Who Review: The Timeless Children

As the Doctor surveys the smoking ruins of Gallifrey, the Master reveals to her his plan of revenge against his own people. He also tells the Doctor what he discovered that finally drove him to this point. The information he shares uncovers a truth about the Doctor and her people that the Time Lords had tried to hide for millennia. A truth that makes a lie of everything she thought she knew. Meanwhile, the Doctor’s friends along with the last humans to survive the Cyber war need to take drastic measures to stay alive as the Cybermen hunt them down. But the Master’s master plan threatens to make their efforts all for nothing unless, somehow, they and the Doctor can stop him.

SPOILER ALERT!! My comments may (and likely will) contain spoilers for those who haven’t seen the episode. If you want to stay spoiler-free, please watch the story before you continue reading!

And so we come to the season finale. It could have been a dumpster fire, given the low expectations Chibbers has built over the previous nine weeks, despite a couple of hopeful flashes of actually good stories. But, I have to say, I didn’t think it was. Granted, the Big Reveal was controversial. At the time of writing this, I haven’t ventured out to the interwebs to see what people are saying, but knowing Who fandom, I anticipate some very angry words. We’ll talk about that in a moment.

The Master takes the Doctor beyond the barrier and into Gallifrey, leaving Ryan, Graham, Yaz, and the survivors to fight the Cybermen. I felt a genuine sense that they may not live to the end of the story, and they all seem prepared to go down fighting if necessary. This is good. It takes the edge off a story if you know all the protagonists are going to come out unscathed. As far as I know, at the time of writing, none of the companions have signed up for another season, so we go through the battle scene with them not knowing who will live.

Their last-ditched effort to evade the Cybermen involves disguising as Cybermen. A risky move since any trace of organic life, such as breathing, could give them away. However, they make it to Gallifrey and are ready to help the Doctor…

Meanwhile, the Master forces the Doctor into the Matrix, the Time Lords’ database of all Time Lord knowledge and experience. The Master splits his consciousness so he can guide the trapped Doctor to the dark truths he discovered about her past while also pursuing his ambitions with the Cybermen. In the Matrix, the Doctor learns about an ancient explorer from Galifrey’s indigenous people, the Shobogans, named Tecteun. While visiting a distant planet, Tecteun found an abandoned child standing outside a mysterious trans-dimensional gateway. Tecteun continued her explorations with the child, eventually returning to Gallifrey none the wiser with regard to the child’s origins. One day, while playing with a friend, the child fell from a height and died. Tecteun was distraught… until the child regenerated. Tecteun then dedicated years of her life, several of the child’s regenerations, to discovering how the child was able to do this. When she eventually found the secret, she gene-spliced from the child into herself to test her theory. And it worked. The Shobogans built the Citadel on Gallifrey, discovered time travel, and developed a ruling elite who dwelt in the Citadel. Tecteun proposed that the ability to regenerate be given to all Citadel dwellers, but capped at 12 times. This would be their inheritance to future generations, using the “Timeless Child” as their base genetic code. All future Gallifreyans from the Citadel, who would call themselves “Time Lords,” would effectively contain a piece of this Timeless Child. And the big reveal? The Doctor is that Timeless Child.

But the Doctor doesn’t remember any of this, because the Time Lords hid this information. They wanted to create a noble creation myth for themselves, so all this past history was locked away and re-written. The last piece of the puzzle involved the Doctor’s participation in something called the Division. But most of the information about that had been redacted beyond the Master’s ability to retrieve. All that remains are clues, perhaps left behind by Tecteun. Memories of a child in Ireland, who grew up to be a police officer, and whose memory of that life was erased when he retired (see “Ascension of the Cybermen”). And the Division telling the Timeless Child/The Doctor that sometimes it is necessary to intervene in history, despite the Time Lord code.

So what angers the Master is the fact that the Doctor has been right all along to think that she’s special. She really is. And a piece of her lives within the Master, and every other Time Lord who ever was.

But the Master has taken inspiration from the Doctor’s story. He preserved some of the Time Lords’ bodies and, with a little genetic manipulation of his own, has created a hybrid Time Lord/Cyberman race. Not only are they indefatigable fighters, but they can regenerate.

I won’t detail the rest of the story–you can watch it yourself if you’re interested. Suffice to say, the Doctor uses the “Death Particle” in the Lone Cyberman (see “The Haunting of Villa Diodati”) to destroy these new Cybermen, and, it seems, the Master (but don’t hold your breath). To keep everyone safe while dealing with the Cybermen, the Doctor sends her friends and the surviving humans to 21st century Earth in a TARDIS (they’re on Gallifrey, after all, so it’s not hard to find a spare TARDIS). The episode ends with the Doctor on her own, imprisoned by the Judoon. This sets us up for the next episode, “Revolution of the Daleks,” which I presume will be a Christmas or New Year special.

Now let’s talk about this Timeless Child revelation.

My initial reaction is a bit of a cringe. I’m glad it’s not the RetCon we feared after Chibbers introduced Ruth, the black female incarnation of the Doctor that no-one’s ever heard of–including the Doctor (see “Fugitive of the Judoon”). However, it is at best new Time Lord lore, and at worst, it’s a bit of a historical re-write. Though, to be fair, we never were told much about the history of Gallifrey or the Time Lords in either Classic or New Who, so there’s plenty of room for embellishment.

