YMMV / Doctor Who S38E10 "The Timeless Children"

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Was Tecteun a cruel, heartless monster who inflicted pain and suffering on an innocent child in the name of science? Or was she merely misguided in her attempts to understand something that was utterly alien to her? This is complicated by the fact that she was willing to submit herself to experimentation and her first regeneration was undoubtedly traumatic for her. Also, the Master speculates that Tecteun may have felt some measure of remorse for her actions and created the Brendan simulation as an apology to the Doctor. Series 13 pretty much confirms the former theory, revealing that Tecteun wasn't apologetic at all and plotted to destroy the entire universe like Rassilon before her. If anything, the Master was being optimistic.
• Applicability:
  • Tecteun's relationship with the Timeless Child can be seen as a damning allegory for colonialism, where a white explorer finds a child of colour and builds an elite class of people from her suffering.
  • Within a few hours of airing, there was already a lot of meta on how much the Timeless Child/Doctor's backstory hit home for people who had been abused as children, had adoption trauma or were trans/intersex. The Master's behaviour towards the Doctor could also ring some bells for siblings born into an abusive family - often they might resent the one who was abused rather than the abuser as a way of dealing with having felt powerless, just as the Master unfairly blames the Doctor for having started the Time Lords and part of her genes being in him, when the Doctor was just a child and had no control over any of it.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: The Thirteenth Doctor's run was divisive overall, but even many fans who otherwise liked the previous episodes turned against it when this episode aired, because it reveals the Doctor is not an ordinary Time Lord, but a mysterious immortal who the Time Lords experimented on to get their regenerations from. This reveal, while enjoyed by some, also infuriated enormous numbers of fans, with entire video essays on YouTube dedicated to arguing why the reveal doesn't work. Common complaints are that it is a massive retcon to a decades-lasting franchise that strips the Doctor of their status as The Unchosen One, contradicts canon and creates many plot holes, turns the Time Lords into frauds, undermined the Character Development of the First Doctor, and generally comes off as disrespectful to the franchise and its history. Granted, other aspects of the franchise have delved into a similar concept with the Other decades prior.
• Awesome Music: Segun Akinola really outdid himself this episode:
  • The Leitmotif of the Master's theme.
  • The eerie but triumphant version of the opening played over the Doctor breaking out of the matrix.
  • The theme that plays when the Cyber-Masters are revealed, a great mix of the Master, the Cybermen and the Time Lords' themes from this season.
  • The sadder version of Thirteen's theme that plays as she goes to make a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Broken Base: Oh Lord. Possibly the single most divisive episode in the entire history of Doctor Who. Mainly over the revelations / retcons about the Doctor's origin:
  • On the one hand, you have fans that felt that this was an exciting new development, adding a new layer of intrigue into the Doctor's history and opening up the possibility for the show to go into bold new directions by delving further into the Doctor's past and revisiting the potentially infinite number of prior incarnations and their forgotten history. There were fans that loved the way that the show finally resolved the question of the prior faces of the Doctor seen in "The Brain of Morbius", and allowed them to co-exist with the regeneration limit. Lines in other stories that strongly implied, or even outright stated, that Hartnell's Doctor was the first incarnation could simply be chalked up to the First Doctor simply being the first incarnation to be referred to as the Doctor (though this paradoxically ignores that, only five episodes ago, the Fugitive Doctor was already calling herself the Doctor, and acted as such to boot!) Notably, Steven Moffat used a similar justification to retroactively place the War Doctor between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors without any change to the numbering of the incarnations, by saying the the War Doctor should be unnumbered because he refused to be known as "the Doctor" throughout his life. There's also the fans that also welcomed the change to the canon in the sense that it made the Doctor far more powerful than they were in the past, and examined the possibilities that she could (possibly^note Assuming their regeneration cycle wasn't limited by the Time Lords when their memories were wiped) use her regeneration energy on a whim to replicate the same sort of destruction the Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors wrought to their surroundings during their regenerations.
  • On the other hand, other fans felt that this was a cheap and bad attempt to rewrite the entire history of the show, that the revelations made the Doctor less interesting, and undermined the characters' status as being a shining example of The Unchosen One by making them no longer just an ordinary Time Lord who became different through their own choices. Many fans were deeply opposed to the idea of William Hartnell's incarnation no longer being the "First" Doctor, even labelling it as "disrespectful". Some also felt that showing a pre-Hartnell incarnation of the Doctor already acting like the familiar character undermined the significance of the First Doctor's Character Development from amoral traveller to hero. Many also felt that the potential for introducing more past Doctors was an unwelcome, cheap attempt to set up future spin-offs. Resolving the "Morbius Doctors" plot thread or adapting the Other storyline was derided by some as excessive Fan Wank.
