If They’re Just Stories, Why Are You So Worried? (Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children)
It’s February 23, 2020. Billie Eilish is at number one with “No Time to Die.” The Weeknd, Lewis Capaldi, and Justin Bieber also chart. In news, Bernie Sanders continues his apparent romp towards the Democratic nomination by winning Nevada, while the plastic £20 note enters circulation. COVID plods along in the background, a slow moving catastrophe that somehow still doesn’t feel real. At Penn and Anna’s, we watch Ascension of the Cybermen, a dutiful but hollow rendition of what you might call standard issue Doctor Who season finale. It’s fine. The ending is stupid and obvious, and the Ireland stuff is weird, but mostly it’s the sort of boringness you expect from the Chibnall era.
A week later The Weeknd is back on top, Biden’s triumphant victory in South Carolina has turned the race on its head, and COVID is just starting to tip into its “cancel everything” phase. We’ve begun the process of packing, and Penn and I watch the season finale. And suddenly, I understand how Jan Vincent-Rudzki felt.
I want to tarry in that space for a minute, because the emotion is so vivid. Doctor Who annoys and disappoints me frequently, and at times I hate it, but this is the first time it has ever made me angry. It’s positively indecorous. I remember going off on a fan on Twitter—one I’d previously gotten on with, and who I think still gets on with Jack and some of the other people around the site—when they make a crowing post in support of the episode that takes time to revel in the misery of Moffat fans. I forget what I say. I’m sure “go fuck yourself” is involved. It may well be worse. Certainly it’s bad enough to be embarrassing. And yet it’s also entirely honest to the raw emotion of the moment. It feels stupid to be this angry about a TV show—even one I’ve tied myself to so completely. But I am.
Really, though, everything about this feels stupid. Three and a half years on, it’s still difficult to quite understand how it happened. No, Chibnall had never been good, but there’s an ocean of distance between Spyfall, which is recognizably doing a bad job at something that at least makes abstract sense to attempt, and The Timeless Children. Here we’re left to try to ascertain just what’s worse—the underlying idea or the execution.
We’ve talked a lot about the basic incompetence of the Chibnall era at this point, and so there’s relatively little new to talk about here. You’ve got Ko Sharmus, whose only real claim to having anything resembling the narrative weight he’s given is that he’s played by a third tier Game of Thrones actor. You’ve got Jo Martin coming back to play Magical Black Lady. And then, of course, you’ve got the fact that the main plot of The Timeless Children is literally the Master tying the Doctor up and explaining his wild new fan theory about the Morbius Doctors to her, a decision that is so comprehensively and stupidly ill-considered that it feels like you’re just being trolled—that this must be some sort of cruel joke Chibnall is unleashing on the world in a fit of Joker-like nihilism and desire to watch it all burn.
But Chibnall’s incompetence was historically checked by his lack of ambition. Sure, The Battle of Ragdolls in Vegas was terrible, but it was a damp squib of anticlimax that could be forgotten before the credits had finished rolling. He hadn’t done anything that would have long term consequences. That changed with Fugitive of the Judoon to an extent—canonizing pre-Hartnell Doctors is eyebrow-raising to say the least. But it was broadly fine. I’d always been partial to the theory that the Doctor’s origin involved them having been given a new regeneration cycle as payment for some past work, and them using it to flee—a move that would make sense of Susan’s apparent involvement in TARDIS development, among other little things. I like taking the name “the Doctor” and explicitly being an adventurer prior to meeting Ian and Barbara a lot less. It bothers me for the same reason that Zelda timeline that relegates the original game to being “the bad ending” of Ocarina of Time does—I think the stories that are paratextually important should also be textually important. But it’s a minor bit of damage—an irritating little scuff mark on the side of the series lore next to that dent left by the Valeyard.
The notion of Timeless Child, however, is just plain fucked. The worst part about it, aside from just being abominably stupid, is that it puts a permanent end to the notion of the Doctor as an ordinary Time Lord—perhaps even a bit of a shite one. Previously there was a glorious sort of Halo Jones ”she was just somebody who had to get out. And she did it” energy to the character. This was, I think, genuinely important—an ethical core of the show’s underlying mythology that distinguished it from everything else. And it’s gone now. Now the Doctor is the magical origin story of the Time Lords—a tiresome bit of chosen one bullshit that means the show will, at least along this axis, be forever less good than it was.
And that’s rare. You can’t really point to many episodes of Doctor Who that have actually done permanent damage to the show. Like, say what you want about The Twin Dilemma, but the Doctor strangling Peri only fucked up the next couple years of the show, and even there it’s not like some chain of dominoes running straightforwardly from “the Doctor strangles Peri in a fit of post-regeneration madness in 1984” to “the show is cancelled in 1989.” The TV Movie made a solid attempt at being that harmful, but the nine year gap between it and the next episode meant that Davies could just ignore its worst impulses, and did. Here, however, we have a piece of major canon, treated as a climactic reveal of a season finale, and reiterated multiple times in the episodes that follow. You could spend the rest of 2020 thinking that maybe they would reveal that the Master was lying and that he was actually the Timeless Child (which would actually have worked quite well), but that’s long gone. We’re stuck with this shit forever.
So what can be done with it? Well, let’s start by thinking seriously about what it actually is beyond “the Morbius Doctors are canon now and there’s no more regeneration limits.” For Chibnall’s part, it appears to have been an attempt to grapple with his own experiences of being adopted. I do not for a moment doubt that there is genuine trauma here. And you can even, in the larger arc, see traces of actual point in the eventual rejection of the idea that one needs to know one’s past. It’s probably the closest Chibnall comes to writing a story that’s about something.
But it’s also largely played out now. It’s hard to imagine any further developments with that specific plot. Even if you have the Doctor fish that pocket watch out of the TARDIS console and get back all their memories, that’s not going to exist as a substantive response to Chibnall. And honestly, why would you want it to? Other than this horribly overburdened metaphor for finding out about your biological parents, there’s not actually anything the Timeless Child reveal adds in terms of the Doctor being adopted that wasn’t already at least tacitly present in Listen. The adoption angle serves to explain why the fuck Chibnall did this, but it doesn’t really give you anything new to work with going forward.
Another option—the one you suspect Davies is going with—is to canonize the big picture while ignoring the details. “The Doctor is adopted” becomes part of the lore, but the watch is never mentioned again, and if “the Timeless Child” is, it’s only in the sorts of monologues that might also include phrases like “constellation of Kasterborous” or “oncoming storm.” That lore becomes like the Valeyard or the Hybrid—officially true, practically nothing. You could even probably still bring back “the Doctor was an unpromising student” type stuff, though honestly the new series has always hit “ancient immortal god” harder than it has “fuckup Time Lord.”
This works, and is probably the right thing to do given that retconning it out is unfeasible—even if Davies wanted to, he’d surely recognize that it’s petty fanwank that needlessly offers a public insult to someone who’s also a genuine friend of decades. I obviously despise it, but ere I writing Doctor Who in some medium I’d not in a million years be interested in engaging with this. Fundamentally, for all that it made me genuinely angry, part of that anger is that it’s not even interesting enough to be worth fixing.
But this is still TARDIS Eruditorum, and we have long engaged in counterfactuals. Given that it’s not going to get contradicted, it does remain a live part of the lore—an unexploded bomb like Susan that could at any point be detonated. For all that it is plainly nothing more than an incompetent showrunner having an incoherent psychological breakdown over the backdrop of his obvious failure at his dream job, what can be salvaged from the scar this black hole of utter meaninglessness has left on our beloved lens upon the people of Normal Island?
The interesting thing—the thing that Chibnall never really seems to be aware of in his own story—is that the Timeless Child is not primarily a metaphor for adoption, but for exploitation and abuse. The Timeless Child is tortured and experimented upon, murdered hundreds of times over in order to create one of the key foundations of the Empire of Time, an empire that then enslaves her for untold centuries, perhaps even millennia. That is the interesting thing about this story. Not whatever poncey time-spy organization she was a secret agent for, not whatever the fuck Ko Sharmus was supposed to be, not even the legitimately amazing-looking Cyberlords; the fact that the Doctor is fundamentally a creature born of infinite trauma.
Were one to be so crass as to answer the question of why the Doctor is the way they are, this is as good an answer as it is really possible to form. Trauma as superpower is an easy way to go wrong, but it’s also a real narrative that people use to make sense of their lives: here is the way I am hurt, and here is the way I am unique for it. To the extent that the Doctor is relatable—and they always are, in spite of all the Dicksian proclamations about companions as viewpoint characters—this is why. Something like this is, almost inevitably, the explanation for why people like the Doctor behave the way that they do. It’s that or neuroatypicality, and let’s be honest, neuroatypicality and trauma go together like renegade Time Lord and clever human companion. If one wants that explanation to be explicit—and there are certainly stories to tell about the Doctor as a refugee, to pick a relevant example—this works as a way of making it so.
Yes, literally all of the details are stupid. But so are the details of “a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey”—just look at those silly hats. In both cases the answer is generally to make the story not about that, using the lore as a set of iconography against which the Doctor can be played instead of as a subject in and of itself. There’s nothing stopping anyone from perfectly good interpretations of this.
And yet watching it remains unbearable. I watched one half of this nauseous and motion sick on mass transit, the other literally nodding off in a hotel bedroom. If I’m being honest, I haven’t meaningfully made it through an episode since Fugitive of the Judoon. Sure, the worst continuity decision since the TV Movie is, upon inspection, probably not as bad as it first looked. But fact remains that the show is genuinely unwatchable, and has now combined this with the most gobsmackingly stupid looking piece of fanwank anyone has seen since Craig Hinton roamed the Earth. (RIP to a legend) And from there it gets to go straight into a pandemic that devastates its ability to prepare, so that the next three and a half years of Doctor Who are a smattering of occasional specials, most of them the result of people who couldn’t even make television under favorable conditions suddenly having to make them under the most unfavorable ones imaginable.
Who knew the ghosts of Pip and Jane were this vengeful.
August 26, 2024 @ 7:15 am
I really don’t understand why, even now, you are so ANGRY about the whole Timeless Child concept. (Assuming “concept” isn’t too creative a word to give to the idea.) True, it’s revealed by a show in horrendous “tell not show” mode. It’s also “science fiction” which stupidly suggests that the full technological challenges you’d face in successfully developing interplanetary travel are possible to solve without, you know, the support of massive government agencies or billionaire-led commercial businesses employing hundreds – thousands, maybe – of highly skilled engineers, technicians and scientists. Yeah, a single person could build a rocket in their back garden and get to another solar system. Fuck that.