I didn’t fail to observe that a number of the Timeless Child’s incarnations were non-whites, and perhaps mostly female (I didn’t count). This might seem to play into the woke RetCon people feared. And maybe there is an aspect of that going on. However, the woke RetCon I feared was a complete re-write of the past 60 years of Who, as if all those white male Doctors weren’t really the Doctor. That’s not what this is. What Chibbers has done has introduced (actually re-introduced) the idea that the Doctor has had many, many regenerations. A lot more than twelve. And while, yes, Chibbers may be playing to the woke crowd to make many of those early regenerations as diverse as possible, he hasn’t delegitimized the twelve (thirteen including the War Doctor) white males. In fact, one could argue that when you’ve regenerated that many times, it’s only natural a number of them might be white males. In short, while I do think Chibbers is engaging in some woke correctness here, I don’t think it’s egregious, certainly not to the extent I feared, and not wholly inconsistent with the series.

All that considered, I ask myself: What does this new information change? How does it affect anything about the show? It does offer an explanation for the incarnations of the Doctor we saw in “The Brain of Morbius” back in 1976 (clips of which we saw in this episode when the Doctor reviewed her memories to escape the Matrix), and I suspect that partly drove this whole backstory. For all we know, this has been a pet theory of Chibbers since the 1980s and his days in the Doctor Who Appreciation Society. On the negative side, however, it does take an element of mystery away from the Doctor. We now know why she’s special. And it messes with “The Time of the Doctor,” Matt Smith’s last story where the Time Lords grant him a new regeneration cycle. We’ve just learned this was unnecessary. The Time Lords derived their ability to regenerate from the Doctor’s DNA. Their ability to regenerate was curtailed, but the Doctor’s wasn’t. Of course, at the time of that story the Doctor was ignorant of this fact. It also means that Chibbers has made sure the series can run indefinitely–it’s not restricted to this regeneration cycle.

I will grant that it seems strange that the Time Lords gave the Doctor this new regeneration cycle knowing he didn’t need it. Yes, it appears to break canon, unless you are prepared to grant that they did it to not arouse suspicion. If the Doctor had regenerated without their apparent intervention, he might have become suspicious and done some digging. In any case, this is not Harry Potter. Sydney Newman did not write the Doctor’s backstory or develop his world or the rules to his universe back in 1963. If the series had only run until 1966, this wouldn’t have mattered. But to keep the series going for nearly 60 years, it’s inevitable there will be character and world development. And it’s hard to keep creating and developing the world over such a long time without some inconsistencies. Don’t forget, this happened in 1976 when “The Deadly Assassin” aired. That’s when we first learned that Time Lords are restricted to 12 regenerations. Robert Holmes added that as a plot device to motivate the Master. He paid no attention to the fact that “The Brain of Morbius,” a mere 11 months prior, suggested the Doctor had had numerous regenerations before William Hartnell. And who was responsible for “The Brain of Morbius”? The same Robert Holmes, who was Script Editor at the time. He was a brilliant writer, but he couldn’t even keep his own canon straight!

So, coming back to my question: What does this really change? Fundamentally, nothing. Sure, the Doctor knows more about her past, and perhaps is intrigued to find out more about the Division. But it doesn’t really change who she is. As Ruth pointed out, the Doctor has never allowed a previous incarnation to define her in the past. Why should it now? If I’m right, and nothing’s changed, why would Whovians get upset at this?

You are going to get hard-core Whovians who believe Classic Who is a closed canon, and anything after that can only draw from that lore. Adding to that lore is heresy. These people don’t like New Who anyway, so I wouldn’t expect them to be happy with this or anything else since 2005. I do wonder, however, if there are people who object not so much to Chibbers adding to Who lore as to the fact that it’s Chibbers who is doing it. In other words, they consider him unworthy to follow in the footsteps of Sydney Newman, Gerry Davis, Derrick Sherwin, Terrance Dicks, and Robert Holmes, all of whom contributed important aspects to the Doctor’s mythos (regeneration, the Time Lords, Gallifrey, etc.).

Given the way this season has gone, I might be inclined to agree. However, like it or not, Chris Chibnall is the show runner. He is the one person granted the power to do with the show as he sees fit. No, we don’t have to like it, but as much as it might stick in the throat to say it, this is now Doctor Who canon. Chibbers has added to Doctor Who lore, and we can whine and grumble all we want but that’s the truth of it.

If you still don’t like it, then you can write fan fiction, or try to pretend the last few years of Doctor Who never happened. But by any measure of what is and what isn’t Doctor Who canon, this is legit.

Am I now convinced Doctor Who should come back for another season? No. If I was in charge of drama at the BBC, I would go ahead with “Revolution of the Daleks,” and have the story end with the Doctor starting to regenerate. Then rest the show for at least five years. When the show returns, it should be with a new production team, and a new Doctor. That’s not a slight on Jodie Whittaker. If you’re going to re-boot, you need to start fresh, as Russell T. Davies did back in 2005.

Will the BBC do that? Probably not. There will probably be a 13th season. My fear is they keep running the show into the ground until it gets cancelled indefinitely. But we shall see.

Did you see “The Timeless Children”? What did you think? Share your thoughts about the episode, or the season as a whole, in the comments!