DOCTOR WHO, 12.10 — ‘The Timeless Children’
By: Frank Collins
Tags: Doctor Who, Television, Review, Culture, TV

It’s the only trace of what seems to be a series of significant early lives prior to The First Doctor we originally encountered in the junkyard in 1963. The clock we saw in the police station is a gift from The Division, or the Garda in the filtered version, and presented to Brendan, the avatar representing The Doctor. Hence, his fall from the clifftop and recovery is a cloaked version of the timeless child’s own history and how The Doctor’s former lives were deleted by the Time Lords. The Master then transmitted that trace of her past to The Doctor as she tracked the Cybermen. Is that trace just a clue or an apology from Tecteun? Presumably, we’ll see The Division explored further in the next series?

This exposition, carried in the main by an always watchable Sacha Dhawan, is a huge amount to foist upon a single episode and on an audience who may not know the entire Time Lord backstory. Specifically, it will be divisive to many long-term fans as it effectively rewrites Time Lord history and uses The Doctor’s genetic code as the urtext for their existence. Previously, she was simply a member of that race who decided to run away from their hidebound society and explore the universe. However, there were suggestions, certainly during the final series of the classic show overseen by script editor Andrew Cartmel, that The Doctor was something more than a Time Lord, with a past shrouded in mystery again. Chibnall has returned to this premise and posits The Doctor is again unknowable, her appearance at the gateway unexplained, her chain of lives prior to The First Doctor’s appearance erased by The Division.

As if to underline this, The Doctor, apparently defeated, meets herself again, in the form of Ruth Clayton (Jo Martin). In answer to some of the questions that fans may have posed and acting as a form of assurance, she encourages The Doctor to look beyond the confusion about her unknown past lives and to focus on what The Doctor represents. “Have you ever been limited by who you were before?” she asks. Of course, she hasn’t. She’s needed and it’s time to rejoin the fight. “I know this place has blown your mind. Maybe you should return the compliment?” suggests The Ruth Clayton Doctor. “All this history. All these lives, it’s too much stimulus,” The Doctor concludes. She promptly uses her amassed memories to flood the Matrix and to deny its reality.

It’s a glorious sequence, with a very rare example of the main title theme being used to score a scene within an episode, that flashes through what seems to be hundreds of clips of past adventures, past companions, past enemies and monsters and, finally, onto past Doctors. One wonders if Chibnall’s strategy here was to fix a few anomalies while he was at it. It can only explain what happens when we get through the various Doctors, all present and correct (well, not Peter Cushing, but who’s to say his Doctor isn’t a past incarnation now that it seems The Doctor has had many, many past lives?), and we flash beyond William Hartnell as the First Doctor. We see the various timeless children looked after by Tecteun, progressing from the young girl she discovered at the gateway to the adult male at the meeting of The Division, and then, surprisingly, to the range of faces seen in the mind battle between The Doctor and renegade Time Lord, Morbius in “The Brain of Morbius” (1976). That’s seven more faces. Plus Brendan and the Ruth Clayton Doctor at the end of the sequence.

To go back and confirm the “Morbius” continuity at the same time that he’s also clearing the decks of Time Lord history will certainly ensure Chibnall’s notoriety. Depending on your opinion, he’s either the showrunner who ruined Doctor Who or injected something very new into it. The First Doctor is still the first and Hartnell’s legacy is safe and sound. The question remains as to where the ‘Ruth Doctor’ fits in as she’s at the end of the sequence featuring the timeless children. Does this suggest that The Doctor was at that point being regressed by The Division to her life as a child? And was the Ruth Doctor on the run from The Division in “ Fugitive of the Judoon “, hiding away from them on Earth? This also throws up questions about the Time Lords granting new life cycles to both The Master and The Doctor in the past? If The Doctor is actually immortal and has unlimited regenerations, were the Time Lords pulling a fast one? Could they actually grant new life cycles given Tecteun’s limit?

So many questions that the last act of the episode seems almost perfunctory in nature. The Doctor escapes from the Matrix, is reunited with her “fam”, a load of explosives and a plan. Her companions successfully blow up the Cyber-carrier (featuring some excellent VFX) and thus eliminate any opportunity for The Master to create a vast army of “endlessly regenerating” Cyber-Masters. I assume it’s The Doctor’s genetic imprint that’s been used to create them and they’re not limited to twelve regenerations? Very conveniently, Ruvio recalls the myth of the Death Particle as The Doctor racks her brains about Ashad’s claim that “the death of everything is within me”. She challenges The Master to one last standoff, having equipped herself with the miniaturised Ashad and a bomb, with a “hand detonation only” cliche, to set off the Death Particle. It’s the only way to destroy the organic Time Lord material of the Cyber-Masters but, rather inconveniently, it’ll kill everyone else.