But revealing that the Doctor’s origins were not what they – or we – thought? Nothing against that. I just wished it had been done better. But then, for decades I’d thought the whole idea of Gallifrey – not so much post-“Deadly Assassin”, but certainly post-“Invasion of Time” – was rubbish. For years, in my own personal head cannon, the Gallifrey of “Arc of Infinity” was a shield, an invention, a distraction—a cover for the real Lords of Time operating outside of space-time. OK, the Gallifrey as eventually brought back by Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat had its interesting points but, overall, I still felt it to be a slightly disappointing, all-too-knowable, all-too-human world to be the true origins of our wonderfully mercurial Doctor.
“The notion of the Timeless Child, however, is just plain fucked.” Well, apart from that kind of “criticism” blatantly shutting down any discussion – which you’ve accused others off, in the past – how can you seriously expect us to consider “the notion of the Doctor as an ordinary Time Lord” as an actual positive? He’s NEVER been an “ordinary” Time Lord—in fact, you yourself point out that, by the time of “The Ribos Operation”, the Doctor appeared to be outgrowing all his so-called superiors, from UNIT to the Time Lords. And an aspect of the alleged “Cartmell Masterplan” – a slightly tiring one at that, as touched on too often by some of The Missing Adventures writers – was the Doctor being very special indeed. “Much more than just another Time Lord”. Etc. So, it’s not exactly a new idea. It’s just been better done in the past.
“Now the Doctor is the magical origin story of the Time Lords,” you say, horrified. Ahem. Well, of course they are. They’ve always been. I seriously doubt Derrick Sherwin, Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke would have come up with the Time Lords in 1969 if they hadn’t already had the idea of the Doctor, and needed a narrative “excuse” to reformat the show as a hopefully slightly-cheaper Quatermass knock-off. So the fiction of the series, to me, has only belatedly caught up with the creative reality of the show’s long-established production history of “making it up as they go along”.
Mind you, why view this solely as “a permanent end to the notion of the Doctor as an ordinary Time Lord”—surely if the Doctor is the “ordinary” hero you want them to be, then that also means that the Time Lords “based” ono them actually aren’t as special as we originally thought?
The idea that the Doctor is “fundamentally a creature born of infinite trauma” is certainly a good one—which, of course, is the idea Chibnall missed completely, fixated instead on the silly hats and faux conspiracies.
Russell T Davies has, of course, reframed the Timeless Child as the Doctor now being a “foundling”, which a cynic might suggest is as far as he can go to smooth out the continuity bumps without causing the non-canon to break. As you rightly put it, he has chosen “to canonise the big picture while ignoring the details”. Which, to be fair, is what he’ and others have done before. In any case, I assume that most reference books and Wikipedia pages about the show will continue to describe the Doctor as “a Time Lord from Gallifrey”, even though – according at least to these episodes – they’re actually “an unknown alien likely from another universe”. Which, to conclude, I think is actually much preferable. Call me old fashioned. Not knowing who the Doctor is remains part of the appeal for me.
August 26, 2024 @ 11:56 am
Here’s my answer, as opposed to El’s. Much of the value of the Doctor’s ordinary-ness — which largely peaked during the 1980s version of the show and the Eighth Doctor novels, but sometimes peeks out even in the modern show — is that I, like most fans of the show, am ordinary. (Neurodivergent, sure, but ordinary in my abilities, circumstances, daily existence and such.) I’m not even a product of infinite trauma; mine’s been a safely below-average amount of trauma, really.
With the result that in many of my favorite Doctor Who stories, the Doctor exists as a semi-plausible role model. A person who’s energetic, resourceful, playful but defiant, and sometimes-flummoxed; who dives into a situation and tries, despite some false starts and mistakes, to reverse injustice, prevent needless violence, and set a situation on a more hopeful path. A person (albeit also a “Time Lord”) who, far more than most protagonists, I both can and probably should attempt to be more like.
(Does that diminish the Time Lords too? They’re already very human, squabbling and bureaucratic and petty and vengeful, so I don’t see how.)
The Davies & Moffat eras, although they’ve often been wonderful, have obviously pushed away from the Doctor’s ordinariness. Not always, though: we’ve seen “the Doctor does foolish things for love (fatherly or romantic)”, “the Doctor is a sitcom roommate”, etc., and the stories of Me and Clara and Bill have still explored what trying to be the Doctor would be like. But “the Doctor is a magical being and the secret root of everything” is as flat-out a declaration as you can make that no, in the writer’s view, none of these stories have any human-scale relevance.
Fortunately, as El does say, that looks destined to be rejected forever. But was it worth anger at the time? I don’t see why not. I’m glad “Ascension of the Cyberman” is the last Chibnall-era episode I ever watched, because at least I got the distance of knowing “Timeless Children” only via after-episodes reviews, not forcing me to rise much above an eye-rolling “Oh, for crying out loud, really!??!??”.
August 26, 2024 @ 7:48 pm
I think the Doctor’s position as a Time Lord who rejected their position of power and wants to help people is a really good way for the show to wrestle with what it means to be part of the left in 21st century Britain. However much we may reject the concept and reality of the British Empire, we’re still beneficiaries of it, and that is something we have to reckon with if we’re to have a positive influence on the world today. Our privileged position also comes with a baggage of unconscious prejudices that we can’t really eliminate and have to try to consciously fight against. I get that Doctor Who is a global show but it’s still rooted in that mentality and I think that’s an important part of the show’s identity and something that keeps it distinctive.
To me, the Timeless Child idea seems to work against that, reframing the Doctor as a victim rather than a beneficiary of Time Lord imperialism, and this seems like a fundamental shift that subtracts from rather than adding to the show’s flavour. I also think it comes across as an attempt to avoid facing up to our complicity in the crimes of empire by simply brushing it under the carpet and pretending it isn’t really a part of our heritage that we’ve benefitted from.
(Tangentially, I feel similarly about inserting so many black incarnations into the Doctor’s past – instead of saying “We know we’ve done badly in the past, but we’re going to do better in the future!”, it seems to say “No, look, we’ve ALWAYS been diverse and inclusive!”)
(I also think there’s something seriously ill-advised about writing a British Empire metaphor in which the victims of that imperialism are represented solely by the show’s white protagonist.)
(I have other objections, but they’re more connected with the Division stuff, the Doctor being so Doctor-ish before Hartnell and the re-destruction of Gallifrey, so aren’t especially relevant to this story in particular.)
August 27, 2024 @ 1:09 pm
I remember a comment with Moffat where he said that it would be harder to cast the Doctor as a black person than a woman because the character is very much old-school upper middle class and that a lot of the bohemian trappings are just “posh kid on gap year”, and being white is a visual signifier of that privilege.
August 29, 2024 @ 8:51 am
Moffat does talk out of his arse sometimes, doesn’t he? Being white is no more a visual signifier of privilege in the Doctor than speaking in RP is/was. It’s just the way things were done in television in those days. And the “Bohemian trappings” never really spread beyond PT and TB.
August 27, 2024 @ 12:03 am
Also not answering for El, but one element of the Timeless Children that other people find particularly egregious is the way it (out of admirable motivations) goes out of its way to show a lot of racial diversity among the Doctor’s former/pre Hartnell incarnations. The clear intent is to say “look, s/he doesn’t always have to be white!” and this is obviously a good aim. Unfortunately, this feels wrongheaded for multiple reasons:
1) it’s very surface level diversity in the first place. Pats on the back and kudos for not having actually done very much except diverse casting within a montage.
2) it has the weird implication of defining these black (or other minority ethnic) incarnations of the Doctor as having been solely defined by trauma, exploitation, and the subject of eugenicist experimentation on the operating table. That’s all we know about pretty much all of them. Does that not feel incredibly crass to you? They are trauma props for a white woman to react to with horror. This is true to a lesser extent of the Fugitive Doctor, but she’s her own kettle of fish.
3) they are consigned to mere footnote status before a cycle of entirely white Doctors in a way that is clearly trying (again laudably) to instil diversity in the programme but unintentionally ends up making the last 13 (14) cycles of whiteness look even weirder, and even harder to wave away as just pure chance. Is this the result of the mindwipe and the Doctor forgetting their ability to regenerate into any skin colour? Is it Time Lord biodata interference? Whatever in universe explanation one considers is really quite crass. To the same point, implying that there has been diversity baked into this programme and lead character “since the beginning” does a grossly disingenuous disservice to how the character has actually been conceived of since the beginning, namely, as an upper class patrician white man with enormous privilege. Trying to lay a thin veneer of “ah but he used to be a young black girl/boy who was experimented on horribly so really he’s the product of trauma BUT ALSO can’t remember any of that so cannot be defined by it in any significant way” over Hartnell et al. feels, as I say, like retconning the early days of the show as far more progressive than they were (and I say this as a lover of the Hartnell era) — which is not just dishonest but it also does away with a genuinely interesting tension, namely, the idea that the Doctor (and the Time Lords by extension) has always been a creature of establishment privilege, with all the attendant perks that go with that, and that minority perspectives of The Other are things he has had to go out and learn about and empathise with, rather than, uhhh, things he used to know but forgot for plot reasons.
August 27, 2024 @ 12:54 am
There’s a scene where the second Doctor is going to be forcibly regenerated and confined to Earth, and he absolutely panics at the idea of his appearance changing. Maybe he thought he’d end up as some kind of discriminated minority. He might not even be worried about himself – maybe he was anticipating a “Dot and Bubble” situation.
August 28, 2024 @ 10:41 am
Two thoughts: 1. While you may be right about the cheapness of showing new past Doctors as diverse, Chibnall was the first to cast anybody besides a white man as the Doctor, and Fugitive counts as a second. Maybe that only earns him a little credit, but it earns him a little.
Isn’t the point of a Doctor whose origin is in trauma that one can be deeply shaped by trauma while still being the Doctor? Chibnall is the wrong person to tell this story, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth telling. In particular, as problematic as Thirteen’s passive responses are, Jo Martin’s Doctor doesn’t scream “oppressed victim” to me. If anything, she reads like Human Nature Doctor, where she’s hiding to protect someone else from what she’s gonna do to them. A good version of this story would read like the Doctor recovering a suppressed trauma in her past and refusing to allow what happened to her to define her.
Of course, eliminating the Time Lords is the worst idea here. “Hey, the Time Lords are British Imperialists who built their Empire on the backs of oppressed peoples, including the Doctor, but also the Master killed them all so that redefinition will never matter.” Creating a dynamic that doesn’t matter because you already deleted part of it was just foolish and the best we can say is that Fourteen gets therapy so Fifteen can move on (sort of). Whatever political comment is here to be made about the English is utterly deflected, starting with “Gallifrey is Ireland” and getting worse all the time.
