Our Biggest Unanswered Questions After the ‘Doctor Who’ Finale

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the season 1 finale of Doctor Who.

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  Season 1 ended on a happy note, but there are still many unanswered questions, including the identity of Mrs. Flood.
• Millie Gibson's Ruby Sunday leaves the Doctor, but her origins and meaning are still unclear.
• Season 1 talked a lot about the Doctor's family and his granddaughter, but we have yet to see Susan.

Like one more season of Doctor Who ends, so does another mystery about the true identity of a companion or a threat that could destroy Earth. This time, the two-part “The Legend of Ruby Sunday”/”Empire of Death” covered both grounds by revealing the origins of the titular companion (Millie Gibson), and returning to the god of death Sutekh, who made his debut in the Fourth Doctor's (Tom Baker) was After searching for his birth mother for eight episodes, Ruby Sunday finally finds her and discovers that she is nothing more than a perfectly normal woman, which is actually kind of neat. As for the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), measures his strength against an entity that is not only a threat to our beloved home planet, but to all of existence. In the end, with the help of his friends and a little mystery up his sleeve, he prevails, and humanity is saved once again. Ruby says goodbye to the TARDIS and heads off to spend some quality time with her birth mother, and the Doctor jumps into the next adventure. The end.

Okay, not the end. This is all very fine and dandy, but the story of Doctor Who it's not over. Heck, it hasn't even been close to a proper ending since 1963! So, of course, there are some cliffhangers up in the air, as well as some questions that could still be answered in the upcoming season. Still, the wait is long and we'll have to bide our time as we try to find the right solution to some serious puzzles. Here are the five most pressing questions Doctor Who best answer when it comes back for season 2.

We still don't know who Mrs. Flood is

This is perhaps the main question on everyone's mind, with what that final scene of Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) standing on top of Ruby's roof in winter clothes, promising absolute terror for the Doctor's future. For much of the new first season of the revamped show, Mrs. Flood appears to be nothing more than a nosy neighbor to Ruby and her family. A nosy neighbor who, oddly enough, never bothers with the new interstellar developments taking place in her home, but a nosy neighbor nonetheless. Our perception of her begins to change when Sutekh (voiced by Gabriel Woolf) takes control of a portion of humanity. Suddenly, he becomes a harbinger of death and doom, fully aware of the horrors to come. That can easily be explained away though by all the possession, but what about that ending though? What does it mean for her character and the upcoming Christmas special?

Maybe it doesn't mean anything, at least as far as Christmas is concerned. After all, Anita Dobson herself has talked about how fans will get to know her character in the second season of the show, so maybe Christmas won't be his time to shine just yet. However, there is no denying that Mrs. Flood is much more than an ordinary human being. Theories abound on the web: it could be a new incarnation of the Master, or the Rani, or perhaps another god from the pantheon of which Sutekh, Master (Jinx Monsoon), and the toy manufacturer (Neil Patrick Harris) arose? Maybe she's an entirely new villain, one connected to Ruby's past. Let's not overlook the fact that Mrs. Flood's last appearance has her covered in snow, like what happened to Ruby whenever she thought about the night she stood on the steps of Ruby Road Church. Is this some kind of omen? Or is it just a coincidence, and the snow conjured by Ruby was just an effect of the memory working like a time machine?

Is Ruby Sunday really gone from 'Doctor Who'?

Speaking of Ruby, is “Empire of Death” really the end of her story? At first, it sure seems like it: upon finding his biological mother, Ruby says goodbye to the TARDIS in a rare healthy companion exit. There is no death, no memory wipe, not a single individual trapped in another dimension or time period. It's just an emotional conclusion to an adventure we always knew would end. However, showrunner Russell T. Davies has already put to rest the rumor that was giving news of Millie Gibson's departure from the show. Davies has made it quite clear that “we were given two years of a series at Disney, and we're delivering two years, and the story of Ruby Sunday literally spans those two years.”

So maybe instead of wondering if Ruby Sunday is coming back, we should be asking how she will return. Their goodbye seems pretty final, after all. Sure, at first she makes it seem like she's just going to catch up with her mom for a little while before heading back into the TARDIS, but it soon becomes clear that she doesn't want to upset the Doctor. Once he tells her everything is fine, she leaves to enjoy the life she's always dreamed of. With all of this in mind, what could bring her back to a life of adventuring through time and space? It is also known that another companion, played by Stranded Sethu, will also be joining the TARDIS team, so it might have something to do with Ruby's return. Or maybe it's all related to Mrs. Flood…

Will the Doctor be reunited with his granddaughter Susan?

Another character whose return has been long awaited Doctor Who fans are Susan Foreman (Carol Ann Ford), the Doctor's granddaughter and first companion, or assistant, as they were called back in the day. His grandfather cruelly abandoned (William Hartnell) on Earth after falling in love with a human freedom fighter in the 1964 serial “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, The Doctor thinks Susan is dead, killed by the Master-induced explosion that wiped out all the Time Lords in “The Timeless Child”. However, encountering a villain who uses his name to lure him into a trap, the Doctor is clearly emotional and hopeful, so perhaps all is not lost. It wouldn't be the first retcon to enter Doctor Whothe story of the showrunners to return to Susan. Just think of all the times the Master and even the Time Lords as a whole have died and then come back. So with all the mentions of Susan this season — the Doctor also tells Ruby about her in “The Devil's Chord” — could Russell T. Davies be planning a return? Carole Ann Ford certainly agrees, and in her own words, “the mind boggles with all the ways Susan could come back.”

Will the doctor find his own birth family?

The Doctor's Gallifreyan family isn't the only one that has been lurking in our minds, completely out of sight. during the Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker), it is revealed that the Doctor is not originally from Gallifrey, but from an unknown planet. Like Ruby, he is a foundlingbrought to his adoptive planet by a scientist named Tecteun (Seylan Baxter), who erases his memory and experiments on him to extract the power of regeneration which he later passed on to other Time Lords. Simply put, without the Doctor, Gallifreyan society as we know it may never have existed. But what happened to the other societies where this power of regeneration was apparently common before the Doctor's encounter with Tecteun?

Now, the new season 1 of Doctor Who it was about the importance of finding the origins. Ruby's adoption story could have gone a number of ways, but the writers chose to emphasize her reunion with her birth mother. All this with Ruby maintaining a good relationship with her adoptive family. Like this, We can only imagine how important finding your roots must be to someone like the Doctor, who was always abused by those who raised him. Will Season 2 of the show pick up where Season 1 left off about biological and adoptive families and reveal the Doctor's true identity? Thematically speaking, at least, it would make a lot of sense.

What happened to the teacher?

Now, this question may be related to our first one, but if Mrs. Flood turns out to be someone else entirely, we'll still have the matter of what happened to the Master (last seen by Sacha Dhawan) to face. On the brink of death, he lost a game to the Toymaker and, as punishment, was miniaturized and imprisoned inside a gold tooth. This is revealed to us in “The Giggle”, the same special in which the Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant) bigenera in the XV. Together, the two Doctors manage to beat the Toymaker at his own game and banish him from this world. As it disappeared, however, her gold tooth is left behind and she is last seen being grasped by a mysterious hand. Whose hand is it, and what plans does its owner have for the Master? The classic villain is as quintessential to Doctor Who as the Daleks and Cybermen, so could he be brought back for Season 2? Season 1 tried to keep the most used Doctor Who bad guys at bay, but maybe Davies will take a different approach for his sophomore run. Whatever happened to the gold tooth remains a mystery.

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