Guide:Plot summary for those who left with Smith
Are you one of the viewers who left as Matt Smith did? Are you looking for a refresher as to what happened after? Have no fear, that's precisely what this guide is for. We'll try to get you up to speed to the current era since the departure of the 11th Doctor.
Series 8
After his regeneration into a starker, slightly more alien incarnation, Clara finds herself questioning her continued journeys with the Doctor. The problem is compounded as she finds it difficult to keep a healthy balance between her travels and her personal life, a new boyfriend. These issues come to a head when her boyfriend dies, and she begins to unravel. At the same time, The Master returns, in a female incarnation, Missy, and tries to convert all of the world's dead into Cybermen as a way to hold the earth hostage and force the Doctor to conquer the universe. Ultimately the crisis is averted by those same Cybermen, some of which didn't fully shut off their emotions.
Series 9
The Doctor and Clara continue on their adventures, with Clara stepping up and taking a more active role, and the Doctor becoming more protective of her. This culminates when Clara dies, and the Doctor becomes trapped in a time loop for billions of years, killing himself over and over again to find a way out. When he does so, he finds himself on Gallifrey, freed from the bubble universe where they were trapped, and uses the technology present to extract Clara from right before her death. The two steal another TARDIS and fly away. But during their flight it becomes clear that Clara's death isn't being reversed, and the Doctor decides that to prevent the Time Lords from tracking her through their memories he'll erase hers. Clara refuses, insisting that her past is her own, and instead randomizes the device that the Doctor would use to do this. the Doctor instead erases his own memory, and Clara flies away in the new TARDIS, leaving him on Earth.
Series 10
Years later, the Doctor finds himself lecturing at St Luke's University, and notices a young woman who audits a class of his without being enrolled, Bill Potts, played by Pearl Mackie. He offers to tutor her, and she finds herself drawn into his world slowly but surely. the Doctor, for his part, has been guarding a vault with Nardole, played by Matt Lucas, and uses trips with Bill as an excuse to travel discretely off world, shirking his duty. In the end it's revealed that the vault contains Missy, and the Doctor has sworn to guard her for one hundred years, slowly trying to reform her, little by little. She finally accompanies Bill, Nardole, and the Doctor on a test run - an adventure on a colony ship, and everything goes wrong. Another incarnation of The Master is present, as are Cybermen, and while Bill ultimately manages to make it off the ship the group is on, Missy and her earlier self wound each other lethally, and the Doctor forces himself to the brink of regeneration saving the colonists. He insists, however, back inside his TARDIS, that he won't change again. He's done becoming someone else, and just wants it to end. His TARDIS takes him back to meet his first incarnation who's wrestling with much the same dilemma. Eventually, they both decide to take one step more. And the Doctor regenerates into the Thirteenth Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.
Series 11
Starting this new era of Doctor Who, this new Doctor falls out of her TARDIS, as it has been destroyed by regenerative energy, and lands on a train in Sheffield, where she meets Yasmin Khan, a police officer, played by Mandip Gill, Ryan Sinclair, played by Tosin Cole, Grace O'Brien, Ryan's grandmother, played by Sharon D Clarke, and Graham O'Brien, Grace's husband and Ryan's step-granddad. Together, they form an alliance, and fight Tzim-Sha of the Stenza, a mighty warrior race whose sole purpose is to hunt human beings. Together, they manage to save the planet, but tragically Grace dies in the process, leaving Graham a widow. the Doctor then attempts to return to the TARDIS, but accidentally takes her new companions with her, and they begin to travel alongside her. After many exciting adventures, they once more face Tzim-Sha, and end up by locking him in his temple, ending the character arcs of Graham and Ryan that began with the death of Grace.