August 28, 2024 @ 6:21 pm
Re: (1), yes, absolutely he deserves a little if not even a fair bit of credit for being the guy who first made both of those calls. But of course, the job doesn’t stop there, and what he then goes on to do with these characters once he’s made progressive casting decisions is where most of his (sane) critics take issue. In fairness, criticising Chibnall for this particular aspect opens up a much wider discussion around “optics”, in which almost all avenues you can go down as a white guy telling stories about women’s or more diverse/ minority experiences (or even frankly as a PoC writer) can potentially stray into fraught territory around tropes A, B and C, regardless of admirable intent, and as such will be criticised somewhere by someone for how they “reinforce X types of narrative” (and criticised in good faith, I’m not talking about bigoted responses here). This similarly applies to the point about Doctors defined by trauma. You absolutely can tell a story about an ethnic minority Doctor (or a multitude of them, though that’s harder) who is/are defined by trauma, but you’re certainly wading into tricky territory if that’s the first Black incarnation, for example. And even then, perhaps that tricky territory can be skilfully navigated. But as you say, Chibnall just isn’t the guy to do it.
Re: Fugitive, you’re quite right that she doesn’t come across as a traumatised figure. I wasn’t very clear on that point. What I meant was not so much that she is a trauma prop like the Timeless incantations, but that like them she plays a secondary fiddle role to ultimately serve the Thirteenth Doctor’s narrative/arc, in a way that I know various corners of fandom have criticised. Similarly, some have not been happy with the idea that the ‘first’ Black incarnation of the Doctor is depicted as a fugitive on the run from the (space) cops, or as more thuggish/prone to violence than other Doctors. And here we come back to what I was saying before, which is that there’s a risk that almost any approach taken or story decision made in such a situation will bump up against some racially problematic trope or other. That’s not to bemoan “isn’t everything woke, you can barely get started writing a story anymore”, rather it highlights just how awash literature / television in general is in all these sorts of shorthand tropes and patterns people easily fall into, and especially DW given how long it has been running & how white it’s been for most of that time. We can see that continuing with the discourse around how well RTD & co have handled Gatwa’s Doctor and narratives around race, trauma, etc. In a way there is no such thing as perfect representation (perhaps especially by white creatives) and all one can hope for is progressive new decisions that, while flawed, at least set new achievements to be iterated and improved on by someone else further down the line. Which Chibnall certainly did, however flawed one thinks his actual work.
August 29, 2024 @ 12:58 pm
“Re: (1), yes, absolutely he deserves a little if not even a fair bit of credit for being the guy who first made both of those calls.”
I’m not even persuaded that he deserves that. My response to people who claim that Chibnall is “woke” is to say “No, he wasn’t. He was a cynical if not conservative-minded operator who was under the impression that ‘wokeness’ was what his audience wanted, so he used every opportunity to virtue-signal a ‘fake wokeness.’ A truly woke showrunner/writer would not have produced ‘Kerblam’ nor would the second season finale have consisted of the Master tying up the Doctor for half the episode and mansplaining her own origin to her.”
August 29, 2024 @ 2:35 pm
Whether he is or is not or would consider himself “woke”, certainly, Chibnall displays a conservative’s understanding of what the word even MEANS, since his “woke agenda” is “Women and people of color exist at all in this world”.
There is some SMALL praisworthiness to the fact that after RTD and Moffatt pretty clearly went to a place of “We want to cast a Doctor who isn’t white and male, but this is someting we need to do carefully and slowly with a ton of caution to avoid getting it wrong” and then went on to hire two white men a piece, Chibnall – possibly more through the dumb luck of not having thought about it too hard – just went ahead and did it without much care or possibly even awareness of how it might backfire if done poorly. I would feel better if I could say “He decided to do it because it was about damn time, to hell with the possible negative consequences”, rather than “he decided to do it because he didn’t really understand the complexities.”
August 29, 2024 @ 6:18 pm
Citizen Alan – Everything I have read about Chibnall’s career and actions suggest he has a genuine belief in the importance of more diversity in television, both in front of and behind the camera. That goes from his better-than-standard track record of writing Anglo-Indian parts into his pre-showrunner scripts, backing campaigns to improve Anglo-Indian representation in British television, founding a course to help train up showrunners of the future with particular focus on those from underrepresented backgrounds, etc.
I think he genuinely cares. He just also makes bad television that shows he has colossal blind spots.
August 27, 2024 @ 4:46 pm
I mean, I was never a fan of the Cartmel Masterplan, a fact that’s visible in my Lungbarrow essay over a decade ago, where I point out the exact same problems I have with the Timeless Child. The difference, of course, is that the Masterplan was never really canonized.
There’s a strong case to be made that The War Games was a mistake in this regard; that all explanations of the character diminish them. Certainly, as both you and I note, the Time Lords were not an idea that ever really worked. I suspect, though, that an origin was always going to happen eventually. Some writer was going to do it, and Dicks/Sherwin/Hulke did it in a way that minimized the damage it was always going to cause.
To an extent the same is true here. Someone was always going to elevate the Doctor to ontological specialness instead of attained specialness. The fact that we made it just over fifty-six years before it happened irrevocably is something to be treasured about the show, but that streak was never going to last forever. Did Chibnall do it in a way that minimized the damage? I extremely don’t think so. Indeed, in taking out the idea that Hartnell was the first Doctor if not the first incarnation, I think he emphatically did more damage than was necessary.
But there’s also recency bias there. The Doctor’s origin/species got resolved in what at this point feels like the prehistory of the show, the reveal coinciding with the move to color and the end of missing episodes, which help render Hartnell and Troughton into feeling like their own show. (Arguably at this point Pertwee has crossed over into that prehistory too.) I’m sure plenty of people sat through the Pertwee era feeling like the show had jumped the shark. But more to the point, the guy in the scarf turned up around the time that there was now more Doctor Who after that switch than before. Even if you insist on going with episode count instead of chronological time, the line gets crossed at Destiny of the Daleks. The point where The Timeless Child Era feels like a majority of the show instead of like an awkward and uncertain couple of years at the end is very far away.
But I think at the end of the day the key thing is simply that The War Games slaps, whereas The Timeless Children is a mind-wrenchingly terrible piece of television. Fundamentally a reveal that comes in an all-time classic feels better than one that comes in an all-time stinker. Half human probably wouldn’t have been quite so awful if it weren’t in the damn TV Movie either, frankly. But this was a bad idea in a steaming turd of an episode that was itself part of an excruciating slog of an era, and the anger I felt as it plopped into my life and consciousness is still fresh.
Past that… well, I did say it was stupid of me, didn’t I? We’ll come back to that anger and its nature in time, worry not.
August 27, 2024 @ 9:52 pm
Both the Timeless Child and the Cartmel Masterplan upset me insofar as they feel like they are first and foremost about “fixing” something. For the Timeless Child, all that other stuff about a secret origin and a mysterious past trauma feel like they are primarily in service to explaining the damn Morbius faces. For the Cartmel Masterplan, it’s “How can the Doctor have a granddaughter without me having to accept that he might at some point have had sex?”
(Though I am tickled that the Cartmel Masterplan got recycled in another franchise and is currently the backstory of Optimus Prime)
August 28, 2024 @ 4:31 pm
Oh dear God I never realised that about Optimus!
August 28, 2024 @ 11:51 pm
Transformers lore is full of absolute insanity and I am here for it. There’s a bit in The Covenant of Primus where Alpha Trion basically apologizes for the way gender works (I’m pretty sure that the implication of his explanation of Transformer gender is that Megatron is intersex), but I was left helpless for several minutes when I got to the explanation of how the Thirteenth Prime, Whose Name Has Been Forgotten threw himself into the Allspark as a protest of the corruption of the patriarchs of Transformer society and millions of years later got reincarnated as Optimus Prime.
September 1, 2024 @ 7:40 pm
I mean, you could pull on both threads and posit that Susan was not in fact The Doctor’s granddaughter, but was in fact their Handler for the Division, with the familial relationship merely a false implanted memory.
From there you could weave an alternate narrative of at least classic era Who, where The Doctor had never really escaped from the Division, but had in fact always been working for them, whereby at least one of his companions was often actually an Agent gas-lighting them at key points to ensure they did their part in whatever you decided the Division’s goal was…
(I’ll let you discount Sarah Jane – K9 was clearly the agent for most of that period. Nyssa on the other hand, that would explain their lack of empathy for the death or their supposed father and then the destruction of their supposed planet…)
Sure you’d have to bend yourself into a pretzel to make it work, but that’s true of all conspiracy theories isn’t it?
To be clear, none of this would make good telly – it would in fact clearly make the Timeless Child plot much, much worse… but as a thought experiment, you could have an awful lot of fun with it.
August 28, 2024 @ 11:04 am
Where did you begin with the show, El? I started with Ark in Space, so my Doctor was always a Time Lord and the Time Lords were always the Deadly Assassin versions. I recall being upset on the level of “Chibnall is the wrong show runner to be doing this story,” but not angry, because my Doctor was always clearly special (scraping by his exams or not) and born out of privilege even if he was sensible about what that meant; his part of the show was about the responsibilities that come from that, and the companions were people like me who could aspire to being wonderful like the Doctor but who were never going to become the Doctor (setting aside Romana and Clara, perhaps).
Deadly Assassin is a remarkably undiverse cast (plus or minus George Pravda) in a story about how diversity matters: the Doctor is special not because he’s a white male Time Lord, but because he’s travelled and learned and is bringing back experiences of not-England and seeing his home differently because of that. That message ultimately gets watered down or diverted from, but it’s a solid if unexplored subtext. Traveling with people unlike him may well be what makes Four special (plus or minus Romana, I guess). If that’s the Doctor-defining episode set against this story, then the reveal ought to be delight on the Doctor’s part that she isn’t a Time Lord coupled with a bunch of emotions about what they did and potential survivor’s guilt over what regeneration allowed the Time Lords to do to others. Mix that all with the emotional response to recovered trauma, to being an agent of the oppressors in all new ways than she’d already dealt with; there’s so much promise to this story, but Chibnall struggles with getting one emotion out of his characters and just can’t support the concept at all.
In a world with JK Rowling, telling a story where the victimized protagonist isn’t the product of amazing privilege, wealthy, and world-famous as a hero as a starting point and instead insisting the victimized protagonist is overthrowing imperialist and fascist governments because she was victimized by them is worthwhile. This wasn’t the way to do it, or even the team; Whittaker, I think, is poorly served by her scripts, but trauma Doctor is not the part she’s prepared to play, either, and this story would land so much better with a Doctor more like Three, who vacillates from being a subversive element and being the chummy patrician.
I’ll still take this story over “violent space opera featuring mercenaries and grudgingly, the Doctor” Eric Saward-style.
August 29, 2024 @ 12:48 pm
I can forgive the idea of the Doctor being the “super awesome special Time Lord” even if it was executed incompetently as this was. What I cannot forgive about the notion is that it was done in a way that actually diminishes the ACTUAL HISTORY of the show. The Hartnell Doctor is the first one that the Whittacker Doctor remembers, the beginning of her “life.” But the Doctor’s “true” life is much longer, thousands if not millions of years! So now, it turns out that the entire 50+ years of the actual broadcast show is nothing but that very brief span in which the Doctor bumbled around with amnesia, totally ignorant of their origins. Their entire televised history is nothing but the coda to the impossibly long span of time (by far the majority of their life) in which the Doctor was raised by Tecteum (stupid name) who tortured her, experimented on her, and then turned her into a gun-wielding enforcer for “The Directive” or whatever it was called (Fanwanker Supreme Chibnall couldn’t even be bothered to have it be the Celestial Intervention Agency).