  • And then you have the fans who take a position somewhere in the middle, not being necessarily opposed to the changing of the show's canon, welcoming the new ideas and they way it at least tries to tie into the classic series, but feeling the revelation could've been handled better, and a common complaint on both sides is that the Master's prolonged Infodump explaining it all to the Doctor came off as forced, taking away a lot of the Doctors' agency. Some also feel it may have been more fitting for the Master to be the Timeless Child, especially given the abuse Rassilon already put on him, and all the pain he experienced due to his regeneration cycle being limited; all of which gives him a bigger reason to blame the Time Lords for robbing him of his original unlimited cycle.
• Crazy Is Cool: Ko Sharmus, introduced innocuously in the previous episode as an old man who had escaped the Cyber-Camps and helped other humans escape through the Boundary and stayed behind on the slim chance others might come, shows his true awesomeness (and a fantastic sarcastic streak) in this episode when he leads Ryan and Ethan, with hardly any weapons, no training and very few defences, in an assault against a death squad of Cybermen and the three take out all but a few of them. He packs enough explosives to take out a Cyberman War Carrier and caps off the episode in a Heroic Sacrifice to take out the Master and his new race of CyberMasters after revealing he was part of the squad that sent the Cyberium back in time in the first place, starting off this whole mess with the Cybermen to begin with, and destroys what's left of Gallifrey.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The Master wants to roll out the red carpet for the Cybermen. He then tells the Doctor it will be red from the blood of the Time Lords he slaughtered.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • With the Doctor spending the cliffhanger in a maximum security prison, the fandom almost instantly jumped to the theory that she was now in Stormcage and that "Revolution of the Daleks" would see Thirteen meet up with River Song. Other fans noted a visual similarity to the Time Lord prison ship Shada.
  • The introduction of Tecteun to the early history of Time Lord civilization has led to many fans speculating about their relationship to the rest of the canon, with one very popular suggestion being that they ultimately changed their name to Rassilon. There is also speculation that Tecteun may be the Woman from "The End of Time", due to a distinct similarity between their actresses, though others are quick to point out issues with this theory.
  • A lot of fans think the kid that pushed the Timeless Child off the cliff is none other than the Master.
  • Some fans with mixed feelings on the Timeless Child reveal have revived the old Season 6B theory, suggesting that the Fugitive Doctor actually came between the Second and Third Doctors rather than before the First, to explain why she was already calling herself the Doctor and using a police box-shaped TARDIS. Not to mention her TARDIS being a reconstruction of the prop used by the Second Doctor.
• Fanfic Fuel: So where did the Timeless Child come from all those millions of years ago, and are they truly from another universe? What were they doing during all those prior lives that have now been erased? What was the Division having them do? The fandom's mind was already spinning on these and countless other questions within moments of the episode airing.
• He's Just Hiding: While the episode seemingly takes pains to render the Time Lords and Gallifrey well and truly Deader than Dead and leave the Doctor firmly established as the last of the Time Lords (the Master's inevitable Joker Immunity notwithstanding) once again, many fans doubted that the Master could possibly have killed everyone on the planet, considering how the assembled horrors of the Time War failed to accomplish that until the War Doctor attempted to use the Moment. To say nothing of any Time Lords that might have been off-world (such as Rassilon) or able to escape via TARDIS use or other means when the Master pulled his Apocalypse How, considering nothing states he used a time lock to keep them there. Also, given that destroying Gallifrey forever and ever would make "The Day of the Doctor" and a chunk of the Twelfth Doctor's character arc All for Nothing, it seems possible, if not likely, that it will eventually be amended — though, as it turned out, by hands other than the seemingly-unconcerned Thirteen's.
• Iron Woobie: She has plenty of undesirable qualities and bad coping methods, like all versions of the Doctor, but Thirteen deals with her trauma by weaponizing it, or in other words, honouring who she's been. Compared to thes Spy Master, who falls apart at what's been done to both her and him, and scapegoats her for it.
• Like You Would Really Do It: So Gallifrey and the Master are gone for good, huh? We'll believe it when we see it. Especially as the Doctor had a spare TARDIS in convenient running distance, so the Master (and at least some of the other Time Lords) probably did too. The Master can even be heard ordering the Cyber-Masters to follow him somewhere to escape, and they came back in "The Power of the Doctor", Thirteen's Grand Finale, the following year. Gallifrey, however, did not.
