Modern Doctor Who has been fascinated with one central question its preceding ego seldom cared to engage with : Doctor who ? It think more than the clever wrench of its title and sought to place its paladin on the marvellous pedestal of a mystery story solve . But last night , it finally asked the question for actual , and added a follow up that ’s far more important : Why should it matter ?
“ The Timeless Children ” is a spot of a paradox — and not just because it ’s the conclusion ofa Cybermenstory that , disappointingly is n’t really about the Cybermen . It ’s a write up that is far more concerned with the Doctor — her relationship to the Master , her human relationship to her people , and at long last her family relationship with herself . In this attentiveness , and in many ways , it is an episode that can be read as a gamechanger for theentire history of Doctor Who : one that boldly , and no doubt controversially , asks us to reconsider everything we ’ve known and take about the series ’ traditional knowledge since the very beginning .
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The Doctor is confronted with the truth, once and for all.Image: BBC
But it does n’t , really . Because “ The Timeless Children ” is n’t , as the Master constantly needles his captive frenemy about throughout the episode , deliver your mind be blow by revelation after divine revelation and that ’s that . It would be a far less interesing story if it was , if all that matter to Doctor Who , and to the Doctor , was this yearning desire to know absolutely everything . No , the season 12 finale is a love varsity letter to the nerdiest of Doctor Who ’s huge nuggets of worldbuilding . Not just by bosom it — all of it — as messily and crazily as it can , but by telling us the most crucial thing of all about it : It all matters . But also : It does n’t , not really .
Before we get into all that , we should dive into what the instalment had to say about the Doctor ’s true past . As her friends slink about on the Cybercarrier and the Cybermen just sort of … flow around , on the Master ’s orders , the Doctor detect herself amid the ruin of her homeworld , a captive of one of her oldest friends , and forcibly force into the full archives of Gallifrey ’s Matrix , the font of all Time Lord history and knowledge . It is there she learns the cracking Trygve Halvden Lie the Time Lords assure themselves , and most crucially , told her : Time Lords were n’t really assume on Gallifrey . They were made , through the uncovering of a mysterious , regenerate kid from another world , manipulated , experimented on , and ultimately brainwash by the society built upon their very beingness to never know that truth .
Hazily interlacing with the much less interesting — or , rather , much less impactful — stories of Ryan , Yaz , and Graham seek to escape the clench of the Cybermen , and the Master ’s own attack to court Ashad into an alliance born of cybertech and Time Lord corpses , the Doctor is pierce back to the origin story of Gallifrey . It turn out , as the Matrix ’s imaginativeness order us , Gallifrey ’s native people were not Time Lords , but the Shabogans — and the discovery by one of its other Internet Explorer , Tecteun ( Seylan Baxter ) , of an exotic child turn a loss from a rift in space in the end chair to their breakthrough of the ability to renew .
The Master worms his way into a sinister pact.Image: BBC
pin down this child in her lab and marry their genes into her own , Tecteun becomes the first Time Lord as we would know them , offering the power to regenerate to her fellow elevated Shabogan , born from years of experimentation — even torture , consider the kid dies and is born-again multiple time in this mental process — of this Timeless Child . finally , Tectuen ’s body of work leads to the Time Lords ’ regenerative abilities simply becoming part of their rude biology , but she and her fellow unexampled Time Lords decide that the Child ’s secret should never emerge . The Child is forcibly regenerate , anamnesis of the Shabogans and what Tecteun did over countless spirit pass over from their memory , and left to be rebirthed as just one Time Lord among many .
That ’s already a destiny . And that ’s even before we get to the twofold reveal of all of this : The Timeless Child and the Doctor are one and the same .
The Doctor has so much of her true past lose to prison term — blocked off by the Matrix ’s surety systems , corrupted by the damage the Master work after get wind of this truth himself in his massacre of Gallifrey — but now she knows she is the mystery at the heart of her own people ’s very cosmos . Though they ’re ostensibly break for good ( again ) , burn to ash and their remainder used by the Master to prop up an intended new race of Cybermen with himself as their leader .
The Master worms his way into a sinister pact.Image: BBC
All this is as potentially bewitching as it is just overwhelming to acquire in one go . The installment ’s marathon - length information dump comes at the price of sacrifice its storyline with the Cybermen , but with it brings this unparalleled reunification of so many bits of funny Doctor Who history . Mysteriousincarnations like Ruth , or those odd faces glimpsed in “ The Brains of Morbius . ” Those scant citation of unnamed Doctors in stories like Russell T. Davies’novelization of “ Rose ” ? They all suddenly have a place in properDoctor Who history , enriching its past by declare oneself a commodious , if insolent , way to harmonise these seemingly irreconcilable pieces of canyon .
But outside of what this means for Doctor Who metatextually , within the tale this reveal is intend by the Master to be whole devastating to his nemesis — the consuming headiness becoming less about fans trying to translate the sheer amount of new history they just see , and more about a unmediated attack by the Master on the physician ’s very psyche , intending to break her with this noesis as he was .
