[Dr.Goth @replies]

Let’s just say it up front. I don’t like the Timeless child idea or the Timeless Children episode.

It’s not because of the continuity issues.  You don’t watch Doctor Who if you want strict and perfect continuity.  You could make a drinking game out of watching any episode and drinking whenever something happened which contradicted some other part of continuity somewhere.

Not sure how many episodes, let alone series, you’d make it to the end of sober.

So I can live with the continuity problems. Even if the final episode of series 12 has sooooo many of them.  My problems lie elsewhere.

Let’s start with what I see as the big one – what it did to the character of the Doctor.  As I understood it before the current arc, the Doctor was someone who chose to make a difference. Not because they had to. Not because they were ‘special’. But simply because they could. Yet now we have been presented with a Doctor who is both more and less than that.

The series, at least at its best, has always taken a stand against entrenched privilege.  The Doctor is now being presented as someone who is immortal, deathless. An almost unique and special being. You might argue that Doctor must still come from somewhere and that even with a Time Lord origin the Doctor was pretty special.  But the Time Lord origin, or something like, was necessary, as the Doctor had to come from somewhere. And the previous origin gave little more than was necessary. Travel in Time and Space was the basis of the series. That implies vast scientific and engineering knowledge. Regeneration was necessary for the longevity of the series (it’s why it was first introduced). So the Time Lords were a pretty minimal solution to the problem. Within that the Doctor was no more special than what they made themselves. What’s been done now is much more than that. The Doctor is special by origin. And while there must be an ‘origin’ somewhere, it so secret that the Doctor may as well be unique.

But it’s also less. We now have a Doctor, at least as presented in the final episode, willing to let the others make the hard choices that the Doctor can’t. And, in this case, an old white male at that. He ‘does what has to be done’ while the Doctor runs away.  I invite people to compare Genesis of the Daleks, and the Doctor’s attitude and behaviour in that, to The Timeless Children.  The Doctor, in the Timeless Children solves nothing. Does nothing. Is simply swept along by events.  Had no hand in helping the companions or the other humans collected along the way.  Even earlier the Doctor was unable to stop the Lone Cyberman getting what he wanted, despite the warning from Captain Jack.

An ultimately uncomfortable mix of messiah and helpless bystander.

That’s never been the Doctor.

The origin principle of the Doctor used to be that of a rebellious thief (or thieving rebel) who stole a TARDIS to run away from their people. Now the origin of the Doctor is a lost and abused child. That both takes agency away from the Doctor (the origin is about what was done to them not what they did) and takes away their transgressiveness. Anything the Doctor does now has to be forgiven, because who can criticise a lost, abused, child?

So much for the character, what about the show? The episode took the show to some very dark places. The only way Tecteun could have got the Doctor to regenerate was by murdering them. Over and over and over again. That sort of child abuse has never been part of Doctor Who.  The genocide of a race.  Somewhere the show has rarely, if ever gone.  And never with the sort of abuse of the dead that the Master perpetrated. Even with what Missy did to humanity’s dead, it wasn’t the whole race. The episode also trampled over one of the most joyous moments of the show – the Doctor’s rescue of Gallifrey and its children in Day of the Doctor.  That scene with Matt Smith, David Tennant and John Hurt where the number of children on Gallifrey is enumerated, then later the Doctor’s triumph at rescuing them.

All made nothing now.

Do we even still have the same show? Or is this a full reboot in disguise?

While, as I said earlier, I can live with problems in continuity what is far less forgivable are inconsistencies within the story itself.

It is never properly explained why Tecteun limited the Time Lords to 12 regenerations.  If you have the prospect of limitless regenerations, as the Timeless Child apparently has, and you want to give it to your race, why limit it to 12?  It’s also never explained how the origins of regeneration were hidden.  When Tecteun gifted the Gallifreyans with regeneration, did no one ask if it had anything to do with the child Tecteun had brought back from space? A child who kept changing appearance?  Why even hide this?  Wouldn’t Tecteun have been better saying that it was a result of what she’d found ‘out there’?  If the Gallifreyans didn’t know, how didn’t they know? And if everyone did know, how did it get forgotten? Because, if we are to believe the Master, it did get forgotten.  If we can’t believe the Master on that, we can’t believe anything the Master said and everything is up in the air.

Now think about the regenerating CyberTimeLord.  Think very hard about it. Regeneration repairs damage. Restores life. Apparently the Cyberised Time Lords are still capable of regeneration.  Inside those suits they may still be subject to the Cyberman emotion suppressors.  But if they were taken out of the suits and made to regenerate? Not too hard to believe that they would have regenerated into free Time Lords. Did the death particle (and what a silly macguffin that was with an oh so convenient legend attached) just destroy people who could have been saved?

The Doctor failing to save people who could have been saved has never, as far as I know been part of the show.

I know a lot of people don’t like the Time Lords. I think Chris Chibnall has just been revealed as their hater in chief. But I like them.  The Doctor has to come from somewhere.  To misquote Voltaire, if The Time Lords didn’t exist we’d have to invent them. The Doctor’s people have to be long lived.  To allow the show to go on. They have to be technologically advanced, to explain the TARDIS.  The Time Lords fill that role.  Yes, they are imperfect, stuffy and bureaucratic, make mistakes and interfere when they shouldn’t. But if the Time Lords didn’t make mistakes, what narrative space for the Doctor would there be?  If they were a perfect, benevolent, race, the Doctor is unnecessary as they’d fix everything.

But with all their faults I found the Time Lords ultimately admirable.  They decided, by themselves, that Imperialism was a bad thing (Underworld), helped rid the universe of the Rachnos and stood up to the Daleks, at immense risk to themselves. What other race would have done that?  What other race, with the power at their disposal, would have been so restrained in its use?

Chibnall turned them into lying, child abusing, thieves.

If you don’t like the Time Lords, what do you expect of whatever is replacing them?  They are even older and more long-lived than the Time Lords (having infinite regenerations). They have advanced technology, even if not time travel. But don’t expect them to be amazingly wonderful. They didn’t seem to put a lot of effort into finding their missing child and where have they ever been when the universe has been in crisis? So we have a long-lived, technological advanced race who don’t do much.

Hmm. I question the point of the change.  For those arguing that the Time Lords restricted creativity I would ask how, when you have the billion year history of a planet that you can do anything you want with, are you restricted and how is the replacement going to be any better?

Oh, and speaking of age, it appears that the Doctor’s true origin race is immortal.  The series has always shown immortality as a bad thing. The Doctor has rejected it when offered (Five Doctors). Immortals have been almost always shown as feckless, selfish and uncaring.

As a final problem, what did the episode do to the Master’s relationship to the Doctor? Before now the Master and the Doctor were two sides of the same coin. Contemporaries, with the same origin.  The Master shows what the Doctor could have been, had they been selfish. That’s not true any more.  The Doctor was always going to be what they are. It wasn’t that the Doctor went through the same experiences as the Master and made a different choice. Now the Doctor is pre-destined for goodness.  They are vastly different, the link is broken. The Master is now just a maniacal villain, last survivor of a villainous race.  So very ordinary. There will now always be this gap between the two characters were before there was a link. The Master isn’t the Doctor’s responsibility anymore, as he stated once.  The Master is just another cut-out villain.

Just another thing lost amongst the wreckage.

 

 

 

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