In honour of Mother’s Day – and because we forgot to get flowers – we salute the best mothers in Doctor Who…
Francine Jones
As if her ex-husband wasn’t enough to deal with, suddenly her daughter Martha’s off gallivanting with a man that the Prime Minister tells her is evil. Imagine David Cameron calling you up and telling you your daughter’s new friend was a bad’un.
All that and then she has to spend a non-existent year cleaning up after the Master. No wonder she picks up a gun and plans to shoot the rogue Time Lord.
The Doctor’s Mother (‘The End of Time’)
Was the mysterious Woman (Claire Bloom) really the Doctor’s Mum? We’ll never know for certain, but it’s the most probable probability.
It makes sense that she’d defy the laws of Time and James Bond Rassilon (Timothy Dalton) himself to save her son’s life. And it’s a beautiful bittersweet moment when the Doctor and her gaze at each other one final time.
Madge Arwell (‘The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe’)
You’re recently bereaved, your children have both gone missing in an alien forest, and you’re still in your nightie. What do you do? Pack heat and go after them, of course.
Madge Arwell is exactly the kind of mum you want: sweet, stern, and able to pilot an Androzani harvester (good vehicle for the school run). She even manages the rare maternal feat of telling off The Doctor, and becomes temporary surrogate mother to the spirits of an entire forest of Androzani trees.
Nancy (‘The Empty Child’/’The Doctor Dances’)
Plucky Cockney heroine Nancy is mother to gas-masked Jamie, but she’s also a sort of adoptive mum to a whole Fagin’s worth of air raid orphans in Blitz-ravaged London, finding them food and making sure that their table manners don’t disappear just because Hitler’s bombing the living daylights out of Blighty.
And, just like every mum, she makes everything better with a lovely big hug. Well, technically it’s the software of Chula nanogenes being reprogrammed by a superior genetic sequence, but ‘big hug’ just sounds so much better.
More on Page 3…