The doctor's physical age is somehow linked to memory.
This is why the 1st Doctor grew from childhood, his memories had been reset on this regeneration so his body reset with it.- While not confirmed one way or the other, it has been implied in other media that Time Lords can regenerate into any physical age range, including young children, so… maybe, but not necessarily.
The asteroid prison is the Shadow Proclamation
It looks almost exactly the same. The Christmas Special will start with the Shadow Architect finding that the Doctor has been imprisoned. She'll quip about the Doctor deserving this punishment after running away in "The Stolen Earth", after which the Doctor will inform her of the extinct status of the Time Lords and be released. Tecteun is Rassilon's original name or a pseudonym used by him
Genetically modifying native Gallifreyans to give them the ability to regenerate, instituting the 12 regeneration limit and functionally founding Time Lord society? Seems a bit coincidental, especially as Tecaptacteun gave themselves the ability to regenerate before coming up with the limit, and so would have an infinite supply of regenerations, much like Rassilon does.- Alternately, Rassilon could be just one of Tecteun's contemporaries, and being the egoistic person Rassilon was, he could just claim credit for Tecteun's discovery and introduction of regeneration.
- Probably it took several more experiments for Tecteun to work out how to limit the number of regenerations she bestowed, so there may have been several associates of hers who volunteered for the treatment early on. Most of those will have been permanently killed off in the interim - we know the Doctor died for keeps in the alternate "Turn Left" timeline, so infinite regenerations still don't ensure all deaths are survivable - during long-ago conflicts like the Great Vampire and Racnoss Wars, or otherwise fallen by the wayside like Omega being trapped in an anti-matter universe. Rassilon, far from Gallifrey's greatest leader, may simply be the only one left from that era of infinite-or-nothing regeneration.
- "Rassilon" may be a Gallifreyan title (like "Lord" or "Sir") by which Tecteun became known as their place as a founder of Time Lord society became mythologized, rather than a given name.
- Seemingly jossed by the script for the episode: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/doctor-who-s12-ep10-the-timeless-children.pdf
, which suggests that the two figures standing next to Tecteun in the Matrix projection are Rassilon and Omega.
Tecteun is Omega.
The real reason behind the rumor Rassilon was behind Omega's fall into the black hole wasn't(just) wanting the glory all to himself. Instead, Omega came to regret the horrible things he did to give his people a form of immortality and wanted to come clean. Not wanting any of this, Rassilon sabotaged his black hole experimentation so nobody would learn the truth. A billion years alone made him too preoccupied with being crazy to spill the beans, and may not even know the Timeless Child grew up to become the Doctor. Maybe time travel was something else exploited first from the Timeless Child and their people, and Omega was actually developing a morally clean way to be Time Lords. Rassilon agreed, but because they'd be better off self-reliant.- Seemingly jossed by the script for the episode: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/doctor-who-s12-ep10-the-timeless-children.pdf, which suggests that the two figures standing next to Tecteun in the Matrix projection are Rassilon and Omega.
Tecteun is The Other
Since she is the one who raised the Doctor at the very start, it makes sense for her to also be The Woman in the End of Time. Effectively, she is the Doctor's mother, even if the Doctor may not have biological parents.- Alternately, the Woman in "The End Of Time" was the Doctor's adoptive mother from One's early life, and the one who hid the vision of Brendan deep inside the boy's mind as a clue. Tecteun was the other female Time Lord seen covering her face and berated by Rassilon, possibly for refusing or outright failing to upgrade every Gallifreyan soldier to be infinitely-regenerating.
- This begs the question of which of them turns into the weeping angel that we see in "Blink" and so on? The fact that it's always the same female looking angel isn't a coincidence. It's one of the 2, checking in on their child.
- No one became a Weeping Angel? The two were forced to cover their faces like the Weeping Angels as a way of shaming them, they didn't become Weeping Angels (besides, all full sized Weeping Angels have the same female looking form).
- Series 13 makes this look quite unlikely, as Tecteun is still alive outside the universe long after "The End of Time," making it seem like she left Gallifrey long before the Time War. Additionally, Tecteun has no problem destroying the universe in Series 13, making it unlikely that she'd protest the Ultimate Sanction or otherwise oppose Rassilon.
- This begs the question of which of them turns into the weeping angel that we see in "Blink" and so on? The fact that it's always the same female looking angel isn't a coincidence. It's one of the 2, checking in on their child.
- In the flashback seen of the Time Lords' early days, we see the newly-regenerated Tecteun flanked by two other Time Lords. These may be Rassilon and Omega, making Tecteun the Other.
- Seemingly confirmed by the script for the episode: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/doctor-who-s12-ep10-the-timeless-children.pdf.
- Seemingly confirmed by the script for the episode: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/doctor-who-s12-ep10-the-timeless-children.pdf
Ko Sharmus is Tecteun
When choosing to take the Doctor's place in detonating the Particle, Ko Sharmus brings up how he was the one who started all of this, and while he does say that he means that he was the one who sent the Cyberium back in time in the first place, considering all that has happened in the story, it could also suggest he may also be referring to the Timeless Child and the Master's reason for what he is doing to Gallifrey and the Cybermen.Other things to note: when the Fam and other Humans find a TARDIS to escape in, Sharmus is seen reaching out to touch the controls, as though he knows them, and it would make sense for Sharmus to know how to send the Cyberium back in time, considering he himself might be a Time Lord.
One can even suggest that part of the reason he took the Doctor's place is so he could save his adoptive child.
- Jossed, as we meet Tecteun herself, alive and well, in Series 13.
- According to the Worlds Apart game, he was actually a member of the Division who came from Gallifrey, becoming disillusioned with the group.
Ko Sharmus is Rassilon
The Doctor exiled him in "Hell Bent", and we do not know where. It could be the Boundary. He could've come across a group of humans in danger during his years, possibly through access to technology and the wormhole that the Boundary is, and decided to try the Doctor's way of life for once. I don't blame him for preferring guns...Cybermen are exhausting.
- This is why the signal was sent directly to the Doctor. Rassilon knows them personally.
Ko Sharmus is the Doctor's biological father
While the Doctor's mother and whether she had a real one is unknown, it is possible that Ko Sharmus is the father. The Doctor came from the other side of the Boundary. He has watched the Doctor since she was adopted, in the shadows. It is also possible that the Doctor's TARDIS was built by Ko Sharmus, for his daughter. Hence why the TARDIS misbehaves and why the Doctor failed his driving test. They were both having all the fun that they were meant to have, traveling together, against all protocol.The TARDIS has always belonged to the Doctor
So the Doctor is the Timeless Child, and has lived untold numbers of lives before becoming the First Doctor. It is indicated that Ruth, who flies a TARDIS that looks like a police box and also calls herself "The Doctor", is one of them. The TARDIS has always been said to have been ancient, or a "museum piece", even when the Doctor was young. Keeping these things in mind, it's likely that the TARDIS may have been previously owned by one (or more) of the Doctor's past lives. No wonder they were drawn to her specifically.- How could the TARDIS have been a police box before One stole it, though? The chameleon circuit broke sometime in 1963 London.
- The Doctor does know how to fix the chameleon circuit, though - at least, for a bit. It might be that certain Doctors repaired it, but not that well, and the circuit continued to break time and again, with multiple Doctors having an outer shell stuck as a different object. We only know what Ruth's TARDIS looked like, not the others. We only know for definite that the Doctors from the First Doctor onwards kept a Police Box shell. Perhaps, if Ruth is the final incarnation before the First Doctor, she repaired the circuit before being captured and having her mind wiped and forced to regenerate, meaning the circuit was functioning before the Doctor stole it again, but broke for the last time in 1963, and the Doctor, whether through subconscious recognition or just personal taste, never repaired it again.