I am offended and disgusted that Shitnall accepted this position (I hesitate to call it a sacred trust) of shepherding a series that had lasted for over half a century and then established that said half-century of canon was less important than his fan fic.
And that’s not even the most offensive and disgusting thing he did (see below).
August 26, 2024 @ 8:21 am
By any reasonable account of the specifics put down by Chibnall, for millions of years (and possibly more than that depending on how long you think Gallifreyan years are). Unlike Platt’s Other-to-Doctor transition, there is no extended gap here between the dispersal of the ancient founder and the rebirth of our Dr. Who; the last Division Doctor was simply de-aged into the baby who went on to sleep in that barn and smooch the Master. Ergo, if Time Lord history spans “ten million years” (as per ‘Trial’) or “a billion” (as per ‘End of Time’) up to the modern Doctor’s era, that’s how old the Timeless Child was in service to the Division for.
Interestingly, Davies has the Fourteenth Doctor claim to be “a billion years old” to Donna in ‘The Giggle’…
August 26, 2024 @ 8:25 am
It will never not be utterly hilarious to me that so many people went “now the Doctor is mysterious again!” because… what, their character sheet now has question marks under Species as opposed to Time Lord? What makes fictional characters (and the first Doctor, and people in real life for that matter) mysterious and interesting is the sense of what might’ve happened in their life to get them to a certain point, and how you’ll probably never know all of it. When we’re given so many dull bulletpoints that start at the pre-Doctor’s childhood, the only thing “mysterious” about them is where their DNA happened to come from, a question as miserably dull as it is disturbingly bioessentialist.
August 26, 2024 @ 9:11 am
Yeah, I can’t actually imagine any answer to the question “where did the timeless child come from?” that is rooted in any context at all – wow, turns out they were a Blippon from the Blippon Empire in the Hidden Dimension all along. Great.
The Doctor’s actual remembered life history, on the other hand, informs their current self, and no matter how much we see of the Time Lords, many questions about the Doctor remain that they simply aren’t interested in answering aloud because it’s in the past. It’s easy to say the Timeless Child is a new form of the Cartmel Masterplan – and it is, since Tecteun’s supposed to be the Other – but the Cartmel era actually was mysterious, like, while watching it.
August 26, 2024 @ 11:14 pm
I remember seeing a theory during Flux that the Doctor’s parents were Vinder and Bel, and that theoretically had the potential to be interesting. Time Lords secretly being descendants of humanity is one of my favorite random headcanons, so having the basis of their society be a mutated human (even if that human turns out to be the Doctor) could’ve been neat conceptually. Shame that Flux was… not good though (even by Chibnall’s standards).
August 26, 2024 @ 11:16 pm
I really thought that, after effectively canonising both the Morbius Doctors and The Other, Chibnall’s end game was going to be canonising “half human on my mother’s side” by showing us the Doctor’s Human mother and Time Lord father (maybe called Ulysses?) sending her back through that portal to be found by Tecteun. It would have been awful but seemed exactly in keeping with Chibnall’s vision.
August 26, 2024 @ 9:19 pm
The fans who ran this argument strike me as the sorts of people who see “mysterious” as a flat signifier and not something that links to any actual mystery or intrigue. It’s a little like the Doctor’s name: one way of looking at it is simply that it isn’t known ergo “mysterious”, as opposed to raising intriguing questions about why the Doctor never reveals it. The Doctor’s species is now unknown = mystery = “mysterious”.
As with all the attempts to praise the Timeless Child, I want to flip this back on its defenders are ask, do they ever look at the Doctor after this episode and think they’re a more intriguing, mysterious, compelling character because now we don’t know the name of her species? Does the Doctor now have greater hidden depths because of this? Say what you like about the full explication of the Cartmel master plan, the hints and reveals of a previously secret history with the Hand of Omega, the Nemesis or Fenric made the Doctor grander and compelling, it changed how the series related to him.
In the end, the fans who say the Doctor is Now Mysterious Again are really just falling back on the show’s history. The Doctor was “mysterious” before we learnt about the Time Lords, so now they’re no longer a Time Lord they’re automatically “mysterious” again. Both the idea and this reaction to it come from the same encyclopaedic, robotic fannish mindset.
August 28, 2024 @ 1:22 pm
I think the best answer here is RTD’s: being excited about all the interesting stories that open up in a universe where “Time Lords have all this mystical technology and the Doctor grew up on Gallifrey, became one, and then left” was the status quo, with the Time Lords vacillating between mythically powerful non-interfering types and deeply corrupt imperialist meddlers. How does this change the Doctor, the Time Lords, and the stories you can tell? The mystery-box approach isn’t a Who approach: if you come away expecting the consequences should be a quest to find out where the Doctor’s from, who her parents are, and why she can regenerate, you want a kind of answer this series hasn’t historically been interested in providing. Even Chibnall understands that. From the start, his focus is on how this affects the Doctor, how it might change her behavior, though his disinterest in how the Doctor might actively change becomes evident pretty fast and the endings of the two parter come close to erasing its significance. That’s certainly subject to anger or even disgust: making a change like this boldly is an RTD trademark, and even when ill-achieved can have verve; Chibnall is mumbling, lowering his head and shuffling away even as he does it.
August 26, 2024 @ 11:09 pm
I will never understand why Doctor Who writers think they can “restore the mystery of the Doctor’s origins” by telling us more about the Doctor’s origins.
August 26, 2024 @ 8:26 am
Sometimes I think a TV show lives too long.
August 26, 2024 @ 8:42 am
Just let this old show gather dust. No one can open it. No one will even notice it. Let it become a strange little thing standing on a street corner. And over the years, the world will move on and the show will be buried.
August 26, 2024 @ 9:24 am
I’m similarly bemused that El is so outraged at the Timeless Child idea. Sure it’s fatuous and hamfisted and is an absurd way to make the Doctor more ‘mysterious’. But it visibly doesn’t damage the show in any way separate to the fact of it being written by someone who thinks it’s a good idea. As soon as it’s written by someone who’s not Chris Chibnall, the idea is smoothed down into the same “it’s said on screen but doesn’t have any affect on anything” fan fact as the Doctor being half human. It’s not going to be remembered by the show in the same way as ‘TARDIS, Daleks, two hearts, Time Lord from Gallifrey’ is remembered as the core of what Doctor is, in the same that less tempting ideas than Friar Tuck and a Saracen friend from the Holy Land aren’t remembered into the core of what Robin Hood is.
And it’s not like Sandifer herself hasn’t toyed with the idea of far more special, magical, un-Gallifreyan screw-up ideas for the Doctor’s secret origin. There’s a phase of this project that took as much seriously as playfully the idea that the Doctor is the escaped Master of the Land of Fiction.
August 26, 2024 @ 10:21 am
Indeed my immediate reaction to the Timeless Child reveal was “Oh shit, Chibnall read that thing El wrote about the Doctor being a refugee from the land of fiction and took her literally.”
Which is dark, man.
(Also, I recently thought it through and personally I think that the original Zelda makes more sense as being the future of the “Adult” timeline, with Twilight Princess as the “Fallen Hero” timeline and Wind Waker as the “Child” timeline. On account of Gannondorf maintaining his Gerudo form in both WW and TP, but only ever appearing as a big pig-man in the 2D games.)
August 26, 2024 @ 11:54 am
Unfortunately this just isn’t true. A sensible showrunner will ignore this bit of lore, yes, but as the Chibnall era proves, “Doctor Who” doesn’t always get sensible showrunners. A door is now opened that should never have been opened. Someone will walk through it eventually and the show will be worse for it.
August 26, 2024 @ 12:14 pm
More than that, I feel like even good showrunners will feel the need to do some kind of wave at the Timeless Child Mythos any time it logically should be relevant. And even doing the very minimal amount of work required to effectively wave it away is damage.
August 26, 2024 @ 12:30 pm
Is it damage when the Doctor talks about himself as adopted in this series?
August 26, 2024 @ 12:53 pm
Possibly! Remains to be seen.
August 26, 2024 @ 12:20 pm
No, I don’t think so. There’ll be good showrunners and bad showrunners, but I think even the bad ones will be bad on their own terms. Outside the fan industrial complex, which is of nugatory importance to the growing shape of the show and the remembered folklore of what Doctor Who is, I don’t think the Timeless Child is the Foundation of Time Lord Society is going to bob back up.
I think maybe the reaction to a limp and ill-conceived season finale is maybe a sign Eruditorum has lost its sense of history at the moment. The reason the excesses of the 6th Doctor tv period don’t feel like an aggressive, stupid, irreparable assault on the core values of Doctor Who (to borrow Sandifers’s own example) is that they were 40 years ago. And we know the show went through other phases of production and narrative for good or bad since. We had the late flowering of the McCoy era, the dissolution of the series’ centre and experiments of novel ranges and comics and TV Movies and radio plays, and then a successful return to TV that itself has multiple eras and phases and aesthetics. The Doctor strangling Peri is a forty year old blip.
Obviously the personal narrative of Eruditorum is one of its advantages and charms (in all senses of the word) but I feel like the personal affront at an exhausted and insipid production means its straying into much more basic fan reaction than I expect from it and it’ll be really interesting if El revisits this period in the future when it’s more safely in the past, dead and cool enough to dissect once we know it can no longer hurt us.
August 28, 2024 @ 6:03 am
I suspect El won’t touch this era with a barge pole, but you’re right, the lack of distance between the series and the blog, and the lack of context that causes, is harming the blog. The stupid decisions are too raw and have not had enough time, with just one set of specials and a truncated season, to allow El to heal from the disappointment. The comparison with the Colin Baker era is a good one; writing about that in 1989 with the show just cancelled would have produced a very different set of essays to the ones El originally wrote, and I think that’s more the territory we’re in now.
The biggest example is the dismissive essay given to Can You Hear Me? It’s not a great episode, but with a bit of effort there’s still an opportunity to contextualise the episode in the history of “Very Special Episodes” and how rare they are in the UK’s televisual landscape. Even the attempt to engage with a non-western historical society again was probably worthy of more note than it got.
August 28, 2024 @ 7:21 am
As she says elsewhere, though, that rawness/anger without sufficient healing space is actually a feature, not a bug, and it does have payoff further down the line (as a Patron who knows what’s coming I can vouch for this).
The counterpoint wrt the CYHM post is simply that, as well as being a howl of despair as a critic finally reaches the end of her tether at how hard it is to come up with interesting angles on this era of the show, … it was also quite funny. And it leaves the space open for someone else to write the definitive piece on the episode. And I say that as someone who quite likes CYHM, or at least appreciates its weird and off-kilter (dare I say ITYAesque) energy.
