- 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, soā¦ maybe, but not necessarily.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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...
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.
- One article in the Doctor Who Official Annual 2022 suggests so.
- Jossed - the Series 13 story arc is focused around a cataclysmic force called the "Flux".
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.
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.
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 Childā¦ we see whatās hidden, even from yourself. The outcast, abandoned and unknownā¦ indicating that they were talking about her. As well as the Masterās rage at the Doctorās 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.
- 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.
- Ruth was on the run from the Division, working for Gat and the Gallifreyan army. Thirteenās 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 doesnāt remember her! Likewise, Ruth would always have met Thirteen because they saved each other from Gat! From Ruthās 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!
- Jossed.
- Jossed.
- Confirmed.
- 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).
- With the trigger for it to reorganise itself being the whole Ruth/Gat incident.
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.
- 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.
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.
- Both prisons are built into planetoids.
- 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.
- Confirmed.
- 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.
- 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.
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"!)
- 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.
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.
- Jossed. It's a Thirteenth Doctor episode, and the Fugitive Doctor doesn't make an appearance.
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.
Some fans have theorized that The Doctor is not really the Timeless Child. One proposed it was Susan, who āThe Doctorā 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 āAn Unearthly Childā), 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 āRuthā and the faces shown in āThe Brain of Morbiusā 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 āThe Doctorā? 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 Susanās memories into First and then repress them, then erase her memory. Place failsafes into each other in case this doesnāt work out(it doesnāt), 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 āthe Doctorā still has her memories, and so keeps the police box appearance.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
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!?
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 .
- 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.
- 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.