The Timeless Children (TV story): Difference between revisions

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== Continuity ==
== Continuity ==
* The Master and his army of CyberMasters mimic the rallying speech of Rassilon at the end of the last great time war. ([[TV]]: ''[[The End of Time (TV story)|The End of Time]]'')
* The Master and his army of CyberMasters mimic the rallying speech of Rassilon at the end of the last great time war. ([[TV]]: ''[[The End of Time (TV story)|The End of Time]]'')
* The Master reminisces about assassinating the [[President (The Deadly Assassin)|President]] in the [[Panopticon]]. ([[TV]]: ''[[The Deadly Assassin (TV story)|The Deadly Assassin]]'')
* The Master reminisces about assassinating [[Lord President|presidents]] with the Doctor. ([[PROSE]]: ''[[Birth of a Renegade (short story)|Birth of a Renegade]]'', [[TV]]: ''[[The Deadly Assassin (TV story)|The Deadly Assassin]]'')
* The Master reveals the truth of the [[Timeless Child]]. ([[TV]]: ''[[The Ghost Monument (TV story)|The Ghost Monument]]'', ''[[Spyfall (TV story)|Spyfall]]'', ''[[Can You Hear Me? (TV story)|Can You Hear Me?]]'')
* The Master reveals the truth of the [[Timeless Child]]. ([[TV]]: ''[[The Ghost Monument (TV story)|The Ghost Monument]]'', ''[[Spyfall (TV story)|Spyfall]]'', ''[[Can You Hear Me? (TV story)|Can You Hear Me?]]'')
* The Doctor and the Master see [[Brendan (Ascension of the Cybermen)|Brendan]] and the [[Garda]] in "[[Ireland]]". ([[TV]]: ''[[Ascension of the Cybermen (TV story)|Ascension of the Cybermen]]'')
* The Doctor and the Master see [[Brendan (Ascension of the Cybermen)|Brendan]] and the [[Garda]] in "[[Ireland]]". ([[TV]]: ''[[Ascension of the Cybermen (TV story)|Ascension of the Cybermen]]'')

Revision as of 09:04, 4 March 2020

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The Timeless Children was the tenth and final episode of series 12 of Doctor Who.

The episode brought to light an account of the Doctor's origins in which, prior to becoming the First Doctor, they had lived many forgotten lives as the Timeless Child. This new thread in the ongoing tapestry brings the Doctor, once again, to the forefront of Time Lord history.

In this new account, the Timeless Child was discovered near a boundary to another dimension or reality by the Shobogan traveller Tecteun, who took her in as her own. Their regenerative abilities were attentively studied by Tecteun, and eventually replicated. This is put forward as the true origin of regeneration on Gallifrey. A radical result of this retroactive continuity is that the Doctor, in their earliest lives, was the biological template upon which Time Lord society was founded.

It also offers a new explanation for pre-Hartnell incarnations like the so-called "Morbius" Doctors, and continues to push the mystery around the "Fugitive" Doctor played by Jo Martin.

The Timeless Children also brought another redesign of the Cybermen not long after the warrior-class Cybermen in Ascension of the Cybermen in the form of CyberMasters - a branch created by the Master with the ability to regenerate.

The episode also brought about another shift in the current status quo, with the Doctor's companions, Ryan, Graham, and Yaz being returned to the 21st century without the Doctor, for their own protection, with the group still being separated by the end of the episode.

Synopsis

Gallifrey is dead, the Master is in control of an army of Cybermen ready to take over the universe, and Graham, Ryan, and Yaz are trapped, being hunted down with the last remnants of humanity. But for the Doctor, one question remains... Who is the Timeless Child?

Plot

to be added

Cast

Special guest appearance by

Crew

to be added

References

Species

  • Shobogans were the original indigenous species of Gallifrey, who later genetically altered themselves into the Time Lords thanks to Tecteun's research.
  • The Timeless Child's species are a species from another reality or dimension that have the ability to regenerate infinitely and continuously change their appearance. Because of Tecteun's research, their DNA was placed into the Shobogans's DNA and thus created the Time Lords.

Biology

Organisations

  • An early incarnation of the Doctor was recruited by The Division, an organisation which officially did not exist nor had operatives and acted against the non-interference policy of the Time Lords.

Culture 

  • When showing the destroyed Citadel to the Doctor, the Master references "Ozymandias", a sonnet by Percy Shelley.
  • When the Master requests an alliance with the Cyberium, he references the TV show The Apprentice, claiming he "deserves to be its business partner, because he has performed well in all the tasks", which was a common excuse used to become Lord Sugar's business partner.

Weapons

  • One death particle was able to wipe out all organic life at least on a planet.

Story notes

  • This episode used the same kind of "cold opening" used in Spyfall: Part Two; a recap of the preceding episode.
  • This episode had the most extensive use of archive footage in any of the Doctor Who episodes or any other media, and indeed any of the spin-offs as of 2020.
  • Tecteun's and the Timeless Child's regenerations mark the first time female to male regeneration has been seen onscreen. However, the first depiction of a female regenerating into a male in any media was in AUDIO: Enemy Lines. In the case of the Timeless Child multiple regenerations were shown, both female to male and male to female.
  • The episode's cliffhanger ending calls back to the cliffhanger endings of both Doomsday and Last of the Time Lords, in which the dumbfounded Doctor repeatedly utters the word "what?" in response to the events suddenly and rapidly unfolding around them.
  • This episode is the first time in the show's history, discounting full red and full blue from various previous stories, that clips from the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton eras have been shown in colour.
  • This marks the second time the theme music has been used during a TV story, playing across the Doctor's Matrix mind-blow-up sequence. The first time was in The Woman Who Fell to Earth.
  • This story confirms that the faces in the mind battle with Morbius in The Brain of Morbius are incarnations of the Doctor, something long debated amongst fans.

Ratings

to be added

Filming locations

to be added

Production errors

If you'd like to talk about narrative problems with this story — like plot holes and things that seem to contradict other stories — please go to this episode's discontinuity discussion.

to be added

Continuity

Home video releases

to be added

External links

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According to one account, the Master had the appearance of Roger Delgado while on Gallifrey. According to another, he had Anthony Ainley's likeness. According to another one, the one with James Dreyfus's appearance was the incarnation who ran away from Gallifrey.

Divided Loyalties, A Brief History of Time Lords and The Legions of Death feature, or otherwise acknowledge, the War Chief, but in the process contradicted the notion put forward by other stories that he was an incarnation of the Master.

One account suggests that the incarnation portrayed by Roger Delgado may be the same as the one portrayed by Peter Pratt while some others distinguish them.

According to one account, the incarnation portrayed by Gordon Tipple is the one portrayed by Anthony Ainley, while some others state that the Ainley one was already lost by then.

While fighting to extend his life at the end of his regeneration cycle, many bodies were possessed by the Beevers incarnation, but all kept somehow reverting to his real being until he finally regenerated into the MacQueen one. Hence, these sections cannot be strictly chronological
v • e
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Additionally, immediate post-regeneration stories, like the 2005 Children in Need Special Born Again — and ones like Castrovalva, where the regeneration sequence was replayed — are not included.
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