Doctor Who: The Timeless Children

“Gird your loins, gentlemen.”

“I don’t... I don’t know how to do that.”

Now that is how you do a season finale. No, none of the “Fam” died, in spite of the many subtle hints. And the explanation of the “Timeless Child” was perhaps the most likely one. But I simply have to admit yet again this season that Chibbers has produced the goods. This is a cracking season finale, and what it does to Doctor Who lore is at once brave, radical and exciting. The whole thing looks amazing too, and there are truly excellent performances from both Sacha Dhawan as a dangerously and compellingly insane Master and Jodie Whittaker as a Doctor forced to confront what she’s never been made to confront before.

Much of the episode has two parallel plots- the Doctor within the Matrix receiving a massively game-changing info-dump from the Matrix while the Fam and their friends dodge peril from Ashad and his Cyber-army. I like this juxtaposition and, much as we fans are fixated on the big revelations, the exciting scenes with the Fam are important. There are some great moments, such as Graham telling Yaz just how awesome he thinks she is, and indeed one of their friends wanting to retrieve the body of his fallen comrade because her greatest fear was always being altered by the Cybermen- it’s this kind of thing that makes the Cybermen so effective in this two parter.

But we can’t help be excited by the scenes on Gallifrey. We begin with the Doctor and Master engaging in some edgily dark repartee mixed with nostalgic references to Borusa and the Panopticon, showing us what fantastic chemistry these two actors have. But when the Doctor is attached forcibly to the Matrix the revelations keep coming.

So once the sentient race of Gallifrey was the Shabogans- nice nostalgic touch- and one of them- Tecteun- was an early space explorer, crudely heroic. But one day she came across the Boundary, and found a child there, apparently abandoned. So she adopted that child and studied it, until one day it died- and became the first person on Gallifrey to regenerate. So she studies the child even further- a creepy, Stranger Things type example of an innocent child being used and experimented on, regenerating again and again. Some childhood.

But Tecteun eventually reached the point where she was able to risk testing her theories on herself- and so she became the first native Gallifreyan to regenerate. Dialogue then tells us vaguely that history passed, that the Citadel was built and that those dwelling in it became a race apart and eventually, presumably after Rassilon and Omega, Time Lords. It’s made explicit that only these elite Gallifreyans are Time Lords and are able to regenerate- an artificial twelve times- and that the rest of the planet’s population are presumably still “Shabogans”.

Meanwhile, Ashad has in his chest a device to destroy all organic life on the planet, a somewhat obvious case of Chekhov’s Gun. And the Master, latest in a long line of Tobias Vaughns, is inviting his Cyber-Army to invade Gallifrey. This is hardly rational of him, to say the least, but then that clearly isn’t the point. And it’s hugely amusing to hear the Master say what we all think about Ashad’s plan to destroy all organic life so that everyone, himself included, can “”ascend” to being purely mechanical creatures- “Oh, you mean robots?” Indeed.

But there’s a big revelation still to come, of course- the Timeless Child is the Doctor. She had many lives before the ones we knew (so The Brain of Morbius doesn’t need retconning after all!), and the Matrix has been redacted to remove all details of those lives- but the sheer size of those redactions imply there were many. And, let’s not forget, we have absolutely no idea where the child came from.

All this is brilliant. At a stroke the mystery of the Doctor is revealed- what happened in this previous lives? Who even is she? What of the Jo Martin Doctor, who we see in a mental pep talk sequence? And, let’s note, what’s even more brilliant is that the bureaucratic, arrogant, silly old Time Lords are no longer even all that relatively important to the central mystery. I love it.

Cue a final confrontation, the awesome spectacle of regenerating Cyber-Gallifreyans complete with high collared robes, and a magnificent final confrontation between the Master and the Doctor. And a splendid performance by Jodie Whittaker as she and the Master discuss whether she will indeed sacrifice herself to stop him- fortunately, there’s a convenient character on hand to make that sacrifice instead. Meanwhile, the “Fam” and friends are sent back to contemporary Earth in a Hartnell-era TARDIS which, like the Master’s, has disguised itself as a house. Cool.

And then we get a very RTD ending, complete with “What? What? What?” As the Doctor is suddenly kidnapped by a “cold case team” of Judoon and bunged in a prison without trial. Probably for a crime she can’t remember. Wow. At least we presumably have a long time to digest this before Revolution of the Daleks...

Oh, and while we wait, here are all my Doctor Who reviews...  https://llamastranglermarathon.blogspot.com/p/doctor-who-index.htmlhttps://llamastranglermarathon.blogspot.com/p/doctor-who-index.html

Doctor Who: Fugitive of the Judoon

“Consider your rhino backside imperially regulated!"

Er... so this isn't a story of the week, then. Blimey.

I'm still more than a little shellshocked from that. Did they really squeeze all that into forty-nine minutes? Impossible, surely?

