Doctor Who Series 12 Spoilers – The Timeless Child

This being the Sunday Who Review, I'm staying home for Tom Baker today.

 

While I discussed the rest of the series 12 finale last week, I felt that this particular aspect – the revelations about the so-called “Timeless Child” – needed a little more space to breathe, so I saved it for its own post. Today, we’re getting into everything around the Timeless Child and will be referencing spoilers from “Spyfall,” “Fugitive of the Judoon,” and “The Timeless Children.” This is your warning, so leave now if you don’t want to know about important stuff going down in these episodes.

(Also, note: I’m going back and forth with pronouns a little here. For both the Doctor and the Master, I’m using “she/her” and “he/him” respectively when talking about their current regenerations and “they/them” when talking about the characters as a whole, across the span of all their lives. This has been my go-to since we got our first cross-gender regeneration, but it comes up more than usual in this post, so I thought the extra clarification might be useful.)

At the end of “Spyfall,” when the Master reveals to the Doctor that he’s razed Gallifrey to the ground over secrets he uncovered about their planet’s past, promising, “Everything you thought you knew is a lie,” I’ll admit to being majorly intrigued. While Gallifrey being destroyed again, so soon after it returned after being hidden after being destroyed-but-not-really (phew!), felt cheap/lazy to me, I really wanted to know what made the Master snap like that. His vague statements hint at something rotten at Gallifrey’s foundations, something he couldn’t let stand, something he knew would devastate the Doctor to learn. Now, I had no problem believing there were secret atrocities in Gallifrey’s past, but I really wondered what it could be that the Master thought he and the Doctor would both find equally disturbing.

The basics of it align with popular speculation: that the Time Lords’ regenerative abilities came about thanks to this Timeless Child. I’d been theorizing something a little more horrible, like the ancient Time Lords wired the Child into some sort of machine and have been feeding off the Child’s regenerative properties for millennia, but that doesn’t mean the actual story doesn’t have a whiff of menace to it. When Tecteun, a Gallifreyan space pioneer, discovers that the abandoned Child of unknown origins that she took in can regenerate, she studies the Child over multiple regenerations, desperate to learn the secret and find a way to replicate those abilities in herself. It’s never said outright, but I definitely got the feeling that she was intentionally killing the Child, forcing them to regenerate again and again for the sake of collecting new data and testing her hypotheses.

The mere fact of this, though, isn’t what drives the Master to slaughter his own people. Rather, it’s the reveal of who that Timeless Child is: the Doctor. In this way, it makes sense that he feels this revelation stands to break both of them, only it’s for different reasons. For him, he can’t bear the thought of the Doctor being so “special,” instrumental in making Gallifrey the civilization it became, and what’s more, he hates that he owes his regenerative abilities to the genetic inheritance the the Time Lords mined from the Timeless Child/the Doctor millennia ago. He just can’t stand that “a little piece” of the Doctor is in him. But for the Doctor, the horror is in the realization that she’s so much older than she knew, that the Doctor has had untold lifetimes erased from their memory, something done to them by the Time Lords to maintain appearances of the Doctor being an ordinary Time Lord.

As soon as the Master said the Doctor was the Timeless Child, my brain went, “Ugh, really?”, and I spent the next chunk of the episode hoping there was some way that he was lying. As I’ve said before, I’m not necessarily opposed to a good “Chosen One” story, about a character who’s set apart/anointed/prophesied about from the beginning, the one destined to be the most important, but I also like what I call a “Spoiler,” someone that no one was expecting, who comes out of nowhere and defies what everyone thought was going to happen. Done well, I like either, and the Doctor has almost always been a strong example of a Spoiler for me. Though they’ve certainly gained both adoration and enemies over their lifetimes and have been the subject prophecies and so on (again I say: prophecy on a time-travel show? How does that make sense?), they’re ultimately “a wanderer in the fourth dimension,” “a madman with a box” running around “being daft and fixing things.”

This new framing of the Doctor’s past, however, is a character type I tend to get really annoyed by: someone who, though long presented as a Spoiler, is revealed at a late stage to be Chosen All Along, retroactively granted destined status. It’s a little different here, but it still feels like that. The Master laments that the Doctor is so special, griping that even back at the Academy, they always acted like they were above everyone is, and I’m not a fan of this “specialness” being conferred on the Doctor by their origins. I mean, I’ve always thought the Doctor was special, but it was about what they chose to do, the lives they made for themselves. Ever since One stole the TARDIS and ran away from Gallifrey, meeting Ian and Barbara and learning to get involved in the lives of other peoples and planets, roaming the universe in search of adventure and offering help to those in trouble, the Doctor has been special because of who they are. The Timeless Child reveal makes it more about the Doctor being special because of what they are, something they had nothing to do with and had no control over, something they didn’t even know about, and I can’t say I’m excited about that.

In spite of all that, though, I actually kind of like how the finale handles this reveal on a personal/character level. As I’ve already said, the interactions between the Doctor and the Master are just stellar here. I can fully believe that this knowledge would drive the Master to the edge, and the weight of it nearly crushes the Doctor until she’s able to get out from under it thanks to some help from a Matrix image of the Nth Doctor (who’s implied to be one of these earlier regenerations whose memories the Doctor has lost, but the fact that she calls herself the Doctor and her TARDIS looks like a police box seems to suggest post-One. Unless, no matter how many times the Time Lords wipe away the Doctor’s past and reset them, they keep stealing broken TARDISes and running away to Earth? There’d be something a little beautiful in that.) I love the scene of Doctor in the Matrix concentrating on the memories of her past selves that she does have, leaning into them while the show’s theme song plays underneath.

In that way, I still don’t necessarily like that the Timeless Child reveal happened, but I’m liking how they’re playing it so far. I like that the Doctor’s come down on the side of, “These new revelations about my unknown past can’t change who I am now.” While she may go looking for some of their past memories in the future and/or seek some kind of reckoning about what was done to them, I expect we’ll still see a lot of the Doctor just doing what she does, traveling the universe and helping out where she can.