Doctor Who: 10 Things We Actually Know About The Doctor's Family
8. We've Met The Doctor's Mother
A huge but regularly overlooked detail about the Doctor's family is that we've actually met their mother, in the form of the enigmatic Woman played by Claire Bloom in The End of Time.
She appeared to Wilf several times before finally revealing herself to the Doctor during his climactic confrontation with Rassilon.
While Russell T Davies deliberately left her identity open-ended in the finished episode (so fans could speculate whether she was Romana, Susan, the Rani, or even Susan's mother), he flat-out told Claire Bloom that The Woman was the Doctor's mother.
In the behind-the-scenes book The Writer's Tale, RTD also explained his thinking for including the Doctor's mother in this particular story, saying that:
"If I can’t imagine a world in which our mothers are there, at the end of our lives, in our time of need, to help us, then what’s the point?"
The Woman tells Wilf that she was lost a long time ago, which explains why the Doctor grew up as an orphan. We also see that she opposed Rassilon's plan to save Gallifrey, and was consequently doomed to stand as a monument to shame, like the Weeping Angels of old. It's a powerful moment, and demonstrates where the Doctor got their anti-establishment tendencies from.
The Woman being the Doctor's mother later had a spanner thrown in the works after the Timeless Child, which revealed that the Doctor wasn't actually born on Gallifrey, but was merely taken there by the explorer Tecteun.
However, there's no reason Claire Bloom couldn't be the person the Doctor knew as their mother on Gallifrey, as opposed to their actual biological mother. Retroactively, this woman in The End of Time could even be Tecteun herself!