Timeout for the Timeless Children
“Zaphod’s just this guy, you know.” – Gag Halfrunt
[Normally I blog about organizational psych. Today I’m blogging about Doctor Who]
I’ve been trying to figure out why “The Timeless Children” bugged me so much.
It’s not like Doctor Who never changes. It’s a show about change, and sometimes its hard to accept just how profoundly the show can change from one regeneration to another. I recall one regeneration where I thought the show had changed beyond recognition; where it seemed to be upending everything that made the Doctor the Doctor; where the very definition of the character seemed to change beyond recognition.
Jodie Whittaker? No, not Jodie Whittaker. Don’t be silly.
I’m talking about the time the 5th Doctor unraveled the scarf and broke the sonic (or sonic screwdriver as it was called back then).
I’ve been watching the show for over 42 years, since I randomly turned it on one Saturday afternoon while sitting around the house bored. It so happened that I got the first episode of Robot, which fans my age (and hopefully others) will recognize as Tom Baker’s first serial. My introduction to the show was seeing this guy lying on the floor turning into someone else, and then seeing that person walk in and out of a blue box. Each time, he had on a different set of clothing until he emerged with the scarf (and I think the hat as well). I was hooked.
It was the late 1970s and getting Doctor Who on TV was challenging. By the time I left for college, I still hadn’t seen all of Tom Baker. It was a long time before I finally did, and saw my first regeneration (I’m not counting the bit at the beginning of Robot since I didn’t know what that was at the time). It took some getting used to, but it quickly apparent that the Doctor was still the Doctor, just with a different face. The physical details are a fun quirk of the character, but really the Doctor is always the Doctor, young or old, male or female, with or without a 12-foot-long scarf (that last one was hard to accept).
But who was the Doctor? That wasn’t such a big deal back then. We knew the story: a young, disaffected Time Lord who couldn’t bring himself to sit idly by and watch others suffer, so he stole a TARDIS that was in for repairs. Nothing terribly complicated. The Doctor was no one in particular. The 4th Doctor says as much in “The Brain of Morbius” when he challenges Morbius to mind-bending, with the goal of making Morbius’s artificial brain case short out.
Morbius: “You challenge me? I am a Time Lord of the First Rank! What are you?”
Doctor: “Oh, nothing, nothing. A mere nobody, but I don’t think you’re in the first rank anymore.”
Granted, the Doctor may not be telling the truth, but the way the contest goes it certainly seems as if he is. Morbius only loses because the brain-case shorts out, and he’s still able to deal a mortal blow to the Doctor. The Doctor is saved from death only because the Sisterhood gives him the Elixir of Life.
(Yes, I’m ignoring the whole bit about the images in the mind-bending contest because really just because some were previous regenerations doesn’t mean they all were. They could be anything.).
Now, of course, in the Timeless Children episode we find out that the Doctor is not the mere nobody claimed by the 4th Doctor but she is something special: an eternal being, gifted with infinite regenerations, the source of Time Lord regenerative power. This rather ignores the earlier claim that regeneration somehow results from exposure to the Time Vortex, which is why Riversong could regenerate: her mother traveled in the TARDIS while pregnant, exposing River to the vortex from conception onward. But that’s a minor nit really.
So the Doctor isn’t a mere nobody. In fact the Doctor is really somebody. Or should that be Really Somebody?
So why should it matter that the Doctor is a mere nobody? In a sense, that’s the whole point of the Doctor: she’s not special. She’s not important. Oh maybe now, maybe after 3000 years or so, she’s become somebody important, but she didn’t start that way. She didn’t steal a TARDIS because she was special; she stole it because she wasn’t. She cared and wanted to do something, not stand idly by.
With Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who, we’re given someone who is no longer the nobody who took action and became someone important. Instead, we’re given a godlike being who has existed for billions of years, immortal, virtually unkillable (think about it – even Time Lords can die, so what does it take to survive for billions of years? Morbius’s body was disintegrated, and his brain couldn’t regenerate on its own, so there are limits. Yet the Doctor keeps on going.).
Even the Doctor’s motivation isn’t real any more: we see in the episode that an earlier incarnation of the entity that would become the Doctor (should we call that incarnation the Intern?) volunteered to be one of the agents who would go out and do the Time Lord’s (dirty) work. So maybe the Time Lords put a more romantic notion in their head, but ultimately Chibnall is telling us that the Doctor’s motivations may not even be the Doctor’s motivations. I’m not sure if that’s what Chibnall intended, but that’s the logical consequence of how its presented.
Again, why does it matter? Part of what makes the Doctor a sympathetic and approachable figure is that he or she is no one. The Doctor is the hero with a thousand faces (okay, in the Doctor’s case this is more than figurative. However, it shouldn’t be literal — see below). The point is, you don’t have to be a god to make a difference; you can start out as no one at all. As Gag Halfrunt reminded everyone, Zaphod Beeblebrox (to mix my shows, but, to be fair, Douglas Adams did write for Doctor Who), erstwhile president of the galaxy, was just this guy.
