Hello and welcome to another Doctor Who review, where this week I’m reviewing the last installment of Series Twelve, the series finale The Timeless Children.
“Everything you knew was a lie.” Bold words, all things considered. After a series of standalone adventures in the Thirteenth Doctor’s first year, we’ve already spent much of season 12 watching Chris Chibnall and his creative team circling the show’s long history, tugging on threads that have always weaved decades of canon together… well, mostly.
That’s the thing about Doctor Who – it is, at its heart, a show about a quirky alien in a blue box who has adventures in time and space. The Doctor’s inspired Shakespeare, started the great fire of London, uncovered the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster, and has saved earth countless times from the threat of alien invasion. For a program handed across generations of writers, producers, and directors that has time-travel at its very heart, it’s amazing that the show hasn’t contradicted or flat-out rewritten itself more often.
Doctor Who has always been about Nostalgia and constant changes, it's one of those rare instances where it has the ability to be whatever show it wants, it can be a soap opera one minute, then its a compelling drama, then it's a comedy. It has all of these aspects and elements to it that makes it unlike any other television show there's ever been.
Doctor Who has always been about Nostalgia and constant changes, it's one of those rare instances where it has the ability to be whatever show it wants, it can be a soap opera one minute, then its a compelling drama, then it's a comedy. It has all of these aspects and elements to it that makes it unlike any other television show there's ever been.
That said, when a head writer makes the decision that the two-part finale is going to be all about disrupting that lore – when you’re banking that there are people who care about Gallifrey, and the Time Lords, and rules of regeneration dreamed up half a century ago – you are the one making the canon important. You’re agreeing that it matters, that it’s worth being invested in and having internet arguments about. Whatever changes you make not only should you have to respect for what has came before, the changes themselves also have to fuel an interesting story.
All of which is well and good, but it doesn’t answer the burning question: did “The Timeless Children” fundamentally change Doctor Who forever? That answer, without spoilers, is: No, not really. You could argue that other episodes in Series 12 did most of the heavy lifting when it came to shaking up the continuity and last night's finale spends a lot of time reflecting on those events. There are a lot of callbacks, both in-universe but also to themes, and even lines of dialogue from series penned by Chibnall’s predecessors.
First thing to mention about this episode are The Cybermen, Ashad reveals his intentions are to upgrade the Cybermen into fully mechanical creatures that will go on to rid the universe of all organic life, and the Master quite rightly calls this plan a load of utter rubbish. In last week's episode, the Cybermen seemed to be lacking a clear focus that made them engaging to watch in action, and this dialogue basically confirms it.
We never find out why Ashad was making that one Cyberman scream, either, and now we never will because the Master zaps him with the Tissue Compression Eliminator.
It’s also a moment that exposes Chibnall’s tendency to under develop his villains when he knows the story is eventually going to shift focus away from them. It happened with Daniel Barton and the Kasavin in “Spyfall” once the Master showed up, and it happens again to the Cybermen in this story.
After Ashad dies the rest of his Cyber Warriors spend the rest of the episode in a sort of holding pattern, all-but-vanishing from the plot while they wait for the good guys to come back and blow them up. It's a real shame because the Cybermen are a great monster and they deserve so much better. I haven't liked any Cybermen stories since their return in 2006 and the reason is because that they are written so weak. There hasn't really been a decent Cyberman story since Earth Shock. Just a shame is all I have to say on that matter.
The second point to talk about is The Master. I don't know what to make of Sacha Dhawan's performance. It's bewildering at times, it's almost like he's trying to mimic John Simm's crazy mad man interpretation. There are moments of his performance which are effective like when he zaps Ashad with the Tissue Compression Eliminator, far more vicious than the gloating Masters of time gone by, as Dhawan’s regeneration has proven himself to be. But then I'm also not quite sure of what to make of his performance or what he's trying to achieve with it, I don't know it's just all over the place.
After Ashad dies the rest of his Cyber Warriors spend the rest of the episode in a sort of holding pattern, all-but-vanishing from the plot while they wait for the good guys to come back and blow them up. It's a real shame because the Cybermen are a great monster and they deserve so much better. I haven't liked any Cybermen stories since their return in 2006 and the reason is because that they are written so weak. There hasn't really been a decent Cyberman story since Earth Shock. Just a shame is all I have to say on that matter.
