Review of The Timeless Children
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

For better or worse, showrunner Chris Chibnall has left an indelible mark on Doctor Who. Series 12 finale The Timeless Children was packed with canon-expanding details that fans will be arguing about for decades to come.

Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2020 BBC

Whether you loved it or hated it (there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of in-between in the chatter I’ve seen), there was a lot to wrap our minds around. Did the Doctor see truth or elaborate lies in the Matrix? What is truth? Does it matter?

I choose to believe the Doctor saw the truth. Among other things, it might explain how she really could be the Other of Time Lord mythology. But mostly, I just think it’s a fantastic twist that simultaneously upends everything we thought we knew about the Doctor and ties in a bunch of things that previously made little or no sense.

The quintessential example of canonical inconsistency, of course, is all those faces that showed up when Morbius challenged the Fourth Doctor to look back on his previous lives, and they went back past the Hartnell incarnation. Add to that the question of how many regenerations a Time Lord has, and you get a recipe for confusion.

What Chibnall’s explanation has done is both to make it so that no future showrunner ever again has to give a reason for the Doctor to keep regenerating, and to fold those previously anomalous potential past regenerations into the on-screen canon. Some fans will hate making the Doctor into some special, unique figure within her own society, but I really like the idea that her origins are, once again, mysterious.

All that being said, the big reveal here kind of relegated the Lone Cyberman to macguffin status. I almost laughed out loud when the Master shrank him, because it was the obvious move at that moment, and thus I somehow didn’t expect him actually to do it. But now the Big Bad from the last two episodes was suddenly a tiny figurine and the new threat took some mental gymnastics to get behind.

You see, I’ve always thought that Cybermen needed live humans from which to build their kind, yet both parts of that remit were flaunted here: to make his new Cyber-Time Lords, the Master used corpses of non-human beings. Perhaps I should’ve been suspicious when Yedlarmi wanted to go back for the body of poor Bescot—finally named on screen in the instant she died. I remember wondering what he was fussing about, since they couldn’t convert her dead body anyway. My writer brain should’ve picked up on that breadcrumb clue.

It’s a little harder for me to swallow the idea that they could convert a Time Lord (although the weird fins off the side of the Cyber-Time Lords’ heads actually fit reasonably well with the Master’s known fondness for “dressing for the occasion,” and will make for some killer cosplay). The Doctor has been out of danger of conversion before because she wasn’t the right species, so what’s changed?

The short answer, of course, is that the showrunner thought it’d be cool. I’m actually okay with that, because it allows me to go a little nuts myself. For example, here’s my big “weird fan theory”: Ko Sharmus is Tecteun, aka the Doctor’s adoptive parent. The way he comes in at the end to save the Doctor, the look she gives him, even his plausibly deniable declaration that “You didn’t start this; I did” (deniable because he follows by saying he was partly responsible for sending the Cyberium back in time) all support the idea.

“But the Cybermen clearly say ‘Three human life forms detected’ back at the camp!” you argue. Well, yes; they only convert humans—except when they convert Time Lords. Maybe their definition of human has gotten a little wibbly. At any rate, Chibnall has set this all up in a way that allows for my interpretation of Ko Sharmus’s identity.

Let me back away from all those large-scale, contentious plot points for a moment, though, because there are smaller details that deserve attention, too. First and foremost is how wonderful the Companions were. Having Graham and Yaz together, on their own, has been a delight (I like Ryan well enough, just not nearly so much as the others). The quiet, tender moment of confessed affection between them was truly touching.

More importantly, I’ve loved seeing them both come into their own. This time it was Graham who came up with the Doctor-worthy plan of hiding within the Cybersuits in order to avoid detection. And Yaz, bless her, was already striding forward before Graham had finished asking who fancied going first through the Boundary. Even Ryan had a triumphant moment, throwing that massive grenade exactly where it needed to be. If this does turn out to be their last adventure with the Doctor, they’ve all gone out on a good note.

But the overall theme of the episode was one of endless possibilities. We’re reminded of everything we’ve seen the Doctor do and be (including Ruth—called it!), everybody we’ve seen her fight, all those we’ve seen her love and lose in the moment she overloads the Matrix with the enormity of it all.

We see flashes of all her adventures over the last two series; of the incarnations of the Master: Dhawan, Gomez, Simm, Jacobi, Roberts, Ainley, Beevers, Delgado; of Davros, the Slitheen, the Absorbaloff, the Sontarans, the Ood, the Racnoss, the Sycorax, the cat nurses, the Sea Devils, the Zygons, Sil, Sharaz Jek, the Autons, Voc robots, Sutekh, Ogrons, Haemovores, Scaroth; of Rose, Martha, Donna, Wilf, Sarah Jane, River, Amy, Rory, Bill; and of Capaldi, Smith, Tennant, Eccleston, Hurt, McGann, McCoy, Colin Baker, Davison, Tom Baker, Pertwee, Troughton, Hartnell, the Child, Brendan, Ruth, and all those unknown faces from Morbius.

And we realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because the Doctor can be anything.