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.