August 28, 2024 @ 12:00 am
You know, there’s still no absolute reason to think the Doctor isn’t the escaped Master of the Land of Fiction. They could have just gone through a much more circuitous set of ‘real’ life experiences than previously suspected, between the escape and An Unearthly Child.
August 28, 2024 @ 1:32 pm
Infinite regeneration absolutely fits with that theory (the character lives every time we read/watch), and opens the possibility that the Time Lords were made more fictional as part of the “regeneration” thing and that would resonate through both their history and their ability to travel through time.
The return of the Chameleon Arch works well with that theory as well: we put you in this watch and construct a fictional you instead. That makes Thirteen a Doctor who embraced the fictional self which she has made into her own over the “true” original.
Bad timing, wrong showrunner, and wrong context and execution, but the central idea has value.
August 26, 2024 @ 10:20 am
I’m still quite fond of the idea that Davies choose to spin the idea of the Doctor being from outside the universe outwards into the whole Pantheon idea – incorporating the existence of beings like the Eternals (and maybe even the ‘Guardians’) into something bigger – in which it is the very horror and trauma of this Timeless Child backstory that explains why the Doctor is the champion of Life, standing against the purely amoral beings such as the Toymaker or Sutekh, who simply don’t understand it. (I feel this is also somewhat supported by the ending of Flux, although that final episode was so rushed as to be mostly incoherent.)
But yeah, I tend towards the view that it’s all grist to the mill in the long run. Every showrunner gets the chance to change the backstory in some way, and they mostly all have – even going back to the ‘original’ regeneration. Sometimes it sticks, sometimes it is just forgotten or glossed over or (in the worst cases) specifically retconned away.
Whoever takes over from Davies* will doubtless do the same thing. It’s one of the few perks of what is clearly otherwise an impossible job.
*I am not entirely convinced that anyone will though. It feels as though we’re in the ‘endgame’ of this version of Who, and the desperate need for another decade or so ‘rest’ for the next generation to come through and start again. And Davies may be the only person who could actually force a hiatus like that.
August 26, 2024 @ 12:30 pm
I think Davies doesn’t get enough credit for facing basically exactly the same problem as Cartmel (and later Chibnall): how do we make this character less fully known? How do we give them new things to discover and unpredictable reactions and disrupt the ‘Time Lord from Gallifrey who’s basically like Sherlock Holmes’ fact that has become monolithic?
Cartmel and Chibnall both go for “some weird stuff happened centuries ago and no one’s mentioned it till now and it’s not affected the character in all that fictional time”. Davies says “something earthshattering happened just before he walked through that door”. The Doctor went off and had a terrible experience and now he’s back and it changes EVERYTHING. More immediate, more dramatic and much, much more effective.
August 26, 2024 @ 3:44 pm
I don’t think it’s obvious we need another generation to get interesting Doctor Who again after Davies. We just need its lower ratings to make BBC willing to get a bit riskier. I think putting Peter Harness in charge, or Vinay Patel, or Sarah Dollard, could be fascinating and take the show in worthwhile and novel directions — they’ve all helmed successful programs before though at smaller scopes. Or if there are other successful TV show runners of a bigger deal who happen to be closet Doctor Who fans, let them bring in even fresher concepts.
The Chibnall era was never inevitable. It was merely a “safe” choice, designed to guarantee that nothing important would go wrong. There’s a lesson in there, if BBC cares.
August 27, 2024 @ 7:02 am
I think what Doctor Who needs is to shift away from the single showrunner model. There should be an experienced showrunner to handle the realities of TV production accompanied by someone younger and more exciting to control the creative direction. Chibnall seems pretty good at the nuts-and-bolts side of things, imagine what his era could have been like if he’d have stuck to that and had someone like Patel or Alderton as head writer/script editor.
August 27, 2024 @ 8:04 am
First off – I’m not sure Chibnall is that good at the nuts and bolts side of things. Witness the production chaos and filming of a first draft for his first season finale, despite getting the longest run up of any showrunner since the Eccleston series.
Secondly, this seems like a throwback to the producer-script editor relationship in Classic Who. TV, especially non-soap drama just doesn’t work like this any more. Maybe it would be creatively productive to return to it, but I think the current system is the natural evolution of that one – it is beneficial for the executive producer (which is what the nuts-and-bolts figure you’re talking about would be) to understand the creative side, and for the head writer/script editor to understand the finance/production and as those specialities converge, you get The Showrunner, a head creative who sits in the exec producer tier.
And of course there are Executive Producers who are far more focussed on the nuts and bolts side. In the triumvirate RTD established, he’s the highest level creative voice, Julie Gardner’s the highest level funding/BBC politics voice and Phil Collinson is the highest level filming the scripts voice. I don’t know what the benefit would be to pulling the writing out of that.
August 27, 2024 @ 6:20 pm
Maybe things will be different now it’s a co-production, but the BBC seemed absolutely adamant that the showrunner needs to be an experienced showrunner, and that narrows the list of potential creative voices quite a bit. If the person with showrunning experience didn’t have to be the person deciding on the creative direction of the show, I think we’d be much more likely to get a more original take on the series.
August 28, 2024 @ 4:23 am
Just replying to Dan L’s point below mine which is too nested to reply to: I think the reason the BBC insists the showrunner has to be experienced is that they recognise it’s a very complex production, and the wheels fall off semi-regularly even with some of the best people in the business.
I don’t think you can separate the showrunner of the fiction from the production elements. They’re too intertwined. They both direct and respond to the budget, actor and location availability, shooting schedules and…everything.
If the head producer is running the production and the head writer is running the fiction, that just means the producer tells the writer what to do. “You can’t have that army, we don’t have the budget”, “the channel wants the Daleks here so we can put them in the adverts”, “we need 11 to be a cheap episode. Can you make it the two of them in a haunted house?”
And if the head writer steps up to defend their choices, to fight for more budget here or write a chamber piece there so episode 11 can blow the doors off like they want it to…they’re well on the way to being Russell T Davies.
August 26, 2024 @ 11:24 am
“I obviously despise it, but ere I writing Doctor Who in some medium I’d not in a million years be interested in engaging with this.”
(Obviously a missing “w” there, but I was disappointed you hadn’t lapsed into some archaic language there for a moment.)
But I look upon the entire Chibnall/Whittaker era as televised Doctor Who Magazine Comic Strips.
Something from the wilderness years of an alternate reality.
It all feels peripheral somehow, like pretty average fan fiction.
I mean, the whole Timeless Child thing, and putting Timelords into tincans that can strangely regenerate, that’s no weirder or dumber-er than the Voord being the Cybermen from “The World Shapers” (which I kind of like actually), or Giant Slugs with Dollar-Sign helmets.
It makes me happier anyway.
I’m not convinced that RTD2 is any better, to be honest. There’s a sense of continual overelaboration, telling taller and taller stories, that leaves no room for smaller, quieter stories about actual people and ideas and instead leads to bigger, louder “events” that make less and less sense (Earth destroyed? Aannnd it’s back. Main characters killed again? Oh look, that didn’t last long).
August 26, 2024 @ 12:23 pm
I don’t know what you’d call Boom, 73 Yards, Dot and Bubble and Rogue other than smaller, quieter stories about actual people and ideas.
They weren’t all successful for me. But they are absolutely high concept science fiction based on humanity and the difficulties of being human.
August 28, 2024 @ 7:14 am
What I’d call those episodes is “unwatched”.
August 28, 2024 @ 10:17 am
Doesn’t seem a particularly helpful perspective to criticise that era from then.
August 29, 2024 @ 7:04 am
Why not? I watched Starbeast and found it a bloated and over-emoted, and I watched the Giggle, likewise reaction, and I watched the Christmas Special, and I said “I’m done”. Like Jodie/Chibnall, I went in really positive, wanting to really like it, and found 90% of it was the worst excesses of RTD’s previous tenure. It may be some people’s cup of tea, but relentless over-indulgence isn’t mine. And a while later I was curious and watched 4 minutes of “Sutekh” sitting on the TARDIS on Youtube, and felt I’d pretty much made the right decision.
Life’s too short to read books you’re not into, and television I hate.
So yes, I’m criticising. I gave the new series a red hot go and found the ratio of stories that worked for me versus the ones I struggled to finish vastly unfavourable. I’ve got a four trays of tree seedlings, and it’s a better use of my time to plant those than watch Doctor Who. And I can listen to “Time Flight” while I do it. It may be a bit crap in some ways, but it’s delightful and mad in others, and it’s not telling me how to feel.
August 29, 2024 @ 11:41 am
Replying to your comment below that’s nested too deep to reply to.
That’s absolutely fair enough and a very coherent story of ‘why I stopped watching Doctor Who’. But not a very sound position to ask “where are these stories?” from. In the middle of the season you didn’t watch. I’m not sure where the discussion goes from there.
August 26, 2024 @ 12:02 pm
That was actually much kinder to the episode than I expected.
August 26, 2024 @ 2:50 pm
Everything about this story made more sense if The Master was the Timeless Child
August 26, 2024 @ 3:38 pm
I actually don’t think that’s true, I think it’s one of those things we’ve all sort of glommed into in desperation at how bad what we actually got was, imagining that an alternative path not taken must have been way better.
While there are ways it would’ve been better (you lose the Chosen-One element of the series’ main character being the foundation of Time Lord society), there are other ways it would’ve been worse (it essentially enshrines as hard fact the idea that the Master, the ultimately believer in his own superiority, IS in fact superior to everyone else for bioessentialist reasons. Which would be just as nasty an implication and the ensuing discourse just as fraught as what we actually got, arguably).
Furthermore, it wouldn’t particularly do any interesting character work for the Master as he’d just be endlessly gloating about how special he is. Although what we got didn’t really dwell on this, there’s surely more interesting mileage in the Master realising that he has a bit of his greatest enemy in him and feeling a degree of self-loathing over this, and rage at the Doctor for having been a more important figure in history than him. That feels more generative of drama to me? Whereas the Doctor would not, I don’t think, react to the idea of part of the Master’s DNA being within them with the same degree of visceral disgust.
That said, I do like the idea of the Time Lords covering this up because it’s terribly embarrassing that their whole civilisation rests on the shoulders of their most notoriously evil criminal! And there’s perhaps something in the idea, if you properly went down the “creature of trauma” route, of showing how damaged this makes the Master and the Doctor feeling a new degree of sympathy and kinship with him… the issue there is, are you just rerunning the drums concept, with all the same messy implications about how damaged people = psychotic? Perhaps one redemptive option would be the idea that the Master finding this out is what gives him an insight into other people’s suffering and trauma, and it leads to him developing into a more nuanced figure. That would be welcome, if a bit of a retread of Missy, but perhaps with the right degree of acknowledgement of his previous incarnation it could be made to work.
August 26, 2024 @ 5:42 pm
“The Master is the real Timeless Child” does at least help explain his ability to survive things he really shouldn’t.
