In 2025’s Doctor Who Season 2 (or Season 15 or Season 41, depending on how you count) the titular Time Lord will be faced with a problem he’s encountered a few times before. As the trailers have revealed, the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) will be joined by a new companion, Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu). She’s a nurse, and in the latest trailers, she tells the Doctor to call her “the Nurse,” as a kind of joke about him being called “the Doctor.”
Because we saw Sethu in the previous season, playing Anglican Marine Mundy Flynn in the episode “Boom,” the Doctor is obviously concerned. He knows he’s seen this face before, and so he has to assume some kind of timey-wimey action is upon us. Many fans have already pointed out that Sethu’s early appearance in “Boom” was a callback to when Jenna Coleman appeared in Doctor Who as Oswin in “Asylum of the Daleks” (2012) prior to her true debut as Clara in “The Snowmen” later that same year. But is this really an “Impossible Girl” re-do, or is Doctor Who up to something else?
“There is something already connecting us,” the Doctor tells Belinda in the newest trailer. In response, Belinda tells the Doctor, “I’m not one of your adventures! You need to get me home.”
The Doctor promises to get Belinda home, but notes that it “might be a the long way round.” We’ve heard this all before in various ways, shapes, and forms, which is why it’s easy to assume that Belinda’s journey and the secret to her connection with the Doctor will be, in some senses, old hat. But, if there’s anything we learned from the previous season, is that Russell T Davies’ latest style of larger plot-arc structure favors misdirection.
Case-in-point: In the previous season, many fans assumed that the reappearance of various versions of actress Susan Twist signaled the return of Susan Foreman, regenerated in a new way. The Doctor himself believed this in the penultimate episode of that season, but, of course, we later learned that it was all part of the return of Sutekh, an enemy from the 4th Doctor era.
With Belinda having already appeared as Mundy, the easy bet is that she’ll have a timey-wimey connection to the Doctor that reminds us of something we’re expecting. In this case, she’ll be like Clara 2.0, or the product of some other kind of time paradox. It’s also possible that the connection is not a big deal, which we have a precedent for in the previous RTD Who eras. Eve Myles appeared in “The Unquiet Dead” as Gwyneth, and then three seasons later in “Journey’s End,” the 10th Doctor noted that the phenomenon of “spatial genetic multiplicity” accounted for Torchwood Gwen (also played by Myles) looking exactly like Gwyneth.
So, while it’s wise to place some bets on the 15h Doctor uttering the phrase “spatial genetic multiplicity” in regard to the Mundy/Belinda question, what if there’s another explanation that his hiding in plain sight? What if that joke about being called “the Nurse” is a dead giveaway? What if... Belinda is a Time Lord?
This kind of twist is also not without precedent. The Master (Derek Jacobi) returned way back in “Utopia” using a Chameleon Arch that disguised their DNA to seem human. The same thing happened with the Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin) in “Fugitive of the Judoon,” when we had a Time Lord hiding in plain sight and the Doctor didn’t even know it.
If Belinda — the Nurse — is a secret Time Lord, the question then becomes which one? Would she be someone we’ve already met, like the Rani or Romana? Or are we dealing with yet another season where Whovians are thinking about the Doctor’s long-lost granddaughter, Susan Foreman?
Either way, the solution to the mystery of Belinda Chandra might not simply be a re-do of Clara Oswald’s “Impossible Girl” storyline. Instead, it feels more likely that a bigger twist is coming, one that is either very obvious or so unlikely that no one has even thought of it. Yet.
