Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Doctor Who season 12.
The Doctor Who season 12 finale has finally explained the mystery of the Timeless Child. The Timeless Child was first mentioned in Doctor Who season 11, episode 2, when the Doctor was subjected to a psychic probe by a race known as the Remnants. "We see... further back," the Remnants whispered. "The Timeless Child… we see what’s hidden, even from yourself. The outcast, abandoned and unknown…" These words were unexplained at the time, but they left the Doctor shaken to the core.
The Timeless Child swiftly became key to showrunner Chris Chibnall's vision. In the season 12 premiere, the Master taunted the Doctor, revealing the Timeless Child is the dark secret at the heart of Time Lord civilization. "They lied to us," he told the Doctor. "Everything we were told was a lie. We are not who we think. You or I. The whole existence of our species - built on the lie of the Timeless Child." The secret led the Master to destroy his entire homeworld of Gallifrey in what seemed nothing more than a fit of spite, and his words caused the Doctor to experience a vision in which she caught a glimpse of the Timeless Child.
The Doctor Who season 12 finale, "The Timeless Children," saw the returned Master present an extended villain's monologue in which he finally revealed the truth about the Timeless Child. He did so using the Matrix, a virtual reality system that acts as the repository of all Time Lord knowledge and history, and it's no exaggeration to say Doctor Who will never be the same again.
When Doctor Who began in 1963, the showrunners had no clear idea of whom this enigmatic wanderer in the fourth dimension really was. Over the years, though, the Doctor's history has gradually been revealed. She's a renegade Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous, who grew dissatisfied with her race's refusal to intervene in galactic affairs. The Doctor swore to never be cruel or cowardly, to never give in, and to always fight on behalf of the oppressed and vulnerable. According to the Master, all that is a lie. The Doctor is not a Time Lord at all; she is something far, far more, a Timeless Child. The truth has been hidden from her - until now.
The Master discovered the true history of the Time Lords while paying his homeworld a visit and raiding the Matrix for lost knowledge - something of a hobby of his in the classic series. He succeeded in digging deeper than ever before, recovering long-lost memories of Gallifrey that predated Time Lord civilization. Those ancient Gallifreyans were known as the Shobogans, and they were a simple race, yet to make their presence felt on a galactic scale. One of their earliest explorers was a woman named Tecteun, a pioneer of space travel who burned with a passion to travel the stars. The Master became captivated by her story, watching with fascination as he learned of the risks she had taken. And then, on some distant world, Tecteun discovered an impossible wormhole to another universe.
Tecteun found a mysterious gateway, a boundary to another unknown dimension or universe. It's unclear whether the boundary was natural or artificial, but it's clearly the same one used by humans countless millennia later to escape the Cyber War. Beneath the boundary was a monument, perhaps suggesting the boundary itself had been created, or else other races had used the boundary before now. "Tecteun glimpsed the infinite through that gateway," the Master observed, "and beneath the monument she found - a child." This was the Timeless Child, apparently an outcast from this other realm, and Tecteun adopted the cosmic refugee as her own daughter. The child accompanied Tecteun on her exploratory voyages, presumably growing to share her mother's wanderlust. Eventually, they returned to Gallifrey.
Then, one tragic day, an accident, while playing with another child, sent Tecteun's daughter plummeting to her apparent death. To Tecteun's amazement, her child did not die, but instead regenerated - "the first regeneration of any person on the planet of Gallifrey," the Master explained. Tecteun, a scientist as well as an explorer, set to work attempting to understand the Timeless Child's powers. She dedicated her life to studying the Timeless Child, detailing every fragment of her genetic material, and she succeeded in cracking the code of regeneration - even at the cost of several of the Timeless Child's lives during her experimentation. Tecteun then tested her theories upon herself, regenerating, becoming the first true Time Lord.