- A police box shell looking like that just means a landing in the UK between 1929 and 1970. It's possible that we have everything backwards; the TARDIS originally brought the Hartnell Doctor and Susan to 1963 England specifically so it would have an excuse to adopt, and then "get stuck in," the police box shape it already preferred from pre-Hartnell Doctors' Earth adventures. (This may also explain why Earth is the Doctor's favorite planet. It's actually the TARDIS's favorite, and each time their mind is wiped and they think they're starting over from one? She steals them again and returns to Earth to reacquaint them with it. It feels like a second home to the Doctor because they've spent thousands of years on it in one "regeneration cycle" or another.)
- Note that this would reconcile one minor discrepancy that's been staring us in the face all along, literally since episode one: an intact police box, although appropriate for a 1963 London setting, has no business being in a scrapyard. Police boxes were sited in public areas appropriate to the needs of police, not on private property and in places of concealment. If Sexy'd really selected her debut shape to blend in with I.M. Foreman's assorted junk, she'd have become a broken-down fridge or wrecked car or the like.
- It doesn't seem plausible that the pre-One Doctors spent that much time on Earth, considering that the Doctor we know and love hasn't run into Ruth or another such predecessor until now. Even River Song didn't have any pre-One Doctors' pictures in her wallet, despite her apparent habit of swiping the Tardis from under our Doctor's nose on a routine basis. Possibly Ruth originally came to hide out on Earth in the late 1960s, at which point the Tardis took on its police box shape; later, when the box became too outdated and conspicuous, Lee temporarily restored Ruth's memories for long enough that she could re-set its shape. Sexy refused to change, so they buried it instead.
- One possibility is that the TARDIS specifically chose to be a police box when it landed with Ruth, to make sure that the Doctor would recognize it, remember that in The Doctor's Wife it is established that the TARDIS doesn't processes it's own time line in a linear fashion, having archived console rooms the Doctor hasn't used yet. It stands to reason that the TARDIS knew it'd get stuck in the form of the police box in the future, and when it landed with Ruth, it knew that the future Doctor, from after it would be stuck in the police box form, would encounter her, so it chose to adopt it's future appearance, so the Doctor would recognize it. It stands to reason that, if the TARDIS was always deliberately choosing the 'random incorrect' landing locations because that's where the Doctor needed to be, then it could choose what the chameleon circuit turns it into when it's working.
Ruth is from the last cycle before One
The Ruth incarnation calls herself the Doctor and flies a police-box-shaped TARDIS. In connection with the above theory, it's likely that she's from the cycle of lives immediately prior to the lives the Doctor clearly remembers. Very likely, over time the Doctor began to subconsciously realize what was going on and began to rebel against the Time Lords, and Ruth can't be too far in the past since she's fairly similar to the Doctor as we have known them since the series' beginning.- In fact, perhaps Ruth was the last life the Doctor lived before becoming One. Maybe when the Time Lords recaptured her, they decided that they needed to reset the Timeless Child with a blank slate immediately to prevent any further trouble...
Ruth is an incarnation between 2 and 3.
We never see 2 regenerate into 3. 2 spins away, vanishing. 3 tumbles out of a TARDIS an indeterminate amount of time later. In color. It's easy to imagine that the Time Lords, disappointed with the Doctor flouting their laws, would recruit them as punishment into a secret organization that flouts their laws. Ruth's TARDIS resembles the default model, which both 1 and 2 piloted. The Fugitive Doctors are forced to go on endless missions, regenerating any number of times into the faces seen in 'The Brain of Morbius'.The Time Lords can edit memories, take away the Doctor's ability to pilot the TARDIS, and have demonstrated they can 'refill' a Time Lord's regenerations. Whatever imposed limitations on the Doctor's regenerations there may be, the Time Lords could simply 'top him up', wipe their complete memory of everything since 2, and send them on their way.
It explains why Ruth!Doctor steers a police box. It works within the established parameters of what Division and the Time Lords can do. The Time Lords agreed to deposit the 2nd Doctor on Earth. They never promised to do it *right away*.
- Worth noting is her TARDIS looks more or less the same as the one Two had.
- Jossed: Ruth had a part to play during the Anchoring of the Thread, which occurred during the Dark Times, long before 2 and 3.
The Boundary and the portal the Timeless Child was found beside are one and the same.
- One article in the Doctor Who Official Annual 2022 suggests so.
The Series 13 Story Arc will be Ripped from the Headlines: "The Doctor, the refugee"
With the revelation that the Doctor is essentially a refugee to Gallifrey and the show's history of tackling social issues, the new season will definitely have a storyline around the theme "Our society is built on the back of a refugee" — especially given that irrational hatred of refugees and immigrants was a major factor in Brexit, an event which had already been referenced in "Resolution" with the closure of UNIT.- Jossed - the Series 13 story arc is focused around a cataclysmic force called the "Flux".
The Time Lords never tried to wipe the Doctor's memories and start over again because they got too well-known in-universe.
It's implied that the Time Lords managed the countless lives of the Timeless Child so that they would be under their control and doing what they wanted. But this couldn't last forever, and it's implied they wiped the Doctor's first life where they chose to call themselves that (presumably the cycle from which the Ruth Doctor originates) before they could become too infamous of a Renegade.But, subconsciously, the Doctor remembered it, so in their next life, the one we know best, they made sure never to get involved with the Division and to go Renegade as soon as possible and become as infamous as possible. No matter how powerful the Time Lords are, there's no way they can just re-start the most infamous Time Lord currently living into a blank slate and get them back under their control without anyone noticing, like they could with the Doctor's previous lives. It's actually possible that the leaders of the Time Lords who knew about what the Doctor really was might have been a tad panicked about how precisely they were going to "reset" someone who had become so completely uncontrollable by them when the thirteen-life limit came up.
The Doctor's name is actually a Secret Agent Name, given to them by the Division.
Since this Episode establishes a group called the Division, which is a Secret Agency on Gallifrey, what if that means that "The Doctor" is actually a Secret Agent Code Name which was given to the Timeless Child, when they became an Agent.This idea may have also been foreshadowed in Spyfall, in which has the Doctor began playing James Bond ("The name's Doctor. The Doctor."), and the Master using an Agent Name as part of his disguise.
- This would undermine the whole, "my name is a promise" thing during the Eleventh Doctor. There have been worse retcons, though.
- One could make the case that the Doctor did have that promise in mind, when they chose their agent name. If the Master got to choose having "O" as his agent name for the sake of an "Oh, Crud!" Pun, then the Doctor can still choose to call themselves the Doctor cause of their name being a promise.
The Master, and not the Doctor, is the Timeless Child
It should be noted that the notion the Doctor is the Timeless Child is based on comments made by the Master, and he isn't exactly the most reliable person out there. Even if we assume that the Doctor is the Timeless Child, it doesn't account for the number of incongruities with previous canon, such as her TARDIS already having its police box shape (which it adopted in the First Doctor's era) or Clara being the one to pair up the First Doctor with his TARDIS in the first place. That flashback with Clara also demonstrates that the TARDIS was not originally a police box to begin with. Furthermore, the Eleventh Doctor was granted a new regenerative cycle at the end of his life after he supposedly exhausted all of his regenerations. This would not have been necessary if the Doctor truly had the ability to infinitely regenerate.It seems more probable, then, that the Master himself is the Timeless Child. This would explain his ability to continually persist after seemingly exhausting all of the regenerations in what was apparently his original cycle. If we assume that the Timeless Child's ability to infinitely regenerate comes with the Required Secondary Power that such regenerations cannot be disrupted or interfered with, this would further explain how Missy might be able to regenerate into the Dhawan Master anyway. Said Required Secondary Power kicked in and still caused her to regenerate despite the Simm Master believing that a "full dose" from the laser screwdriver is enough to permanently kill a Time Lord. Perhaps it could do in any ordinary Time Lord, but the Timeless Child would've been a completely different beast. It is thus possible that the Master simply couldn't take the revelation that he is the Timeless Child and scapegoated the Doctor instead.
- One problem with this, the Master has already run up their regeneration limit in the past, eventually resulting in decaying and malformed bodies as a result of botched attempts to continue regenerating, before just resorting to body stealing to continue living (and then actually dying for good, until the Time War came along and the Time Lords resurrected them with a new cycle and a new Time Lord body). From that alone, the Master can't be the Timeless Child.
