2nd Opinion, Part 2: “The Timeless Children” – A Host of Issues

Gustaff’s take on the tenth episode of Series 12.

Cue the recap! Canon welding made the Master this way, a harbinger of chaos brought to make this fandom pay. He captured the Doctor early on, but ruined his plan by leaving her a bomb. He threw continuity into a hole and exposited so much it quickly became droll. TARDIS fam hits planet-fall, while plot convenience made the Cybermen stall. Timeless Child reveal, Cartmel Masterplan steal. Slamdunk exploding, heartfelt pouring, boundary jumping, exposition pumping, canon crumpling; more matrix expositing, man it’s so boring! The Doctor has an existential catastrophe…but quickly overcomes this naturally. Cybermen receive an upgrade, but look more like cinematic fan made. Lone Cybermen shows emotion, gets downsized with no commotion. Doctor escapes a heroic moment, while a redshirt blows up her opponent. Safe inside her time machine there’s just enough space in the episode for one last surprise on screen.

Now that we’ve gotten the boring bits out of the way, let’s take a closer look at the list of issues that this episode helped create in exchange for “fixing” that one plot point that has never been referenced again in over forty-four years:

• How did the Master destroy Gallifrey in the first place? At face-value this might not seem like something noteworthy to show, until you realize that he wiped out the most advanced civilization in recorded history BY HIMSELF OFF-SCREEN. How?
• Are we expected to believe the Master was able to destroy all the Time Lords without having them regenerate into new bodies to continue fighting?
• Why is this episode not two separate finales? The Timeless Child reveal has nothing to do with the Cyberman plot and is incidental at best. Remove this arc and nothing changes. Add the Cybermen plot and nothing changes.
• How come when the CyberMasters regenerate, the dead tissue inside their bodies isn’t renewed? The whole point of regeneration is to heal damaged or dead tissue. Wouldn’t a bunch of Time Lords suddenly find themselves stuck inside Cybermen?
• How come a legion of Cybermen (1000s going by previous episode’s claim) only manages to kill one person during this entire episode? That’s not badass!
• How come the Cybermen droves suddenly can’t hit anything despite being shown to have remarkably accurate and pin-point aim in the last episode?
• What is the point of the Timeless Child arc if you’re just gonna mind wipe the Doctor of the information of her previous selves? Worse than that, why set up the Doctor going through an existential crisis if you make her overcome this life-changing reveal minutes afterwards?
• Why do the Cybermen not swarm the settlement in masses instead of just sending eighteen? Also why must so many Cybermen stay behind on the spaceship? Normally you’d argue that eighteen Cybermen is more than enough except the Cybermen did not know how many people there were in the settlement. Even more importantly, the Cybermen have just lost a MAJOR war against the humans and are on the brink of extinction. Isn’t it LOGICAL to use dynamite to cut down a tree after that tree almost destroyed your entire species?
• How did the Master deduce that the Doctor is the Timeless Child if all records after the regeneration legend had been redacted? He should only have knowledge that the Timeless Child story is true, not whom they grow up to be. He even states that after a certain point the information is locked away and he doesn’t know any more.
• And while we’re on the topic, why would the Time Lords not redact the whole story of the Timeless Child and regeneration legend if it’s meant to be their greatest lie? Why would you possibly document the most shameful, disgraceful, embarrassing and maybe even incriminating thing in your entire history and culture if you didn’t want anyone, not even your descendants to know the truth?
• How exactly is Yaz the best person Graham has ever met? She skirts her duties as an officer of the law whenever she feels like it (thus putting civilians in potential danger) for as long as she feels (because to hell with annual mandated leave) and lies about it repeatedly to her boss (because she can, and no biggie right). Not to mention it was Yaz’s ‘brilliant’ idea to bring a legion of Cybermen to a planet potentially full of defenceless, unsuspecting refugees.
• Why is the Doctor unwilling to destroy Gallifrey when she might die but is suddenly completely okay with it when her life isn’t in danger? She barely puts up a fight when the old guy offers to take her place.
• Why doesn’t the Master just kill the old guy? The conversation about who sacrifices who goes on for quite some time and this Master has repeatedly been shown (even within this episode) to kill people on a whim and does it fast and without warning. Was it because the script called for him to stand around like an idiot and wait? I think it’s because the script called for him to stand around like an idiot and wait.
• How come the Time Lords didn’t notice that the Doctor’s DNA was vastly different than their own? They are part Timeless Child species now and part Gallifreyan whereas the Doctor is completely Timeless Child species. We know the Chameleon Arch could have been used to rewrite the Doctor’s DNA, but what about all that time before it was created?
• Are we expected to believe that the secret of regeneration, the Magic of the Time Lords is something that can be reverse engineered/discovered in only a couple of decades? Davros, one of the smartest, if not the smartest non-Time Lord individuals in Doctor Who lore, managed to find the mathematical formula for the Intergalactic Stock Exchange from billions of strands of data in a single day and he can’t seem to crack regeneration.