An alternative idea: thanks to bigeneration, a bunch of different Time Lords, including both the Doctor and the Master, are the Timeless Child.
August 26, 2024 @ 9:03 pm
“It turns out ALL time lords are the timeless child, because timey wimey” is exactly the sort of “Oops, changed our mind, retconning this away” thing I expected to happen. It’s what they did with Grandfather Paradox after all.
August 27, 2024 @ 4:35 pm
You could play it as the Master having “superior” genes and still losing to an “ordinary” Time Lord. It’s a fairly common story trope (and real life trope as the Munich Olympics showed).
(It’d also explain why he enjoyed hanging around with actual Nazis in Spyfall.)
August 26, 2024 @ 9:00 pm
I think it plays into the Master having a massive inferiority complex – he completely loses his shit to learn that the Doctor really is “the special different unique chosen one” – that no matter how hard he tried, the Master could never top his old rival because it’s literally writ in her DNA.
But this is not really an angle that the Dhawan’s Master ever really earns. And it makes me think back on the old Virgin EU stuff that wanted to sell that the Master became evil because the Doctor never let him win at chess.
It could alternatively pay into a resolution of the Missy arc – Missy ultimately sought redemption. The Master learning that Time Lord society was founded on the torture of a child and decides to burn it all down can be spun as “He retained the desire to fight against injustice, but he’s still ultimately a violent psychopath” could be some kind of angle at least. I could learn to enjoy a “Dexter” Master who has chosen to direct his murderous impulses to using violence against injustice, but it doesn’t really go there either. Because this is the CHibnall era, and things just sort of happen, they don’t serve any greater purpose.
August 29, 2024 @ 1:22 pm
It could not have logically or practically been a part of this story, but I think the Timeless Child concept would have worked better if it had been Susan. Even within the story, the Master concedes that the Matrix records are incomplete. Perhaps Hartness was the “ordinary” Timelord who somehow comes across a child named Susan who is being subject to experiments by the Directive and decided to rescue her in a stolen TARDIS. But something timey-wimey happened and Hartnell’s memories got scrambled so that he thinks /he/ is the Doctor and Susan is his granddaughter though he (per Gatwa’s Doctor) has no memory of having any children.
August 29, 2024 @ 3:00 pm
Oh that would have been clever – the Doctor is actually Susan’s granddaughter!
August 26, 2024 @ 4:35 pm
So, I was actually too bored during the timeless child revelation to be truly outraged, but IIRC I did think “El’s going to hate this” (though that thought may have come shortly after). It does feel like the sort of “professional fanwank” we sometimes got in the wilderness years, for sure. And talking about that plus the slow arrival of COVID, it must have been around this time that I was booked to attend an evening with Paul Cornell, something I was quite excited about; but it was cancelled because of fears around the virus. I was quite disgruntled, thinking it an overreaction, something I changed my mind about later. My copy of Timewyrm: Revelation remains unsigned.
August 26, 2024 @ 5:26 pm
I just can’t believe it’s been four and a half years since this aired.
It feels so recent, and yet that’s the distance from The Tenth Planet to The Claws of Axos.
August 26, 2024 @ 5:32 pm
“You could even probably still bring back “the Doctor was an unpromising student” type stuff”
One thing that could genuinely work from this angle with the Timeless Child? The young Doctor mentioning half remembered details and logic from a previous life in classes and being thought of as strange, answers not quite making sense to their tutors. Just like a child in a 1960s British school using Time Lord logic.
August 26, 2024 @ 5:44 pm
The barmiest thing to me about the Timeless Child has always been that it isn’t relevant to the plot of the episode. The plot of the episode is that the Master has an evil plan to combine Time Lords and Cybermen. The whole Timeless Child flashback is just used to stop the Doctor interfering. The shock of the Doctor’s origins doesn’t then factor into how she deals with the Master when she gets back into the story, ither than a quick quip about how it’s good actually. Imagine taking the most earth shattering revelation possible and reducing it to a minor subplot that could be cut for syndication.
The whole Chibnall era is defined by creative decisions I do not understand. Why did they have everyone think Ko Sharmus was a planet and then it turned out to be a guy? That’s not egregiously bad or anything, but why is it in the episode at all?
August 26, 2024 @ 6:11 pm
Read this during my break, great post, love your writing, live forever
August 26, 2024 @ 6:43 pm
Moffat skirted the whole issue: https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/steven-moffat-the-timeless-children/
The BBC defended it in the most averagely-written-PR way possible: https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/bbc-responds-to-the-timeless-children-canon-complaints-93292.htm
August 26, 2024 @ 7:05 pm
the Timeless Child shit is so bizarre to me it’s simultaneously the perfect encapsulation of the Chibnall Era’s suckitude, and yet among the least of its crimes imo, simply cuz it doesn’t… fucking go anywhere. The whole arc is pitched as an epoch-shattering reveal, and then it concludes with the Doctor basically tossing it into her junk drawer and saying “well the next showrunner doesnt need to do anything with this if they dont want to”
Like none of the reveals add or change anything about the Doctor, they just reiterate “the Doctor is super special and not just another Time Lord” a thing we already know because this show is called Doctor Who, not The Time Lords. The specific details of those reveals are groanworthy, but not inherently destructive to me as much as they are pointless. They’re details that a good showrunner would avoid, and an exceptional showrunner could make hay of (which i guess Davies has indicated at least a willingness to do). Chibnall as an exceptionally mediocre showrunner manages to bumble into and out of them in a way that just makes me wonder what the fucking point was
Also: learning this was inspired by Chibnall’s own experience as an adoptee is as jarring as learning Ryan was inspired by his experience living with dyspraxia, cuz they’re both so utterly tone-deaf. You have a character who’s always felt alienated from their own society, and your Aesop is “it doesn’t matter where you come from!” but you deliver it while confirming “however, you were right to feel alienated this whole time, because also you never truly belonged here! Surprise!!”
and like really, maybe it’s just me but did anyone else already have a vague headcanon that the Doctor was the progenitor of the Time Lords in some way? probably for timey-wimey reasons? like its the obvious joke you avoid telling. and they had Sacha Dawan straight monologue it to us
(all of that said: the Cyberlords do kinda own ass tho)
August 27, 2024 @ 12:09 am
I believe it was Chibnall’s nephew or similar family relative who had dyspraxia, not Chibnall himself, not that that substantially changes your point of course.
August 27, 2024 @ 10:57 am
I’ve honestly wondered what Chibnall’s adoptive parents thought of this episode. Like, I’m assuming that they get on, but that’s still a wild dinner conversation.
“Hey, mum and dad, I’m going to write about my own experience of being adopted by making the Doctor be adopted!”
“Oh, how lovely. What will her adopted parents be like?”
“Well, her adopted mum will find them as a child, and then repeatedly murder them to find out what makes them different. And then her adopted species will use her for their own ends and then wipe her memory.”
“Oh. Er. Lovely.”
August 27, 2024 @ 10:19 pm
“At least you’re getting off lightly compared to Joss Whedon’s dad.”
August 28, 2024 @ 1:45 pm
There’s probably something interesting to be done with Chibnall’s obvious desire to “be” the Doctor and how that largely expresses itself in his run as he as showrunner identifying as the Master. It’s probably healthier (however unhealthy) than Chibnall presiding as qlippothic showrunner and emptying out the program, and if taken too far opens interesting questions like if he needed his Doctor to be a woman to legitimate his own desire or if that points to complex psychosexual dynamics as much implicating British society as Chibnall himself. But it’s probably not worth the effort, which would be my sad epitaph for this period in the program: “probably not worth the effort.”
August 26, 2024 @ 7:15 pm
This story could have been an email.
August 27, 2024 @ 12:07 am
A post on rec.arts.drwho in 1995, surely?
August 27, 2024 @ 1:50 am
Or like the death of Poochie in the Simpsons. Just a handwritten note on screen reading ‘The Doctor is way old, and the other Time Lords are just copying her.’
August 27, 2024 @ 1:52 am
PS: The Cyberlords died on the way back to their own planet.
August 26, 2024 @ 8:04 pm
I’m mostly surprised RTD didn’t completely ignore the Timeless Child etc
August 27, 2024 @ 10:57 am
He functionally has – every scrap of engagement he’s had with the Chibnall-era backstory has completely discarded “secret source of the Time Lords’ power” and focused on “foundling adopted by the Time Lords” instead.
That’s sensible, seeing as the foundling angle is the only option that has any dramatic heft to it whatsoever.
August 26, 2024 @ 10:03 pm
Even El Sandifer says “tortured and experimented upon, murdered hundreds of times over”, and it still isn’t in the story. It just is not there. He tells the story twice and it isn’t in there. The narrative stands right next to the part where that would go and does not in fact twitch a finger in that direction. The story makes no sense without that happening, to be sure, but this is Chibnall: that’s not an argument in favour.
August 26, 2024 @ 10:56 pm
The natural conclusion you reach watching that part is that the Child keeps falling off the cliff and Tecteun never got around to fencing it off.
August 30, 2024 @ 8:10 am
I was just scrolling through and I misread that as “Chibs keeps falling off the cliff” which is what his run felt like.
August 27, 2024 @ 9:02 am
I wonder if it’s instructive to compare the impact of the Timeless Child with the Master’s drumbeat.
When RTD gave the Master a drumbeat in his head, it effectively rewrites the character. It says “you never knew, but he was always like this”, then in The End of Time it puts that (and therefore the whole character) in service to a faintly ill-conceived and disappointing era finale.
And for a while, that stuck. Doctor Who Magazine talked about (often as a bit of joke, commenting that the Drums must have been particularly loud when the Master was planning The King’s Demons the drums must have been particularly loud), Big Finish referenced it a bit (musically at least) and then when the TV stopped referencing it, it just fell away.
It remains ‘true’ about the character. Anthony Ainsley was listening to his own Drum and Bass soundtrack while building Castrovalva. But it’s just not remembered any more. Despite being on TV and not being canonically unhappened, it’s just not part of the character any more.
August 27, 2024 @ 10:59 am
There’s at least a small nod to this in The Doctor Falls – the Doctor mentions the Time Lords having fixed the Simm Master’s “little condition” before he left, which could either mean the drums or the whole turning into a skeleton bit.
August 27, 2024 @ 11:16 am
And the drums motif is used when Simm returns at the end of World Enough and Time, of course, as well as with Dhawan and Whittaker’s Morse code in Spyfall (though there it’s just a Time Lord heartbeat).
August 27, 2024 @ 1:48 pm
Well… exactly. It goes from this massive (ish) rewrite of the whole character to a little a note played quietly in a minor key for the Simm Master when he appears.
August 27, 2024 @ 1:05 pm
Wasn’t there a comment in The End of Time that the Time Lords implanted the drums in the Masters head for… reasons?