- That doesn't eliminate this theory from the realm of possibility, though. We don't know the exact mechanisms behind the Timeless Child's regeneration and how it differs from that of the average Time Lord. We know it is possible to interfere with a regenerating Time Lord's regeneration to inhibit it and thus kill them permanently, but we don't know what doing the same thing will do to a regenerating Timeless Child (or whatever their race is). That could kill a Timeless Child permanently, or alternatively, it could simply allow them to survive without a physical body. It could very well be that a regenerating Timeless Child Master had his regeneration inhibited or tampered with, and rather than permanently die as would be expected of any other Time Lord, he simply persisted as a disembodied soul. It should be noted that the Ainley Master is the decayed Master (played by Pratt and Beevers) inhabiting Tremas' body, and that audio dramas set between the classic and new series have had him lose that body and continue as the decayed Master. The audios also had several other incarnations of the Master come together to grant new regenerations to the decayed Master and enable him to regenerate again. If the audio dramas are taken as canonical (and there's no reason they shouldn't be), then the Master never actually died during the interim period between the series (the Time War).
- Except 13 meet the pre-wipe Ruth!Doctor who was the Timeless Child and both were able to identify the other as the doctor. Via telepathy ( as well as a bio scan via sonic ) , verifying that 13 was the timeless child as she meet an earlier version of herself.
- This simply means that the Doctor lived more lives than was initially thought, something we already suspected because of the additional faces we saw when the Fourth Doctor battled Morbius. It doesn't necessarily indicate that they are the Timeless Child. How the Doctor got more lives and regenerations before the First Doctor could simply be chalked up to the Division or some higher level Time Lord authorities opting to give the Doctor more regenerations every time they reached the end of a cycle, or flat-out resurrecting the Doctor if they are killed outright.
- However back in season 11 it was revealed to the Doctor she was the timeless child from the remnants who spoke directly to her. The Timeless Child… we see what’s hidden, even from yourself. The outcast, abandoned and unknown… indicating that they were talking about her. As well as the Master’s rage at the Doctor’s origin indicate that she is the Timeless Child. His self-hatred, his rage over the fact that his friend who he tried to beat had already and would always beat him by being the originator of their species. That everything special came from her. There was no gain in making the Doctor think she was the Timeless Child. If The Master was the Timeless Child he would find it validating, his ego would be soothed by it. But his reaction is what an egocentric sociopath would have if he found out he would be second best to someone, ie the Doctor. Self-Loathing, lashing out,suicidal thoughts, destroying their home and people. His reaction where everything he was, everything he could be came from his greatest rival and friend.
- That can suggest that the Doctor is a Timeless Child, but not strictly the Timeless Child. It's very possible still that the Master is also a Timeless Child alongside the Doctor. The Master's rage at the Doctor being a Timeless Child can also be explained as him being jealous that he has to share such a privileged position in Time Lord history with the Doctor. The fact that the Master wiped out the Time Lords upon making this discovery can also suggest that he is taking revenge on them for how they treated him as the Timeless Child to obtain regeneration for themselves.
- Except WordOfGod is that Chris Chibnall planned for the Timeless Child to be the Doctor even before Jodi was cast. Also both the Master and the Remnants refered to "the" Timeless Child not to "a" Timeless Child referring to singular not plural. Not to mention if the Master was a Timeless Child he would revel in it due to ego and finally matching the Doctor. He would rub it in her face. Not make the Doctor think that they were superior and more important then him. He would declare that they were finally truly equal and two sides of the same coin.
- Confirmed Jossed in Season 13 when the Doctor confronts the head of Division. Who turns out to be Tectuan who confirms the Master reveal about the Doctor's origins.
There are two Timeless Children, the Doctor and the Master
This postulation accepts that the Doctor is the Timeless Child, but also theorizes that there are in actuality at least two Timeless Children, and that the Master is the other one, as per the reasoning drawn from the above theory. It would also directly explain the episode's title, "The Timeless Children", meaning to say at least two such individuals exist.- The Timeless "Children" could simply refer to the multiple child incarnations of the singular Timeless Child which resulted from Tecteun's experiments and which helped the development of regeneration.
- Possibly, but that still doesn't eliminate the Master being a Timeless Child alongside the Doctor. There are many titles in fiction that contain more that one meaning that is pertinent to the story, after all.
- However Russell T Davies has declared the he has no intention of retconning the Timeless Child reveal. Which for now means that the 13th Doctor remains the only Timeless Child.
- Also, the Master was angry to discover the Doctor was more powerful than him in this episode, and he's run into regeneration limits in the past. Even if there is another Timeless Child, it's probably not the Master.
- Because we don't know how differently the Timeless Child's regenerative capability is, we can't say for certain that Master actually and truly did have his regenerative ability curtailed or that he ran into some sort of limit. As the Timeless Child is not stated to be Gallifreyan or possibly even Time Lord, their biology could very well be drastically different from that of the average Time Lord.
- Except the Master did not run out of regenerations, he flat out died. Only to be brought back by scientific means, body stealing, and Gallifreyan science etc. The Master did not run out of limits but simply died, also the Matrix showed the story of the Timeless child, from which the Timeless children ( Time Lords) came from.
- Confirmed Jossed in Season 13 when the Doctor confronts the head of Division. Who turns out to be Tectuan who confirms the Master reveal about the Doctor's origins.
"Fugitive of the Judoon" is a paradox
- Ruth was on the run from the Division, working for Gat and the Gallifreyan army. Thirteen’s intervention is the reason that Ruth was captured by the Division in the first place because they went back to the lighthouse and Ruth smashed the arch. Thirteen got herself arrested by helping Ruth out, even though she doesn’t remember her! Likewise, Ruth would always have met Thirteen because they saved each other from Gat! From Ruth’s point of view, she met the Doctor before she became the Doctor we know now, and will always meet the Doctor to help her with the Judoon!
The Doctor is locked up by the Judoon in Stormcage.
This gives us the potential to have River Song meet her wife, just like Alex Kingston has said she's hoping will happen. However, if she does, the Doctor won't reveal who she is this time.- Jossed.
Ruth will be the one to break Thirteen out of the Judoon prison.
She knows that the Judoon crossed paths with her other self, and will be keeping an eye out for signs they've caught her. She'll feel obligated because it was her actions breaking off Pol-Kon-Don's horn that left them so determined to catch the Doctor, not necessarily caring which one.- Jossed.
Captain Jack will break the Doctor out of prison.
He did say he'd be there when she needs him most.- Confirmed.
Ruth will still turn out to be from between the Second and Third Doctors.
There's still the matter of her TARDIS being in the form of a police box, which didn't happen until "An Unearthly Child." All the reasons people have developed for a Season 6b Ruth still apply.- If Ruth was before One, then there would be no sense in not confirming that in this episode, because why bother keeping that a secret, unless the truth is that she is in fact still in-between Two and Three (possibly leading to a reveal that the Season 6B concept where the Doctor was stuck under the employ of the CIA was the Division - now the CIA - trying to rein the Doctor back in again).
The clock seen at Brendan's retirement and memory wipe is an early version of the fob watch.
The chameleon arch in question not only blocks the Doctor's memories of being the Timeless Child, it also gives the Doctor Gallifreyan physiology, the same way they've given the Doctor and the Master human physiology in the past. If the Doctor ever finds it and smashes it to recover her memories, she'll also discover her true body is internally different from those of Gallifreyans. The extra regeneration energy the Time Lords gave Eleven is why that regeneration was so destructive.
He didn't actually need the energy, but they either didn't realize that, or didn't want the Doctor to realize it, so they sent what turned out to be extra energy beyond that needed to regenerate. The extra energy is what went into destroying the Dalek fleet. None of the Time Lords we've seen in the show knew about the Timeless Child.