Series 12
They continue with their travels, fighting a new incarnation of the Master, robotic postmen and Judoon. The Master reveals to the Doctor that he has destroyed Gallifrey once more, and the Doctor discovers that this is true. Heartbroken, the Doctor nonetheless continues on her travels, and she meets an earlier incarnation of herself, one she has no memory of, and one who has no memory of her. This mysterious incarnation, known retroactively as the Fugitive Doctor, works for shadowy organisation Division, but has run away and become a human on Earth. The Thirteenth Doctor helps her escape from Division, and carries on her way across the universe. Later, she comes across a lone Cyberman by the name of Ashad. She manages to temporarily defeat him, but must now face of hundreds of Cybermen in an epic battle. Alone with the last of humanity, she must battle the Cybermen and the Master, who had allied himself with the Cybermen. The Master takes her aside to Gallifrey and reveals (in a retcon which proved controversial with fans) that she is, in fact, no Time Lord, and that everything that she has ever been told about the Time Lords is a lie. Her current identity was born when the Division erased the memories of their agent the Doctor, who had once been the "Timeless Child", a mysterious foundling discovered by a wormhole by the early Time Lords. It was from the Child's biology they discovered the secret to regeneration. This was the reason that there Master has destroyed Gallifrey. This was the explanation for the mysterious earlier incarnation of herself. The Doctor manages to save her companions and the rest of the universe from the Cybermen, but is captured by the Judoon and trapped in prison.
Series 13
The Doctor and Yaz have been travelling alone for some time, but the Doctor is still determined to find answers about the Division, which eventually puts the two on the trail of a former Division operative, the dog-like alien Karvanista, whose species the Lupari seem to be heading for Earth. When they find him, however, he reveals that the Lupari are actually trying to save humanity from the Flux, a devastating wave of antimatter which is in the process of destroying the entire universe. All across time and space, various species and faction try to take advantage of this destruction, including the Sontarans, exiled space dictator the Grand Serpent, and most worryingly Swarm and Azure, god-like crystal people from the dawn of time hell-bent on destroying the entire universe and unraveling the Web of Time. The Doctor and Yaz are joined on their travels through this chaotic universe by Dan Lewis, an impoverished but ever-optimistic man from Liverpool, who was the human Karvanista had been assigned to protect. Together they foil the Sontarans' attempted timey-wimey invasion of Earth, and are then ured to the mysterious Temple of Atropos.
The Temple is where, through Division, the Time Lords first gained control of Time itself, and it has been damaged by the Flux, causing temporal anomalies throughout the universe as the Time Lords' posthumous hold on History weakens. At the Temple, the Doctor and her friends meet Vinder, a space adventurer with a grudge against the Grand Serpent. All four are catapulted into a time storm by Swarm and Azure, allowing the Doctor to discover that her forgotten counterpart the Fugitive Doctor was the one who originally defeated the villainous duo. After being reunited, they are drawn to a remote English village whose people are being preyed upon by Weeping Angels, and meet the paranormal expert Eustacius Jericho. They discover that the Weeping Angels are actually an "Extraction Squad" summoned by the Division, trying to collect a rogue Angel who has been hiding inside psychic Claire Brown's mind. Wanting to save itself, the Rogue Angel instead allows the Extraction Squad to capture the Doctor herself, while her companions are left stranded in the early 20th century. Taken to a space station built into the Void Between Worlds, the Doctor meets the leader of Division, who is none other than a new incarnation of Tecteun, the scientist who adopted and abused the Timeless Child, then wiped their memory, creating the Doctor as we know them. Tecteun believes that the Doctor's meddling has irreparably corrupted the Universe, which she views as her "experiment"; she released the Flux, as well as Swarm and Azure, to destroy the Universe, intending to move into another reality and start over. The Doctor refuses to forgive and join her, and Tecteun is abruptly murdered by Swarm and Azure, who take control of the ship and thereby the Flux itself, intent on using it to destroy the Temple of Atropos and free the malicious godlike embodiment of Time, whom they worship. Thanks to the Lupari, Earth is protected against the Flux, and, learning that it will be the final available refuge, the Sontarans (allied with the Grand Serpent, who infiltrated UNIT to weaken Earth's defences) invade the Earth again, destroying the Dalek and Cyberman fleets by tricking them into the path of the Flux. Having been temporarily split into three due to an interdimensional phenomenon, the Doctor guides her scattered friends, who manage to simultaneously foil the Sontarans and Serpent's plans (at the cost of Professor Jericho's life) and safely funnel the Flux into a portable pocket dimension. Angered at its servants' failure, the embodiment of Time destroys Swarm and Azure, and leaves the Doctor with an ominous prophecy: her time is coming to an end, and the Master is amassing forces to move against her.
