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Spoilers Hot Take: Chibnall didn't obliterate Doctor Who's continuity. He actually fixed it.

The Wormhole said:
The Doctor was always going to perpetually regenerate by simple virtue of being the lead character of the franchise. Or did you actually believe every time Moffat did the "the Doctor faces permanent death for real this time" storyline there was a possibility that this time it might actually happen?
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Thing is Moffat more or less took care of this without removing peril to the character by having the Time Lords give the Doctor an unknown number of regenerations.

They can regenerate the Doctor however many times they want to but the character still has to be careful as they don't know how many, if any, regenerations they have left.


DigificWriter said:
The point of the Timeless Child origin for the Doctor isn't that they're perpetually immortal; the point is that they were lied to, abused, and enslaved over and over for centuries.
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It's unnecessary convoluted horse crap bolted onto the character because part of fandom, which includes Chibnall, can't handle the bored underachiever that wanted to explore the universe origin of the character.
 
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DigificWriter said:
The point of the Timeless Child origin for the Doctor isn't that they're perpetually immortal; the point is that they were lied to, abused, and enslaved over and over for centuries.
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If nothing else, it does effectively answer the question of how such a character (as has been hinted at over the decades) eventually goes bad at some point. (Or, if the Timeless Child is actually the Master and the Doctor already knows, why she pities him and can't bring herself to permanently kill him.) Who wouldn't after all that?? Who could blame 'em?
 
OCD Geek said:
As for Braxiatel and Iris Wildthyme's appearances in both continuities? Well, their timelines were always delightfully convoluted anyway. Iris has always been heavily hinted to come from another universe (The Obverse, not the alt-Whoniverse I'm now proposing).
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Any continuity errors involving Iris Wildthyme are a feature, not a bug! ;)

M.A.C.O. said:
But it does change what we know about the history of the Time Lords, Rassilon and Omega's contributions, where regeneration comes from (prolonged exposure to the Time Vortex), and supplants the Doctor's origins on the planet to being of an unknown race and species.
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I don't know that it retcons anything regarding Rassilon or Omega. They were the ones who invented time travel, whereas the Timeless Child only deals with regeneration.

But it doesn't jive very well with some of what has been implied about regeneration, which did seem to be a side-effect of their time travel. Some of the Season 6 episodes like "Day of the Moon," "A Good Man Goes to War," & "Let's Kill Hitler" established that Melody Pond had regeneration abilities because she was conceived on the TARDIS while it was in flight.

Qonundrum said:
What he does with this in moving forward - since there aren't many more shocking developments he can use to throw off clunky dialogue arcs and passive style... - especially as the consolidated figure revealed yet another 300k VANISHED due to youtube clips of the episode from official sources combined with news articles shows Chibnall's heading down the wrong path or took the wrong approach. Even if the AI went up one point. They have fewer viewers but those that remained are hugging it.
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Wasn't that basically what happened to the show back in the 1980s? They kept shedding viewers each season while the AI scores kept going up accordingly. What happens is that the show loses casual viewers and all that's left are the die hards.

DigificWriter said:
The point of the Timeless Child origin for the Doctor isn't that they're perpetually immortal; the point is that they were lied to, abused, and enslaved over and over for centuries.
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Yes, but for what narrative purpose? What does that have to do with a plot by the Master to create an immortal army of Cyber-Time Lords?

The thing is, I don't object to the lore changes in principle as long as they're in service to the story. I actually really liked the main Cybermen/Master story of the last 2 episodes. It felt much more Doctor Who-y than most of the Whittaker episodes that I've seen so far. But taking the Doctor out of the main story so that the Matrix could give her a big info-dump served no purpose. Maybe there will be a later episode that will pay off this Timeless Child stuff in such a way that it will all be worth it but I doubt that Chibnall has that kind of talent in him.

