Because they no longer had a space ship or weapons and had been concussed so that they probably couldn’t remember their names. 
I believe he mentioned to Martha they would follow them through space and time.
They had followed them through space and time, hence Son of Mine’s rather creepy rant to the headmaster about what was coming for the students. The Family had already seen WWI while hunting the Doctor.
And I’m dreadfully peeved that I’ll probably miss next week’s episode. :mad:
Right. But that’s stupid. “Oh dear, a family of homicidal maniacs is chasing me through time and space in a desperate effort to steal my essence, but they’ll be dead in three months. To stop them chasing me I can either a) trap them somewhere for a few months or b) turn myself into a human being and put my consciousness in a watch that someone might steal and then I’d be totally buggered not to mention potentially stranding Martha 80 years before she was even born. I pick plan B. I could choose plan A and trap them, even trap them somewhere pleasant, but that wouldn’t be very nice.”
For that matter, The Doctor dodged the near-omnipotent Black Guardian for months by simply installing a randomizer on the TARDIS controls. Certainly the less-than-omnipotent family could have been similarly dodged.
Yeah, but plan A wouldn’t have been a very long episode. In the original novel, the Doctor becomes human so that he can try and understand his then-companion Bernice better, and then encounters the baddies. I wonder why they didn’t go for that.
Since Martha was being shot at in the first seconds of the episode, I believe a trap at that point would have been more dangerous than running a hiding for a few months. Indeed, perhaps hiding and waiting to be found was the trap, and the Doctor’s fury was at the unforeseen deaths of the 1913 humans.
I don’t mean to beat this to death, but I find it very hard to believe that the Doctor could not have slipped away in the TARDIS long enough to set something up. If nothing else, while the TARDIS is in dematerialized, isn’t it for all intents and purposes nowhere/no"when" until it rematerializes? So dematerialize, don’t rematerialize until you’re ready to rumble and then rumble.
I know, it’s a TV show, I’m over-thinking it, it’s still annoying.
I would think that “they could follow us” meant in a sort of quantum mechanics “line of sight” fashion, but my knowledge of Dr. Who comes from watching the Dr. With the Scarf (Tom Somebody?) on educational TV a long time ago.
Tom Baker.
You’ve been watching Doctor Who that long and this is the plot hole that bothers you? As someone on here pointed out to me when I started complaining about the gaping chasm-sized holes in the plot of “Gridlock,” looking for logic in Doctor Who plots is the way to madness.
Oh no, other plot holes bother me, this is just the one that I’m harping on for whatever reason.