The last episode ended with the Master telling the Doctor “everything is about to change forever”, which I cynically noted the Doctor has heard before. But in “The Timeless Children”, at least as far as the Doctor is concerned, everything does change forever. Much of the characters’ personal mythology is thrown into disarray, some that has as far as we believed, been established canon going back decades. It’s an extraordinarily bold move for a show with such a longevity, legacy, and being a sci-fi property in the twenty-first century, a legion of fans worldwide, many of whom are dismayed by change.
There can be good reason for this. Sometimes a major continuity alteration or adjustment can be made for poor reasons: the contriving of the Eleventh Doctor to be the last of the initial twelve regeneration cycle purely as a lazy way of giving his exit extra weight comes to mind. And there are a couple assertions brought up in this episode I don’t think Chris Chibnall quite thought through when it comes to the established history of the Doctor or what it does for the shows’ tone and themes. Nevertheless, the major reveals of this episode for the most part aren’t about egotistically making a stamp or rewriting the Doctors’ history for shock value. Their purpose is quite clearly to expand the breadth of the Doctor’s identity. Where that aforementioned change suggests the Eleventh Doctor was specifically more special for being the landmark “last” incarnation, this extension of the Doctor’s backstory renders the Thirteenth almost less significant, an even smaller part of the whole than she thought. But that whole is what becomes a lot more important.
Before getting to that though, my worries about this episode being unable to balance two widely different storylines were solved in pretty short order by the two being successfully merged. By the Master splitting his consciousness across both so he could bring the Cybermen to Gallifrey as part of his latest scheme, while unloading a great truth onto the Doctor. I can’t say its’ entirely seamless, and the episode has no idea what to do with Ashad, ultimately deciding his worth as a character is only attached to a plot device in his chest cavity, and subsequently Boba Fetting him rather than doing anything compelling with it. This isn’t the first time Doctor Who has wasted a very good villain, but given his build-up, it’s still disappointing. There were some real promising avenues to the characters’ story and identity, and I really wish the show wasn’t so afraid to establish a new recurring nemesis, rather than merely returning to the well of the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, or Davros again and again (unsurprisingly, the next episode, likely next years’ New Years special, is called “Revolution of the Daleks”). That said, we do get a lively exchange between Ashad and the Master before the latter casually kills the former, where the Time Lord pokes holes in the Cybermans’ plan of wiping out organic life and just becoming robots (the Master is right in that, dominion though it may be, it would be terribly boring). The matching of great villains has often been a highlight of Doctor Who, going back to pairings like the Master and the Rani, and here we get a similar dynamic in these two very different personalities with compatible goals. There’s also more of Ashads’ well-conveyed menace seen early on as he tries to sniff out the surviving humans aboard the warship.
Those humans, shortly down to four, manage to escape the nigh unwinnable odds they were left with last episode by way of a goofy plan of Grahams’ that hearkens back to the earliest episodes. Just as the Doctor once fooled the Daleks back in their very first encounter by hopping into an empty Dalek shell, Graham, Yaz, Ravio, and Yedlarmi get into Cyberman armour (complete with dead tissue inside that the episode hopes you’ll forget about) in order to fit in with the other Cybermen and get off the ship. Due to the plot heaviness of the rest episode, it’s no surprise that we don’t quite see as much as this subplot as I would like. For example, there is no scene of our protagonists having to mimic Cyberman voices or struggle to pass. Instead we just get the reveal after they save Ethan on the barrier planet with the predictable joke of Graham struggling to get his face-piece off and the inherent comedy of Bradley Walsh’s voice coming out of that metal man.
The lightness of this is supplemented though not only by that tense scene of Ashad inspecting the Cybermen bodies while the humans desperately try not to give themselves away (using the standard horror movie shot of a close-up of their watering eye peering through the hole as they try not to breathe), but a tender moment between Graham and Yaz, where Graham compliments her courage and espouses his admiration for her. It’s a nice moment, though does feel a bit like Graham being sentimental to make her feel better, given what he sees in her doesn’t seem especially unique, and could almost apply exactly to Ryan as well. Perhaps its in reference back to her earlier revealed depression at the end of “Can You Hear Me?”, that these are things she really needs to hear, especially the part about “doing her family proud” -but there’s no indication Graham knows anything about that past.
Their fellow companion Ryan, along with Ethan and Ko Sharmus find themselves at the mercy of the Cybermen almost from the moment the Master forces the Doctor through the barrier to Gallifrey, and the three mount a defence using Sharmus’ old war weapons. Ian McElhinney plays the formidable old warrior very well (as he did on Game of Thrones), and is the second veteran British actor to guest star this series after Ian Gelder to just exude gravitas and lend great importance to every line delivery and action. He’s not the only standout on this front though, as Ryan gets to pay off a surprise set-up from back in “Spyfall”, where he tosses a bomb shaped like a basketball into a cluster of Cybermen.
