10 Doctor Who Mysteries With The Worst Possible Answers
Not all of Doctor Who's many mysteries are worth writing home about...
Doctor Who is all about mysteries, it's right there in the name! However, much like the real name of the Doctor, there are some mysteries that must never be answered, or at least not like this.
A satisfying resolution to a Doctor Who mystery should make sense of everything that's come before, while also providing a new direction for the storytelling. Case in point, the River Song reveal in A Good Man Goes to War. We always suspected that she was the Doctor's wife, so it hits a lot harder when we find out that she's also the daughter of Amy and Rory.
Other times, however, Doctor Who can really drop the ball. Whether it's by providing a resolution that ignores or undermines the setup, or by rushing the climax due to external factors like actor availability, it can be really disappointing when a Doctor Who mystery doesn't deliver.
The revelations in The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death are the most recent examples of this, but they're not the first, and probably won't be the last.
10. The Thirteenth Doctor's Fob Watch
The Thirteenth Doctor's decision to not open the fob watch containing her lost memories is definitely satisfying on a character level. It's an explicit choice by the Doctor to focus on who they are in the current moment, rather than be defined by their past. It's also a pretty decent allegory for a 60-year-old TV show, too.
However, this choice still felt quite disappointing in the moment. The whole reason that the Flux happened was because the Doctor had gone poking around in her past, and it destroyed half the universe! Not only that, but the Doctor watched Swarm and Azure murder her adopted mother, and came face-to-face with Time itself.
After all that madness, it does feel like a bit of a cop-out for the Doctor not to get some answers, especially when those answers were literally in the palm of her hand. This is what she was looking for all this time, and she just... throws it away? And ultimately, we're no further forward with the mysteries of the Division or the Fugitive Doctor than when those concepts were first introduced!
Although, let's be honest, the true disappointment will likely come when a future showrunner decides to actually open that fob watch... but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.