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The Master and Ashad watch as a dreaming Doctor has the truth revealed to her by Gallifrey’s Matrix.Image: BBC
But it does n’t . Because really , this is where the Doctor and the Master dissent the most . The Master has always been fascinated with , and weight by , the past — lingering enmity over his family relationship with the Doctor as children , schoolmates , and eventually rivals , his ever - present desire to bust the rules of positive feedback and continue to linger beyond the incarnation granted to him , his rightful anger at being turned into a weapon system during the Time War . The Master has always wanted to simultaneously be the castaway and yet also be someone special , his intellect and capacity for cruelness driven by some latent fate that no one else can see . Of naturally , when face with the revelation from that past that he isn’t — and that the person he simultaneously respects and despise the most is — it would part him . In his head , the Doctor and he are so alike that he feel the same revelation should likewise intermit her .
But the Master , so wrap up in his own unreconcilable burdens , forget that the Doctor runs from the past not out of a fear of it — but because she , unlike him , is truly unbeholden to it . It ’s not that the Doctor does n’t care — all that lingering guilty conscience over the Time War is more than enough evidence — but rather that the Doctor is not as chained to that yesteryear as her archrival is . As she tells him , the divine revelation that there is so much more to her life ( lives , rather ) beyond that charming old man who stole a TARDIS and ran aside from it all with his granddaughter so long ago is an idea so wholly free that it empowers the Doctor more than it could ever repel or break her .
She does not know the totality of who she is , and therefore is gratis to be whoever she wants to be — to hold the ideals she chooses to deem , to defend the causes she chooses to champion , to see the slew and go on the adventures she select to go on to . None of that is defined by the Doctor being the origin point of Time Lord fellowship . None of that is change by her inherit this “ Timeless Child ” title , as much as the Master would require it to be . She is , and always be the individual she choose to be no matter of what she knows about herself : the Doctor , and all the ideal that pick represents .
The Master finds his frenemy a lot less fazed by his secrets than he was.Image: BBC
It is meet that an episode which , on the surface , uncovers so much secret history that we had n’t previously known about the Doctor chooses this as its ultimate dissertation . Paradoxically , by telling us so much more about the Doctor ’s past , it opens doors to mysteries beyond what we have learned — and instead asks us to imagine the potential of those mysteries far more than it does the ramifications of what was really unroll here . It ’s not what we ascertain that really matters , but what is left unlearned — who are the Doctor ’s actual people ? Where are they from ? Why was the Doctor depart forsake by the Boundary ? What even is the Boundary?—simultaneously peel back layers of mystery only to lay down the potential for even more .
In the end , it asks us , as many mass have attempted to ask before : Doctor who ? But having ask it , this particular era of Doctor Who is quite all right with leave the answer to that up to our wedge than it is some lofty canon . And it ’s quite ripe to .
Assorted Musings
The poor Cybermen . I think there are perchance two fib in their time on Modern Who — their debut in “ ascension of the Cybermen / Age of Steel ” and then the Twelfth Doctor ’s swansong in “ World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls , ” but even the latter does it to an extent — where they ’ve remain the full-grown villains of the slice instead of falling back to being lackey that do n’t get to be the true threat they were built up as in the first part of a two - parter . allow the Cybermen stick out as the compelling villains they are , dammit !
That aver , the Master is an inviolable bastard , but you ca n’t fault his genius for pattern with the Cyber - Masters . Cybermen suit of clothes + robe + a dash of Gallifreyan prodigality ? Lovely . The little sad side too is so very Master . I like we ’d seen more of them .
verbalize of wishes though : It ’s kind of wild how very separated Ryan , Yaz , and Graham ’s arcs are here from the Doctor ’s . Of course , there ’s the intentionality in that they ’re physically separated from her , but their part of the Cyberman subplot imply their time is made much less impactful thanks to the focus on the Doctor . We do n’t really get to see how they feel or oppose to these Revelation of Saint John the Divine , or hell , what even being on the ruins of her homeworld is like ! After a lot of strides taken to try and flesh these characters out this season , sometimes less successfullythan others , it feel bizarre to have them sense so totally out of this story .
The Timeless Child lives.Image: BBC
Aside from all of it ’s play with Who history , I did appreciate that this sequence play around with another time - abide by classical Doctor Who trope : companions mask themselves by shroud in the shelled - out bodies of their foes . From the Daleks and now to these Cybersuits , it ’s always a nice and tense little melodic theme to literally put our heroes within the skin of their pursuers .
At one point , the Master tells the Doctor that the visions of mysterious Irish policeman Brendan ( seen throughout last week ’s episode ) were mental hint he was mail her about the unfeigned nature of her past tense . Except … “The Ascension of the Cybermen ” never actually made that clear ? There could ’ve been way good ways to blue-pencil those scene into last week ’s installment that made it obvious the Doctor was mean to be live these scenes as we were . Maybe they would ’ve felt way less random and unnecessary ? Alas .
The TARDIS is meant to be pretty respectable at end people from just teleporting into it . How did the Judoon , of all races , do to transmit themselves through its defenses ? hapless Doctor .
The Master’s regenerating Cybermen are, ironically, a short lived legion.Image: BBC
So , Daleks at … well , whenever the BBC decides to drop “ Revolution of the Daleks , ” as tease at the death of the episode ? The internet is being really vague on whether Doctor Who ’s moving back to Christmas specials or sticking with the New Year for now , but either way : I think this might be where we see some fellow traveler stay behind for good , give we did n’t lose anyone here as many people had expected to . Nothing like a bitof Dalek murderto get you to eye the TARDIS door , is there ?
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Chris ChibnallDoctor WhoDoctor Who RecapSci - Fi
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