WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for the latest episode of Doctor Who, “The Timeless Children,” which premiered Sunday on BBC.
Doctor Who's Season 12 finale was perhaps the biggest and most important in the BBC series' 57-year history. In "The Timeless Children," the Master revealed the secret origins of the Time Lords to the Doctor, and confirmed that she was in fact the Timeless Child. This universe-shattering twist retroactively means that the Doctor is the first Time Lord. The others simply replicated her ability to regenerate and hid the truth from her for thousands of years.
This revelation also means the Doctor has a lot more than the 13 regenerations we know about. Already, we've seen another of the Doctor's incarnations, played by Jo Martin, earlier in the season -- and she is likely simply one of many. But as big as this answer to the mystery of the Timeless Child was, it also brought up a new question: what is the Division... and are they still around?
Throughout Season 12's penultimate episode, a series of flashbacks showed the life of a police officer named Brendan, who was adopted as a baby. He eventually discovered he was special after he walked away unscathed from an accident he never should have been able to survive. But then, things took a mysterious turn when two men who looked exactly like people he knew hooked him up to a machine -- one that appeared to erase his memory.
At the time, we had no idea how this connected to the larger story of Doctor Who. After the finale, however, it appears that Brendan was one of the Doctor's past lives. As for the men who wiped his memory, they appear to be agents of a secret Time Lord group known as the Division.
A short briefing scene from a Division meeting shows three Time Lords discussing their responsibilities. They explain that while the Time Lords have the ability to travel through time and space, they are not allowed to interfere with events that will change their course. However, the Division doesn't abide by this rule. They appear to be, a sort of black ops unit for the Time Lords, and it looks like they are the ones who erased the Timeless Child's memory.
Thanks to her visit in the Matrix of Gallifrey, however, the Doctor is now aware of the Division. This discovery is bound to send her on a quest for answers. And given the secretive nature of the Division, not to mention their ability to hide in plain sight, it's possible they managed to survive Gallifrey's destruction. If that is the case, then they are still out there. And while they hold possibly all the answers, they might also make for a formidable new adversary for the Doctor in Season 13.
Doctor Who stars Jodie Whittaker as the 13th iteration of the titular Time Lord. Whittaker is joined by co-stars Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole and Mandip Gill in a series spearheaded by showrunner Chris Chibnall. The next episode, "Revolution of the Daleks," will air this holiday season. The new season and all previous 11 seasons will stream on HBO Max later this year.