Penelope Gate

Penelope Gate was the human creator of a time machine. She was also the mother of the Doctor, according to some accounts.

Biography
The first time she successfully used her time machine, she used a lightning strike to charge it up. She travelled to 1996 where she obtained a mutated Tzun battery. She used that to power her machine. Penelope met the Seventh Doctor, who took her back to her own time of 1883. (PROSE: The Room With No Doors)

Later in her life she would meet the Time Lord Ulysses, whom she married. She moved to Gallifrey. Unbeknownst to the High Council, they had a son together. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

The Doctor said that his mother used to sing the Zagreus nursery rhyme to him. (AUDIO: Seasons of Fear) When the Doctor was just a "small child", Penelope sat by the side of his bed and told him the story of Grandfather Paradox. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

When the Doctor was young, Ulysses and Penelope went on a trek in the mountains of Gallifrey with him. Ulysses and Penelope owned a summer house on the other side of Kasterborous to Gallifrey. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors)

Penelope and Ulysses became friends with Mr Saldaamir, whom they frequently went exploring with. Penelope, Saldaamir and Ulysses also associated themselves with Lady Larna, who was from their future.

When the Time Lord Marnal threatened to expose Penelope's and Ulysses's activities, they used the telepathic circuits of his TARDIS, which would later belong to the Doctor to wipe his memory and dumped him on Earth in England, 1883, to board with Penelope's mother. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)


 * It was unknown what happened to Penelope after this point, but she was not with her husband when he became a renegade and went to live on Earth. (PROSE: Unnatural History)

Appearance
The Doctor remembered that his mother had long red hair and a cut-glass voice. On Gallifrey Penelope wore an ankle-length skirt and prim white blouse, with long red hair that "hung wild to her waist". (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

Behind the scenes
The character of Penelope Gate's Time Lord husband Ulysses derives from Philip Segal's backstory for a proposed late 1990s revival of Doctor Who for which his television movie introducing the Eighth Doctor served as an unsuccessful pilot. The Doctor's search for his father would have served as a story arc for that series.

Russell T Davies has stated that the unnamed woman, implied to be a Time Lord, in the End of Time was meant to be the Doctor's mother. Accepting the television series and New Adventures and Eighth Doctor Adventures novels to exist in the same continuity, this would make her Penelope Gate. However, he has also said that who the woman is up to judgment, and she could be someone else.