• Also, are we expected to believe that no other alien species has managed to capture a Time Lord and keep them incarcerated for research? Because here’s at least one example: the Daleks captured Romana, Lady President of Gallifrey and kept her prisoner for twenty years in The Apocalypse Element.
• How is Ruth’s TARDIS in the shape of a police box? This episode explicitly states that the Doctor’s hidden lives take place before William Hartnell’s incarnation lands in Totter’s Lane. We know Ruth is in the Doctor’s past because she works for the Division which is also shown to be in Gallifrey’s ancient past.
• If the Division’s purpose is to secretly intervene in temporal events, what’s the purpose of Gallifrey’s CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency)? They both do exactly the same thing: Secretly and co-vertly intervene in temporal events of other species.
• The Third Doctor states that he is thousands of years old. It’s one of the few actual plot holes in the series since this age is repeatedly contradicted later on. The plot hole still remains after this episode, but the reason for it changes. The Doctor can be thousands of years old now, but he doesn’t possess his memories from back then so the fact that he can make that claim in a non-jokey manner is a plot hole.
• The Sixth Doctor claims in The Trial of a Time Lord that it has taken ten million years of absolute power for the Time Lords to become corrupt. Given that this episode shows the Doctor alive since before there were Time Lords, this means the Doctor has been alive for ten million years at least. How come no one has ever noticed in the entire history of the Time Lords that one of their own has lived an extraordinarily long life and never seems to run out of regenerations…even before the ability to grant new cycles had been discovered?
• Why does the Valeyard travel back in time to steal the Doctor’s remaining lives during The Trial of a Time Lord, when he is from a point in the future where he knows he is the Timeless Child and has infinite regenerations? Previous episodes make mention of the Valeyard which means the event that births him is still waiting to happen. He is situated between the Doctor’s twelfth (Tenth Doctor) and final incarnation (as of now, can be any incarnation before the Curator).
• How does the Seventh Doctor have knowledge that he is far more than just another Time Lord if the bits that make him far more than just another Time Lord (like say being the Timeless Child) has been wiped from his memory as this episode explicitly states?
• How come Clara didn’t see any of the Doctor’s hidden lives when she jumped into the Doctor’s timeline? The Master states the Time Lords wiped the Doctor’s memories, but the Time Scar represents the Doctor’s entire existence and thus will show everything from birth to death. And if you think it’s just a convenience, remember the Doctor’s lifespan now stretches to have 10 million years worth of incarnations…at least. If anything, the Doctor’s timeline (representing birth up until events of Trenzalore) should be littered with 1000s of people Clara and the Doctor do not recognize.
• How can River Song be part Time Lord? This episode states that experimentation with the Untempered Schism over billions of years did not in fact create the Time Lord’s ability to regenerate. It was the proto-Time Lords harvesting the Doctor’s DNA. Given this new absolute evidence, River Song cannot have regenerative powers.
• If the Doctor has infinite regenerations, how can he be in danger of running out in “The Time of the Doctor”? The Time Lords grant him another cycle. You can argue it’s to keep up the lie, but remember the Doctor is the Time Lords’ only hope. When he dies, they become trapped forever. Is it rational to withhold such information in exchange for potentially spending the rest of eternity trapped in a bubble? It is not…unless you mean to retcon this event. You can also argue that they didn’t know he wasn’t in danger, but Rassilon is still alive by this point and would thus know about the Doctor’s heritage. As has been shown repeatedly in Doctor Who, Rassilon is a character who will do whatever it takes no matter what to continue existing.
• How is it possible that no psychic, telepath, mind reader, Elder God or All-Powerful Entity in the entire franchise of the show has been able to see into the Doctor’s mind and uncover her hidden past until a bunch of dirty magic dishrags manage it some several thousand adventures later on a desert world?

And off Doctor Who goes. Gone for another year…maybe a year and a half or more for the next full series. Who knows?

Am I upset at the unnecessary “addition” to the Doctor’s past? Yes. I am. Very much so. Why? Because if you look back at every major reveal in this franchise: regeneration, Daleks, introduction of the Time Lords, Earth Exile and UNIT, the Master, the Morbius Doctors, the Valeyard, I’m ‘Half Human’, the Time War, the War Doctor, last of the Time Lords, “The Day of the Doctor”, Trenzalore and now the Timeless Child…You can clearly spot which parts of the mythos worked and which the makers of the show regret.

Ask yourself: Will the Timeless Child be something that forms part of loads and loads of future Doctor Who television stories with journeys and exploration and character development, or will this arc quickly be put to rest like the infamous Hybrid Arc? And if it’s the latter, then ask yourself: What was the point?