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BBC The Timeless Children |
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| Story No. | 323 | 
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| Production Code | Series 12, Episode 10 | |
| Dates | March 1, 2020 |
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With Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill
Written by Chris Chibnall Directed by Jamie Magnus Stone Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens |
| Synopsis: The Doctor learns the truth about the timeless child. |
WARNING: This episode is almost impossible to discuss without spoilers. Proceed with caution.
A Review by David Rosenthal 24/3/21
I don't personally care for this episode at all. Cybermen with Time Lord robes I found absolute rubbish. The design was not good, I felt. The Master played by Sasha I felt was okay, but not in my favorite Masters either.
Then the big reveal. Oh, my heart broke. The reveal that the Doctor was the timeless child and not originally from gallifrey but from another dimension and was originally female is basically an f-you to some long-term fans to say "Guess what? The doctor was never born a male." Thanks Chibbs. That was sarcasm, by the way, not a real thank you. And the timeless child was tortured to constantly regenerate to give Tectuen the secret of regeneration. By the way, no mention of Rassilon or Omega either.
I don't plan on watching anymore Who under chibbs. For me now, Doctor Who is 1963 to 1996, from Hartnell to McGann. For me, Chibbs' Who is not true Who. My rating is a 1 out of 10 for this story.
"Even a sponge has more life than I!" by Hugh Sturgess 31/5/24
This episode is absolutely shockingly bad, for reason that have quite little to do with the continuity-shaking revelations contained within. This is an episode so terrible it easily ranks among the worst the series has ever produced, managing to evoke turgid depressing Sawardian shoot-'em-ups like Attack of the Cybermen and Warriors of the Deep, vapid Master vamping like The King's Demons and interminable Gallifreyan lore like Arc of Infinity or Trial of a Time Lord. It feels like an exorcism of the worst qualities of the show at the time Chibnall publicly complained about it in that notorious interview.
Where to start? Maybe we ought to start with the sheer, crushing grimness of this story. I'm only reviewing The Timeless Children because the idea of watching another fifty minutes of bleak, depressing and utterly mindless Cyber-scares in Ascension of the Cybermen is putting me in the psych ward. Ashad and his Cybermen march through this story brutally executing the last surviving humans, all of them blandly interchangeable characters who die or survive for no reason, with just enough mourning to drain even more joy from this story. This is truly Doctor Who drained of any humanity or joy, just the irreversible march of oblivion. It's shockingly nihilistic.
The story dwells on the carnage that exists off-camera. The Cyber war that has annihilated both the Cybermen themselves and (apparently) all but seven humans (reduced to a mere three who are deposited in their own past by the end of the story). The Master's gleeful reminders of the slaughter of the entire population of Gallifrey, and the morbid touch of keeping the bodies in cold storage. It's not frightening, it's ugly. It is an incredible recreation of stories like Resurrection of the Daleks or Attack of the Cybermen, wherein countless innocents are hacked down without fanfare, the Doctor is an ineffective git and the series seems to revel in the nastiness it is depicting.
I'm not going to say that this is an illegitimate way to tell a Doctor Who story, but this sort of bleak fight-for-survival story works if it pushes the characters. And the bland companions of the Chibnall era really don't mix here. Even back in the 80s, stories like Earthshock or Resurrection of the Daleks looked like they hurt. They pushed the characters to the brink. Here the Fam just carries on as usual, playing essentially bit parts in their own series. The scene between Graham and Yaz, in which he compliments her with a string of generic, vacuous platitudes about how she never gets scared and she's making her family proud, while Ravioli - sorry, Ravio - and Yedlarmi do the actual work of emptying out the Cyber-suits, rather sums up their contribution to this story.
The same goes for the Doctor, who spends a full forty-eight minutes standing around listening first to the Master and then the Ruth Doctor before she takes her first action of any kind in the story. After she escapes, what is her next most important action? I guess to wire mini-Ashad up to a bomb? Which is Ko Sharmus's bomb and which he subsequently detonates. That's the sum total of her contribution to the plot.
Even the "mind blown" scene in the Matrix amounts to her summoning up clips of previous episodes to break the Matrix. Even putting aside the dodgy logic of this --- the Matrix contains the sum total of experiences of every Time Lord ever, and yet gets overloaded by just her memories alone? --- this is essentially the show calling on the power of its own past in order to mean anything in the present. It's a statement that this whole shitshow matters because it is Doctor Who.
