Doctor Who Flux: 10 Huge Questions After The Vanquishers

8. Why Was Di The Only Prisoner Kept Alive In The Passenger?

Doctor Who Flux The Vanquishers
BBC

Keeping Di alive inside the Passenger was a big mistake by Swarm and Azure. It’s true that they underestimated her, treating her and all the Doctor’s human companions as insignificant. Di wasn’t wrong there. But isn’t that how they saw all their victims? What happened to the rest of them?

In Survivors of the Flux, we saw other victims taken out of the Passenger and turned into an energy source to enable the Ravagers to get to Tecteun’s ship. Was Di the only one able to hide from them, because surely she would have served their purposes just as well as the rest of them?

When Azure first took Di, they were using her as a plaything, a means of getting the Doctor’s attention. And right to the end, they were still wanting to use the Flux for entertainment. They couldn’t wait to see the Doctor watch her precious universe be destroyed, again and again. Saving one human to taunt the Doctor would make sense, though it’s an odd choice of victim.

There’s something not quite right about how Diane’s story ends, she all too easily rejects Dan’s advances, raising a suspicion that something else has happened to her inside the Passenger. Will she be revealed as a double agent, working for the Master perhaps? Was he also inside the Passenger and has he been keeping Diane alive all along?

Contributor
Contributor

Paul Driscoll is a freelance writer and author across a range of subjects from Cult TV to religion and social policy. He is a passionate Doctor Who fan and January 2017 will see the publication of his first extended study of the series (based on Toby Whithouse's series six episode, The God Complex) in the critically acclaimed Black Archive range by Obverse Books. He is a regular writer for the fan site Doctor Who Worldwide and has contributed several essays to Watching Books' You and Who range. Recently he has branched out into fiction writing, with two short stories in the charity Doctor Who anthology Seasons of War (Chinbeard Books). Paul's work will also feature in the forthcoming Iris Wildthyme collection (A Clockwork Iris, Obverse Books) and Chinbeard Books' collection of drabbles, A Time Lord for Change.