The Master had to dig deep to discover this secret. The fake history, over time, was known by fewer and fewer Time Lords, until eventually it was completely forgotten. There may or may not be some sort of directive passed down about keeping the Doctor out of trouble, or making sure she is given extra regeneration energy if she hits the end of a cycle, or something like that, or it may be completely forgotten and that's why the Doctor was finally able to get away with escaping. After all, we've seen a lot of High Council members killed off unexpectedly just during this show's run, and they likely didn't get to pass on their secrets to their successors properly. Multiply that by many, many more generations, and a lot could get lost. The Division is an early version of the Time Lords' CIA.
- With the trigger for it to reorganise itself being the whole Ruth/Gat incident.
The Doctor really is half-human. Just not a natural one, and it ultimately reveals a far deeper lie.
It's not stated what species the Timeless Child was before capture and experimentation, but that they were from an alternate universe. Regeneration could've been a natural product of their species, but it could also have been genetically engineered. Now who else has the ability to regenerate apart from the Time Lords? That's right, River Song, a human. And further exploited by a Renegade Splinter Faction of time travelers led by the human Madame Kovarian. So if a human can be given a set of regenerations and be made like a Time Lord, who's to say with more advanced technology they couldn't engineer a being with infinite regenerations? And so the Timeless Child was born as part of modified homo sapiens, possibly the first ever one, until found and kidnapped by the Shobogans/Proto-Time Lords. And then modified biologically so as to become one of them. In essence, the Doctor became half-Shobogan, half-human. And every single Time Lord is half-human because of their Awful Truth of splicing and experimenting on the proto-Doctor.The 1st and 2nd Doctors being Ambiguously Human? 1 having a single heart? He still had substantial DNA at that point to differentiate him from the Time Lords. Subconsciously, he still knows what he is. Maybe even go to a time he already visited; the 1950s to 1960s, where blue police boxes were a good disguise. And if a Type 40 TARDIS already has a finicky chameleon circuit? Perhaps History Repeats if Ruth predates him. But then 2 was put on trial with the Time Lords. Ruth still may fit Season 6b, but she's the last in the Doctor's known lifespan to know what they are and be genetically dissimilar enough to prove the difference. 8 calling himself "half-human on his mother's side?" He used to be pure, if modified human, and would've had a mother. In an amnesiac funk he remembers some details of the Timeless Child. The Chameleon Arch, the Meta-Crisis? All they do is have a Time Lord's human DNA override their Shobogan DNA. Even the Doctor's preference for humans? Deep down he knows he's one of them.
It might go even deeper than that. When Tecteun stole the Timeless Child, Gallifrey had yet to discover time travel. They had no issue experimenting on a child and harvesting their immortality. They didn't invent time travel either, they stole it from the alternate version of homo sapiens. Humans look Time Lord? No, Time Lords look human. If Gallifeyans aren't straight up descendants of mankind through time travel, they were shaped to be so by this advanced alternate race of humans. Rassilon isn't just a tyrant and a liar, but straight up fraudulent and stole the real Precursors. And once he managed, he shifted the main universe's history so drastically it would seem the other way around. That humanity is a pale imitation of mankind.
Why do humans always revert to their original appearance, no matter how much evolution they go through? Why do they survive until the end of time? A shadow, an imprint of what should have been, had the Time Lords not supplanted mankind's role in N-Space. Mankind never developing to rival the Time Lords? Imposed by the machinations of Rassilon; he cannot allow mankind to reach the potential he and all of Gallifrey benefited from. Rassilon was probably Tecteun herself, an amoral bastard from the start. The Master wasn't kidding when he said Time Lord society was built on a lie; they boasted about being the Superior Species, responsible for the universe as we know it, but the entire time they worked off the backs of the Timeless Child and humanity. They were built on usurpation and thievery. Enough that even the Master was disgusted and sought to tear Gallifrey down.
The Doctor was created by the Time Vortex
The Boundary is a portal within the Time Vortex. It holds many wormholes, and contained a lot of energy at the time that Tecteun found the Timeless Child. This is why the Ninth Doctor was able to "eat" the heart of the TARDIS with the only consequence being regeneration, not permanent death. It's like a baby eating the womb while inside of it.- This would coincidentally explain River Song's regeneration ability as well. In this case she can regenerate a finite amount of times only, because she wasn't created from the Vortex but only conceived in it.
The Timeless Child is one of the Old Ones left by "parents"
Let's just think about the universe as a playground for kids, or a zoo or computer simulation. Let's say parents accidentally left their child there and it was adopted by local creatures, NPCs or wild animals. However my theory is that the Universe exists only for the Child to grow up as a full adult member of their species. Time Lords were reprogrammed to be more like actual "parents", looking at the child as higher ups to represent the reality (from their point of view) as their full form. But with a flawed design, the program was changed so it has more Renegade Time Lords, and the Master killed all the Gallifreyans just to fix that point. Eternals? Many of the deities are actually just small problems for the child to solve as a learning method. The Time Lords imposed a regeneration limit on the Timeless Child
After the Child became the First Doctor, the Time Lords decided that it was too dangerous to keep around, but fearing that it might look suspicious if they had him outright killed, they opted instead to place the same 12 regeneration limit all Time Lords have on him. The intention being that the Doctor would live out his lives ignorant of his true nature and once they were spent, he would die for good, taking with him the secret of the Timeless Child.Thus, the Eleventh Doctor really was on his last incarnation and when the Time Lords sent him the regeneration energy, they weren't giving him more regenerations, they were (possibly unknowingly) undoing the limit that was preventing him from regenerating.
The Timeless Child was an amnesiac Romana who fell through a portal from E-Space
Therefore the Time Lords themselves are a huge Stable Time Loop, and Romana and the Doctor were unknowingly the same person. The prison the Doctor is in is Shada
The Doctor got sent to a prison at the end of the episode. Shada is a Time Lord prison. The Doctor was being hunted down by Judoon on Time Lord orders. So when the Doctor was captured, due to Gallifrey now being destroyed, the Judoon, being the thick rhinos they are, decided to send the Doctor to Shada, as it was the closest they had to returning her to the Time Lords.- Both prisons are built into planetoids.
The regeneration energy in "Time of the Doctor" was just a placebo
- This seems likely - if the Time Lords didn't give the Doctor regeneration energy, he would've regenerated naturally anyway, and blown wide open the lie about the Doctor's history. Appearing to hesitatingly 'grant' him a gift of a new cycle upholds the secret and is something they can hold over the Doctor's head, make them believe they owe the Time Lords for it, which is on brand for them. Additionally this explains how explosive the regeneration was (with the Doctor just rationalising it as being a consequence of the new regeneration cycle), the energy acts as the initial trigger for regeneration but after that the Doctor didn't need it, it was just power to burn.
Conversely the Doctor’s thirteen regeneration limit was psychosomatic, and without the extra energy from the Time Lords Eleven would have died as the final incarnation.
We know Time Lords can forego regeneration and choose to die. We’ve seen it with the Master. With the Eleventh Doctor strongly believing that he was in his final body, his death would have been a case of Your Mind Makes It Real.The Valeyard was created from Tecteun's experiments.
We know that the Valeyard was created from the Doctor "between [their] twelfth and final incarnations", and at least one account (The Eight Doctors) has suggested it was done by the Time Lord High Council. Perhaps Tecteun attempted to clone the Timeless Child, but the result did not exhibit regeneration abilities and was abandoned, leading to the second child growing up with a hatred of the original they could never be. At last, the corrupt High Council- needing someone who could prosecute the Doctor- found the file on Tecteun's old failed experiment and went a-knocking... "Revolution of the Daleks" will be a Breather Episode
After all the drama bombs of Series 11, it's time for something lighter to ease up on the tension, especially since this will be a holiday special and the previous two were already dark and, in the case of "Spyfall" Part One, plot-heavy. The show's never really done a lighthearted Dalek episode either. Especially if the prison the Doctor's trapped in turns out to be Shada — a setting pulled from one of the show's most lighthearted eras — this could be a Douglas Adams-style romp with the Doctor and a guest companion, with her being returned to the companions and Myth Arc at the end.- Confirmed.
