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In the 10th Doctor episode Smith and Jones when Martha asks the Doctor if he has a brother, he says

No, not any more.

It seems like if there had never been any mention of a brother, and no plans to introduce (a history of) one, a simple "no" would have worked for the purposes of this episode.

Has there been mention of a brother in any other episode or any of the novels?

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    I had assumed it was a reference to (and foreshadowing of) the Master, and that he was using "brother" metaphorically.
    – user1030
    May 28, 2011 at 9:55
  • Also there was suppose to be an episode with the third doctor that reveals the master is his brother but the man who played the master died so that had to replace it with planet of the spiders. Would that count?
    – Apocrypha
    Feb 22, 2014 at 23:41

8 Answers 8

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I'm pretty certain that there has never been a mention in the series about a brother. There have been mentions of the Doctor's family in that he has said he had to leave his family. The End of Time implied that the woman that appeared and talked to Wilf was the Doctor's mother - although this is not stated explicitly. I think Joe (in the comment) is right in that the implication is that the reference to "brother" was a reference to the Master.

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    This answer while receiving a great number of votes is only true if you consider the televised Dr. Who. The doctor's brother shows up in the audio and written spinoff stories of Dr. Who.
    – Thaddeus Howze
    Aug 17, 2013 at 4:11
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    Yep - you're completely right. However - most DW fans would not consider non-TV episodes as part of the true DW. No one believes that Peter Cushing was one of the 13 Doctors. Now, the various spinoffs may be inspiration for current episodes - or even insights. But effectively they don't exist.
    – Lekarz Kto
    Jan 19, 2015 at 3:05
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Lots, if you know where to look, er, listen. The Doctor's brother, Irving Braxiatel has quite a storied history IF you have listened to any of the audio products/broadcasts of the Dr Who Series.

Irving Braxiatel, or simply Braxiatel, was a Time Lord and the older brother of the Doctor. He maintained the Braxiatel Collection. At one time he held the office of Lord Cardinal in the High Council on Gallifrey. He also briefly served as Lord Chancellor and Lord President of Gallifrey. He was an associate of Bernice Summerfield.

  • Irving Braxiatel appeared in "The Inquiry" as Cardinal Braxiatel, produced by Big Finish Productions in 2004 and is played by Miles Richardson. Some of these stories appear to take place in an alternative timeline called The Axis.

  • It is mentioned that at least in one alternative universe the Doctor may have had to kill his brother during a time when the Doctor was "The Burner", a temporal assassin for the Gallifreyan Council. This could explain the Doctor's cryptic "not anymore statement".

  • Irving Braxiatel has also appeared in a number of novels as well. He appears in The Empire of Glass, Tears of the Oracle and Dragon's Wrath to name just a few.

  • Irving Braxiatel does not appear to have made any onscreen appearances since the reboot of Doctors Nine through Twelve.

The Empire of Glass is a Virgin Missing Adventures original novel written by Andy Lane based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It features the First Doctor, Steven Taylor, Vicki and Irving Braxiatel.

Tears of the Oracle: The shattered world of Dellah, once a thriving place of learning, has only one aspect of the university left. This is under siege by religious fanatics. Bernice Summerfield has to deal with this, a mad collector (Irving Braxiatel), her ex-husband and an Oracle that could lead to priceless information.

You can partake of the Doctor's brother Irving Braxiatel's complicated history at the Tardis Data Core where they track his appearances both in print and in audio. You can also reference Big Finish Productions for other Dr. Who audio appearances.

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    Very interesting! This should be the accepted answer.
    – Rand al'Thor ♦
    Dec 31, 2015 at 23:37
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Thus far, there has been no explicit mention of a brother. The only information we have on any immediate family of the Doctor is:

  • Susan, his granddaughter, who appears regularly in the first ten serials or so (season one and start of season two).
  • A great-grandson by Susan, who appears only in some Eighth Doctor audio episodes
  • His mother, who appears (not acknowledged on-screen, but has since been confirmed) in the Tenth Doctor's final season finale.
  • Jenny, his cloned offspring, whom he has acknowledged as his daughter.[1]

Presumably he has at least one natural son/daughter, Susan's parent, but we are never told which.

Of course, if you buy the New Adventures novels, then Time Lords aren't born, they're "loomed" in batches of 40-50, all of which are called "cousins", but its usually best to just pretend that stuff never happened.

[1]: As @Mr. Lister correctly points out, Jenny is not strictly a "clone" of the Doctor; she was produced by some unspecified replication process based on his DNA, but obviously including some genetic variations. She appeared physiologically to be Gallifreyan, so it's not clear where the alterations to her DNA came from. Calling her a "daughter" is probably the closest term we can come in English.

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    +1, but Jenny wasn't a clone. If she were, she'd have been male.
    – Mr Lister
    Aug 8, 2012 at 20:23
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    Although she couldn't be a true clone, Jenny could have 100% of the Doctor's genes. A method that would theoretically possible today would be to replace the genes in an ovum with those from one of the Doctor's sperm (with an X chromosome) and then fertilize it with another of the Doctor's sperm (with an X chromosome), although if you wanted to be 100% thorough you'd also need to replace the ovum's mitochondrial DNA with mitochondrial DNA from the Doctor.
    – Ben Hocking
    Aug 8, 2012 at 22:12
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Given that the Doctor may be

a clone, via Looming, of The Other

(as hinted in the book Lungbarrow) it's conceivable that he had a brother that way.

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  • The genetic relationship between people originating from each Family Loom was lateral rather than direct, meaning that people from the same Loom were "cousins" of each other. (as found here: tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Loom)
    – silvith
    Aug 13, 2012 at 13:05
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    No, I meant in the same way that Susan is the Doctor's granddaughter, he may have had a brother, via the same mechanism. Likewise he would have had a child, in order to have Susan as etc etc...
    – David Roberts
    Aug 13, 2012 at 23:33
  • Sorry, I didn't understand you meant that :) So far, the answers here lead me to believe the line was something improvised and may have been left in to use as a reference for a future plot...
    – silvith
    Aug 14, 2012 at 6:52
  • You are probably right. I doubt that the writers of the new series are that interested in continuity with the novels.
    – David Roberts
    Aug 14, 2012 at 7:18
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The Doctor's Brother might be this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Braxiatel

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While it has never been officially stated, Dr Who scripts were written where it was reveal The Doctor and The Master are half brothers. Paul McGann read one as part of his audition for his role as the 8th Doctor.

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    Hi, welcome to SF&F! This is nice, but would make a better answer if you included the relevant excerpt from the dialog as text, just in case the video disappears from Youtube someday.
    – DavidW
    Aug 15, 2019 at 19:16
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http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Irving_Braxiatel This link states that Braxiatel IS the Doctor's older brother.

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  • The audio dramas and prose novels aren't considered canon for the tv series though
    – Monty129
    Aug 16, 2013 at 22:11
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    There is no canon for Dr. Who. Unlike the owners of other science fiction franchises, the BBC takes no position on which Doctor Who stories are definitive for future projects. The show has no 'canon', and indeed, recent producers of the show have expressed distaste for the idea.
    – Thaddeus Howze
    Aug 18, 2013 at 8:10
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I remember long ago in a store looking at a Dr. Who novel or more likely a serial novelization, with a scene set in an alien underground city I think, where the Doctor and the Master were said to be brothers. For along time I thought that was canon in the TV series.

If my memory is correct the Doctor and the Master were brothers in at least some part of Dr. Who literature.

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