The second point to talk about is The Master. I don't know what to make of Sacha Dhawan's performance. It's bewildering at times, it's almost like he's trying to mimic John Simm's crazy mad man interpretation. There are moments of his performance which are effective like when he zaps Ashad with the Tissue Compression Eliminator, far more vicious than the gloating Masters of time gone by, as Dhawan’s regeneration has proven himself to be. But then I'm also not quite sure of what to make of his performance or what he's trying to achieve with it, I don't know it's just all over the place.
The major part of the episode to point out and discuss is the moment where the Doctor has been plugged into the Matrix and forced to confront the Great Big Lie of the Time Lords. The Time Lord ability to regenerate stems from a single, immortal alien known as the Timeless Child, and that child is revealed to be the Doctor. (no surprise there, even I could see that one coming) Moreover, it seems that many of the Doctor’s earlier regenerations involved working for some form of Gallifreyan secret service before effectively undergoing a factory reset at the end of her tenure.
Let’s break this down, because it’s really two revelations and they’re only loosely connected. The first half hour of this episode is essentially Get to know Gallifrey, as the Master talks the Doctor and anyone in the audience not up to date on their Time Lord history through some of the basics – the Citadel, the Panopticon, the Matrix. What we don’t hear is one important name: Rassilon, who we’ve always been told was the founder of the Time Lords and invented regeneration. Here, that honour goes to Tecteun, effectively the Doctor’s foster mother.
The Master vaguely alludes to the Time Lords making up a suitably grand origin story after the fact, but I’m forced to wonder – why not simply have Rassilon find The Timeless Child? The twist here is not that someone invented regeneration, we’ve always known that, but that the Doctor herself is the blueprint for the process and has had many, many other lives as a result. That’s huge news for her, of course, but why keep the specifics of a “Timeless Child” aiding in the discovery of regeneration so secret? A single line of dialogue explaining how and why Rassilon replaced Tecteun in the history books would have been all that was needed, and the total omission of his character from this new canon is really quite baffling.
The second reveal is that at some point during her past, the Doctor joined up with a Time Lord agency known as ‘The Division’ that violated their world’s normal rules of non-interference. The “Brendan” cutaways we saw in Ascension of the Cybermen were actually a kind of filter placed over the information to disguise the Doctor’s service and eventual memory wipe, ensuring it wouldn’t be purged from the Matrix.
This is apparently news to the Doctor, but clues were laid out fairly explicitly in Fugitive of the Judoon, where Gat stated that she used to be Ruth’s commanding officer. Fans have had over a month to get used to the idea that Hartnell might not have been the ‘first’ Doctor, so this comes across as clarification rather than a huge mind-blowing shock. Plus, as the Doctor points out, the new knowledge does nothing to change the person she is today.
What’s weird here is that Gallifrey already has its Celestial Intervention Agency, a secret service designed to covertly interfere in other worlds’ affairs, and yet they don't get mentioned, why not?. So much of what we learn in this episode comes from ignoring established continuity only to replace it with things that are basically the same – The Division instead of the CIA, Tecteun instead of Rassilon. These feel like changes for change’s sake, rather than being necessary alterations to canon so that the story of the Timeless Child can make sense.
So, in summery this episode is Chibnall basically reinventing parts of Doctor Who's cannon to suit his needs, under use Cybermen and add more to the origin story and the mystery of the show we have only guessed at and made up our own theories about. At least it makes all the Morbius Doctor's cannon and that part of the show make sense at least.
Had the Ruth Doctor made her debut during this story, we’d all have been left reeling from the surprise. Instead, we’re left acknowledging a belated explanation.
The joy of knowing this now though is that the Doctor as a character has the ability to go on forever, which is fantastic.
I will give this finale an 8/10! The series ended on a fabulous cliffhanger.
It’s rather a pity now that this series has finished. I rather enjoyed tuning into a new episode each week. I look forward to the special with the Daleks later in the year.
On the whole this series has been really great. A massive improvement from Series 11. With some episodes I have watched more than once shortly after their original air date. Something which I haven’t done that since 2008 with Series 4. A strong series on the whole and I'm very pleased for it.