While all this is going on the Doctor is having her mind blown by her greatest enemy. Sacha Dhawan is really upping the evil of his Master here, as he makes dark jokes and takes sickening glee in the devastation he caused. There’s true terror embedded there and a malicious thirst for destruction that comes out in spite of his moments of humour. And he perhaps portrays the madness of the Master better than any other actor in the part. While Anthony Ainley and John Simm played it through camp theatricality, Dhawan’s madness comes across as a truly fractured mind, pitiable in how much the psychological trauma shows through but also abundantly dangerous in his impulsiveness and lust for chaos. And I don’t know if his and the Doctors’ relationship has ever been more opaquely hostile, the Doctor actually at one point physically accosting him for holding back on information, and the Master later aggressively goading her into killing him.
If the Master is more deranged and determined than ever before, it’s clearly because of the information he found here, the Doctor now experiencing it through the intact Matrix. And the hidden history is revealed: that a member of Gallifrey’s indigenous species the Shobogans, called Tecteun, the first Gallifreyan interstellar explorer, found a child at a portal on a distant world (bearing a striking resemblance to the one we’ve been seeing these past couple episodes). Bringing her back to Gallifrey and raising her, Tecteun eventually discovered she had the ability to regenerate her body upon death and subsequently spent years experimenting on the child, putting her through a number of additional regenerations before discovering how to replicate it. Her people then engineered the ability into the genetic make-up of their species, with a limit of twelve regenerations per individual, and later upon developing time travel, styled themselves the Time Lords, creating a new origin myth for their race (as previous stories have established, the “Shobogans” became the name given to the outsiders of the Citadel who rejected the ways of the Time Lords). And so the Time Lords’ ability to regenerate, to be fundamentally immortal, was stolen, their superiority fabricated (which must have been a pretty big blow for the Master on its own), but the clincher which by this point you may be able to have guessed is that this foundational ‘Timeless Child’ was indeed the Doctor.
The bombshell is delivered in a way that aspires to The Empire Strikes Back, and though it doesn’t pack that punch, it is comparably earth-shattering -certainly it was for the Master. He expresses to the Doctor how excruciating it was for him to learn that a part of her is in him, and was in every other Time Lord before he wiped them out; but more interesting is his comment about how she always carried an air of entitlement and thought herself special when they were growing up, and this was validation of that. Childhood insecurity and jealousy about the perceived superiority of his best friend in tandem with his debilitating psychological faculties goes a long way to showing how he became this unstable and why this news was such a visceral blow to him. His childhood fear was real. The Doctor really was better than him.
But the Doctor is equally shell-shocked. This development pulls that other thread of this series into the fray from back in “Fugitive of the Judoon” of the Doctors’ uncertainty of her own identity and history. And here she learns that she has had lives prior to her current regeneration cycle, memories wiped by the Time Lords to cover her real history, and likewise wiped from their own Matrix detailing god knows how many incarnations she had before becoming the Doctor. And this may not be where you expected the Brendan storyline of last episode to resurface (I sure didn’t), but we learn now it existed in the Doctors’ mind and was a kind of metaphor cloaking her true history: being a foundling, the manner of her first death and the shock it elicited in others, living a full life and then having her memory erased by her parent figure. Some of these we see literally, others can just be inferred, and still others allude to something else: a scene of her being recruited into a secretive Division on Gallifrey that seems to be concerned with interfering in time. There’s possibly more to that perception filter -such as why it’s Ireland in the twentieth century to begin with, but it’s still a very poorly integrated device, the Master having to explain he projected it into the Doctors’ mind despite there being no indication in “Ascension of the Cybermen” that she was experiencing visions.
What this all means for the future of Doctor Who is limitless. It manages to take a mysterious character, one who’s real name we will never know, and makes them even moreso. It’s not the first time the show has hinted at prior unknown lives of the Doctor (as the cameo from the secret Doctors of “The Brain of Morbius” shows), and it sets up any number of storylines: from a possible search for Tecteun, the parent who abused the Doctor to learn the secret of immortality, to finding the world and portal where she apparently came from, to breaking down these barriers within her own psyche. It opens up the universe of the show and an intrigue in its title character in a way it hasn’t been in years, but it does come with notable downsides. For one, it re-frames the Doctor as this larger than life cosmic figure, something I’d kind of hoped we were done with after Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat hammered that idea into the ground. She’s essentially a chosen one, the progenitor of a whole race, with a godlike ability that is unexplainable. It also confirms she’s not really a Time Lord, which I don’t mind in principle, but in practice it separates her from the problems and faults of that race. There’s a somewhat colonialist metaphor in this episode regarding the Time Lords, but it doesn’t really matter now that the Doctor isn’t part of them. She doesn’t belong to that legacy of arrogance and piousness that her distinction from made her previously an inspiring bright spot of their order. She was the good Time Lord, the shimmering beacon of her species, and now she’s just an alien again.
