Wilfred Mott
Wilfred Mott was the father of Sylvia Noble and the grandfather of Donna Noble. He was also a one-time travelling companion of the Tenth Doctor. A victim of several significant alien invasions of Earth in 2009, he was instrumental in stopping the Time Lords' return from within the time-lock which sealed them inside the Time War. During that effort, he became himself trapped. His rescue was the proximate cause of the Doctor's regeneration into his eleventh incarnation.
Biography
Military service
Donna Noble said he had enlisted to fight in World War II while underage (NSA: The Nemonite Invasion). In 1948, Wilfred was a private in the British Army stationed in the British Mandate of Palestine at its end. (DW: The End of Time) Years later, a mysterious Time Lady pointed out that he had served in the military without once taking a life. Wilf refused to feel any shame about this fact. (DW: The End of Time)
21st century
In the 2006 elections, after the death of the British Prime Minister by the Slitheen, (DW: Aliens of London) Wilfred claimed to have voted for Harriet Jones. His daughter disputed this. (DW: The Stolen Earth)
In December 2007, Wilfred was laid up with Spanish flu, unable to attend his granddaughter's wedding. (DW: The Runaway Bride, DW: The Sontaran Stratagem) Wilfred was manning his newspaper stand in London, on Christmas Eve 2008, when he met the Tenth Doctor for the first time. Earth was aware of alien life and the threat they posed, and, given events surrounding the Sycorax (DW: The Christmas Invasion) and the Racnoss (DW: The Runaway Bride), believed aliens might attack on Christmas. Wilf told the Doctor and Astrid he was the only person who remained in London apart from Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace as everyone else had fled to the countryside. He was angered when the Titanic hurtled over London. (DW: Voyage of the Damned)
An amateur astronomer, he pitched a tent behind his daughter's house in Chiswick and spent most of his nights on top of a hill with a telescope looking for aliens among the stars. In 2009, Donna waved to him from the Doctor's TARDIS while flying away with the Doctor. (DW: Partners in Crime)
Donna visited him and her mother after she had arrived on Earth again. She told him but not her mother about the Doctor because she knew she would react badly. She told him about ATMOS and what they were doing. When the Doctor turned up with a UNIT soldier, Wilfred realised the Doctor was the same man he had met at Christmas. He opened the family car to investigate an ATMOS device and was trapped in the car when it was triggered. He began to suffocate (DW: The Sontaran Stratagem) but was freed by his daughter Sylvia Noble. The next day he told Donna he would keep her secret safe and not tell her mother. (DW: The Poison Sky)
There is an unconfirmed account that Wilfred discovered a new star, which was named after him. (NSA: Beautiful Chaos)
When the Earth was moved into the Medusa Cascade, Sylvia and he tried to fight against the Daleks. Wilf fired a paintball at a Dalek, but it dissolved the paint.
As it was about to exterminate him, Rose Tyler teleported to the scene and killed the Dalek. Sylvia and Wilf took her to their home. A communication came from a Sub-Wave Network, but they couldn't respond as Sylvia thought webcams were 'naughty' and didn't let her father have one. He watched as Martha Jones and her mother, Torchwood 3 and Sarah Jane Smith spoke with Harriet Jones. Rose located the Doctor and teleported out. (DW: The Stolen Earth) After the Earth was put back in its proper place, they celebrated. When the Doctor brought Donna back to them without any memory of her adventures with him, Wilf was distraught at the thought of her going back to her previous life. He promised to look up at the sky every night and remember him on Donna's behalf. (DW: Journey's End)
The End of Time
As Christmas 2009 approached, Wilf, along with everyone else on Earth, began having nightmares involving the laughing face of the Master. Seeking refuge in a church, Wilf was approached by a mysterious woman, who told him that the church had been a convent in the 1300s, had been attacked by a demon from the sky and saved by a "saintly physician", before she vanished. The next day, Wilf organised a 'Silver Cloak' of old age pensioners. He quickly found the Doctor and learned of his prophesied death in a café. On Christmas morning, Wilf prepared to watch the Queen's speech, but was interrupted by the image of the mysterious woman, an image only he could see. The woman told Wilf that he would have to take up arms, that the Doctor could still be saved and that Wilf could not tell the Doctor anything of what she said. Taking his old service revolver, Wilf met the Doctor outside the Noble house and joined him in tracking down the Master.
