Doctor Who Flux: 10 Huge Questions After Survivors Of The Flux

The trailer for The Vanquishers ends with the cliff hanger of the fobwatch being opened. Whilst we have to be wary of deliberate misdirection (last week’s trailer made it look like Kate was in the same room with the Grand Serpent and the TARDIS), it’s clear that whatever it contains is going to be exposed. So will the Doctor finally get to know the truth?

Again, it depends if Tecteun can be trusted. Is it possible to plant false memories inside a fobwatch, in the same way that the Matrix on Gallifrey can be manipulated? One twist could be that the watch contains someone else’s memories. Could the Master be the Timeless Child after all? He’d been noticeably ignored until the Doctor bought him up in conversation with Tecteun. If Bel and Vinder’s child is to be significant, then making them the Master’s parents is more palatable than making them the Doctor’s.

The possibility that the Doctor has had many more lives is already part of the series’ lore. The numbering of the Doctor’s incarnations simply indicates the order of televised appearances. It’s never been clear that William Hartnell’s first Doctor was the first incarnation. The Doctor already knows about many more faces than we do. The memory wipe doesn’t include, for example, the pre-Hartnell incarnations played by members of the production team in The Brain of Morbius.

The preserved memories are supposedly of the Doctor’s time as a Division operative and possibly also her Gallifreyan childhood. Tecteun herself is ignorant about who the Doctor was before she found her. We could be looking at two memory wipes, the one that left the Doctor stranded as a little girl and the one imposed by the Time Lords.