The Timeless Child was already eerily similar to the Shobogans before their first known regeneration
It's shown that before the Child's first known regeneration, Tecteun had already studied them somewhat to try and understand who they were, but came up blank. What if part of the reason for her confusion was because the Child's internal biology was identical to the Shobogans' (or so similar that it made no difference), despite the fact that since Tecteun was the first resident of Gallifrey to travel in space, the Child could not possibly be from their species? After all, the Doctor is known to have had biological descendants. This could be one of the factors that made it easier for the Division to conceal the Child's true nature from them, or it could hint at the Time Lords' origins being some enormous Stable Time Loop...- The alternative would be if the Child's first regeneration made him/her more like the Shobogans. This would be an extension of how the Doctor's regenerations sometimes make him pick up traits - accents, Caecilius's face - from humans he's encountered.
- And a third possibility is that the genetic alterations that turned Shobogans into the Time Lords made them more like the Timeless Child, meaning the Doctor really is the only "true" Time Lord.
- That might, come to think of it, account for why the city-dwelling Gallifreyans - even the low-ranking ones who'd probably never been to the Academy or earned the official title of "Time Lord" - look down so much upon those rustic residents of Gallifrey whom they still call Shobogans. The folks living out in the countryside may be the only purebred Shobogans left; the urbanized Gallifreyans are either Time Lords endowed by Tecteun's treatments, or the descendants of mixed Shobogan/Time Lord pairings, who would have some small fraction of the Timeless Child's genetics by inheritance.
- Wouldn't it be less time-consuming to rewrite the Timeless Child's internal biology to make them more similar to the Shobogans/Gallifreyans than the other way around to hide the Timeless Child? There is not a single scrap of evidence to hint at the Timeless Child's internal anatomy - they could have had 3 hearts, 1 lung and 7 stomachs.
The Doctor is an Eternal, half-Eternal, or something similar
So apparently the being that came through the tear in space and time as a little girl and would much, much later become The Doctor we all know and love, came from some far-off place - possibly a whole other universe, or somewhere outside the universe - and has the ability to regenerate potentially infinitely-many times, making them functionally immortal. While the Eternals in their only appearance in-show (and appearances in the books, as far as I'm aware) do not show them regenerating, merely being completely immortal and indestructible and ageless, it is perhaps possible that The Doctor is of a species related to the Eternals, if not one of the Eternals herself. Or perhaps half-Eternal, there's that theory too. The Timeless Child is a Time Lord from Gallifrey's future
Far into the planet's future, the Time Lords have become even better at the Time Master business than in the 1st to 11th Doctor's era and lifted the Regeneration limit. The Doctor was born in this era, and sent back as part of a Stable Time Loop. The Valeyard was created from a previous 13-cycle reincarnation of the Doctor before they were mind-wiped.
When they say the Valeyard was created between the Doctor's "12th and Final" incarnations, they meant between "the 12th incarnation in the previous cycle" and "the final incarnation in the previous cycle before they were mindwiped and started over again as the "first" Doctor." It's also possible this means that the Valeyard knows about the Timeless Child.- Wouldn't that make the Valeyard's quest even more pointless? He wanted to steal the doctors regeneration's, but if the Doctor is his future self rather than his past self he already knows he'll survive to become him, and the only possible result of a success would be causing his inevitable death in a future life. Stealing from your past at least makes sense, even if it's paradox causing, stealing from your future is pointless since you inevitably become the victim of your own crime.
The Timeless Child had a name, or nickname, given to them on account of their mysterious origin.
That name, of course, being "Who", or its Gallifreyan equivalent.Given said name might constitute an Embarrassing Nickname (or residual memories of their dark past that survived the mindwipe), they prefer to go simply by "Doctor" and the other name only gets shared sparingly, such as with the "Who knows/Who nose" joke between the Curator and Eleven at the end of "The Day of the Doctor" or inadvertently blurted out by K9 in "K9 and Company". Amongst other examples (yes, there are hints, despite what some of the fandom may insist that the Doctor's name might actually be "Who"!)
The Timeless Child is also The Other.
Thus Arc Welding the "Timeless Child" and "the Doctor is the Other" stories. Whether it be Stockholm Syndrome or a desire to make right Time Lord society from it's bloody origins, the Timeless Child served as the shadowy co-founder alongside Rassilon and Omega. It's possible they were reincarnated and what the Doctor seeing is Past-Life Memories, rather than erased memories, or maybe they just pulled a War Master and regressed to an infant William Hartnell to hide. The Other is Shrouded in Myth because they would expose the Awful Truth. If Tecteun is Rassilon as theorized, the Timeless Child/Other would have even more reason to hide. The first Timeless Child we see isn't the original incarnation.
Just the first one to land on Gallifrey. If it's possible for an adult Time Lord to regenerate into a child(something seen in the comics with The Master), and the Timeless Child has unlimited regenerations, the little girl we see could've had thousands of lives in their universe of origin. Going by the "the Timeless Child was a genetically modified human" theory, this could mean the Peter Cushing Doctor is canon; he's the human Timeless Child fighting off against his universe's version of the Daleks. One was either subconsciously interested in his old adventures, or has lived for so long he's bound to repeat some of what he did in his home reality.- As the Timeless Child fell down the cliff, she looked calm and even bored. Any other child would be screaming all the way down. Perhaps she has regenerated before, or due to her species' ability to infinitely regenerate, they have an instinctive sense that fatal accidents will not lead to permanent death.
- Alternatively if we assume that they were part of a species from some other realm on the other side of the boundary, all of whom naturally possessed the capacity to regenerate, then it'd stand to reason the Child would know about regeneration, even if she hadn't regenerated herself yet, so she'd know the fall wouldn't kill her.
Captain Jack is the Timeless Child, and the first incarnation of The Doctor
What if the Timeless Child we see isn't the original incarnation (as speculated above), but the original incarnation was Human, Male, and named "Captain Jack Harkness"?Think about it, what is Captain Jack if not a timeless entity? He is naturally immortal, a fixed point in time, he lives countless lifetimes. And while we never see him regenerate in the way the doctor does on screen, the portion of his life we see is only a few hundred years, where he lives for millions. It would certainly make more sense to think that Jack changed his face through Regeneration than that a human aged into a giant alien head.
Despite being a fixed point, Jack is shown to be capable of change, subtle, small, and uncontrollable change in the form of aging, but change nonetheless. Maybe over the millennia Captain Jack learns to control this process, to direct it. At first in an attempt to simply stop his continual aging, but once he's mastered that for more drastic changes, like a different face (I'm sure it gets old after the first epoch) or seeing what it feels like to be a different gender. He uses the moments of flux between his death and rebirth to do this, because once he's come back he's 'fixed' in that form again, giving us the standard regeneration process. At some point he messes up (maybe he was still in the experimental stage) and goes too young, becoming the Timeless Child we see, and is transported to Gallifrey through methods unknown (perhaps he rode a Tardis like he did in Utopia, and fell off into the time vortex), and eventually became The Doctor. The 10th Doctor is uncomfortable looking at him not just because he's a fixed point, but because he's a part of his own timeline he's unknowingly overlapping with, a fixed point not just relative to the universe, but to the doctor himself.
- This would mean Rose and the TARDIS created the Doctor, explaining his particular fondness for her (a trait he notably shares with Jack), he remembers her from the most important event of his first life. Making the doctors whole life a stable time loop as a result of the 10ths actions in Boom Town. When Bad Wolf says "I create myself" she meant it, and not just in regards to that Season's Arc. She creates the timeless child, who creates timelord society and becomes the Doctor, who brings her the Tardis, which allows her to become Bad Wolf. Bad Wolf would have known this, seeing all of time at once, and took the exact actions needed to resolve the and create the situation. She didn't make Jack immortal by accident, it wasn't some unintended side-effect, it was the most crucial step in a plan devised to create and protect the Doctor in the brief time she knew she'd have the power. Bad Wolf and Regeneration use the same color scheme because they are the same power, roses power, protecting the Doctor throughout all of time and space.