I seem to recall the Simm master in The Doctor Falls saying that the drums had been removed and he was basically acting like the “classic” Master in that.
August 27, 2024 @ 9:44 am
Not that many of the comments are like this, but this definitely is a comment section that contains a couple rejoinders to the post via agreeing with other parts of the post, without seeming to realize said perspective is, in fact, in the post.
Yeah, being mad at the Timeless Child is just as dumb as the Timeless Child, but that is explored in the text!!
August 27, 2024 @ 11:09 am
This has got nothing to do with the rest of the story, but I can’t get over the fact that Ashad is functionally just Tzim-Sha all over again, tall, angry, beefy guy stomping about giving grand speeches. Did Chibnall not have a second returning villain concept..? I think the essay and the comments have successfully relitigated just how incomprehensible the choices made here were – that it was a dull idea, implemented poorly, in a narrative that isn’t designed for it, then made pointless anyway.
August 27, 2024 @ 11:55 am
This comment would probably make more sense when we get to the finale of Flux, but having seen the Flux entries on the Patreon already, I know it might just as well go here.
One of the defenses I kept seeing of Chibnall was that he was better at writing smaller scale, character driven moments, which is why stories like this always fell short.
So we get The Doctor confronting Tecteun in Flux, and for a brief moment, I thought, “This is it, now we’re going to see why he thought Timeless Child was worth all the controversy.” Two actors, going toe to toe, with all that pent up drama the previous season’s reveal.
And, we get yet another scene of a character providing exposition, and then being dispatched immediately afterward. It’s the moment where any hope I had left was abandoned.
The rest of the run was a slog towards the end, and I feel like the show still hasn’t entirely won me back.
August 27, 2024 @ 2:35 pm
While it’s as much an unfortunate coincidence as every other thing about this era being awful at the same time they cast a woman in the role, it really makes me sigh that the woman Doctor spends every single one of her finales (conventionally excuses to have the Doctor run around being clever and impressive)… standing around being lectured at about boring lore.
Doubly incredible when you realize that all the focus on the Timeless Child means that we, the Doctor, and the show itself spend almost all of Whittaker’s era fantasizing about the adventures of hypothetical other versions of the character not played by her. Christ.
August 27, 2024 @ 4:43 pm
That’s a good point. Along with the whole “the first time the Doctor is a woman they get a backstory about how they were abused” which is like how 90s comics writers were obsessed with giving female superheroes depth by giving them pasts where they were sexually abused.
October 6, 2024 @ 2:59 pm
Dumbass pointificating, I know, sorry, but was it 90s? I recall this being more of an early 2000s thing (Lady Blackhawk, Black Cat ect.).
August 27, 2024 @ 4:48 pm
Your post also highlights the difference between this and the “War Doctor” reveal. That was also “secret regeneration(s) you never knew about”, but the story was still about the current Doctor. WHY had they hid that part of themselves? And the resolution was the Matt Smith Doctor facing what he had done in the past and then finding another way.
This does none of that. All of this was done to the Doctor by outside forces and she can’t remember any of it. Then, when she does, she gets over it by thinking about the theme tune really hard. And it introduces the idea that there could be other Doctors out there, which means we’re not thinking about THIS one.
August 28, 2024 @ 11:01 am
and on top of all that she doesnt even do anything climactic to stop the Master: she gets a retread of the “coward, any day” scene from Parting of the Ways, and then Korn Shawarma warps in and sacrifices himself for her instead. (which come to think of it means it’s also a retread of Pete warping in to save Rose in Doomsday lol)
it’s practically self-parody!! the Doctor standing by and doing jack shit to save the day happens enough in this era that it has to be an intentional choice, and i cannot fathom why
August 28, 2024 @ 2:44 pm
This is how I’ve made sense of it… While writers like Cornell, Orman, Davies and Moffat tried to fight the Doctor’s troubling paternalism/authorityness that the history of the show is shot through with by stating that the actions of ‘ordinary’ people are as important and impactful as anything epic sci-fi can offer, including the Doctor’s ‘specialness’ and Time-Lord-iness or whatever else, this era instead said that the Doctor and mortal folk are equally impotent, even when she tries to pull rank or do the ‘noble brooding hero’ thing in hiding information from her companions. This doesn’t fit at all with the era’s insistent proclamations that it’s defined by hope, though, does it?
August 27, 2024 @ 4:14 pm
I hated the Timeless Child reveal, for many of the same reasons El cited (making the Doctor yet another Chosen One character, undermining their becoming the Doctor over the course of the Unearthly Child, etc.). Initially I’d hoped it would be retconned, especially since there’s an obvious escape clause built into the episode (the Matrix has been tampered with and the Master is a liar). When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, I tried to work out my own head canon to soften the blow. And that head canon kept evolving with the RTD2 era into something that at least somewhat works for me (and pulls in a lot of ideas that I’m indebted to this place for). It goes like this:
Once upon at time there was a Time Lord. Not the smartest Time Lord or the most talented Time Lord, perhaps, but unique in his own ways. And one day they grew tired of simply watching the universe from afar and decided to go out and see it for himself. So they stole a TARDIS and ran away with their granddaughter to experience everything all firsthand. They landed on Earth in 1963, and the stolen TARDIS froze in the form of a police box. Their granddaughters’ teachers were nosy and started asking too many questions, so the Time Lord panicked and ran away again, this time with these two Earthlings in tow. And in part because of the influence of these humans, the Time Lord discovered something inside themself and became the Doctor. Not the First Doctor, just the Doctor. And they lived a life. And then another life. And another and another. They fought in a Time War and, after centuries of running, used up all of their regenerations, only to have an endless cycle of regenerations bestowed on them by the other Time Lords. And then they went on living a life. And another and another.
And one day, after countless lives, something changed. And the Doctor, by choice or by force, lost all of their memories and regenerated into a child. A child who would be found by Tecteun and become the new origin of the Time Lords. And this child who had once been the Doctor lived a new life. And another and another, in an endless cycle. And became the Doctor again (the First Doctor this time). And lived a life. And another and another. And one day found themselves once more back on some planet in a child’s body with no memory. Again and again in an endless loop.
Each time through the loop, perhaps things played out a little differently, particularly at the two softest points in their timeline (when they pass the entrance to the loop, replacing their original self, and during the Time War). Sometimes the First Doctor looks like Richard Hurndall. Or sometimes like David Bradley or Peter Cushing. Sometimes the Ninth Doctor sounds like Richard E. Grant. Sometimes the Third Doctor looks like Jo Martin at first before being recaptured by the Time Lords and made to look like Jon Pertwee. Sometimes the Doctor becomes the Other. Endless variations on a theme, but all part of the past, tied to the same loop. Every Doctor Who story is true. Every Doctor Who story happened one time or another through that loop. Endless possibilities, but all in a closed circuit, a loop with one entrance and no exit. Until bigeneration.
The 14th Doctor is the past, eventually folding back in on themselves, over and over. But the 15th Doctor is the future. Free of the loop. With the entirety of Doctor Who lore living with them, but with no endpoint.
The Doctor didn’t begin as the Chosen One, but the gravity of their story pushed them into that role. They were just an alien to begin with, but all the lore of the Time Lords grew out of the this character. The true origin of the Doctor will always be the one broadcast on November 23, 1963, but there can be endless retellings of that. Just as, due to its premise, Doctor Who the show can be anything, so too can the Doctor be any version of themselves, with any and every version of their history. And the reigning Doctor, while carrying all of that within themself, steps out of that endless loop and creates the future, until its time for them to pass the baton and step into the past.
With apologies for the obvious cherrypicking of some of El’s ideas and themes (and a splash of Morrison too, I suppose) and the quickly thrown-together writeup, that’s my head canon until the show explicitly negates it (which will probably happen as soon as this year’s Christmas special).
August 28, 2024 @ 11:22 am
oh i really like this, what a lovely headcanon!!
honestly “time can be rewritten” is as good a handwave as this show’s ever come up with for its shapeshifting canon, and youve demonstrated why. the Doctor’s “timeline” has got to resemble Rincewind’s lifetime hourglass from Discworld, just an impossible ouroboros knot twisting around itself endlessly, growing into a giant timey-wimey ball of twine
(and i said it elsewhere but imhc the Doctor was always the origin of the Time Lords somehow, because duh who else could it be?? of course their whole life turns out to be a bootstrap paradox. canonizing it almost feels like spoiling a joke)
August 28, 2024 @ 2:58 pm
Funnily enough, this is more than a bit like (spoilers!) the Devil’s Hour, the Peter Capaldi drama series. Which is absolutely awful in its own ways (also involving a child), but that’s another story.
August 27, 2024 @ 7:24 pm
“And suddenly, I understand how Jan Vincent-Rudzki felt.”
Me too! Ever since I’d been vaguely aware of him I’d scoffed at his failure to recognise the brilliance of The Deadly Assassin, a story I’d loved since I was 6 years old. And then I had a dawning realisation that I wasn’t so different. I wonder if there were 6 year olds gripped by The Timeless Children who will go on to scoff at us. I’ve got a feeling there won’t be.
It annoyed me because I don’t like retcons like this, and because I don’t like idea of the Doctor being the most important Time Lord in the history of Time Lords. It also annoyed me because it seemed so inept. The whole mystery around the Jo Martin Doctor , which I assume is meant to be solved here, isn’t all because of her TARDIS being in a police box guise. I assume Chibnall just hadn’t thought that one through. I mean, I knew watching Fugitive of the Judoon that the resolution would be a let down, but it still seems more inept than I expercted. Also the stuff with Brendan which was nicely mysterious doesn’t pay off for me because even though it’s explained it’s not in a way that connects directly with the main story. And the Lone Cyberman ( I thought human who regards Cybermen as superior to the point of wanting be one was potentially an interesting idea ) just gets killed off having barely done anything. I could go on.
One thing I do remember is seeing an online headline the day after it aired saying that the epsiode had “resolved a forty year old continuity error”. The impression was that Chibnall expected fandom to hail him as a hero!
August 28, 2024 @ 2:03 pm
A genuine question: why should the Doctor as Timeless Child suddenly be MORE important? She’s been really important to and in the show, including multiple new series finales. How does finding out “the Time Lords got started by finding and stealing regeneration from a child” make the child inherently important? Antibiotics are vitally important in human history but that doesn’t make the specific patch of penicillin mold suddenly “the Chosen One.” This story parses as well or better if the child is just an ordinary child of an unknown origin and all her people can regenerate. “All key Time Lord discoveries were either by theft or enabled by past theft” rewrites the show in interesting and critical ways, and that’s a reasonable take-away here, too.
It’d be nice if the ambiguities seemed intentional, but not much of this era of the show seems very intentional and the gap between intention and execution yawns wide.
It’s hard to see a continuity between these two eps and, say “Oxygen” where it isn’t to see one between “Underworld” and “The Ribos Operation.”
