When it comes to writing for something in a longtime franchise that is meant to shake things up for good. One thing you shouldn’t take for granted is the fact that the people watching aren’t idiots, and yet sometimes, we’re treated as such. A great example is the upcoming Furious 9 where Dom (a character we’ve learned a lot about) only NOW reveals to the world that he had a brother that is evil. And now, with “The Timeless Children” we find out that a major part of Doctor Who’s lore is a “lie” and…it’s rather underwhelming.
In short, we learn that once upon a time there was a singular child that had Regeneration. And through experimentation, that child’s ability was given to the Gallifraens to turn them into the Time Lords we know of that. The Time Lords set the limit of Regeneration to 12, but for the Timeless Child, it was apparently infinite. And that child…was The Doctor.
Which is both rather underwhelming given the “everything you know is a lie” bit and also incredibly contradictory. Now sure, Doctor Who has done this in the past (remember The Valeyard that was said to also be The Doctor?) but not to this degree. After all, in “The Time Of The Doctor”, Gallifrey opened up a portal in space to save Matt Smith’s Doctor from dying in full via giving him another Regeneration cycle. Why would they do that if he had infinite Regeneration? And obviously the high command of Gallifrey WOULD know that.
And of course, that would mean that there are potentially an infinite number of Doctors traveling through time and space…and that’s honestly kind of lame.
Speaking of which, I REALLY am not liking this version of The Master. In my opinion he shouldn’t have been a part of this season (which by the way we still don’t know how he went from Missy to this guy) and what he did in this episode completely undermined the Cybermen storyline. They turned easily the most compelling version of the race (The Lone Cyberman) into an afterthought in seconds flat. Which made the previous episodes rather meaningless.
The sidestories honestly didn’t matter to much either outside of a certain person HAPPENING to save the day at the end because…he could?
And of course, that random stinger at the end just made me go, “Wait, what?” Because it didn’t even let us have time to breathe before thrusting us into the holiday episode that’s coming later this year. So…yeah, that happened.
In the end, “The Timeless Children” swung for the fences, but they whiffed on many a thing, and it’ll be up to you to determine whether this season was worth the effort to bring back so many old foes of the Doctor instead of doing what the previous story did and make new ones.
Todd Black
Todd Black is reader of comics, a watch of TV (a LOT of TV), and a writer of many different mediums. He's written teleplays, fan-fictions, and currently writes a comic book called Guardians (guardians-comic.com). He dreams of working at Nintendo, writing a SHAZAM! TV series, and working on Guardians for a very long time!
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