The Doctor can wear a scarf or a stalk of celery or a rainbow coat. The Doctor can be he or she. Those are all superficial. The character is everyone. But no longer. It’s no longer the story of a wanderer trying to do some good in the universe, and often (though not always) succeeding. Now it’s the story of a wandering god who perhaps has forgotten its divinity, but is still a god. It’s kind of like getting to the end of the Lord of the Rings and discovering that Frodo was really a Valar all along.
But Wait, It Gets Silly
Doctor Who has always had inconsistencies and continuity errors. That’s the nature of a time travel show where the rules are fluid. However, Timeless Children has a couple of other logical inconsistencies — or maybe “laugh out loud” moments — that go above and beyond even what is typical for the show.
In this brave new Who, the Doctor has been around for billions of years. If we assume an average incarnation duration of 500 years (which is probably optimistic given the Doctor’s lifestyle, but it’s an easy number to work with), that means that over a billion years there would be 2,000,000 Doctors. That is, 2,000,000 Doctors per1 billion years. We don’t know exactly how long Gallifreyans have existed, but the implication throughout the show is that they’ve been around a significant fraction of the universe’s 13 billion years of existence. So what does that give us? 8,000,000 Doctors? 10,000,000? More?
But wait, it gets sillier.
Did all the Doctors go to London in 1963? Jo Martin’s Doctor is supposedly a completely different regeneration set, yet somehow her TARDIS is stuck as a blue police box. How many other “first” Doctors did the same thing?
The population of London in the early 1960s was about 8,000,000 people. Given what appears to be a lot of Doctors visiting London in the same approximate time period, it’s odd that they’ve never bumped into each other. Or filled up the city. Are they source of the traffic congestion? Or is London a city of Doctors? Is the Doctor their own species? Can they reproduce with one another? Did the Doctor inspire Robert A Heinlein? (think about it…).
And who was the second agent in that brief scene where the Doctor’s early incarnation was being told they passed some test? The Master? Or maybe the Master is really a different set of Doctor incarnations? Let’s face it, there are enough to go around.
Speaking of the Master, how did he manage to destroy Gallifrey? Where did the Master get that sort of power and why didn’t any of the Time Lords regenerate?
Not that saving Gallifrey would be all that difficult. At least the first time Gallifrey was destroyed Russell Davies had the plot device that it was time locked as a result of the Time War and the Weapon. The Doctor couldn’t just go back and fix it, nor could the Time Lords easily escape through time (the whole point of David Tennant’s final stories). Now, though, the Time Lords of the past can always dispatch a Doctor, or even a few dozen Doctors, to fix it. Sometimes show-runners write themselves into corners. This corner has a trapdoor, a window, and a bloody big hole in the ceiling. Also, a door, and it’s unlocked.
On the other hand, why should we even care about Gallifrey anymore? What made the first destruction of Gallifrey poignant was the Doctor’s pain and loneliness. But now, Gallifrey doesn’t matter. The Doctor is alone no matter what. And somehow, it’s really hard to care.
The Master thought he could break the Doctor by showing her that there were more of her than she thought and that the Time Lords were using her. The Master blew it. He should have said, “You think you’re so good, so noble? You were programmed. You’re a deep-cover agent who was programmed to think you care and you volunteered to be programmed. You left Gallifrey because you were programmed to leave. You never made the choice.”
This is not the first time Doctor Who has had plot holes. Most of them, all things considered, were pretty small. This may well be the first time the plot hole is bigger on the inside.
Okay, now what?
So what really changes at this point?
Pre-Chibnall the Doctor was a wandering Time Lord, a member of somewhat mysterious species whom we think we know a lot about, but really don’t. The Doctor is long-lived, hard to kill, knowledgeable, and imperfect.
Now the Doctor is a wandering… something. A member of an even more mysterious species (the Thyme Lords?) from beyond the universe. The Doctor is long-lived, hard to kill, knowledgeable, and imperfect.
The Doctor is now special by birth.
There are now a lot more of the Doctor.
The writers can grant the Doctor ever more godlike powers because now the Doctor is some other being and they’re no longer constrained by what we thought we knew about the Time Lords.
For a big, earth-shattering (Gallifrey-shattering?) reveal, the Timeless Children manages to simultaneously feel huge and sort of silly at the same time.
Doctor Who has always been about change. But the changes existed in a tacit framework or set of constraints about who the character is and how the world works. The constraints on the story create the dramatic tension. A great story is one where the author sets up the rules of the world, creates what appears to be an impossible situation, and then reveals a solution that fits the constraints and is also (hopefully) unexpected. A poor story is one where the author just blows up the constraints whenever it’s convenient. And sure, skilled authors change the constraints of their stories all the time – they just do it in ways that aren’t obvious, which (at their best) don’t tip us off to what they’re up to, and which leave us feeling like it all made sense the whole time.
Maybe the best we can hope for is that it’ll turn out that the Master screwing around with Time created some sort of discontinuity, and this is the result. The Master “rewrote” some of the mathematics of the universe (perhaps in the style of Logopolis only more so) and fixing it will also remove all this nonsense from Chibnall. Unfortunately, I think we’ll have to wait for a new showrunner before that happens.