• Narm: The first Timeless Child falling off the cliff is accompanied with an expression of Dull Surprise and her awkwardly waving her hands.
• Narm Charm: The Cyber-Masters have metallic versions of the High Council headdress in place of the traditional handlebars, along with black robes draping from their shoulders. Are these design choices impractical and slightly silly-looking? Maybe. Are they a dread-inducing indication of what exactly these things are and how dangerous a threat they represent? Absolutely.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • After the debut of this episode, the internet had a bit of a field day in interpreting the Master as an extremely violent Tsundere.
  • The Doctor escaping from the Matrix by overloading it with all of her memories, portrayed as a Continuity Cavalcade of archival footage with Triumphant Reprise of the theme tune, has been described by fans as "the Doctor defeats the Matrix by uploading all episodes of Doctor Who" or "by explaining in detail the Doctor Who lore".
• Older Than They Think:
  • The concept that regeneration is not a natural facet of Time Lord biology but rather was invented (and the artificial limit imposed) by the founders of Gallifrey has already been suggested in the Expanded Universe, with the specific suggestion that Rassilon was responsible for giving the other Time Lords said ability (while granting himself immunity to the 13-body limit).
  • The Reveal that the Doctor is actually an important figure from Time Lord history, without necessarily being consciously aware of this, is nothing new; it was a key aspect of the "Cartmel Masterplan" from the classic series (it would have formed the backbone of Season 27 onward had the show not been cancelled), and the Expanded Universe showcased the connection more fully.
  • The Doctor having multiple incarnations prior to the one we know as the First Doctor was first teased all the way back in "The Brain Of Morbius", when the Fourth Doctor's brain was scanned and several mysterious faces were glimpsed alongside the Doctor's four known incarnations. This episode indeed calls back to said serial by including those very same faces in the montage of the previous Doctors, finally confirming them to have been incarnations of the Doctor after four decades of speculation.
  • As pointed out by Doctor Who Magazine, the fandom's complaints about the reveal "destroying the canon" was previously made concerning "The Deadly Assassin" and its depiction of the Time Lords. A later issue points out that both were made on similar reasoning (namely that past continuity opened itself up to some Fridge Logic that could do to be resolved).
• Shocking Moments: This episode had been built up as being the Wham Episode to end all Wham Episodes, and it delivered. Not only is the Doctor the Timeless Child, but we finally get to find out what that means, and it delivers quite possibly the biggest shock of the entire run.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: There are lots of fans that strongly dislike the Timeless Child twist, seeing it as disrespectful to the show's lore due to undermining the First Doctor and making the Doctor, who has always been merely a traveller and The Unchosen One, far too important to the Time Lords' existence and having little to no impact on anything that happens even within this story, as the Doctor seems to get over the whole thing rather quickly and continue as before and the Time Lords being wiped out again means that she can't even confront them over it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The Doctor finds out that the Time Lords experimented on her, wiped her memory and have been lying to her her whole life. This should naturally lead to a huge confrontation with them... except they were seemingly wiped out off-screen by the Master before the start of the series.
  • Ashad, the Lone Cyberman, was built up since "Fugitive of the Judoon" to be a major threat and antagonist, and in the previous two episodes as well. Yet here, he is unceremoniously killed by the Master and is barely mentioned again beyond becoming a MacGuffin. It would've been much more interesting to have him and the Master either work together or be at odds with each other throughout the episode.
  • The idea that the Time Lords experimented on an innocent child in order to develop their regeneration ability could have posed an interesting moral quandary for the Doctor, forcing her to grapple with the question of whether she should keep using it while knowing where it came from. Unfortunately, her turning out to be the innocent being in question removes this quandary, since it always belonged to her anyway.
  • A common complaint among detractors (such as ScreenRant) is that the idea of the Timeless Child is not intrinsically terrible, but that it would have been a far better and more interesting idea for the Timeless Child to be the Master instead of the Doctor. The Master was already a victim of Rassilon and had a bad history with the Time Lords in general, and making him be the victim of their immortality experiments would further justify his hatred of them and make him more sympathetic. Especially since he spent one incarnation as a walking corpse stealing bodies to survive because he ran out of regenerations at the time, meaning they doomed him to that fate by cutting off his previously unlimited regeneration cycle to hide the deception. It would also lead to the above interesting moral quandary of whether the Doctor should continue using this ability or not, considering the effects it would have had in their former best friend.

---