The two arrived too late to stop the Master turning every human on Earth into a duplicate of himself, but Wilf was protected from the effect behind a radiation shield. He escaped with the Doctor to a spaceship and after another encounter with the woman, gave the Doctor his gun and encouraged him to kill the Master. The Doctor initially refused, but on learning the Time Lords were behind everything, he took the gun. In the battle that followed, when Earth shot missiles at the ship, Wilf manned one of the guns and later had the aliens land so he could join the Doctor. He freed someone trapped in the radiation booth, but as a result, was trapped himself. He witnessed the Doctor and the Master defeat Rassilon and the Time Lords and then knocked on the booth door to be let out, fulfilling the prophecy of "he will knock four times." Due to the nuclear bolt still being active, the radiation would flood the booth and kill him, but not harm anyone else. To save him, the Doctor would have to sacrifice himself. Wilf was willing to die instead, but the Doctor saved him and absorbed a fatal dose of radiation, which caused him to start to regenerate. He returned Wilf home and promised to see him one more time.
At Donna's wedding, Wilf encountered the Doctor one last time. The Doctor gave Wilf and Sylvia a winning lottery ticket he had purchased with money borrowed from Geoff Noble, then left. Wilf and Sylvia gave Donna the ticket and Wilf tearfully saluted the Doctor as he took off. (DW: The End of Time)
Donna's World
If his granddaughter Donna had turned right instead of left and never met the Doctor, Wilfred would never have met the Doctor, either. On Christmas Day 2008 of the alternate timeline, he was in the English countryside on holiday with his daughter and granddaughter, courtesy of Donna's winning raffle ticket. He and his family were thus spared the destruction of London, but the lingering radiation forced their evacuation to Leeds, where they had to share a house with other families. Wilfred adjusted to this life, joining in the shanty singing in the kitchen. Wilfred was upset when all non-English residents were forcibly deported to "labour camps", noting this had happened before in his life.
Wilfred set up his telescope behind the house at Leeds; it was there that he and Donna first noticed the darkness spreading over the night sky, eating up the stars. It was this sight that finally prompted Donna to find Rose Tyler and repair her timeline. (DW: Turn Left)
Personality
Wilfred had a positive attitude. Even in a crisis, he turned to good war-time spirit. He was a strong patriot, loyal to Queen Elizabeth and his beloved England. He also had a good relationship with his granddaughter Donna Noble and encouraged her companionship with the Doctor, even keeping it a secret from his daughter, Sylvia, for a time.
After the Doctor had to erase Donna's memory in the aftermath of foiling Davros's latest plan, Wilfred's strong spirit seemed to have gone. That was probably because he believed that she was better with the Doctor. As the TARDIS dematerialised, Wilfred saluted in respect. (DW: Journey's End)
Wilfred also proved a loyal companion to the Doctor, from searching him out when prompted to by The Woman, to giving the Doctor his gun and prompting him to kill the Master, as well as serving as a gunner when the ship they were on was under attack. He convinced the Vinvocci to bring him back to help the Doctor. He also showed a willingness for self-sacrifice: saving someone trapped in a radiation booth and being willing to die there so the Doctor could live, saying he was an old man.
He developed a paternal relationship with the Doctor, trying to comfort him when he began to cry during their conversation and wanted him to be happy and have someone to make him laugh. He was also willing to give up his life to let the Doctor live. This relationship was picked up by others, with the Master sarcastically referring to Wilfred as the Doctor's father. Wilfred admitted he would be proud to have the Doctor for a son and the Doctor said he'd be honoured if Wilfred was his father. (DW: The End of Time)
Behind the scenes
- Wilfred Mott is played by actor Bernard Cribbins, who first appeared in the Doctor Who movie Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D..
- Wilf is the Doctor's oldest televised human companion, as of 2011.
- The character was not originally conceived as Donna's grandfather. The character was retroactively made Sylvia Noble's father following the death of Howard Attfield, who was originally to have reprised his Runaway Bride role. Several scenes with Geoffrey Noble had already been filmed by the time of Attfield's death. They were rewritten and re-shot to incorporate Wilfred as Donna's grandfather.
- Wilfred spoke of a conversation with the Doctor where regeneration was discussed. This does not occur during the filmed series and may allude to an off-screen encounter with the Doctor (unless the topic was brought up when the Doctor returned the memory-wiped Donna to her family to explain how she came to have Time Lord consciousness).
- Wilf's newspaper stand appears only in Voyage of the Damned. It is not known if he continued to operate the business during the Series 4/Specials time frame. Most of his appearances in Series 4 are, however, at night or in the late afternoon, well past the day part when most newsstand agents conduct the bulk of their business.
- As with other characters identified as companions for a single story, including Adelaide Brooke, Grace Holloway and Sara Kingdom, Wilf's status as a "full" companion is open to debate.
- When Voyage of the Damned was being filmed, Wilfred was not planned on for a second appearance. He was just going to be a news stand worker named Stan. However, after Howard Attfield's death, it was decided that Wilfred would come back as Donna's grandfather. In the credits, his name was changed from Stan to Wilfred Mott.
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