2022 specials
Trying to relax for New Year's Day after all these adventures, Doctor, Yaz and Dan soon encounter consequences of the Flux as the Daleks blame the Doctor for the destruction of their fleet by the Sontarans. They send a squad of Dalek Executioners to kill the Doctor and her companions, but after they all become trapped in a storage building with the building's owner, the TARDIS puts them all in a time loop until they figure out a way to stop the Daleks without dying. During this stressful looping event, Dan reveals to the Doctor that Yaz has fallen in love with her, something Yaz had not admitted even to herself. The Doctor is unwilling to reciprocate or even acknowledge these feelings, however, still mindful of her own impending death. The two finally talk about it during the course of another adventure involving the Sea Devils, underwater counterparts of the reptilian Silurians, tangling with Chinese pirates: though the Doctor admits that she would happily enter a relationship with Yaz if she were willing to consider romance at all, she is refusing to take that risk in the knowledge that "eventually, it'll hurt". The long-predicted crisis finally arrives when the Master returns, posing as Grigori Rasputin in a complex time-bending scheme where he has allied with the Daleks and Cybermen, shortly after Dan decides to leave the TARDIS. After capturing the Doctor, he uses the power of a starry entity to highjack her body and force it to regenerate into a copy of his own, asserting that he is "the Doctor" now. UNIT get involved, as do the Doctor's former companions Ace, Tegan, and Graham. With their help as well as that of a returning Vinder, plus a hologram duplicate of the Doctor, the Master's scheme is foiled and the artificial regeneration is reversed, temporarily restoring the Thirteenth Doctor. However, as she tries to free the powerful star-entity, the Doctor is fatally wounded by the Master, who is back in his own body but promptly dies — seemingly without regenerating — due to the strain the body-hopping put on his physical form. Yaz carries the unconscious Doctor back to the TARDIS before the planetoid they're all standing on explodes, but it's too late to prevent her regeneration. After holding it off for one melancholy ice cream date with Yaz, the Doctor admits that she would rather face her next rebirth "alone", and drops Yaz off on Earth again, where she is greeted by Dan and Graham, who introduce her to a support group full of other past companions. Kate Stewart of UNIT is also at the meeting, noting that she may soon recruit some of them for "some work". Meanwhile, the Doctor steps out onto a lonely cliff and, wishing the best to her successor, allows the regeneration to start, transforming into the Fourteenth Doctor. Feeling his face, the newly-regenerated Doctor is baffled to realise he looks (almost) exactly like the Tenth Doctor.
60th Anniversary Specials
The Doctor finds himself in London once more, marveling at his old face returning, and time and time again, despite his best efforts comes into contact with his old companion, Donna Noble, now married with a teenage daughter. A strange alien ship crash-lands nearby, its pilot the deceptively cute and secretly tyrannical Meep hiding with the Noble family, causing them to be pursued by galactic policemen. The Doctor shows up and defends the Noble family, but discovers the Meep's true genocidal intentions, causing the Meep to endanger the entire world. In order to prevent the destruction of the earth, Donna's memories are returned to her, foiling the Meep's plans but endangering her life, it only being saved through her daughter being used as a release valve.
Donna, excited to now have her memories back, insists on going on one small trip with the Doctor, but accidentally spills tea on the console of the TARDIS, sending the pair hurtling through time, to various places, such as the 17th century, where they cause Isaac Newton to name gravity "Mavity" instead, and to a ship on the far reaches of space where the TARDIS begins to heal itself. While there, the pair find themselves stalked by a pair of shapeshifters who reflect their surroundings, absorb and learn from those around them, and to slow their advance the Doctor invokes a superstition, drawing a line of salt between them that he insists the pair of not-things can't cross. The Doctor and Donna escape the ship just as the self-destruct sequence activates, eradicating the shapeshifters.
But as the pair reappear in modern day London they find that things have gone wrong, everyone believes that they're always right, all the time, and everyone else is unreasonable. In invoking a superstition at the edge of the universe, the Doctor has called to the Toymaker, who has decided to play a game with the human race. The Doctor insists that he must stop, and challenges him to a game, but loses. Recalling their previous encounter though, the Doctor points out that they're now tied, and that best-of-three should win. The Toymaker accepts, but as he played one game with a prior Doctor, one game with this Doctor, he'll play the next game with a new Doctor as well, and forces a regeneration. Or, rather, bi-generation, a myth of the timelords, where the body splits in two, one staying the same, and one being the Fifteenth Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa. The pair together defeat the toymaker, and the Fourteenth Doctor decides to spend time with the Noble family, to get some well needed rest, while the Fifteenth Doctor continues on his adventures.