Also, what was the point of Jack's warning back in "Fugitive of the Judoon"? He told the Doctor not to give the Lone Cyberman what he wants. But she did anyway and everything seemed to turn out fine. Heck, what was the point of Jack appearing in "Fugitive of the Judoon" at all apart from (1) continuity porn and (2) keeping the companions out of the main story because Chibnall can't figure out what to do with them half the time, same as in "Spyfall, Part 2."
 
The Borgified Corpse said:
Also, what was the point of Jack's warning back in "Fugitive of the Judoon"? He told the Doctor not to give the Lone Cyberman what he wants. But she did anyway and everything seemed to turn out fine.
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There’s now an army of omnicidal regenerating Cybermen under the command of the Master (you don’t really think they all died in the explosion, do you?), so I think it’s premature to say everything turned out fine.
 
^ You have a point. Personally, I doubt that we'll see the Cyber-Time Lords again, although I'm sure the Master will come back. The Master always come back.

I have mixed feelings about that. Part of me enjoyed Missy's redemption arc so much that I wanted the character to stay dead after "The Doctor Falls." But at the same time, I really like this current version of the Master. The actor seems really committed and really genuine about the character's sociopathic glee, which works for me in a way that John Simm's cartoonish mugging never did.

The other thing about the Master always coming back is that, when Anthony Ainley would do it on the classic series, he & the show were just campy enough that I could accept it without explanation. "I'm indestructible. The whole universe knows that." The new series takes itself a bit more seriously, so I instinctively hold its continuity to a higher standard. When the Master died in "Last of the Time Lords," they went to the trouble of building an entire cult around him and using that ring to resurrect him "The End of Time." After the Master was marooned on Gallifrey on the other side of the Time Lock in "The End of Time," they made a point of not bringing her back until after the Doctor saved Gallifrey in "The Day of the Doctor." But we don't know how the Master survived her supposedly mortal wounds from the end of "The Doctor Falls." We don't even know for certain where the current Master falls within the Master's timeline or if he's even from the same reality. And while I'm only speculating here, when we see him again, I doubt that we'll get much of an explanation for how the Master survived the Death Particle at the end of "The Timeless Children."

BTW, does anyone else think it's weird that 3 of the last 5 Master stories involve the Cybermen?
 
captain crow said:
Thing is Moffat more or less took care of this without removing peril to the character by having the Time Lords give the Doctor an unknown number of regenerations.
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Those might have burned off in the Dalek saucer destruction, allowing a reset. The idea that the Doctor comes from some rip opens things up.
 
People, please, this is the show that turned Daleks into humanoids in a 2 parter, and then never mentioned it again. Redesigned the Daleks and went straight back to the old design. Declared that the Doctor had a human mother, and then never mentioned it again. This isn't the KJV of the Bible we're talking about, it's a silly, brilliant tv show about a mad man in a box who travels anywhere in space and time, and can completely change his face and can just as easily be a mad woman. As the OP and many others have said, there's always been an air of mystery around the Doc, suggestions that he's more than just a Time Lord, that he's older than he remembers and that the Time Lord council have always kept a very close eye on him for some reason. Chibnall may not be my favourite show runner either, but he hasn't murdered any puppies or ran over any grannies (not to my knowledge anyway), and he definitely hasn't raped anybody's childhood. The Timeless Child reveal may not be complete, there might be more to learn, and the Master could easily be mistaken or lying about some or all of it. A thing might happen, something timey wimey, and the Time Lords will return, just when the story needs them. The Doctor will never die, or run out of regenerations, because it's not real life and it's just a tv programme. Don't like the current Doctor? Never mind, there'll be a different one along before too long. Don't like the showrunner? Same. Don't watch a show you don't enjoy, you have many many options of other shows you can watch for entertainment, stop torturing yourselves. They're all also fiction too though, so don't expect them to be any different.
 
All it's going to take to undo all of this Timeless Child mess is for a new show-runner to commission a story where we find out that The Master lied to The Doctor to screw with Her mind.