- When she says "the time war ends" she's not referring to her destruction of the Daleks in that scene, but rather the War Doctors use of the Moment, an event that only happens because she makes sure Jack is immortal enough to live long enough to become the War Doctor and do it.
- The Face of Boe, then, is either the final incarnation of the Doctor after he has finally run out of his seemingly endless regeneration energy, or simply one of the pre-hartnell regenerations that fakes his death and waits till the doctor leaves to finish regenerating.
- This why the Timeless Child is unique. The Doctor was the only timelord good enough that someone with Omnipotent Power would choose to use it to benefit them instead of themselves. The Doctors connection with his companions is the reason he is special, and by extension the reason Timelords as a whole are able to exist. A god able to see everything he had ever done, ever could do, looked upon him and determined that he was worthy, that he, out of everyone in the universe, deserved eternity. That is Rose's gift to the Doctor, the same one he gave her, All of Time and Space.
"The Doctor will return in Revolution of the Daleks" is a misdirect
It will be a story about the Doctor fighting Daleks... just not the Thirteenth Doctor, instead a different adventure featuring the Fugitive Doctor.- Jossed. It's a Thirteenth Doctor episode, and the Fugitive Doctor doesn't make an appearance.
The Master killed the Time Lords via a biological weapon.
The "red carpet" is "red with the blood of [the Master's] people", indicating the method of killing spilled blood. It also wasn't "being shrunk with the TCE", as the Time Lord corpses were able to be put inside Cyber Armour. The method would have also given the Time Lords minimal time to protest and defend themselves, as well as inhibit their regeneration first time. Perhaps the Master infected the Time Lords with a pathogen which kills them within hours or days, giving them heavy haemorrhaging (hence the spilled blood), and inhibiting their regeneration. The pathogen could be of Gallifreyan origin or not. The burnt Citadel was something the Master did afterwards and the Time Lords did not die as the Citadel burnt down.The Master would have been able to smuggle infectious material in the form of a fairly innocuous item, whereas a weapon would arouse more suspicion. Alternatively, he sprayed the source of the pathogen into the Citadel from the top.
- Alternatively, it could have been a neurotoxin, delivered via the air in the Capitol or its water supply, which drove the Time Lords to a state of extreme aggression, causing the Time Lords to kill each other.
The Matrix attacked the Doctor because they are not a true Time Lord
When the 4th Doctor is inducted as President during the Invasion of Time story he is given a gold coronet which gives him full access to the Time Lord’s Matrix system but the system attacks or in Borusa’s words rejects him this may be because he is not Gallifreyan The Master was the Hybrid from the prophecies in Twelve's second season.
He discovered he was a hybrid - part Gallifreyan, part...whatever the Doctor is. As a direct consequence he destroyed Gallifrey and stood in its ruins. The Doctor is the Timeless Child, but Thirteen is not.
This theory I have is that the person we’ve come to know as the Doctor is not the Doctor. Not originally, that is. Perhaps someone else is, and they agreed to let this “fake Doctor” masquerade as them to protect them. Then this person is now called ‘The Doctor’ and the real Doctor is safe.Some fans have theorized that The Doctor is not really the Timeless Child. One proposed it was Susan, who “The Doctor” protected under the pretense of being his granddaughter. While this is certainly a possibility and would make for a nice surprise(not to mention gives a nice Once More, with Clarity moment to a line in “An Unearthly Child”), there are some gaps in logic(there are many plot holes for the Doctor to be the Timeless Child but I digress). This episode confirmed that ‘Ruth’ and the faces shown in “The Brain of Morbius” are past incarnations. How then did those get there?
My theory is that these were of the Doctor, but who said Tom Baker was playing ‘The Doctor’? If this theory turns out to be true, I do believe it would play out something like this: Susan/the Doctor turns to First!Doctor for help, they come up with a plan... implant Susan’s memories into First and then repress them, then erase her memory. Place failsafes into each other in case this doesn’t work out(it doesn’t), then Plan B: steal a TARDIS and run away. The failsafes prevent them from remembering this(or pretty much anything else), and off they go.
- As a member of The Division, the Timeless Child would probably have access to any and all TARDISes, and somehow this causes them to all remember the Doctor. Somehow, The Doctor ended up liking a police box disguise and all the TARDISes they flew picked up on it(telepathic circuits?). Susan left but ‘the Doctor’ still has her memories, and so keeps the police box appearance.
Morbius was part of the division
Maybe he accessed the faces of the Timeless Child because he was part of the group that memory-wiped the Doctor, and was thus able to partly reverse it. Rassilon is alive
By exiling him, the Doctor inadvertently saved him from the events of this episode. This could allow him to appear again and have his relationship with Tecteun explained. Rassilon and Omega's true roles
Rassilon and Omega were actually revolutionaries who overthrow Tecteun and took over Gallifrey. They then rewrote history to make themselves the founders of Gallifrey.- Likely jossed: a picture showing Rassilon, Omega and Tecteun standing side-by-side was released, so Tecteun wasn't the only (legitimate) founder of Gallifrey.
The Timeless Child originates from an alternate-universe Gallifrey.
In this alternate Gallifrey, the Gallifreyans are naturally able to regenerate, or the Time Lords in this alternate Gallifrey did not impose a 12-regeneration limit. The Timeless Child is a regeneration of "10.5", who managed to somehow restore the ability to regenerate to himself.
Maybe Rose died or something before she and 10.5 could spend their lives together. 10.5 then started working to restore his regeneration ability and go back to his original universe, but it worked too well, resulting in a return to child age and a memory wipe. Thus making the Doctor's entire existence a bootstrap paradox. The Timeless Child originates from the Kasaavin dimension.
When the Master allied with the Kasaavin, they could have given him information about the Timeless Child, leading to the Master going back to Gallifrey to investigate, then destroy Gallifrey. Perhaps some of the Kasaavin are the Doctor's biological parents, or this is the first time a Time Lord has passed into the Kasaavin dimension and the Kasaavin take this opportunity to investigate.- I agree with the connection between the two. I actually think the Kasaavin dimension is inside the fibres of the time vortex, like the villi of the human intestine. So yes, the Doctor was "conceived " in this place.
The Master is being Metaphorically True. All Time Lords are the Timeless Child in the way.
Rather than the Doctor being the Timeless Child, Shobogans become Time Lords by harvesting potential lives and incarnations from the Timeless Child, similar to how Weeping Angels feed on potential life of people. Thus the Doctor is the Timeless Child, but in the sense that 2 onwards were spliced into the Doctor, as was every Time Lord past their first, natural incarnation. The 12 regeneration limit is because no limit is just too torturous to the Child, except in emergency cases. In other words, it's a The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas situation. The reason why the lie about exposure to the Time Vortex is the source of regeneration works on River Song is either because the Timeless Child has an inherent connection to it, or it's possible that the Time Vortex can give regeneration energy but it only works for humans and not Shobogans. The Master is leaving out details to make her hate the Time Lords and come around to him by getting her rallied at the abuse. The Master is Tecteun's biological son, and the child who pushed the Timeless Child down the cliff.
The child Master seen in "The Sound of Drums" was the result of this child being reverted into a child, in a similar manner to how the Timeless Child was reverted to the child who became Hartnell's Doctor.
Regeneration is not a natural trait of the Timeless Child's species.
- The Timeless Child was perhaps the only member of their species which could regenerate.
- The "boundary" the child was abandoned next to could have been the Time Vortex, and the child gained regeneration abilities from the Time Vortex.
- Or perhaps, a few individuals with the ability to regenerate arise in the Timeless species from time to time, and being able to regenerate is viewed unfavourably (possibly as being a sign of being a witch/demon, or being cursed). For this, the Timeless Child was abandoned.
