Doctor Who: 10 Things We Actually Know About The Doctor's Family
Doctor Who Do You Think You Are?
From Lady Larn and Irving Braxiatel to the House of Lungbarrow and Gallifreyan looms, Doctor Who spinoff media has been attempting to connect the branches of the Doctor's family tree for decades. Onscreen however, information about the Doctor's ancestors and progeny is far more vague.
Since 23 November 1963, we've known that the Doctor has a granddaughter, and then had an actual "daughter" (more of a clone). Across the past six decades there have been nods to brothers, sisters, children, grandparents, and uncles, but we've never actually met any of them onscreen. Not that we know of anyway, given that the Master could've been the Doctor's brother at various points in the show's history.
Then, in 2020, Chris Chibnall's Timeless Child revelations meant that almost everything we knew about the Doctor was a lie. It also meant that we knew even less about the Doctor's family than ever before. Who exactly are the Doctor's biological relatives? From what species do they originate?
But that's enough about what we don't know – what do we actually know about the Doctor's family? And now that Ruby Sunday has inspired the Doctor to think about family on a deeper level, could we soon learn even more?
10. The Doctor Didn't Grow Up With Money
The shabby old barn from The Day of the Doctor, Listen, and Hell Bent heavily implies that the Doctor didn't grow up with Time Lord status, or any other lordly status for that matter. After all, it's located pretty far from the Citadel, and it's not exactly glamorous.
In Listen we see a young Doctor sleeping in this barn, scared and alone and crying himself to sleep. This suggests that the Doctor's family wasn't wealthy and couldn't afford to send him to some nicer digs, or, at the very least, that the Doctor didn't grow up surrounded by wealth.
A man and a woman then enter the barn, and have a brief exchange. The woman invites the Doctor back into the house "with the other boys", while the man is pushing for the Doctor to join the army.
The man and the woman definitely aren't the Doctor's parents. The reference to "other boys" rather than "brothers" indicates that, like the young Rupert Pink, the Doctor was orphaned and then grew up in some kind of children's home.
It also sounds like the adults in the children's home were raising kids for service with Gallifrey's Chancellery Guard, setting up the Doctor's complicated relationship with the military and seeding his disdain for guns and soldiers.