Doctor Who is a complicated beast. Characters die and are reborn, others travel in time so they end up further back than where they started, and the narrative rules by which one story is told are quite often discarded to suit the needs of another. This inevitably leads to lots of loose ends, where promising story arcs and character ideas are abandoned in favor of whatever happens to be attacking the TARDIS this week.
And that’s a good thing. As fans, we might expect every event in every story to have a significance worth exploring – and the fine people at Big Finish audio productions have done great work in doing just that – but within the canon of the TV show, tying up every idea into a neat bow would undermine the chaotic hotchpotch glory of the scattergun narrative.
Plus, some concepts really do work better in the mind. Here are a few examples:
1. Can we see the Time War?
When we first meet the Ninth Doctor he has just enacted the destruction of Gallifrey, the final and decisive act of the Time War. This has killed all the Time Lords and all of the Daleks and he’s haunted by what he has seen and done (“The End of the World”). Later on, the Tenth Doctor talks about the war in horrified tones, referring to “the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, the Nightmare Child, the Could-have-been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-weres” (“The End of Time”).
Later still, we see the War Doctor shooting Daleks on Gallifrey in the last days of the Time War (“The Day of the Doctor”) and it’s explosive and dramatic, but visually it’s just a Dalek invasion of a planet. Those intangible horrors Ten talks about are nowhere to be seen, because we all know that seeing them would make them less horrific. The full reality of the Time War works far better as an unseen and time-locked atrocity than a visual feast for TV. The fact that it has left such a vivid emotional scar on the Doctor tells us all we need to know.
2. Who was Susan Foreman’s mother?
The Doctor’s familial history is, on the face of it, a potentially fertile area for exploration, given that we know so little about it. Numerous spin-off media stories have tried to grapple with what happened before we first met the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan (in “An Unearthly Child”), and what happened to her since she left the TARDIS (in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”).
The thing is, if any of it was codified into the core canon of Doctor Who the TV show, you’d either have a family history of functionally immortal time travellers to contend with – and that means they could pop up at any point, or worse, we’d have to see how they died in the Time War – or you’d have to explain that Susan isn’t in fact the Doctor’s granddaughter, it just made sense to call her that for propriety’s sake in 1960s London.
3. What happened to Jenny?
The universe is big. I mean it’s really, really big. And if you add time travel into the mix, the chances that any two people who have said goodbye and headed off in different directions could meet each other again, are so microscopically tiny that an atom could wear them for a hat. That’s the best and clearest reason why the Doctor hasn’t come across his clone daughter Jenny (“The Doctor’s Daughter”) since they first met.
It’s fair to say that having a character that shares so much of the Doctor’s DNA traveling around the cosmos does raise interesting questions, but they’re not the kind that really need answering with any urgency. She’s related to him, she’s alive, he doesn’t know it, and she’s having a look around. Cool.
And before anyone gets too excited about making her the mother of Susan, let’s just say this: not every character we know has to be neatly related to every other character we know in what is, as we’ve said, a massive universe. We can leave that kind of thing to Star Wars.
4. What is in the Doctor’s biodata module?
Cards on the table, we don’t know what’s going to happen next in Doctor Who, so this may become a moot point very soon. But it was a huge relief to get to the end of Doctor Who: Flux and discover that the Doctor was in possession of that Time Lord pocket watch with all of her memories of the Division, and that she wasn’t prepared to open it.
It might be nice to find out exactly why that is, to see what she is feeling about everything and why she hid it in the TARDIS console, but as with the Time War, the more we see of the Doctor’s inner life, the less mysterious a thing it becomes. In effect, Doctor Who becomes Doctor Oh, Them. The eternal mystery would be solved and we could all go and get on with our lives. And who wants that? Exactly.
5. What happened to the Sandmen?
At the end of “Sleep No More” it became apparent that the Sandman virus was being transmitted and would soon spread across planets. The Doctor and Clare were lucky enough to escape, but they didn’t beat the virus and so theoretically, it’s still out there in the 38^th century, causing trouble.
Mark Gatiss, who wrote “Sleep No More,” even had a sequel episode lined up to address this situation. However, when he realized that Steven Moffat was moving on, and that he might only have one more script to write for Doctor Who, he offered “Empress of Mars” instead, which had been a dream of his to write. As for the Sandmen, that situation could be easily resolved with by a passing remark from some future Doctor about sorting them out, much in the same vein as previous references to “the terrible Zodin” or even “Jim the Fish.” It’s fine not to see everything the Doctor does.
6. When does the Doctor become the Valeyard?
The last time Doctor Who spent an entire season telling one story was in 1986. Season 23 was denoted “The Trial of a Time Lord” and saw the Sixth Doctor facing a judge and jury for his meddling ways. He finds out, towards the end of a biased trial, that the Valeyard, his prosecutor, is actually a future incarnation of his.
This highly promising idea has been like geek catnip for certain Whovians, who want to know exactly which Doctor regenerates into this cold and pompous creature. But just like the older version of the Fourth Doctor who appears at the end of “The Day of the Doctor,” it’s enough to know that somehow this thing happens eventually. We don’t really need to know how we got there.
7. What happened to Me and Clara?
They flew off in a TARDIS and had lots of fun.
Do we need to see it? No. Would it be nice to bump into them from time to time? I guess. Did I mention that the universe is big? Yes.
Is there a loose Doctor Who thread you just can’t let go of?