Doctor Who: the problem with 'The Timeless Child'

The Timeless Child retcon presents a problem for the long running British institution that is Doctor Who. I recognise that this isn’t exactly a hot take; the finale of Jodie Whitaker’s second season as The Doctor aired well over a month ago. However, I wasn’t on Vocal back then, so what are you going to do about it? Also, now that everyone has had their chance to watch it, you can’t complain about the massive spoilers I’ll be hurling about with almost spiteful abandon; you’ve been warned.

I should also preface this with a clarification that this isn’t an attack on Whitaker as The Doctor or Chibnall as showrunner. While not my favourite Doctor, 13 can stand shoulder to shoulder with any other incarnation of the Doctor without shame. Meanwhile, Chibnall’s first two seasons as showrunner were generally of high quality and no episode ever dipped below ‘decent’. He’s also the writer behind two of my all-time favourite episodes (‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’ and ‘The Power of Three’). I haven’t had any reason to complain about his plans for the show; until the season 12 finale, at least. I still find myself a little staggered how such a promising new exploration of the Doctor and her universe could suddenly swerve into such a poorly thought out plot twist that completely fails to grasp the core elements of the Doctor’s character and the whole flipping point of the entire show.

For those late to the party, the finale of season 12 revealed that the Doctor is ‘The Timeless Child’: a mysterious being found next to a portal to another dimension by an explorer from the planet that would one day be known as Gallifrey. This child had the ability to regenerate without limit and decades of painful experiments on the child allowed the explorer to figure out how to splice this ability into herself and the rest of her people. This allowed them to rapidly advance into the most advanced and powerful civilization in the universe, the Time Lords. After billions of years and countless different incarnations, this unique individual had their memory wiped under obscure circumstances and eventually would flee Gallifrey in a stolen Tardis and become known as The Doctor. Except, when the Doctor meets one of her forgotten past selves, she’s already calling herself the Doctor and has the Police Box shaped Tardis. There is so much to unpack with this, that I almost don’t know where to begin

Almost.

The simplest place to start is this last bit because it renders the First Doctor’s run utterly pointless. What makes One’s character arc so fascinating to later viewers is that he wasn’t written as the First Doctor, he was just the Doctor; regeneration as a concept came later. He wasn’t originally meant to be the protagonist of the show; the teachers he abducted (Ian and Barbara) were supposed to fill this role. When it became clear that he would have to carry the show, he started to develop from a rather selfish and cowardly figure into the more familiar compassionate, but flawed, individual we know and love.

Except, with the Timeless Child retcon, we find out that the Doctor was already the Doctor before they met Ian and Barbara. One of the earliest themes of the show was that it was the Doctor’s interactions with the infinitely less advanced humans that turned them into the hero who has saved people and worlds across time and space. Under these new conditions, the Time Lord in question has always been The Doctor, they just forgot for a bit. What undermines the show even more is the retcon that there have been innumerable incarnations of the Doctor before the ‘First’ Doctor. Up until now, the Doctor teaming up with one of their past selves was a big deal because each incarnation is an established hero and character in their own right. We followed their journeys on camera and we know them. Except now, the door has been opened to inventing a new incarnation of the Doctor whenever the plot requires it. Not only have multi-Doctor team ups become less special because they’re now so easy to arrange, it devalues the established incarnations of the Doctor because they’re now just a small drop in the ocean.

I can’t say I didn’t have my doubts going into the finale that something was going to go wrong. Any time a storyline promises that it will ‘change everything’, it’s either a hollow marketing ploy that will change nothing or else a sign that the author has their eyes on making their mark on the franchise rather than just telling a good story.

The Timeless Child smacks of being an ego project by Chibnall because it causes problems for both the Doctor’s character and the essential structure of the show itself with no actual payoff beyond a cheap plot twist. We’ll deal with the character problems first; namely the focus on making the Doctor a unique superbeing from another dimension. The problem with doing this, and I hope you’re paying attention, is that the whole point of the Doctor’s character is that they are not innately special.

It sounds a bit nuts until you think about it. Because, while the Doctor has many incredible abilities, these are only special by human standards. By the standards of their own species the Doctor is no one special. The classic series even went as far to establish that it took the Doctor two attempts to graduate from the academy. What makes the Doctor special is their actions and attitudes; the Doctor has outwitted enemies that, on paper, they are no match for because of their unwavering determination to fight for their moral principles. It is this determination that pushes the Doctor to try strategies that no sane person would try, that allows them to win in impossible situations. There’s a reason that Eleven refers to himself as a ‘Madman in a Box’ and Twelve calls himself an ‘idiot’. Making the Doctor a special super-being who was doing good in the face of impossible odds long before the events of the series removes the agency of the Doctor’s character and makes them less interesting.

