WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the season premiere of Doctor Who: Flux, "Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse," which aired Sunday on BBC.
Doctor Who: Flux opened big on Halloween with more questions than any actual answers, with one of the biggest being who Karvanista is, and why he is the only surviving operative of The Division besides the Doctor. The mystery surrounding Karvanista (Craige Els) and his past involvement with The Division is actually following up on the Timeless Child storyline first explored in Season 12. In the last season, the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) ran into an earlier incarnation of herself (Jo Martin) that came before her supposed first incarnation (William Hartnell). And to add to the mystery of her own past, the Doctor also supposedly worked for a mysterious organization known as The Division under the supervision of another Gallifreyan named Gat.
Since discovering this lost incarnation and learning that she's not actually Gallifreyan but an extradimensional being formerly known as the Timeless Child, the Doctor has been looking to piece together her missing past. One of the first mysteries she's set on resolving in Doctor Who: Flux is her past involvement with The Division, which is why she's so interested in tracking down Karvanista.
While little has been revealed about The Division thus far, an idea of what the organization was and how the Doctor got involved with it in the past can be pieced together based on the information available. One thing that is known is that the Doctor alongside her adopted parent, Tecteun, was initiated into the organization when she was still the Timeless Child. The Division also seemingly had its headquarters based on Gallifrey, though not all of its members were Gallifreyan based on the fact Karvanista -- a Lupari -- was a member.
Another detail that's known about The Division is that it was a secret organization that intervened in other worlds and their histories when its members felt it was necessary to do so -- something that went against Time Lord law. This makes The Division very functionally similar to the Celestial Intervention Agency first mentioned in the classic Doctor Who serial "The Deadly Assassin." Whether The Division is the same organization as the Celestial Intervention Agency, a predecessor to it or a rival organization, is yet to be revealed.
One thing that's implied about The Division's history, though, is that the organization must have been found out about by a higher authority at some point and was probably shut down due to the secret nature of its operations. The Division may have violated multiple Time Lord laws in its attempt to police the universe in ways that got too big to go unnoticed. This would explain why the Time Lords attempted to erase all traces of The Division from the Matrix (before Tecteun repackaged it as the Brendan story), and why they wiped the Doctor's memories clean.
Related to that point, multiple violations of non-Gallifreyan worlds and their respective histories could also potentially explain why the Doctor in her Jo Martin incarnation ran away from The Division. Given that she couldn't actually resign from her position, this forced her to hide on Earth with the use of a chameleon arch and restart her life as Ruth Clayton in Gloucester. Whether or not this aspect of the Doctor's history will be revisited in Doctor Who: Flux or in the specials leading to the 13th Doctor's regeneration, only time will tell.
To see if The Division is explored further, new episodes of Doctor Who: Flux air Sundays on BBC.
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