Series 13 will address the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on the Whoniverse in some way
Whenever it is actually produced (it should have started filming this year for a Fall 2021 release date, but that is looking highly unlikely now), there really won't be a way for the show not to address what the pandemic did to Earth and the U.K. especially; while previous seasons didn't have to confront major disasters/tragedies head-on, this is a rather different situation. It could drive another wedge between this Doctor and her companions since she won't be able to do anything about it as a fixed point in time (since Reed Richards Is Useless in this case).- Post-production work on Revolution of the Daleks (the Series 12 special) is continuing remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. This could presumably involve adding dialogue which accounts for the COVID-19 pandemic having occured, as Doctor Who episodes which are set in the modern day are typically set around the time the episodes air. As Revolution of the Daleks will air in late 2020/early 2021, it would be set around then.
- Jossed. The episode makes zero references to COVID-19. (There is a scene with protestors wearing masks and scarves around their faces, but protestors were dressing up like that pre-COVID, and they weren't socially distancing.)
- Already, the original short "The Best of Days", written by Steven Moffat and featuring Bill and Nardole, has established that the COVID-19 pandemic and the international Black Lives Matter/anti-Police Brutality protests that launched in June 2020 exist in the Whoniverse.
Series 13's story arc will be the Doctor's quest to restore Gallifrey
Having the show's first female Doctor be the one who gives up and lets Gallifrey burn would have major Unfortunate Implications after her previous male incarnations teamed up in the 50th to save it, so her finding a way to save it after all and more fully come to terms with her place as the Timeless Child will be the heart of Series 13. That said, if the COVID-19 pandemic delays the season long enough, and assuming the Fourteenth Doctor is not introduced by 2023, she could lead the other Doctors on this quest in the 60th anniversary special.- Generally speaking the other Doctors did not team up to save Gallifrey. They used an opportunity provided by the Moment to save Gallifrey. Also Gallifrey was saved by the intervention of a omniscient reality-warper. Another factor is that 1) Gallifrey originally was not destroyed , the previous incarnations mistakenly thought it was and 2) in her case Gallifrey was actually destroyed , thus becoming a fixed point in time and as such cannot be changed otherwise risking a universe ending paradox and 3) she not actively attempting to prevent Gallifrey end is not giving up, as the other Doctor's did not attempt to prevent Gallifrey end as well due to the after mentioned all ending paradox. Which is why 9th,10th and 11th Doctor were in so much emotional pain. Therefore no
Unfortunate Implications involved. More likely like the previous incarnations she will not interfere in the fixed point in time and bear the burden of truly being the last of the the TimeLords.- The problem with this is that this would leave Thirteen's Myth Arc and the changes made to the larger mythos with no real goal or dramatic purpose. Yes, she knows that she is the Timeless Child, but if she doesn't do anything with this knowledge, such as restore Gallifrey or confront the Time Lords who manipulated her, then there is no in or out-of-universe reason for her to have that information, or for the Timeless Child concept to exist at all. It's possible of course that Series 13 will reveal an alternative goal for her to fulfill with this information, but what that might be isn't clear at this time (since redeeming the Master again is probably off the table).
- Not saving Gallifrey would not really be a problem because Thirteen already has a Myth Arc. Discovering her own origins and her true people. Saving Gallifrey again would serve no purpose because it would use up another Doctor's arc as her own instead of creating an identity for her own arc. The reason for the Timeless Child to exist is to give the Doctor an actual identity. It showed the sins of Gallifrey. Revealed sources of the Doctor's inner pain, feeling of abandonment her tendency to rebel. It actually for once changed the status quo of the show and the mythos. Saving Gallifrey would just reset the status quo, not only that; is just reusing another Doctor's story instead of furthering the one they have. In any case Gallifrey was always destined to be destroyed as per the prophecy. Each writer and show runner puts their own stamp on the show, RTD, Moffat and now Chibnall. To go back serves no purpose so logically Gallifrey would not be saved again because there is no leeway, it is a fixed point in time. In revealing the Doctor's origin they already showed the goal. Finding out more, there is no reason or narrative benefit of going back only forward.
- Jossed as her current arc is ending with her fighting to end the Flux as well delve deeper into her past.
The Timeless Child did not have infinite regenerations.
It has been popular for fans to assume that the Timeless Child could regenerate infinitely. However, there was nothing in the episode which outright stated such; all we know is that the Timeless Child could regenerate more than 12 times, as it was stated that Tecteun limited regenerations to 12 for each Time Lord. The Timeless Child could have had a regeneration limit, but a very large one — thousands of regenerations before they ran out.- The Timeless Child could regenerate 507 times. When the Eleventh Doctor told Clyde in Death of the Doctor that he could change 507 times, this was a bit of his memory as the Timeless Child slipping through. We know that the Timeless Child was chameleon-arched into a Gallifreyan.
The role of the Untempered Schism in giving Gallifreyans regeneration
The Timeless Child's regenerations could have been somehow inserted into the Untempered Schism, so that Time Lords after Tecteun's original Time Lords (who had the Timeless Child's genetic material directly inserted into them) got regenerations through the initiation test at the Untempered Schism. The Timeless Child is an attempt to bring back the Cartmel Masterplan
During the Seventh Doctor's Run, there were plans for a Story Arc, known as "The Cartmel Masterplan", which would have revealed that the Doctor is also known as "The Other", a mysterious figure from Gallifrey's past who helped form the Time Lords' society and perfect their ability to time travel.
This is an idea which does echo a lot of what was explained in "The Timeless Children" Episode.
In fact, another part of this Theory is that the Seventh Doctor KNEW they were the Timeless Child.
Possibly, after the "Trial Of A Time Lord", after hearing about the corruption of the Time Lords, the Sixth Doctor dug in to the Matrix to see if there was more he needed to learn about what the Time Lords had been doing, and discovered the truth about the Timeless Child.
In "Remembrance Of The Daleks", when talking about the Hand Of Omega, the Seventh Doctor comments "...and didn't we have trouble with the prototype...", which suggested that the Doctor was there when Gallifrey gained the ability to Time Travel, and may also have been part of the Team that achieved it.
He even tells Davros, in a deleted scene, that he is "Far more than just another Time Lord...", suggesting some thing about his Back Story, like potentially being the Timeless Child!
The Doctor, however, forgets about what they learnt of the Timeless Child, either through his Regeneration in to the Eighth Doctor (since he does get amnesia as part of his Post-Regeneration Trauma), or it was taken from his mind during the Time War.
But, with the Doctor learning about the Timeless Child, is it possible we may either see a Revival or, at least, a Spiritual Successor to The Cartmel Masterplan!?
The Timeless Child's name is Theta Sigma
.The Doctor has forgotten their true name, thinking Thete is a college nickname. There is only one Timeless Child in all of creation
.Throughout the entire multiverse, there is only one Timeless Child. But, there are splinters of the Child, as a result of her falling through the dimensional rift - much like how Clara was splintered across the Doctor's timeline. This means there are many copies of the same Child, and none as well. The real Timeless Child is the one that we know as the Doctor, but the many splinters found homes in other universes. Some of them helped shape other Time Lord sociteties, but some of them were also left abandoned and alone, and thus no Time Lords existed in those universes. Most of the splintered Children would become their universe's equivalent of the Doctor, but some won't.Maybe some of the splinters differed from the original, too. Some may have had their ability to regenerate change to self-resurrection instead, or became male instead of female.
There may also be some universes where the lie about how Time Lord society was founded is actually true, and the Timeless Child played no part in it.
The TARDIS deliberately let the Judoon through
Sexy knows that it's never good to let the Doctor start sulking and brooding. The Doctor is at their best when there's danger, adventure, and intrigue afoot. So instead, she deliberately lowered her shields to let the Judoon get in and kidnap the Doctor, hoping that it'll give the Doctor something to do and get her out of her funk.- I agree with the headline..but not the reason for doing so. Rather, I think it's simply a case of the Doctor and also the TARDIS respecting their authority. When they requested entrance, the ship granted it, not thinking particularly of what they might want. Besides, there might be a sliver of her programming by the Time Lords, which stuck with her, through travelling with the Doctor, which involves pilots being held responsible for violations committed via TARDIS; in this case both escaping the shadow proclamation(see WMG at the top), and the Division. Finally, even though the warrant for her arrest was prescribed by a now presumably extant race, it's still valid, and the TARDIS should be programmed to respect it.
