Spoilers The Timeless Children grade and discussion thread

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The season finale is already here. Will we get all of the answers? I suspect not and I'm fine with that, just as long as we get some answers. It's not like the show is ending and hasn't been arc driven over multiple seasons in the past.

Also, I love The Master's pose in the above photo. I hope that remains his regular outfit in future appearances.

 

I'm braced for whatever curve ball they've got lined up.

 

Remember folks, Dr Who is on earlier tonight - ten to seven.

Is Brendan the Doctor? Were there a percentage of humans born immortal that the Timeys milked of the ability in order to create regeneration? Was being a copper in 1930s Ireland some kind of Timey community service punishment? (Think about it - making a convict life out a mortal life of service isn't that far from exiling Three to Earth), Did the last human refugees become the Timeys? Is it all just an elaborate play on the old Bob Baker/Dave Martin 'Gallifrey is in Iireland' gag? Will the Cybermen plot and the Gallifrey/Timeless Child plot actually be related in any way? Will we really care about any of these after the fact, or is all the 'game-changer forever' stuff just over-hyping?

Either way I do love the new Cyber-helmets, though.

 

I saw a leaked photo from another DW site.

Spoiler

It's the Doctor in the middle of a dais in the Citadel on Gallifrey, with Cybermen around the dais wearing Time Lord ritual garments and presumably chanting something in Old (Get-)High Gallifreyan. How can audiences not be sick of the pale teal/orange puke palette by now? That aside, it's a great photo that does ratchet up suspense at what the Master and friends are up to.

And those Kashyyyyyyyk things from "Spyfall" probably are the ascended Cybermen as everyone was saying the shape was similar, with emotions, mocking humans they hate. 'Ascension' pretty much adds the final piece to make that a plausibility, if not the preceding episode. What did the Master do, indeed. Especially if it turns out they're not related...

I just hope it's not revealed that humans become Time Lords, which is one of many fan theories going around right now... like flu strains. May Chibnall's not be the corona.

 

The Brain of Morbius doctors confirmed as Doctors! LULZ.

 

Haven't fully processed this episode yet but am slightly disappointed Captain Jack did not return.

 

Can't wait for Big Finish to announce box sets starring the Philip Hinchcliffe Doctor, the Douglas Camfield Doctor, etc.

 

I can't see it until tomorrow, but if the added Doctors from "Morbius" aren't due to the Doctor outmaneuvering Morbius with the mind control game, then what... the same incarnation of Doctor had stated he had regenerated two or three times in the past, which discounts the Morbius add-in package. Never mind outright spoken dialogue from Time Lords in asking about the earliest incarnation ("The Three Doctors"), and "Day of the Daleks" which shows only 2 prior incarnations. Unless season 6B has the 2nd Doctor becoming the Morbius Doctors and then the third, complete with mental block... In the end, it doesn't change too much and will be overrode by some other showrunner and/or novel in the future.

But all this is the problem in expanding or fixing disjointed canon, which was also attempted in the 1980s, (which also solidifies the regeneration counter).

I don't recall where Jack said he would return. It was just a silly cameo to drive up ratings.

But it sounds like Doctor Ruth isn't going to be the Doctor in series 13. Unfortunately.

 

I... kinda liked it. The Doctor as the unwitting founder of all Time Lord existence... makes Rassilon look like a dick for trying to whack him, but also does posit whether the Doctor couldn't regenerate on Trenzalore because of a psychosomatic block...

Also makes the Master's destruction of Gallifrey clearer - a little bit of his hated enemy is in each and every Time Lord, including himself. He's the part-human Daleks from Parting Of The Ways in TL form, LOL.

Guess the Xmas Special will be the Doctor escaping prison or perhaps being given a "Suicide Squad" reprieve to fight the Daleks and getting back with Team TARDIS?

 

Was average. The "changes everything" stuff was really just some minor alterations to the cartmel masterplan. I wonder if Tecteun is supposed to be Omega? The Morbius stuff was a nice touch for longtime fans.

Speaking of which, I wonder how this was for new fans? Felt like kind of a big infodump. I didn't mind it as it was all kind of fanwankish stuff and I enjoyed a lot of the references, but I wonder how people who have only been watching for a few years would have taken it?

The only surprise to me was the Judoon being able to transmat into a tardis.

 

Was that Shada at the end? Because I'm pretty sure The Doctor has been imprisoned in Shada.

