Spoilers The Timeless Children grade and discussion thread

Ah, so Brendan is not real? I was confused about that.

 

Fine my me

 

It turns out none of it was in Ireland or even a fake Ireland. It was all on Gallifrey and everything looked Gallifreyan, but Tecteun put a perception filter on the Matrix recordings so it wouldn't look important--it made it look like Ireland. At least that was my take on what was done!

 

Which really begs the question do Gallifreyans really, really like Old Earth?

Because they really like using Earth imagery in their virtual constructs.

 

I think so as well. The BF sets take place, IMO, somewhere in the middle of his incarnation's lifetime, closer to the end than the beginning. Shalka is his one venture off the Time War, with a mechanical Master to remind him of the friend he once had. Or something to that effect.

BTW, since the Master was mentioned again, is it at all possible that NuWho will ever depict the emotionally scared but psychotic and creepy Master as portrayed by Geoffrey Beevers in the audios? He's proper intimidating in those, despite having the appearence he had in Keeper of Traken. I just can't stand the campy Master act at all anymore.

 

Why does the child regenerate so often? The first time was an accident but the others??? Was the child experimented on?

I have always thought timelords cannot see their own future, just everyone elses.

 

And it was set in Old Earth Ireland for some unfathomable reason, aliens must like Old Earth.

 

Brendan was false memories that the timespies used to cover up the doctors secret life is what they said, but I think they meant that this is how they reboot the Doctor, every time they gets to the end of their 12th regeneration.

 

It's more obvious than that. Tectun(sp) placed spliced the Doctor's DNA into the Timelords, as the Master says a little piece of the Doctor is in him. Ergo all Timelords except the Doctor are in fact hybrids.

The very last Doctor stumbles through a gate and regenerates into a little girl who's then found by Tectun?

This. The problem besetting Jodie since the start and it's going to be horribly ironic if the first female Doctor is remembered as a passive observer rather than anything else. I thought they'd made great strides in reversing that this year, only for Chibnall to revert to type in the finale. Someone on Twitter said that the Doctor should have struggled through the Matrix (like Baker in The Deadly Assassin) and come to the realisation herself. Instead we just get the Master going all Basil Exposition while she stands there.

I don't believe you have to be a woman to write women well, any more than you need to be a bloke to write men well, but Christ Chibnall can't seem to get a handle on how to use this Doctor.

 

Even though it was implied that the child was loved and cared about. Weird.

 

Loved and cared for until she regenerated was how I read it.

 

Unless stated otherwise, I stick to the notion that most Time Lords are completely oblivious to his nature.
There are probably just a handful of them at beat who know the truth. Maybe even just one, and they might be completely out of the picture by now.
So unless someone digs deep into the codex and decodes the altered recordings of the Timeless Child, no one would have known.
Millions of years Is even enough for Time Lords to forget their own history.
And the rewriting of their origin was deliberate as we’ve seen.

 

M

Maybe they've renovated?

 

And it's a big problem, of which the way to get out of this big big epic setup is by saying "Oh. The Master lied." It's an incredible crock and from solely exposition of her greatest enemy doing it. My cat can hack up better material than that.

The Master also discovered and then told the Doctor, via direct analysis and not just an excuse for this instance, the Doctor was half-human as to why he's "more than just a time lord". (1996 TVM)

But producers since then didn't always go along with what has been accepted as canon as well or else McGann wouldn't have been shown in any form. I'm even partly sure that Doctor 16 will have another origins salad toss story (with Gallifrey moved to a pocket universe and destroyed... again), and Doctor 24 will have a couple incarnations stowed away and will be given another set of lives. Or an even different excuse. The show hasn't been great on continuity and has to reinvent and rewrite itself, whenever needed, as a shock moment in an attempt to get at crowd-pleasing ratings. Probably because any other show singing "wibbly wobbly timey wimey humany wumany with a box, wanna wide in it squee" would be laughed at.

And, of course, for being such an epic pre-release teaser with the big glass wall and everything else... she's just a passive snoozefest copy of Tennant (not an uncommon but proven claim). But pre-release visuals showed "the fam" with a big bright colorful background. With hues more varied and more saturated than the corpse-like teal orange palette that the actual episodes were. That's another irony, if not another bait and switch by the Chibster. He really doesn't know what he's doing.

At least Tosin and Bradley are leaving while the going is good.

 

But not improbable. It can relate to Stockholm Syndrome and other things, prior or after the abuse...

 

With a label on that reads Our Rob or Ross, yeah.

 

Am I the only one that picked up on the sinister implication that the Timeless Child regenerated multiple times while being experimented on?

As for the episode as a whole; I'm honestly rather "meh" about the whole thing. There's something lacking, or rather there's just too much of everything. It all feels rather muddled and rushed.
Still not a fan of this incarnation of The Master; nothing against the actor it just the whole thing seems like a step down after Missy.

Not especially bothered either way about the revelation of the Doctor's past. I suspect somewhere down the line it'll end up being some kind of closed loop with the Doctor eventually going back and reverting to thr Timeless Child again...unless this whole thing gets retconned out. Who knows?
Could have been worse though; for a moment there I thought they might be setting up that the last humans as the progenitors of the Time Lords.
Incidentally, how many groups of "the last humans in the universe" have been in Who at this point? Three? Four?

I'll probably regret asking this; but doesn't this contradict the whole origin of River Song? Specifically the notion that ability to regenerate comes from exposure to the time vortex? In untempered schism in the case of the Time Lords and being conceived while in flight for River/Melody?
I may have answered my own question there; maybe the Timeless child was conceived in the time vortex like River, and the untempered schism had nothing to do with regeneration?

 

Another layer about it that's disturbing is that the Timeless Child was basically a little girl who was experimented on.. and she was "fine" with it.

Like a rape victim finding out years later she was ruffied and raped but, you know, kewl!!!