August 29, 2024 @ 5:02 pm
I see what you mean, but it’s certainly presented (by the Master at least ) as the thing that “changes everything”. And then the conclusion seems to be that it doesn’t really matter. Perhaps that is one of those very ambiguities that may be intentional but probably isn’t.
August 29, 2024 @ 8:49 pm
I mean, sure, it’s incoherent, I accept that. But the Master claims this changes everything? How, exactly, for him, because that’s mostly what he cares about. “Oh, now the Master wants the Time Lords all dead.” Well, is that really new? Is he less upset at the Doctor now? More envious? I can believe the Master genuinely hates owing the Doctor for his ability to regenerate, but has anything actually changed? The Master already hated and envied the Doctor, except when she didn’t.
Is even Chibnall the kind of person who would point at these episodes and say “Wow, were you all surprised at the big reveal that the Time Lords are colonialist oppressors?” as if none of the rest of us had watched Doctor Who? Who is this big reveal for? Who does he think it matters to in his audience?
August 28, 2024 @ 3:16 pm
There might be an interesting, dramatic story to be told here. Something like the story of Henrietta Lacks, maybe. But at the end of the day, this doesn’t compute on any level. The Doctor doesn’t really care or seem affected by the revelations, so nor can we. The Master’s reaction of ‘All I am is somehow because of you, and believe me when I say, I cannot bear that’ just doesn’t make enough sense. It might if he was a Dalek, but he’s meant to be the same character as Missy (did Chibnall see any of her episodes??).
August 28, 2024 @ 11:46 pm
There’s this weird parallel to the previous story, wherein Chibnall sought to “improve” Frankenstein – and by extension all of Science Fiction as a genre – by declaring that the Doctor was secretly part of its origin story. Chibnall believes so strongly that “It makes a story better to declare that it was secretly caused by the Doctor all along” that he somehow thought it would make sense to apply this logic RECURSIVELY TO DOCTOR WHO.
We’re like one step away from “The Doctor lands in Canada in 1956 and inspires a drama producer for CBC to make a TV film with Jimmy Doohan that will get the producer noticed by the BBC” (Honestly this is too clever for Chibnall, He’s just have her show up in the spring of 1963 and pitch her own autobiography to Newman)
August 29, 2024 @ 1:39 pm
“VERITY LAMBERT WAS THE DOCTOR THE WHOLE TIME!!!”
August 29, 2024 @ 1:48 pm
Well, I’ve read all the comments, and I think only one person has even touched on what I consider the absolute worst, most contemptible thing about this episode: the manner in which the Time Lords were wiped out, again, this time at the hands of the Master.
Some Context: For me, “Day of the Doctor” was the perfect capstone of the 50 year history of the show and the perfect resolution of the Time War story arc that had begun in “Rose.” The emotional heart of “Day” was the scene where the three Doctors were locked up in a cell talking about how many children they murdered when they destroyed Gallifrey. I thought it was riveting.
And it turned out that the correct answer to the question was “zero,” because they joined forces with all the other Doctors who had ever been televised to save Gallifrey while make it seem like it had been destroyed, undoing the Doctor’s greatest regret and worst sin without changing the canonical history of the show in any way. And the penultimate scene before the Doctors separate and the episode ends is a shot of Time Lord children alive and full of hope, looking up into the morning sun.
And then, it turns out not to matter at all. Because a few years later, the Master came back to Gallifrey and brutally murdered all those children in the space of a day so that he could cannibalize their corpses to make his insipid Cyber Lords. And he was only able to do so because the Capaldi Doctor saved Missy from execution and set out to rehabilitate her, only for her to inexplicably survive “The Doctor Falls” and regenerate into the most obnoxious and annoying iteration of the character yet!
Chibnall didn’t just elevate his fanfic over the 50+ year televised history of the show. He very specifically took a steaming crap over everything that Moffatt tried to do in the 50th anniversary show and with the Missy arc. Fuck him.
August 29, 2024 @ 2:26 pm
We don’t know for sure that the Spy Master comes after Missy in the Master’s personal timeline, though.
In some respects it actually makes more sense for the regenerations to go Simm/Dhawan/Gomez. Simm Master regenerates still very angry at the Time Lords, and very very upset at the idea he might be rehabilitated (though the specifics of that adventure are, as with all timeline crossovers, already fading in his memory). Spy Master duly genocides the Time Lords, both to settle old grudges and as a “Ha, rehabilitate THIS!” move. Then Missy has that guilt to deal with along with everything else – making her rehabilitation all the more difficult, and doing the whole Death In Heaven thing as a callback to what she’s about to do/has already done to the Time Lords.
August 30, 2024 @ 8:03 am
While I respect the grievances of anyone who would rather treat Dhawan’s Master as an out-of-sequence incarnation than meaningfully a diegetic retcon of Missy’s character progress, I personally find it the less compelling option, akin to trying to solve Thirteen’s failure to respond to Twelve’s character arcs by pretending she slits between Ten and Eleven – obviously the former is basically viable as a little bit of fannon given that we may never get a categorical answer (unless Davies chooses to hire him back at a later, regenerate him on screen, and either he or subsequent regenerations directly reference being Missy at some point, none of which is impossible but is at least unlikely in the sense that it hinges on several very specific choices. Broadly though it’s well within fair game, and I’m inclined to a very broad definition of fair game when it comes to liberal interpretation of just what the fuck is going on in Chibnall Who, if it makes the experience of watching it more sufferable…
My issue is just that, for me, it has the opposite effect. Dhawan’s Master may be a dismal idea of where the character can go post-Moffat, a determined, glaring, pointless, miserable attempt to break what had so artfully been mended… but the only lens on the character of any real interest is as a screaming, anxious, insecure, uncomfortable panic attack in the wake of having opened up to personal vulnerability for the first time in millennia and been completely destroyed by it. Dhawan’s performance is mercilessly uncomfortable, and largely one of the few things in the whole era that had the capacity to surprise – by far the least interesting thing about him is that mechanically he’s a lazy retreat of Simm, but reframing him as just a little more than that guy’s next costume change doubles this issue for me rather than reducing it.
August 30, 2024 @ 5:18 pm
Just like the first ever woman Doctor being utterly impotent, it’s stomach-churningly incompetent that the first ever Master to be played by someone who isn’t white is little more than a generic snarling animal defined entirely by his fixation on the white Doctor’s genetics being superior to his. It’s incredible that Chris Chibnall’s ability to get mediocre scripts on time like a proto-Chatgpt allowed him to fail upwards into damaging Doctor Who so much.
While the notion that Dhawan comes before Missy is raw finger-in-ears-la-la-la cope, I’m very sympathetic to it… at least in just how hilarious it is that Chibnall so completely shat on the emotional continuity of Doctor Who that thousands of fans have independently come up with the same unprecedented, unsubstantiated fan theory JUST so that an amazing years-long story arc isn’t utterly broken by him.
September 1, 2024 @ 4:45 am
Oh, I fully agree that the racial semiotics of the material Dhawan was given are appalling to the highest degree (even setting aside the infamy of the nazi stuff in Spyfall), it’s dismal, thoughtless and offensive in ways that very much underscore El’s ongoing points about how superficial Chibnall’s taste for representation is – not that beneath the surface he’s a raging racist misogynist, merely that he’s a peak liberal, shuffling images around by rote with a nebulous sense that social good is accomplished by ensuring a pseudo-random cross-section of them are no longer images of white men and never bothering to check if chance, of deep rooted social attitudes, create unexpected implications and render these stories more offensive than they might have otherwise been.
And yes, it’s certainly of note that any fan off the street will have at least considered a little sequencing reshuffle in the face of quite how little the text engages with Missy as a thing that happens – it’s one thing to write a villainous character falling off the wagon after a dalliance with redemption, it’s quite another to simply reset a character who has been at least somewhat morally complex for over a decade back to a level of moustache twirling they haven’t been since 1996, and do so without even passing reference to the idea that this is a backslide – even Magneto in the 90s got more grace than that.
All of which being said, two things stand – firstly, as I’ve noted, looking at Spyfall as the next time we meet The Master after The Doctor Falls, it is simply much more interesting at a character psychology level, more interesting to watch him, if that’s coming out of everything he experienced as Missy in that story than everything he experienced as Harold. ‘Harold goes and does some even worse (ethically and tonally) Harolding in a strop about not wanting to become the softie girl one’ certainly meets Chibnall’s writing at the level of what it’s bringing, but that’s basically the opposite of what I want a reading to do for bad writing. Secondly, and this is fairly key, the next place to go after Missy is absolutely a relapse narrative. Not necessarily an all encompassing total relapse that doesn’t even self acknowledge as one, nor is acknowledged by anyone else (and yes there’s a case for not wanting to get down in referencing the past… except everything about Chibnall’s writing from Spyfall onward) – but short of doubling down on redemption to an alarming degree the next move was always going to be ‘having had their on attempt at doing the right thing made a mockery of, The Master succumbs to their worse instincts’, and while casting a South Asian actor in that role is dismal (let alone the bio-essentialism at play, let alone ‘the real you’ of it all), it’s as dismal wherever you put them in the timeline. Ultimately if we have to get a backslide out of the way before integrating anything we learned from Missy then pairing that away with explaining the desperately uncomfortable energy of Dhawan’s (legitimately impressive) performance does no harm to Missy’s arc that isn’t done by bringing the character back at all, which, let’s face it, was always going to happen.
September 2, 2024 @ 9:08 pm
The idea of the Dhawan Master having taken the experience as Missy and retained the desire to Burn It All Down When Faced With Injustice, but ejected the desire to actually try to be a good person (Since that’s ultimately what got Missy killed) isn’t TOO much of a stretch as an interpretation for him wiping out the Time Lords after learning about the Timeless Child, and is probably a more interesting read of the character than whatever Chibnall reckoned he was going for.
August 30, 2024 @ 3:39 pm
Not only that, but the Master somehow just razes the planet to the ground – something even the Daleks themselves struggled to do in the Time War. And it’s off-screen. What a smack in the mouth. If Chibnall preferred Gallifrey being gone, fair enough, but couldn’t he have at least built up to it, rather than “btw I nuked home between adventures ok bye”
August 31, 2024 @ 6:03 am
My head canon atm is that Dawan’s Master killed at most a few dozen Time Lords. His “genocide” was to do something timey-wimey to basically shoot the entire population of Gallifrey through a Chameleon Arch. All the Time Lords are still alive. They’re just scattered around time and space living the lives of ordinary mortals and oblivious to what they’ve lost.
August 31, 2024 @ 11:48 am
There’s only been one or two times in the show that gave the impression that the population of Gallifrey was more than a few dozen anyway.
August 31, 2024 @ 5:08 pm
I guess an easy fix is that the Dhawan Master found Gallifrey while the population was small and they were still rebuilding (post-Time War, Hell Bent). But even so, it sort of makes the whole Time War look silly if one guy could tear down the whole planet and civilisation so easily, whereas the Daleks couldn’t.