by some of the staff on the series at the time as "The Doctor's Mother". This doesn't break any logical sense, I suppose. The Doctor must have a mother, after all, unless Lungbarrow has suddenly been canonized. But it just seems so unnecessary, and the Doctor implies in "The Tomb of the Cybermen" that most of his family are dead. So the idea of her being his mother is not needed and potentially problematical. Let's look at two other options. The Time Lady could be a regenerated version of Susan. There's no reason for this not to be the case (unless you hold to the theory that Susan wasn't a Time Lady, but more on that later). The Doctor left Susan on Earth in the wake of a Dalek invasion. She married and had a child. Later, her husband died, and her son was murdered in front of her by the Daleks (see the Big Finish audio stories "An Earthly Child", "Lucie Miller" and "To the Death" for details). After that rather traumatizing event, we can assume that she went back to Gallifrey, and that after seeing what the Daleks have done to various other places, she could well be involved in the fight against them. This all seems reasonable, so perhaps we can collectively accept the idea that this woman was a regenerated Susan. The other major theory is that she's one of Romana's regerations. We know Romana had two on screen (Mary Tamm, Lalla Ward), and one in the audios (Juliet Landau), so it's quite reasonable to assume she might have regenerated again, especially during a long and dangerous war. Her little comment at the very end (something along the lines of "That's my boy"), would be in keeping with Romana's character. This makes this a very probable and acceptable possibility, and one that is worth considering. There is one more possibility, however: she might just be some random Time Lady the Doctor knew, but we didn't. A next door neighbor, perhaps, or some girl he had a crush on in school. Maybe she's a reformed version of the Rani, or...well, really any number of possibilities. But we likely won't ever know for sure, and perhaps that's ok.
Chris Swanson is a freelance writer and blogger based in Phoenix, Arizona, where winter happens to other people. His blog is at wilybadger.wordpress.com
