We’re only two episodes into season two, but it seems clear that Doctor Who is setting up another confrontation with the dreaded Pantheon of Discord.
Most recently, they’ve run into Lux, who introduces himself as a Harbinger for the Pantheon: a trickster creature who’s tasked with announcing the presence of the gods in this universe.
But this isn’t the first encounter they’ve had with these gods. In the last season, we met the villainous Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris), who caused the death of David Tennant’s reincarnated Tenth Doctor. There was Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon), who almost used the power of music to silence the world forever.
And of course, there was Death, who literally ended the universe at one point.
But who are the Pantheon of Discord, and what’s the deal with all these Harbingers? We break it down.
They are gods of chaos
Are they gods? They’re certainly powerful: they’re a bunch of creatures from outside this universe who occasionally poke their heads into ours and cause chaos.
Most of them are also named after certain specific concepts: music, games, disasters, death. The Doctor has talked before about the Pantheon, saying he’d heard legends of them as a child.
They’re also bound by specific rules of engagement that the Doctor can invoke when he meets them.
Members of this Pantheon include the Trickster, Krampus, the Toymaker, Maestro, the Mara, Reprobate, Doubt, Dread and Incensor, all of whom the Doctor has run into at some point over the years.
The Doctor has met them before
Over the course of his adventures, several of these Pantheon members have cropped up. Most often, it’s the Trickster, who has tried to alter the course of history several times. In 1951, he convinced Sarah Jane Smith to save her parents from dying in a car crash, which in turn weakened the fabric of history enough for the Pantheon to slip through.
The Trickster’s Brigade popped up again during the Tenth Doctor’s tenure, when Donna changed the course of history and let the Doctor be killed by the villainous Racnoss. Things properly kicked off during the Fourteenth Doctor’s tenure, though, when an encounter with the not-things at the edge of the universe let them seep back in.
The first to come through was the Toymaker, but that’s been followed by Maestro and Sutekh, the god of death.
And we might yet meet another
Which god is Lux a Harbinger of? That’s yet to be discovered, but the season is definitely setting up a big reveal for the finale. After all, we’ve just found out that the Tardis keeps ‘bouncing’ off the date of May 24, 2025, and episode one ends with an image of the Earth seemingly in ruins.
One obvious answer might be Mrs Flood – aka Anita Dobson – the kindly old neighbour who seems to be popping up everywhere right now. She’s already teased that she’s got big plans in store, and that those plans are destructive ones.
Perhaps Mrs Flood is the final boss of Doctor Who – but everything remains to be seen.