So let's take a deep breath. I shall try and be coherent about what I just watched. Firstly, it was very good- I'm not sure how much was Chibbers and how much was Vinay Patel; frankly a big chunk of it was very heavily arc stuff so you can see how Chibbers ended up with a co-writing credit. Nevertheless, between this and Demons of the Punjab I'm impressed with Patel, on present evidence one of the more promising of the new writers.

I'm also extremely impressed with Jodie Whittaker. So far she hasn't been given scripts which allow her to show the kind of range that other recent Doctors have, and the result has been a kind of vague post-2005 generic Tennant-style performance. But here we get to see more of this Doctor's hidden depths, and at last Whittaker is called upon to dig deep- and she really nails it. This, more than anything with current Doctor Who, is what I've been waiting for. We know that this isn't going to be an episode of the week from very early on, in the TARDIS, where the Doctor is uncharacteristically secretive to her friends about what the Master told her at the end of Spyfall.

At first this seems like a fairly normal episode. Yes, we know the Judoon of old but they're portrayed as the same old occasionally murderous comic foils of old, with their silly language and vulnerability to having obscure legislation quoted at them. They're looking all around Gloucester (naturally, the episode gives us a good look at that fair city's main tourist attractions including, KGB assassins please note, the very pretty cathedral) for a fugitive, who seems to be a bloke called Lee, played by Matthew from Game On.

Except all this is just very clever misdirection. Because we begin the episode from the POV of Lee's very ordinary tour guide wife, Ruth, who is likeable, relatable and reacts just as a normal person would to all these alien rhino people. Only after a while, and after the appearance of the Judoons' immediate employer Gat, do we realise that all this is just misdirection and that Ruth- not poor, doomed Lee- is the fugitive.

None of this, at this point, seems to have much wider significance. Much more jaw-dropping is that ship orbiting the Earth that first Graham and then Yas and Ryan are transmatted to. Only gradually do we get the completely out-of-the-blue (at least to those of us who are unspoiled) return of Captain Jack. This is something of a joyous shock- and I love his reaction to the Doctor's current gender. I suppose it makes sense that Chibbers, former showrunner of Torchwood, would bring back a character he knows well. Even more intriguing, for vague reasons of plot convenience he can't hang around, and gets to impart some enjoyably cryptic and fascinating words before sodding suddenly off. The Doctor is to "Beware the lone Cyberman" and "Don't give it what it wants". It seems there's a big alliance against a massive Cyber-empire which can only be "brought down to nothing" if the Doctor does the right thing. Oooh.

All of this is huge, but it's not even close to being the main shock of this not-exactly-anonymous episode.Because Ruth shows some unexpected combat skills while facing the Judoon and the mysterious Gat in Gloucester Cathedral, which a probably going to get a few more tourists than usual. The Doctor accompanies her to her lighthouse childhood home and digs up a strange object while Ruth goes to what turns out to be a trigger for a chameleon arch (remember them?). The object turns out to be a somewhat '60s-ish looking TARDIS and Ruth turns out to be... the Doctor. We can add Jo Martin (who is very good indeed, and whom I remember from Chef) to the list. And she is absolutely Doctorish- right up to giving Gat a chance before letting her trip the fatal booby trap.

This is, I think it's fair t say, a bombshell. Oh, there's a certain amount of plot and peril until the episode finishes, but while all this is going on we, the viewers are trying to digest this information. Because this is clearly a past Doctor and that, as continuity currently stands, is theoretically impossible. There are thirteen incarnations in a regeneration cycle, and although it's slightly complicated by the fact that Jodie is the first of a new cycle of thirteen, we know every past incarnation of the Doctor, right? And Brain of Morbius, you can shut up. Multi-Doctor stories from The Five Doctors to Day of the Doctor have flat out stated that William Hartnell was the first.

But Chibbers, of course, knows this. He's one of us. It's pretty much certain that a) all this is done deliberately and with all due continuity obsessiveness and b) he has a plan. We're going to get yet another layer of retcon. The Doctor's past is looking a bit knocked about, certainly, but I for one am excited. Even more curious is that the employers of the Judoon are the Time Lords- but Time Lords from the past. This is the first time we've seen non-renegade Time Lords from Gallifrey's actual past, which in any other episode would itself be huge. There's clearly some kind of forgotten, buried past.

Then again, the TARDIS is a police box- so post An Unearthly Child? But no sonic screwdriver as yet, so pre-Fury from the Deep? And Chibbers is certainly well aware of these points.

We end with the Doctor and her friends reaffirming their togetherness, the Doctor concluding that "Something's coming for me", and a hook into next week's episode. We have a week to recover. Phew.

I have no idea, excited as I am, where all this is leading. But that's how you masterfully ramp up the revelations, beat by beat. Brilliant.