She packs everyone off in a TARDIS and sends them to safety on Earth. It’s then just her, The Master and his Cyber Masters. Except, of course, The Master calls her bluff. She simply doesn’t have the will to detonate the bomb. Equally convenient, old Ko Sharmus is willing to step in so that she can live. If we’d had a really emotional connection to Sharmus then this may have had more impact. It simply shows up the problem with Chibnall overreaching in this finale. The companions, the surviving humans and Sharmus are rather sidelined in favour of action and the massive information dump about Gallifrey and the Time Lords. While The Doctor’s departure from the TARDIS does strike an emotional chord, both in her scene with Yaz and her entreaty to all of them to “live great lives”, there’s been too little of an emotional connection with them. Although some dialogue has signalled Sharmus’ do-or-die approach to matters, we don’t really feel that aggrieved when he finds The Doctor, offering to emulate Obi-Wan Kenobi and sacrifice himself. It’s also a well-used motif to get The Doctor out of such situations, often to prevent an act of genocide, and defuse the entailing tricky moral implications.

Once we’ve seen everyone home safely, The Doctor’s pinched another TARDIS to get back to where she parked her own (leaving one on Earth and on the planet seems rather cavalier), and the Judoon have shown up and flung her into a cell on what looks like Shada, the Time Lord’s own prison facility, the important question is: just who is The Doctor now? Has she “become death”, as The Master suggests, quoting Robert Oppenheimer as he clapped eyes on the Trinity nuclear test (Gallifrey’s disintegration at the end of the episode looks like a mushroom cloud).

It might be worth looking at Oppenheimer’s quote “Now, I am become death, destroyer of all worlds”, a somewhat rough translation from the Bhagavad-Gita Hindu scripture. It is a dialogue between the warrior-prince Arjuna and his charioteer Lord Krishna, an incarnation of the god Vishnu. Arjuna faces an army of his friends and relatives and is caught in an impossible dilemma about whether to fight them. Krishna offers an alternative philosophy, allowing Arjuna to fulfil his destiny despite personal complications.

This is Dharma. Krishna suggests it’s Arjuna’s duty to fight. The people that die are truly killed by Krishna, not Arjuna. They are all fated to die. Arjuna is just the instrument. For Krishna himself is time or death. The Master merely wants The Doctor to become his instrument, to become death. It would please him if she did her duty and killed them all. Certainly, we could see this as a variation on the themes at the heart of the story, the idea that reincarnation or rebirth defeats death but time eventually destroys all things. The Doctor lives on as the timeless child but the Time Lords are gone once Ko Sharmus presses the button to fulfil The Master’s death wish. Sharmus rather than The Doctor accepts The Master’s offer to “become me” and his reasoning is that he alone must accept responsibility for starting all this, having been part of the resistance unit that sent the Cyberium back though time and space.

As Matthew Sweet pointed out, there’s also something of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself in her declaration to The Master. He’s not broken her because she now has the gift of “myself”, she is now more than she was and contains “multitudes more than I ever thought, or knew.” She tells The Master “I am so much more than you”, suggesting that not only has she many more incarnations that she never knew about but that genetically she is more than he is. He’s a Time Lord, limited to a wonky regeneration cycle, and she is a mysterious, immortal alien who can go on forever.

However, the latter, which is a neat bit of rejigging of the series’ main principle and frees it up a bit, seems to get written over by the implication that we’ve also swapped one great big bit of canon for another. We may end up being constrained by the fact that The Doctor was part of some dubious Time Lord organisation and have loads of other Doctors popping up all over the place. The Ruth Doctor could be implicated in why The Doctor had her previous memories wiped and I suspect we’ll be seeing more of her again as that story has been left inconclusive. I also expect The Master to return. His last line “all of you, through here now” implies he was making a quick exit into a TARDIS.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the episode. It has its problems, in terms of how to use TV to tell a story in flashback, in leaving your central character as someone to be talked at rather participating in the making of her own story, and is a further example of how character development needs to have an emotional underpinning. However, it’s sustained by decent, if often barmy ideas, two rather good performances from Sacha Dhawan and Jodie Whittaker (despite The Doctor being left powerless to explore her own hidden past), impressive production design, VFX, and costumes. Uneven as it is, director Jamie Magnus Stone deserves the credit for managing to keep 65-minutes of wild ideas moving, and he gives them convincing scale and pacy, visual interest.

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Cast & Crew

writer: Chris Chibnall.

director: Jamie Magnus Stone.

starring: Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill, Ian McElhinney, Julie Graham & Sacha Dhawan.

Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on March 6, 2020.