Or...someone messed with the Matrix's records for some other reason, not expecting that the Master would see it.

Or, conversely, that's *exactly* what they wanted to happen.

Some other dark forces at play...trying to cover up some other crime. Maybe even a crime dealing with how regeneration technology was invented.

I think that there likely indeed *is* a Timeless Child, maybe it's even The Master. Or someone else. (Which would be the most interesting of the possibilities.)
 
Davies introduced the Time War, which easily explains a lot of inconsistencies. Then Moffat destroyed and rebuilt the universe. And what Chibnall's done is some big horrible destruction of canon? Every new showrunner (or producer/story editor team, depending on the year) effectively resets the show, and has done since the beginning. As for fanwank... how about a war between the Daleks and the Cybermen? How about all the baddies team up to try to trap the Doctor? Davies and Moffat respectively. Hope you complained then. Hell, I hope you complained when the show suddenly invented this whole notion that the Doctor could "regenerate" and be played by a different actor. Two hearts? "Time Lords"? It's like they just keep making stuff up about the Doctor. Oh, but if it happened before you started watching, well, that's established history, not something that changed what people thought they knew about the Doctor and the show.

People need some perspective. All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. You don't like what's happening, sit down and wait, something different will be along shortly, and in the meantime other people are enjoying what you're hating.

I mean, getting worked up enough to say, as someone did last year, "Chibnall can fuck off." He'll fuck off in his own good time. And then you can tell whoever's next that they can fuck off too.
 
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Emperor-Tiberius said:
To put it mildly: Yes.
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Not really. Especially since there is no canon in Doctor Who. As for continuity, that doesn't really matter in a time traveling show.

Besides, as Steve pointed out, this isn't the first time, nor the last, a showrunner has introduced such "radical" elements to the show. Not really that a big deal at all.
 
After @Stevil2001 posted on GallifreyBase a few weeks ago a review of "Party Animals," the DWM comic story in which the seventh Doctor meets the Nicholas Briggs Doctor from the Audio-Visuals fan audios (while a bunch of other characters, including Star Trek: The Next Generation's Worf get into a bar brawl), I've been contemplating the idea that Briggs' Doctor, who appears to be a post-McCoy Doctor, is actually a pre-Jo Martin Doctor -- with the twist that he doesn't realize that he's not a later Doctor. The CIA would cover its bases -- they couldn't let their agent discover his own future, so they implanted false memories of the Doctor's future so if he did run into a later Doctor he'd assume it was his own past.

Okay, as weird as that sounds, it makes sense in my head.

This thinking has led me to relisten to the Audio-Visuals while I work from home, and Briggs is honestly better than I remember.
 
The Nth Doctor said:
Not really. Especially since there is no canon in Doctor Who. As for continuity, that doesn't really matter in a time traveling show.

Besides, as Steve pointed out, this isn't the first time, nor the last, a showrunner has introduced such "radical" elements to the show. Not really that a big deal at all.
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It made the Doctor less interesting by making her the implicit beginning of her own race, and set the notion that there were multiple Doctors before Hartnell. i find that personally unfathomable and demonstrably wrong an approach.
 
Emperor-Tiberius said:
It made the Doctor less interesting by making her the implicit beginning of her own race, and set the notion that there were multiple Doctors before Hartnell.
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An episode during the Troughton era was originally going to make it explicit that Hartnell wasn't the very first Doctor but the line was cut, so objecting to a Showrunner doing exactly that makes very little sense to me.
 
Emperor-Tiberius said:
It made the Doctor less interesting by making her the implicit beginning of her own race, and set the notion that there were multiple Doctors before Hartnell. i find that personally unfathomable and demonstrably wrong an approach.
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Very well, demonstrate.

In the meantime, what do you think of the hints we got of the Cartmel Masterplan back around season 26? Chibnall’s not the first to suggest the Doctor’s past goes a lot farther back than we thought.
 
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