And in a glaring instance of Chibnall not quite thinking things through as I’d mentioned earlier, there’s the matter of the Fugitive Doctor introduced in “Fugitive of the Judoon” to foreshadow this exact development. “The Timeless Children” brings an approximation of her back to help the Doctor grapple, find herself (if only temporarily), and escape the Masters’ clutches, and seems to want us to believe firmly she’s one of these secretive past Doctors. The trouble there is that there still isn’t really an opening in the timeline for her. She calls herself the Doctor, travels in a TARDIS stuck in the form of a police box with human companions, which means she can’t come from that history prior to the Doctors’ known first incarnation -unless even before the memory wipe the Doctor was prone to the exact same character choices and strokes of luck that led to those circumstances. Which would really be depressing and harmful for the show, suggesting the Doctor has never been fully in control of her own choices. The only workaround I could see would be for the Fugitive Doctor to come from a missing period between the Second and Third incarnations (the Second Doctors’ is the only regeneration we haven’t explicitly seen and it was forced upon him by the Time Lords), but even that is shaky given the immediate set-up made at the death of the Second Doctor of the Third Doctors’ exile to Earth. I still prefer the idea of her being from the future, and the cloud that would hang over the Doctor at the knowledge her memory was going to be wiped again.
These questions are put on hold when the Doctor has a universe to save, reuniting with her fam, who join the exclusive club of companions to actually set foot on Gallifrey, as she breaks free of the Matrix. The Masters’ big ploy with the Cybermen has resulted in an awesome new creation: Zombie Time Lord Cybermen, an idea inspired by this secret history to sap the regenerative power of the Doctor into the corpses of Time Lords within Cybermen armour, capable of regenerating infinitely. And it’s where the last relevance of Ashad comes into play via the organic-decimating Death Particle he carries (also, the Master persuaded the Cyberium to fuse with him given they both carry the knowledge of an entire race -it doesn’t go anywhere). With that the Doctor forces her companions and the other survivors into a TARDIS set to take them home -with Ravio, Ethan, and Yedlarmi just having to adjust to twenty-first century Britain; and leaving some sweet parting words, takes the long walk back to the Master to finish things. It’s a confrontation of the utmost intensity as the Master either takes delight in or tries to reverse-psychology the Doctor out of killing them all. But she’s freed from the burden in a cop-out device of Ko Sharmus coming to do it instead, having sent the Cyberium back in time originally and seeing this as his penance. So the Doctor escapes in another TARDIS and Ian McElhinney gets one more badass moment as he dies pressing the button presumably (but almost certainly not) killing the Master and his Zombie Time Lord Cybermen.
The Doctor is left to this new truth about her, and while she asserted her multitudes with pride in that essential moment, it still has to have a severe impact on her and her sense of identity. For the first time, she knows no more about herself than we do. “The Timeless Children” is a pretty good episode, some characterization and technical issues aside (I get that it’s Gallifrey, but did so much of it need to be shot in pale orange?). Whittaker and Dhawan are the highlights of course, and Chibnall’s script for as heavy on exposition and light on personality as it is, is peppered with real ingenuity. As far as the world building is concerned, my nerd quibbling and commentary don’t matter as much as whether it sufficiently works for the narrative and the character arcs. And I think it does, divorced from the lore Chibnall is rewriting. It brings a true sense of mystery back to the show, and if it can follow through, not so much with solutions as with growth and evolution it may prove to be one of Doctor Who’s greatest creative choices. Though I would hope in doing so it tries to be a little humble with the Doctor, who I’ve grown to like best when they’re not carrying the weight of the galaxy on their shoulders.
And that brings us to the end of the series. Ryan, Yaz, and Graham believe the Doctor is dead and the Doctor, moments after returning to her own TARDIS, has been arrested by the Judoon who, not taking any chances this time, immediately transport her to a prison, where she will spend the next ten months. Overall, I think I liked series twelve slightly more than series eleven. “Fugitive of the Judoon” and “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” especially are new series classics, and the story arcs for the most part were really gripping. I especially admire that not everything was resolved: the Fugitive Doctor, the dimensional barrier, Captain Jack, that Brendan story and the Division, Yaz’s history with depression -all still story threads for future episodes. However I feel the series didn’t have as organic a flow as series eleven; and probably most of all, the companions were shortchanged. Ryan, Yaz, and Graham had no throughlines this series, acting a lot of the time as merely the Doctors’ support -she was the one all the drama was directed at. But Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill, and Bradley Walsh are capable actors too and I’d like to see them given the chance to show it.
Sadly, that doesn’t seem likely with them completely cut off from the Doctor for this upcoming special, which somehow is going to involve the Daleks. But with no signs of them or Jodie Whittaker leaving the show I’m optimistic they’ll have ample opportunity to cement themselves more and grow over further adventures. It’s a wide universe full of stories and secrets, and as Doctor Who heads into its fifty-eighth year it’s as new and surprising as ever.
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