Considering all of the revelations of the episode, I frankly don't understand why The Master was sooo mad that he decided to destroy all the Time Lords and transform them into Cybermen. So the early history of the Time Lords and how they achieved regeneration was a lie (odd that Rassilon and Omega were never mentioned in any form) and The Doctor isn't really Gallifreyian. Those are big revelations, but why does that bother The Master so much? He never had any fondness for the Time Lords, their history, or anything else related to them. Certainly to a degree, he does care about The Doctor but I still can't fathom why this new knowledge angered him so much.

And that lies the crux to why I'm not a big fan of this episode. I'm still processing the truths about The Doctor and that means about her past (it certainly does inject new mystery into her, if nothing else), but this whole season's climax was built upon The Master's anger and feelings of betrayal and I simply don't feel like it's justified. Not unlike my own feelings about series 8's climax was dependent on Danny and his relationship with Clara, when I absolutely despised Danny and never felt any real passion from their relationship.

While I like the sudden twist at the end with the Judoon miraculously showing up to apprehend The Doctor, I don't like how they easily breached the TARDIS' security systems. I think it would've been better if they had showed up outside of the TARDIS just before The Doctor had the chance to go back in. That would've been more heartbreaking and more realistic (within the confines of Doctor Who's own logic).

While I'm not surprised he didn't show, I am a bit disappointed that Captain Jack didn't appear. There wasn't much room for his presence to fit into the storyline. On the other hand, aside acting as a stand-in for The Master's grand scheming, the whole Cyberman plotline from the previous two episodes felt completely disconnected with the rest of the episode and, as a result, I just didn't care because I wanted the episode to get back to The Doctor in the Matrix and the following repercussions.

Now to really sit back and process these new revelations because I'm still not sure how I feel about them (aside from injecting new mystery in the character's history).

 

Well, that was a bit of a muddle. Fun, well shot, good scenes for everybody, but not a permanent game-changer, because there's a built-in get-out-of-jail-free card in the simple fact of who was telling us all this stuff, and in what format/setting... I expect some of it will stick and some of it will be quietly forgotten/overwritten.

In general, though, nice and spectacular, lacked the courage of its convictions a bit, disappointingly didn't echo Murray's Cybermen theme in the music, and had as many flaws as cool moments. Still utterly kicked the living shit out of last year's Battle of Ravi Shankar as finales go, and I liked the 'what, what, what' RTD-style cliffhanger-to-special, and left things open for the various companions to return or not according to availability, depending on who's in the Dalek special.

Oh, of course the title was a lie - still only one Timeless Child, origin unaddressed, which I guess means they can look at that next season if they want...

 

I'm not 100% certain that the BBC owns Shada as a concept. That may be owned by the Douglas Adams estate, though Titan Comics has used Shada; the eleventh Doctor and River Song staged a break-in of Shada in Eleventh Doctor Year Two.

 

Regarding the Morbius Doctors, I postulate that perhaps The Fourth Doctor wasn't actively aware of how he was able to fight Morbius while at the same time reflexively reaching back to his hidden past to fight back Morbius' psychic attack. As Allyn said, this has Big Finish written all over it.

Hm, I didn't even think about that particular hurdle. But until I am able to go back and rewatch the episode (which I need to do because my feed froze several times and I missed out about a minute or two overall), I'm going to maintain that was Shada because the exterior looked like it was.

 

Which Timeys know what is addressed in the episode, so the ones in Three Doctors may not have known the 'truth'.

That said, everything we saw here was told by the Master, and a Matrix duplicate of the Master, in a Matrix that he admitted earlier he had been hacking, and which had bits of data erased. Not the galaxy's most convincing source of information. Which means the Morbius Docs she threw at it may well have been just repeating Four's use of the images to pile on the enemy she's mentally fighting.

IOW, everything the revealed has a get-out-of-jail-free card and at least half of it will probably be forgotten in future and never mentioned again.

RuthDoc herself is the only 'real' anomaly, still.

 

^ Yeah, pretty much all of that.

Mildly disappointed but not badly disappointed.

 

There's always Series 13. Or, if it's anything like last season, the special will be the REAL series finale.

I know in Lawrence Miles' unlicensed 8th Doctor spin-off Faction Paradox they had to refer to it as "the prison planet".

 

Dunno about that, I just checked my Shada BD and I don't see any Douglas Adams copyrights.

 

Yup, I had the same thought. Between The Master and the Matrix, the sources on these new truths are rather dubious at best. Hell, the possibility of The Master lying about all of this would help reconcile my disbelief in his anger over these revelations.

 

I just watched it. The kids loved it. Now let’s never talk of this again,