Regeneration proved the key to Gallifrey's development as a global power. Tecteun now had immortality, and - having regenerated into a male form - he helped his particular tribe of Shobogans to advance socially and technologically. They built a Citadel, and Tecteun spliced the ability of regeneration into the genes of the Citadel-dwellers, creating a self-appointed ruling elite. The Timeless Child became the base genetic code for all Gallifreyans within the Citadel, although Tecteun chose to restrict them to just twelve lives. The people of the Citadel became the nascent Time Lords.
While the Master is generally duplicitous, he seems to be telling the truth, given the Matrix files clearly show Tecteun and her experiments upon the Timeless Child. That means William Hartnell, the actor who played the Doctor from 1963-1966, was not the First Doctor after all; rather, he had his memories of previous lives erased by the Time Lords. "The Timeless Children" confirms the Doctor had at least seven lives - both male and female - prior to William Hartnell.
The penultimate episode of Doctor Who season 12, "Ascension of the Cybermen," included a sub-plot featuring a mystery man named Brendan. His story parallels the Timeless Child's; he was found as a baby by two adoring adoptive parents in Ireland and became part of the community there. He took on a job as a police officer, and then - in a shocking twist - he was shot by a criminal he was pursuing, knocked off the side of a cliff. Astonishingly, Brendan survived the incident completely unharmed, and the final shots showed him being experimented upon by the people he had been living among.
According to the Master, the story of Brendan was a "filter" created by the Time Lords, created to conceal memories of the Timeless Child absorbed into the Matrix. He was irregularly beaming these memories into the Doctor's mind during her escape from the Cybermen, which explains why the scenes kept flashing up in "Ascension of the Cybermen." The Master speculated the memories had been left behind by Tecteun as a gift to the Doctor to help her learn the truth about herself. This is a pretty odd twist, but perhaps suggests there are more as-yet-unrevealed clues to the Timeless Child concealed within Brendan's story.
There's now a substantial jump in the Master's tale. He skips the early days of Time Lord history when the Time Lords took a more interventionist approach; those ended in tragedy, with the Time Lords unwittingly giving a race called the Minyans the power to wipe themselves out. As a result, the Time Lords imposed new rules of non-intervention. Not all Time Lords were willing to accept these strictures, however, leading to the founding of a black-ops organisation apparently called "The Division." It's now that the Master's story picks up again, with the renegade Master revealing the Timeless Child was recruited as a field agent for the Division, manipulating history to serve Gallifrey's interests. It was the Division who ultimately erased the Timeless Child's memories, planting him back into Time Lord society, where he grew up alongside the young Master.
The Division presumably evolved into the Celestial Intervention Agency, a clandestine Time Lord organisation in the classic series. The CIA protected Gallifrey by carefully manipulating history, frequently using the Doctor as their unwilling agent. Ironically, the CIA would prove to be Gallifrey's undoing in the end; they fired the first shot in the Time War in "Genesis of the Daleks," when they sent the Fourth Doctor to Skaro to try to prevent the creation of the Daleks.
All this fits fairly well with a previous episode of Doctor Who season 12, "Fugitive of the Judoon," in which the Doctor encountered a possible forgotten past incarnation. Played by Jo Martin, this maybe-Doctor had been living as a human, using a Chameleon Arch to hide on Earth. When the facade lifted, however, she remembered her true identity and introduced herself as the Doctor. The episode went to great lengths to confirm both Jo Martin and Jodie Whittaker's characters really were two different incarnations of the same Time Lord. It deployed all the traditional multi-Doctor tropes, including personality clashes and occasionally finishing each other's thoughts. The Judoon scanned the two Doctors and realized they were indeed the same person. At the same time, though, Martin's Doctor appeared to be pre-Hartnell; her TARDIS was similar to the Hartnell era design, she had his habit of referring to the TARDIS as her "ship," and she didn't know what a sonic screwdriver was.
