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Spoilers The Timeless Children grade and discussion thread

How do you rate The Timeless Children?


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    91
That was explained, the Time Lords covered the depiction of the Timeless Child's origins in the Matrix with the metaphorical tale set in Ireland about an orphan who grows up and joins the police because that was so bland and uninteresting no one would pay attention to it. And then, during last week's events, the Master was sending this telepathically to the Doctor.
Ah, so Brendan is not real? I was confused about that.
 
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So.........trying to piece this all together here, what exactly was the point of all that time we spent with the Irish orphan who became a police officer? Why did that get so much screen time? That was an earlier regeneration? So, why is that so important? I feel like I'm just not understanding how it all works.

The more I think about this episode, the less I understand it.
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!
 
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.
 
That's been my view since 2013. :)

We know the War Doctor began as a young man and ended as an old man. While Big Finish uses a Time Destructor to age up the War Doctor in their first box set, i prefer to think that the War Doctor lived a very, very long life, and I would not be opposed to "young" War Doctor audios from Big Finish with a recast actor.
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?

Shouldn't the time lords know what the Master is capable of, since they have access to the future?
I have always thought timelords cannot see their own future, just everyone elses.
 
Why did the Judoon have an arrest warrant for The Doctor? I don't feel that was adequately explained why they nabbed her at the end?

I thought they were after the Ruth Doctor, speaking of which where did she bugger off to? And why no Jack in the finale?
They don't care which Doctor they bag, they are just after The Doctor. There's a fantastic coincidence in the fact they find The Doctor at this exact point in her timeline after she's just encountered Ruth Doctor again and learnt how she is the Doctor, but then stuff has always happened to the Doctor at exactly the most dramatic time.

Why does the child regenerate so often? The first time was an accident but the others??? Was the child experimented on?
I wondered that - was the implication that they repeatedly killed the child? Because that's sort of how I read it.


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

No he wasn't - it was a story that mirrored that of the timeless child. For some reason.
 
They don't care which Doctor they bag, they are just after The Doctor. There's a fantastic coincidence in the fact they find The Doctor at this exact point in her timeline after she's just encountered Ruth Doctor again and learnt how she is the Doctor, but then stuff has always happened to the Doctor at exactly the most dramatic time.


I wondered that - was the implication that they repeatedly killed the child? Because that's sort of how I read it.




No he wasn't - it was a story that mirrored that of the timeless child. For some reason.

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.
 
I'm guessing that the bit where Matt Smith gets his regenerations reset is now, what, theatre to cover the truth?
 
Come to think of it...
The Hybrid turned out to be the Master/Cyberium at the end.

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.

One thing I hope they never do is try to explain the source of the Timeless Child - because there's one fucking obvious and inevitable answer that's both both utterly predictable and yet utterly unbeatable, so either doing it or attempting to do something else would be a disappointment.

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

My thoughts:
The Doctor lacks agency for most of it. The story happens to her instead of her making it happen.

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.
 
I'm guessing that the bit where Matt Smith gets his regenerations reset is now, what, theatre to cover the truth?
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
Okay, so my memory about Shada was off (memory is a fickle beast) but the principle is still the same (even if I could've sworn it was a lot closer in design).

Maybe, maybe not Shada:

NotShada.jpg



Animated Shada:

AnimatedShada.jpg



Shada:

Shada.jpg
Maybe they've renovated?
 
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.

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

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