Full spoilers follow for the Doctor Who Season 12 finale, “The Timeless Children.”
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After the world saw the Doctor Who Series 12 finale, “The Timeless Children” – in which we learned a great deal we never knew before about the truth behind the development of the Time Lord power of regeneration on Gallifrey, and the related mystery of the Timeless Child (AKA, the Doctor) – Internet fandom went predictably, gloriously mad. Out of all of that craziness, we thought we’d focus on a number of continuity-related questions that have been coming up again and again, as fans try to reconcile these new facts about the formative years of the Time Lords with everything else we’ve ever seen in the show’s 57-year history. We also thought we’d try to provide answers to those questions – if not definitive ones, at least possible theories that might help to smooth over the rough edges. It’s early days yet, of course, and we’re all still reeling from the wonderful insanity of that game-changing episode, but we hope that this might help to process some of it. After all, we’re all in this together.
Without further ado, here are seven of the most frequently asked questions right now about how the information in “The Timeless Children” does or does not match with what went before, as well as some issues of plot and character, and our suggested theories!
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Doctor Who Finale: Questions, Answers and Theories
1) Why did the Time Lords need to give Matt Smith’s Doctor a new regeneration cycle in “Time of the Doctor?”
Since we now know that the Doctor is the Timeless Child, a being with a perpetual ability to regenerate that enabled Tecteun and the other founding Time Lords to grant themselves that power via artificial means derived from the Timeless Child’s genetics, why would the Doctor need to be given another regeneration cycle? Surely he wouldn’t have actually run out of regenerations after all?
As with many of these things, this is only a question if you assume that everything you’ve ever known in Doctor Who is absolutely immutable with no possibility of variance or flexibility. Since much of the Doctor’s pre-Hartnell life is still very murky, and since we don’t know the circumstances under which the Doctor was mind-wiped and reset in order to obscure their time in the Division, it’s just as possible that the cycle of TV Doctors from Hartnell on were specifically engineered and therefore limited as with the other Time Lords’ 12-regeneration, 13-body cycles. Basically, how do we know that eventually the Timeless Child wasn’t robbed of its perpetual regenerative ability and turned into “just another Time Lord,” at least for a while? And who’s to say the Doctor isn’t now back to full Timeless Child mode? As with most things in this show, time will tell…it always does.
2) Where did all the humans go?
We were told that all the humans fleeing the Cyber Wars escaped through the Boundary, but clearly none of them made it to Gallifrey, and we don’t know where else that spatio-temporal or dimensional gateway may have led over the years. In modern parlance, this is a huge “plot hole” (which is what some people call anything in a story that isn’t spelled out to their satisfaction, even if it’s deliberately left open for future exploration and therefore is not really a “plot hole” at all), but the question remains: Where are the people?
No answer for this one; this is surely a deliberately designed dangling plot thread to be picked up down the road. Unless it’s not, in which case, how about this: The future humans all scattered into the past, reintegrated into various times in human history, and we’ll leave it there unless told otherwise. The Doctor kind of does that with their future friends when she drops them off with Yaz, Ryan, and Graham in the 21st century, so maybe that’s a George Lucas kind of clue – it’s like poetry, it rhymes.
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3) What was the deal with Brendan in “Ascension of the Cybermen”?
This one really was answered directly in “The Timeless Children,” but in the massive wave of revelations happening in that episode, it’s not too surprising that people might have missed it. The Master explains that in the vast swath of missing data in the Matrix that would have shed light on the Doctor’s pre-Hartnell life as a Division operative, material was redacted and further obscured by hiding it under a visual perception filter of sorts, making it appear to be mundane recordings of a guy growing up in Ireland. So in other words, the Brendan sequence can be seen as a sort of visual cloak hiding the way in which the Timeless Child was pressed into service by the Division (like the police department Brendan joined) then forcibly mind-wiped at the end of a regeneration/incarnation. Also, it mirrors the story the Master told us about the Timeless Child’s first death, in which both the Child and Brendan fall off a cliff.
4) If the Timeless Child is not Gallifreyan, how does the Doctor have two hearts?
Again, this is one of those questions that only exists because fans of the most imaginative series in television history aren’t exercising their own imagination just a bit more (but hey, it’s a lot to mull over, so we’ll help). This question seems to be based on the idea that if the Timeless Child is from some other race, and we know that Gallifreyans/Time Lords have two hearts, it’s therefore a coincidence that the Timeless Child/Doctor has two hearts too. But it’s really not.
There are a multitude of possibilities here, so take your pick. One, it’s exactly that, a coincidence, and both races – whatever the Timeless Child is, and the Shobogans of Gallifrey – have two hearts. Two, the genetic experiments Tecteun conducted to derive regeneration from the Timeless Child altered the Time Lords to have two hearts too. Three, the Timeless Child didn’t have two hearts originally, but when the Time Lords used the Chameleon Arch on the pre-Hartnell Doctor to mind-wipe and reset a regenerative cycle, it also altered the physiology. Four…actually, come up with your own here. This isn’t a problem at all, it’s science fiction!
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5) Surely the Master didn’t die for good this time?
Oh, of course not, why would you even think that? But if you did indeed wonder whether this time around, the Master may have truly met his end alongside his beautifully-designed Cyber-Time Lords, rest assured the episode actually had a clue to their survival in those explosive final moments, although apparently a lot of us (myself included) missed it. When the Death Particle is activated, you can hear Sacha Dhawan’s Master shouting “All of you, through here, now!” Presumably, the Master and at least some of his clockwork-motif minions managed to make it into a spare TARDIS (there were a lot of them laying around at the end of the episode), which means they will surely return one day soon.
6) How did the Judoon get inside the TARDIS? And will it connect to Revolution of the Daleks?
At the end of “The Timeless Children,” just in time to set up the seasonal special coming later this year (or perhaps New Year’s 2021) called Revolution of the Daleks, a Judoon “cold case” squad turns up in the TARDIS and takes the Doctor into custody. But wait, how did they get in there? In fact, how is it that lately the integrity of the TARDIS’ previously impregnable interior has been somewhat lacking?
The TARDIS has gone through a number of traumas over the years, and given that it is more than just a machine but a sentient being that often goes not where it’s told but where it believes the Doctor needs to be, and is also capable of seeing into the future in order to make that determination, there’s therefore a lot of leeway as to its behavior at any given point. For all we know, the TARDIS drops its defenses when it knows that the Doctor will need to get involved in an adventure later on, and whatever is going to happen in the next story may only be facilitated by the Judoon getting into the TARDIS and taking the Doctor out, which the TARDIS may have predicted. Well, that’s better than treating it like a mistake, right?
7) This is the big one – where is the Timeless Child/Doctor from?
Ah, this one has no answer right now. After all, it’s simply a refreshed and restated version of the question that has always been right there at the very core of the series itself, part of what drives us all to be fascinated by that mysterious heroic time traveler and her journeys through space and time…
Doctor Who?
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Find Arnold T. Blumberg on Twitter at @DoctoroftheDead.