The Timeless Child retcon also dampens the heroism of the Doctor’s future adventures with the revelation that she has unlimited regenerations. Before this, the Doctor having a limited number of regenerations meant that there were some stakes when the Doctor risked his/herself or performed a heroic sacrifice; they were risking something they couldn’t get back. This was emphasised even more when the Doctor got their new regeneration cycle as it was left deliberately vague as to how many new regenerations they had been given. This meant that every time the Doctor risked death, they didn’t know if this might be the time they died for good. Now, every time the Doctor expends a bit of regeneration energy to heal their companion or to fuel the Tardis, it’s something they can do without batting an eye.

So, all of this harm to the Doctor’s character and for what? It doesn’t even give any interesting character payoffs for the Doctor. The Doctor already disliked the other Time Lords, they’ve already been established as hypocritical and morally dubious and we’ve already had seven seasons of them being dead. Like I said, I like Chibnall’s work up to this point, but this really does feel like a vanity project to give himself an extra-large place in the official history of the show. The half-hearted conclusion to the finale really underlines this. The Doctor confronts the Master with the death particle, intending to use it to destroy the Master, his new ‘Cyber-Lords’ and Gallifrey with it. However, she can’t bring herself to do it and one of the human resistance fighters does it in her place as she flees to grab a Tardis and escape. This is somehow treated as a moral victory over the Master. Apparently, an act you consider morally wrong is fine and dandy if you get someone else to do it. This rushed and feeble conclusion to the storyline really gives the feeling that Chibnall stopped caring after he’d got his ‘everything changes’ plot twist on paper.

So, as we’ve established, the ‘big twist’ caused new problems for the Doctor’s character to no appreciable benefit. But, as I mentioned earlier, it also causes problems for the show as a whole. If you want a clue as to what these problems are, you need only look as far as the title of the show. Is it Doctor Bob? No, it most certainly is not. No, if you recall the show is called Doctor Who, so this is a case of the clue being in the name. This show is unique in that an essential element of it is that the protagonist is the one character who should never have a defined backstory. The only things we know for certain about the Doctor is that they had a granddaughter and that they stole a Tardis and fled Gallifrey for unknown reasons in unknown circumstances. Now, to be fair, Chibnall hasn’t revealed this part of the Doctor’s life. Instead, with the Timeless Child, he’s overshadowed it with a defined backstory that predates it. The mystique regarding that period of the Doctor’s life is effectively gone now that it’s parked up against the story of an immortal extra dimensional being spanning billions of years. Doubly so give that, once again, they were the Doctor long before this, so its role in shaping their character has been removed.

This, ultimately, is what makes this retcon so infuriating. In long running franchises, new elements to the mythos come about from stories that were created just to be good stories. But, in this case, Chibnall has engineered this whole storyline to supplant core elements of the show’s sixty-plus year history with his own elements. By having the identity of ‘The Doctor’ predate the events of the show he’s deliberately prioritising his new backstory over the one established by decades of the series. By having the Doctor be revealed as an extra-dimensional immortal, you’re demeaning their development from selfish coward into a compassionate hero. Giving them infinite regenerations only undermines the courage of their heroics by removing the personal threat. It also adds the plot wrinkle of why the Doctor won’t use their infinite regeneration energy to heal every injured person they meet. When they only had a finite amount of it, they had a reason not to do it constantly; now what excuse do they have?

It’s possible that the Timeless Child is the set up to the most amazing twist in the storied history of the show. Maybe this is all a deception by the Time Lords for some sinister plan further down the line. Maybe the Master’s plan has another layer and he managed to sabotage the Matrix to trick the Doctor. Maybe the Master made a mistake and assumed, wrongly, that the Doctor was this special figure from Gallifrey’s murky past. However, it doesn’t feel like it; the past version of the Doctor who, according to Chibnall, is definitely the Doctor. There’s also the reveal coming from the Matrix, which is clearly done to give it the stamp of truth. Combine all this with no little hints that there’s anything wrong with what we’re what we’re being told. I want to believe that Chibnall is playing the long game and that we’re not going to have to wait for the next showrunner to counter-retcon this, but I’m not going to hold out too much hope.

Stick a fork in me, I’m done.