“Doctor Who” season finale recap: The Timeless Child, revealed
For a show that’s been on the air for more than a half-century, it’s remarkable how little we know about Doctor Who’s titular, time-traveling protagonist. There are always a few constants, of course: There’s a Doctor, they travel through time and space in a ship called a TARDIS, they’re an alien called a Timelord, and they usually will risk anything to save the day. Over the years, we’ve learned bits and pieces about the Doctor’s off-screen past, whether that’s a glimpse at their homeworld of Gallifrey or a hinted dalliance with Queen Elizabeth I. But ultimately, there’s a reason the show’s title is a question. We may spend time with the Doctor, but we may never truly learn everything about them. Now, the explosive season 12 finale “The Timeless Child” is upending much of what we thought we knew — and teaching the Doctor a few new things about herself.
There’s a lot to unpack in this episode, but let’s start with the biggest, most universe-altering revelation: the true nature of the Timeless Child. This cryptic phrase was first teased almost two years ago in “The Ghost Monument,” the 13th Doctor’s second-ever episode, and it’s been haunting our normally happy-go-lucky heroine ever since. The Master uncovered the truth and it shook him enough to burn Gallifrey to the ground; now, he’s sharing that knowledge with his oldest foe (and oldest friend). After outrunning an army of Cybermen in the previous episode, the Doctor finds herself in the ruins of Gallifrey, where the Master traps her and forces her to stare into the Matrix, an ancient repository of all Timelord knowledge. It’s there that she learns the truth: She is not the last of the Timelords, after all. Instead, she’s the very first — the so-called Timeless Child.
Long before the Timelords ruled the galaxy, an indigenous Gallifreyan named Tecteun (Seylan Baxter) found a lonely child from another universe, stranded by a strange interdimensional portal. She took her and raised her as her own, until she discovered that the child had the ability to regenerate, renewing her body and cheating death over and over again. Tecteun studied her adopted daughter and eventually found a way to splice her ability into her own genetics, creating the race we now know as the Timelords. As for the child herself, the Timelords recruited her into a top-secret organization called the Division, sending her on missions and wiping her memory when necessary — until she grew into the figure we know as the Doctor.
So not only is the Doctor not from Gallifrey, but she’s lived countless lives that have all been stripped from her mind, long before William Hartnell’s Doctor stole a TARDIS and ran away. Whittaker turns out not to be the first female Doctor at all — there have been countless more before her, all forgotten. Jo Martin’s Ruth, whom we met earlier this season, is presumably one of those lost lives, and because parts of the Matrix have been redacted, it’s impossible to know exactly how many there have been. (Last episode’s visions of the Irish police officer Brendan are a filtered, edited version of the Doctor’s story — an immortal being pushed into service and their memory wiped.)
James Pardon/BBC Studios/BBC America
It’s a bold reveal that not only shocks the Doctor but is sure to shock audiences, too. Genetics didn’t give the Timelords the power to regenerate; instead, they stole it, and a very small piece of the Doctor now lives on in all of them. It’s a fact that drives the Master mad, and he soon sets out to enact the newest part of his plan: an alliance with the Cybermen. So ensues a fairly standard end-of-the-universe finale plot, involving Cyberium and a Death Particle and all sorts of silly sci-fi jargon, until the Master transforms all of the dead Timelords he massacred into an undead Cyberman army, capable of endless regeneration. The images of Cybermen decked out in Timelord capes and regalia are rather silly, but hey, it’s Who.
Far more interesting are the confrontations between the Doctor and the Master. Sacha Dhawan’s Master has been a chaotic delight ever since his debut in the season premiere, and here, he and the Doctor circle around each other with dramatic menace, each trying to outmaneuver the other but unable to ever really kill their former friend. Dhawan’s Master is a Master who revels in death and blood, casually boasting about a torture chamber in the basement and easily dispatching the Lone Cyberman with concern only for his choice of villainous pun. Sure, he’s eager to conquer the universe with his new endlessly regenerating army, but he’s more concerned about the psychological damage he can inflict upon the Doctor by shattering her psyche.
Ultimately, however, the Timeless Child revelation doesn’t break the Doctor but renews her sense of self. It’s her embrace of all of her repressed memories that allows her to break free of the Matrix, and as she goes to finally confront her old friend, it’s with a cool, collected strength that frightens even the Master.
“You think you’ve broken me? You’ll have to try harder than that,” she says. “You’ve given me a gift of myself. You think that could destroy me? You think that makes me lesser? It makes me more. I contain multitudes, more than I ever thought or knew. You want me to be scared of it because you’re scared of everything, but I am so much more than you.”
Whittaker delivers this instant-classic “Doctor Who Big Speech” with a calm fury, and it ends up being one of the 13th Doctor’s most empowering, moving moments yet. It’s a liberating idea that trauma doesn’t have to be debilitating; instead, it can grant us determination and inner power that can help us carry on. Ultimately, the Doctor attempts to sacrifice herself to bring down the Master and his Cyber army, but she can’t bring herself to do it, and the old warrior Ko Sharmus (Ian McElhinney) steps in to pull the trigger for her. And so yet again, our Doctor escapes from Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS, rewriting her own origin story. The Timeless Child may have lived countless lives, but the Doctor, our Doctor, is still the hero we’ve always known.
It’s a jam-packed finale and the culmination of showrunner Chris Chibnall’s most ambitious storyline yet. A few other characters and plot points get lost in all the big revelations, and the companions largely take a backseat to the Doctor’s journey. There is, however, one lovely scene between Yaz and Graham, where they muse about how much they’ve grown since traveling with the Doctor. Ultimately, they decide, their power comes not from their association with her but from their own inner self — a nice little character moment.
Wearied and humbled, the Doctor takes the stolen TARDIS — chameleon circuit intact! — back to her own ship, where she takes a minute to breathe before heading to Yorkshire to pick up her lost fam. She’s waylaid, however, by the arrival of a Judoon squadron that arrests and imprisons her. It’s a cliffhanger ending, but it’s also an optimistic one: No matter how much the Doctor may change or how the world may shift around her, there will always be enemies to best and galaxies to save. The Timeless Child, the Last Timelord, the Mad (Wo)Man with a Box… She has many names, but she’ll always be our Doctor.
TARDIS log notes:
Fortunately, we’ll only have to wait a little while longer to get to the bottom of the Doctor’s incarceration and all that nonsense with the Judoon: Chris Chibnall has revealed that the Doctor “and her friends” will return in a holiday special later this year. It hasn’t been announced yet whether “Revolution of the Daleks” will air around Christmas or New Year’s, but Chibnall is promising the return of everyone’s favorite genocidal pepperpots and plenty of exterminations.
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