- Or, a potential other reason; In The Doctor's Wife, Sexy told the Doctor that she always took them where they Needed to go! Considering the Judoon were first hired to find the Ruth Doctor, she may have let the Judoon in, in order to help the Doctor learn more about her Pre-Hartnell Life?
- Or, the TARDIS knew that the Doctor needed some quiet time to think and process everything she's learned. She's been running from adventure to adventure, time traveling to avoid any dull bits, never letting herself be at rest long enough for stuff to sink in. For normal tragedies the TARDIS is okay with that, but this has shaken the Doctor's world like never before. She needs to slow down and think and feel, and since she'll never do that voluntarily, maybe being stuck in a prison cell will force her to take the time to process and mourn and heal.
Tecteun was a member of Rassilon's (or Omega's) immediate family (wife or sibling).
The Timeless Child's people were/are indigenous to N-Space, if not the planet on which the child was found.
Fans have commonly assumed that the child originated from the universe to which the portal led. However, the child could in fact have been abandoned when the rest of their people left N-Space/their planet for another universe through the portal.- In Series 13, the Doctor brings up the point that Tecteun had no knowledge of the child's circumstances. "You assumed I came through that wormhole, but you don't know. What if I was waiting there to be collected? What if I was supposed to be taken through it? What if whoever left me there was taken by that wormhole?" The last two questions raise the possibility that the child originated from N-Space.
- I have a theory, it's out there, but then this page is called wild mass guessing; Ashilder, in the dying days of the universe, made her way to gallifrey, somewhere down the line she lost some of her journals, of note, the ones warning her not to have children, and, as all life in the universe wasn't gone yet, she met someone (probably not Jack) on the ruined gallifrey, and they had a child, and once the child was born, she wanted to save the child from the impending collapse of the universe. Now until 12 and Clara showed up in what would become the Diner!TARDIS, there were no TARDISes left on Gallifrey, but she was able to find a Time Scoop, which she intended to use to superman he child back into the past, to live a full life in a universe that wasn't dying. However, unbenkownst to her, the scoop broke down, exposing the child to the energies of the time vortex, which mutated the child into the Timeless Child, and she ended up in the body we saw in the flashback, dropping into the wormhole becasue it happens to break through the vortex. This ties one controversial Doctor origin to another controversial Doctor origin, as the Doctor would be human on his mother's side.
The Doctor and Captain Jack met during their missing memories.
When we first meet Captain Jack, he mentions that he quit the Time Police when he discovered they has erased a couple of years of his memories, and he thus had no idea what he'd done while working for them. Now we learn the Doctor is in the same position, only moreso! Romana doesn't have the imposed regeneration limit.
This would explain how she could so cavalierly use up several regenerations just to try on different bodies. The whole "Timeless Child" thing is made up by the Master.
First off, the Doctor's been shown to have an excellent Psychic Block Defense, but a bunch of random sentient rags were able to get through it, enough to see something the Doctor herself has forgotten? The Master created the Remnants in order to Troll the Doctor, destroyed Gallifrey because of his own ego (in order to one-up the Doctor), and then hacked the Matrix (which he's done before) and came up with a cockamamie story about the Timeless Child and the Doctor having had a gazillion past lives. Ruth could be a past incarnation of the Doctor (maybe between 2 and 3), or maybe the Doctor has had a prior regeneration cycle (Ruth, the ones we saw in "The Brain of Morbius"), and the Master decided to use that as the basis of his elaborate prank.- Jossed as per Chris Chibnall he had intended the twist from the start. Even before Jodie was cast, so basically the reveal is the real deal. Pretty much confirmed as per WordOfGod. Also considering the Master's breakdown and pretty honest bitterness about the reveal it's not a prank because it makes the Master inferior by default to the Doctor, and his ego would never allow that.
- Even more jossed by Series 13, in which the Doctor asks Tecteun herself whether the Master was lying about the Timeless Child, and that character tells the Doctor that it's true.
It's basically all a con by the Time Lords.
- People thinking they're dead means fewer people trying to kill them. Also this:https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/cover-up-by-committee-doctor-who-1-1-spoilers-for-recent-events.836829/
- Doubtful as their location was the safest point of existence. Out of normal space and time. Also Gallifrys death was a forgone conclusion as of the Prophecy. In fact most of existence including their enemies at the time thought they were already extinct. No need play dead if everyone thinks you are . Also using someone's fanfic as a link doesn't prove a WMG makes it look like someone trying to pimp the fanfic instead of making an WMG. Also the basis of the fanfic is "the Timeless child" not being real. When it has been proven cannon in show by multiple person's. The Flux, The Jo Doctor, Her Mother etc .
The Shobogans were already incredibly long-lived prior to Tecteun's discovery of regeneration
Tecteun, the first Gallifreyan to travel off-planet, apparently accomplished interstellar travel within her lifetime, which humanity is very far away from, if it is even physically possible. Assuming the first Gallifreyan spacecraft was as technologically advanced as the first Earth spacecraft (or even current Earth spacecraft), then Tecteun's journey must have spanned centuries or millennia. This just makes her experimentation on the Timeless Child so that the future Time Lords could accomplish regeneration all the more motivated by greed.- Presumably the pre-regeneration Shobogan lifespan was the same as that of a single incarnation within a regeneration cycle, if the regeneration was caused by "old age" - a millenium or so.
On the contrary, Tecteun's Gallifrey, despite being "little regarded" and "sparsely populated", was already incredibly technologically advanced.
During the span between Tecteun's journey, discovery of the Timeless Child's regeneration, experimentation on the Timeless Child, and eventually giving herself regeneration, Tecteun visibly "grew older". Assuming that pre-regeneration Shobogans had similar lifespans to humans, Tecteun's interstellar round trip would have taken only a couple of years or decades at most, which would have involved space travel technology far beyond what we currently have.- Perhaps the Gallifreyans had developed hyperdrive by the time they started their first Shoboganned space exploration missions. The Gallifreyans just decided to send no-one into space for a really, really long time - they could have had no good reason to do it, or they decided they had to have some level of space travel technology sophistication (far beyond that of Earth at the time of sending the first human into space) before they should send anyone into space.
- The Master claimed that the space travel Tecteun had was "dangerous" and "unsophisticated" - but that's the impression of a Time Lord now looking back. What a modern Time Lord considers "dangerous, unsophisticated" technology is already incredibly advanced by human standards.
- Or the Pythia - the pre-Time-Lord rulers of Gallifrey - and their magic could have been involved somehow, in making spacecraft with 20th/21st-century technology travel at interstellar speeds.
Tecteun was not literally the first Gallifreyan to travel into space.
Tecteun was the first Gallifreyan to develop "space travel" and also to "[take] risks to explore the worlds and galaxies beyond [Gallifrey]". The definition of "space travel" for civilizations with a long history and high prevalence of interstellar/intergalactic travel could be different from the Earth definition of "space travel" - while Earth "space travel" is any manned travel beyond Earth's atmosphere, Gallifreyan "space travel" is Shoboganned travel beyond the orbit of Gallifrey's natural satellite(s) to another "world" (planet) at the very least. ("Another world" is more often used to mean another planet, than a moon.) Presumably Shobogans before Tecteun had accomplished satellite launches, simple travel beyond Gallifrey's atmosphere, and travel to Gallifrey's moon(s) - Tecteun is not to Gallifrey what Yuri Gagarin is to Earth.The Timeless Child originated from Pete's World.
Pete's World has no Doctor. Why? Because Pete's World's Doctor fell into N-Space.The Master is a victim of I Cannot Self-Terminate.
His last two regenerations (last three, if you count Big Finish Audio as canon) were killed by earlier or later versions of themselves, and so the first thing the Spymaster did after he regenerated was to somehow prevent himself from being killed by themself again. By the time of "The Timeless Children", he clearly wants to die—and he's gone and prevented himself from doing anything proactive to make it happen.