Doctor Who Season 2 Makes The Doctor's Family Tree More Confusing Than Ever

This article contains spoilers for "Doctor Who" season 2, episode 7, "The Wish World."

Early in "The Wish World," we see the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Mel Bush (Bonnie Langford) look up in awe, and the camera reveals that their quiet residential London street is surrounded by gigantic skeletal beasts and a bone fortress that reaches toward the clouds. This strange fever dream soon turns out to be precisely that — a wish dreamed up by the chillingly monstrous podcaster Conrad Clark (Jonah Hauer-King) and brought into existence by the infant God of Wishes, Desidirium. Somehow, though, even the combination of a particularly dangerous member of the Pantheon of Discord and the devious villain from "Lucky Day" isn't enough for the show's antagonist game. On the contrary, both are simply following the larger plan of the bi-generated Time Lady Rani (Archie Panjabi) and her other self, Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson). They, in turn, are on a quest to free an even more fearsome Gallifreyan from the Underverse: the founding Time Lord called Omega.

However, the biggest mystery of the episode has nothing to do with the Doctor's rogues gallery and everything to do with his family tree. "Doctor Who" season 2, episode 6, titled "The Interstellar Song Contest," reintroduced the Doctor's mysterious granddaughter Susan in a series of tactically-deployed visions. In "The Wish World," she makes another cameo on the TV screen before Rogue (Jonathan Groff) takes over ... but the truly bizarre family plot line in the episode is that the Doctor and Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) have a very familiar-looking daughter in the Wish World. Granted, the Rani insists that it's not actually their child, but the Doctor seems to believe otherwise. Here's what this latest twist in the protagonist's strange family tree might mean.

After coming to his senses and plummeting toward the rapidly disappearing ground at the end of the episode, the Doctor specifically states that the young Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps) really is his daughter ... and in a way that's meaningful enough to cap off a hair-raiser of a cliffhanger ending, too. This is an interesting development considering that Poppy last appeared in the "Doctor Who" season 1 opener "Space Babies" as one of the titular babies. While the episode makes no mention of a blood relation between her and the Doctor, it's worth noting that the babies briefly think that the Doctor and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) are their parents.

It's possible that this shared history is what prompts the Doctor to verbally claim Poppy as her own — after all, he is a protector, and young super-intelligent children he personally knows very much fall within his purview. However, there's some additional weirdness surrounding Poppy, and it's too similar to the current mystery surrounding Susan's appearances to write off the possibility of a family-themed plot twist. See, just like Susan, Poppy has turned up in mysterious circumstances before this particular episode. In "Doctor Who" season 2, episode 5, "The Story & The Engine," Belinda briefly spots her in an alleyway in Lagos, but Poppy disappears before anything happens.

It doesn't seem like an accident that both Poppy and a confirmed relative of the Doctor both start making mysterious appearances in the lead-up to the season's endgame. As such, it's entirely possible that the season finale will reveal that there's more to Poppy than meets the eye.

Because of the Doctor's constant time traveling (and the soft semi-reboots "Doctor Who" goes through after every regeneration), his familial relations are impossibly complex and paradoxical. He has at least three official origin stories, for one. The first posits that he's one of 45 artificially-created Time Lord cousins. The second one claims that he has a normal father and mother, though there are various versions of their identities. The third and most recent was introduced during Chris Chibnall's time as showrunner and reveals that the Doctor is actually not a Time Lord at all. Instead, he's a strange and ancient being known only as the Timeless Child, and the closest thing he has to a relative is an adoptive mother, Tecteun (Seylan Baxter). On the sibling front, the Doctor has mentioned sisters and ancillary material has featured a brother called Irving Braxiatel (voiced by Miles Richardson) – but he's also said that none of his family members are alive.

Susan's existence strongly implies that the Doctor either has been or will be a parent. Thus far, though, the closest thing to a genuine child he's had on the show is Jenny (Georgia Moffett), a young woman who was artificially created from the Doctor's DNA in the 2008 episode "The Doctor's Daughter."

The fun and frustrating thing about "Doctor Who" is that just about every plot development can turn out to be incredibly consequential or completely irrelevant — or even both at the same time. As such, it may be too early to start guessing where the Poppy storyline will lead ... but as the Doctor's incredibly messy family tree proves, there's always room for another branch.

The "Doctor Who" season 2 finale drops May 31, 2025.