It takes forty soul-crushing minutes for the Master to slowly explain the Timeless Child retcon to her, scene after scene of Sacha Dhawan talking and Jodie Whittaker standing there frowning. It doesn't matter what he was saying, this is an insane way to write drama. Acres and acres of flat, uninspiring prose, so much of it superfluous. The delivery of the reveal takes so long that the episode has no time to react to it. What is the outcome of this shattering revelation about the Doctor's secret origins? The episode doesn't have the time to get around to showing us, because it's too busy resolving its dreary CyberMaster plot. How did anyone think this was a good idea?
The Master is the virtual protagonist of this story, and yet he's a black hole of motivation and character. His motives are impossible to follow: he is deranged with hatred at the notion that the Doctor is, in fact, superior to him as he always feared, yet he goes to enormous lengths to tell her in detail how superior she is and thinks this will break her spirit? Dhawan has nothing to do in this story but gloat and exposit, and so tries to alleviate the tedium with an incredibly annoying over-density of giggles, twitches and shouts. He's simply a failure of character and drama, and I dearly wished the Doctor smacked him or wandered off during his interminable "quirky" turns. Dhawan is an extremely talented actor, but he's given nothing here, no direction (for instance, he wasn't told until the day before shooting whether his three-minute monologue about Tecteun would be done as a voiceover or entirely in camera), and so he improvises this nonsense. He's trying to add colour to the episode and failing so badly he manages to make it all even worse. This is a recurring pattern of the Chibnall era, that even its most talented contributors can't do good work.
I suppose we should move onto the Timeless Child concept itself. We should, I think, acknowledge that it isn't quite as bad as it may have first appeared. Yes, it tramples all over whatever remained of the old notion that the Doctor was a mediocre Time Lord who ran away because they were scared and stumbled into becoming a hero thanks to their friendship with their companions. But the series has been trending in the direction of the Doctor as a grandiose figure of terrible myth since the McCoy era. (There is definitely a distinction to be made here, though. When Steven Moffat made the Doctor the origin of the human title 'doctor', that was a result of the Doctor's actions. When Lungbarrow finally spelt out the Cartmel masterplan, it made sure that the Doctor contained the Other's essence but was still a separate being, preserving his fundamental ordinariness, which is one of the most endearing features of the Doctor's backstory.)
So it's not something that wrecks the series. It's something that happened before the show even started and thus makes no real difference to it. This isn't so much a defence as a kind of backhanded compliment. The show has never been interested in where the Doctor came from, what they upbringing was like, their "origin story" --- at least, not when it's been good. The closest comparison is the half-human revelation in the TV movie. That was also a dumb idea, but it didn't destroy the series.
That said, the bar an idea in Doctor Who ought to clear is not "Does this permanently fuck the series?" I want to flip this around and ask, does anyone genuinely think the Timeless Child improves the series in any way? "The Doctor is a magical child the Time Lords found and experimented on to get regeneration and then they worked for the Time Lord CIA but all their memories were totally wiped." What does this add to our understanding either of the Doctor or the Time Lords beyond a few more lines in their Wikipedia articles? We never needed a mythic "secret origin" to the Doctor to make them interesting. What does it add to the Doctor's relationship with the Time Lords to add this analogy for child abuse (yuck) to their shared history, but only after you've gone and blown them all up again so there's no one for the Doctor to react to?
It doesn't help that this is really three separate things: 1) The Time Lords stole regeneration from a foundling child they experimented on / abused; 2) The Doctor is adopted; 3) She also worked for the Time Lord CIA and did missions. Firstly, #3 is clearly completely out of left-field and adds nothing to the story. Secondly, what, exactly, is meant to be the most shocking part of this to the Doctor? That an innocent creature was experimented on for decades to benefit the Time Lords? That SHE was experimented on? Or that, as the Ruth Doctor blandly puts it, her memories aren't compatible with what she's just learned?
There's just nothing human to grab onto. Finding out you're adopted is relatable. Finding out that you are the secret source of your civilisation and you also were Jason Bourne is so far beyond any normal experience it's impossible to sympathise with her. But in this Chibnall is trapped in a bind. He has said that this is an adoption story, stemming from his feelings about his own adoption. But it's impossible to make us care about the Doctor being adopted, because we've never met the Doctor's family, we don't know their names, we know next to nothing about them. So an unnamed bunch of characters we've never met weren't actually the Doctor's parents. Who cares? The very part of this story that reflects the human experience Chibnall is trying to convey just cannot work with the Doctor, whose past has deliberately been kept a secret from the audience for over fifty years! So Chibnall has to add this grandiose backstory so there's any actual weight to it, but he is blatantly uninterested in it.
