Warning: SPOILERS for the Doctor Who episode “The Story & the Engine” are ahead!
We’re past the halfway point of Doctor Who Season 2 on the 2025 TV schedule, with the latest episode available to stream with a Disney+ subscription seeing Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor getting trapped in a barbershop in Lagos, Nigeria where the inhabitants were forced to tell stories to power an alien engine. Arguably the biggest surprise from “The Story & the Engine” came when we got a cameo appearance from Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor, who was introduced during the Thirteenth Doctor era. Martin wasn’t onscreen for long, but it was enough to convince me that a lingering storyline from when Jodie Whittaker was leading Doctor Who has finally been resolved.
Secret incarnations of The Doctor were nothing new prior to when the Thirteenth Doctor started traveling around time and space in the TARDIS (see The War Doctor), but it was during this period of Doctor Who that we learned that there were incarnations of the protagonist who existed prior to The First Doctor. The Fugitive Doctor was one of those incarnations, but what’s even weirder is that The Doctor had no memories of their pre-First self. This all stemmed from The Doctor having been revealed to once be The Timeless Child, an orphan from an unidentified world whom the Time Lords replicated regeneration from and infused into their biology.
At the end of Doctor Who: Flux, the Thirteenth Doctor received a fob watch containing all her missing memories. However, rather than open it up and have all these experiences from her past lives come flooding back, 13 instead deposited the watch into the TARDIS. The implication was that there may come a day when The Doctor is ready to regain those memories, but for now, she wanted nothing to do with them. Simple enough, right?
But here’s the thing: in “The Story & the Engine,” the Fifteenth Doctor remembered meeting Anansi’s daughter Abena back when he was the Fugitive Doctor. How did that happen? Have those pre-First Doctor memories started to resurface on their own within the Time Lord’s mind? Maybe, but I’m thinking that sometime after the Thirteenth Doctor regenerated, The Doctor decided to retrieve the fob watch from within the TARDIS and finally fill those memory gaps.
Admittedly, this is a moment I would like to see onscreen, but I can also understand why it would be handled offscreen. With Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor entrance coinciding with the series becoming available to stream on Disney+ outside of the United Kingdom, this Doctor Who era has been designed to be the most newcomer-friendly in a long time. Sure, there have been plenty of callbacks and other past Doctor Who characters who’ve appeared, including Vanessa Redgrave’s Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Bonnie Langford’s Mel Bush. But for the most part, accessibility has been more important than ever now that Doctor Who is available to more people internationally than ever.
Delving into the nitty gritty of those pre-First Doctor memories might be too daunting of a task to delve into on Doctor Who right now. It’s one thing for the Fugitive Doctor to briefly appear or allude to the Timeless Child by having 15 tell Ruby Sunday that he’s adopted, it’s another to try to explain the backstory behind the fob watch and squeeze it into a story that Russell T. Davies and co. want to tell. For now, my headcanon is that the Fourteenth Doctor opened the watch while he was recovering from the psychological trauma of his past few lives as part of the healing process.
There are three episodes left in Doctor Who Season 2, and if it turns out that in either this season or a future season, we see The Doctor opening up the fob watch, I’ll gladly admit I was wrong. Until then, I’ll go back to ponder what the deal is with the mysterious Mrs. Flood.
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