Penelope Gate
Penelope Gate was the human creator of a time machine (PROSE: The Room With No Doors) and the wife of the Time Lord Ulysses. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) By some accounts, she was the Doctor's mother. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles, The Infinity Doctors)
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 met 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 remembered that his mother's name was Penelope. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors) Penelope and Ulysses became friends with Mr Saldaamir, with whom they frequently went exploring. The trio also associated themselves with Lady Larna, who was from their future. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)
When the Time Lord Marnal threatened to expose Penelope's and Ulysses's activities, they used the telepathic circuits of his TARDIS to wipe his memory, and they dumped him on Earth in England, 1883, to board with Penelope's mother. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)
Appearance
At the Shoal, Penelope wore an ankle-length skirt and prim white blouse, with long red hair that "hung wild to her waist". (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) In the portrait with her husband hanging above the Doctor's fireplace, she appeared slightly plump with red hair. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors)
Behind the scenes
- The description of Penelope Gate in The Gallifrey Chronicles matches the description of the Doctor's mother in the same novel. Furthermore, Penelope's husband Ulysses originated from Philip Segal's proposed late 1990s revival of Doctor Who, where Ulysses was the Doctor's father. Lance Parkin utilised these ideas in The Gallifrey Chronicles, though Penelope and Ulysses' son is never explicitly identified as the Doctor.
- Kate Orman, creator of Penelope Gate, said it was "absolutely clear" in her mind that she was later "seduced and carried away" by the renegade Time Lord Daniel Joyce (from Orman's later novel Unnatural History), then abandoned to raise their son on Earth. This was meant to explain why, in Black Orchid, the Fifth Doctor said he always wanted to drive a steam train when he was a boy.[1]