"Fugitive of the Judoon" revealed Martin's Doctor had been working for the Time Lords, but had gone rogue and hidden from them. This corresponds nicely with the Master's revelations in "The Timeless Children." Presumably this past Doctor had ultimately decided she didn't want to work for the Division anymore, prompting her decision to hide away on Earth. She wound up on the run from the Time Lords, and in the end, they captured her. The Time Lords forced a regeneration, a similar punishment to the one they imposed on Patrick Troughton's Doctor, and then erased her memory so she reintegrated into Gallifreyan society. It's safe to assume the memory wipe didn't manage to erase everything, of course; the reborn Time Lord still chose to call herself the Doctor, retained her love of exploration and her belief in the importance of intervention, and even stole her battered old Type 40 TARDIS. By this reading, the TARDIS returned to a comfortable shape when it disguised itself as a police box in Doctor Who season 1's episode "An Unearthly Child," and it then stuck again. Chris Chibnall avoids spelling this out in "The Timeless Children," but it's the most logical explanation for Martin's Doctor. It remains to be seen, of course, whether Chibnall has any further convoluted twists in mind.
This is easily the biggest retcon in the history of Doctor Who, and as such it causes major continuity problems; it's particularly difficult to reconcile it with the Matt Smith era, which kicked off with the Atraxi conveniently finding records of the Doctors viewers already knew about. In season 7, episode 17, "The Name of the Doctor," Clara Oswald learned what it meant to be the Impossible Girl and found herself projected through time, saving the Doctor's life on many different occasions. Again, this seemed restricted only to the period previously shown in Doctor Who. Finally, "The Time of the Doctor" saw Matt Smith decide how to use what he believed was his final incarnation; the Time Lords intervened to give him a whole new life cycle. According to "The Timeless Children," that was superfluous because the Doctor - unlike the Time Lords - has unlimited lives.
And yet, this does actually correspond with subtle hints that have been given throughout the show's history. In the Tom Baker story "The Brain of Morbius," the Doctor became locked in a psychic duel with another Time Lord. Memories of previous Doctors were displayed on a monitor, with Morbius declaring, "How far, Doctor? How long have you lived? Back, back to your beginning…" The images continued back after William Hartnell, displaying eight more faces, apparently in period dress, before the machine exploded. Producer Philip Hinchcliffe told the Radio Times he definitely intended to suggest there had been other versions of the Doctor before Hartnell. "I just reasoned that it was entirely possible that William Hartnell may not have been the first Doctor Who," he explained. "So yes, as far as [writer] Bob [Holmes] and I were concerned, the other faces were meant to be past Doctors… it is true to say that I attempted to imply that William Hartnell was not the first Doctor."
Chibnall's retcon also resolves some plot threads from the Sylvester McCoy era. In the 1980s, script editor Andrew Cartmel decided it was time to restore a sense of mystery to the Doctor, and he began writing in oblique hints the Doctor was "more than just a Time Lord." Dialogue implied the Doctor had been present at the very dawn of Time Lord civilization. Nothing came of this; Doctor Who was canceled before the idea could be developed, and the so-called "Cartmel Masterplan" was relegated to tie-in books that aren't considered canon. But all the clues Cartmel slipped into the scripts can now be seen as pointers to the Timeless Child.
Of course, the problem with this theory is that the Doctor's mind was supposed to be wiped. But the regeneration process scrambles neurons, meaning previous incarnations of the Doctor may have known a little more of their past than Whittaker's so-called "Thirteenth Doctor." Even Whittaker's Doctor has implied the existence of previous, unseen Doctors; "Arachnids in the U.K." hinted at previous female Doctors. So it's possible fragments of memory occasionally bubbled to the surface, but the Time Lord conditioning prevented the Doctor looking any further. That would certainly explain why she never discovered the truth of the Timeless Child until confronted by the Master, even though previous episodes in Doctor Who season 12 said she'd spent days exploring the ruins of Gallifrey, looking for clues but finding none.
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