The most common defence of this plotline that I've heard is that it restores mystery to the Doctor's character. It is ludicrous, on its face, to say that an episode that devotes 60% of its run-time to exposition about the Doctor's origins, that gives us tons more information about the Doctor's childhood, family and career, somehow makes the character more mysterious. As far as I can tell, the mysteries we are left with after The Timeless Children are all mysteries that only appeal to the same fannish, encyclopaedic mindset that birthed this dreadful idea in the first place: What is the name of the Doctor's real species? What other secret Doctors are there? What missions did the Doctor do for the Division? Yet this show has never been called Doctor What. The question of what specific made-up alien species the Doctor might be is just not intriguing, not least because to answer this question would destroy the mystery!
The very thing that this retcon obviously exists to explain --- the Morbius Doctors --- feels diminished by the association. No longer are they a weird fragment of continuity that is fun to think about and pick over precisely because it doesn't fit anywhere into the canon. Now it fits perfectly: those are the Doctors who worked for the Division, which happened before his mind got wiped and he was regenerated into the "first" Doctor. It's been neatly filed away in a big, sprawling fan theory made canon, any intrigue to them buried with a TARDIS Wiki tombstone.
On rewatch (likely the last time I ever watch this dreck), what's really astonishing about this is that the Timeless Child is entirely unrelated to the rest of the episode. It's almost stunning that the Master shoves the Doctor off into an entirely irrelevant subplot that affects nothing around it, and yet this subplot gives us the title of the episode. There's a fundamental disconnect here that would have been trivial to address. The Master's ultimate scheme is to create the CyberMasters, harnessing Gallifreyan regeneration and Cyber-technology to build an unstoppable army. We've just sat through forty minutes of learning that the Doctor is the source of regeneration and has, it appears, unlimited regenerations. Linking these two together seems obvious, and yet all discussion of the Timeless Child is confined to the Matrix. It's literally two separate stories.
At the time, most people assumed Chibnall would of course do something with all this. But now we know that the Timeless Child was going the same place as the rest of his era: nowhere. When Doctor Who finally returned in late 2021, the Doctor is searching for information about the Division. She is profoundly uninterested in what species she really is or what happened to them. She isn't looking for Tecteun, she just accidentally blunders into her. It's almost funny that Chibnall did all this, just to get this stupid idea canonised, and after that was done he couldn't think of anything interesting to do with it.
Part of the despondency here is that it represents the final betrayal of anything that looked hopeful about the Chibnall era. When Series 11 was going out, there were glimmers of a unique vision for the show: an ensemble cast, the Doctor decentred as the all-knowing charismatic hero, a more serious attitude towards history than "Theme Park Britain" of the Davies and Moffat eras, and generally speaking a "kinder, gentler" show. Series 12 dumped all of that (albeit retaining the Doctor as a passive and whey-faced ignoramus, just one whom the rest of the characters inexplicably considered all-knowing and charismatic) and with The Timeless Children we see what the Chibnall era has really been building to. As Darren Mooney has suggested, this "secret origin" was likely a core part of Chibnall's pitch to the BBC when he took over the show. This 40-minute exposition dump, that only dilutes and weakens some of the best features of the Doctor's (previously known) origin and in its innovations amounts to nothing and goes nowhere, this was what Chibnall genuinely aspired to do with Doctor Who. This is his Big Statement.
This episode genuinely is as bad as everyone said it was at the time it was broadcast. It exceeds your average crappy episode because it exposes a fundamental rot at the core of the show itself. The Timeless Children is the magnum opus of a writer who truly aspires to nothing more than canonising a bad fan theory he had when he was a teenager. Who prefers to name-drop Borusa and make fanwanky nods to The Deadly Assassin (the Doctor's inexplicable declaration "no humans on Gallifrey!" being a reference to that story) than give us characters with a trace of humanity who perform actions of any meaning or consequence. It's a story that exists to explain a ten-second parade of faces from The Brain of Morbius, something only someone who can sincerely echo Morbius's words ("Even a sponge has more life than I!") could possible care about. Not merely is this vision of Doctor Who shatteringly uncool, it's so divorced from anything outside of itself that it almost makes me hate the show in general, for producing fans as obsessive as this. This is Doctor Who that is proud to think it matters purely because it is Doctor Who.
There is, though, one small consolation. In April 2020, just a little over a month after this episode went out, Pip Baker, one half of the famous Doctor Who writing team, passed away. I like to imagine that when he was reunited with his late wife Jane in the next life, he was able to tell her about the final, humiliating collapse of the reputation of the writer who so long ago had publicly criticised them.