The Timeless Children by Chris Chibnall

Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.

We'll start with the headline. The Timeless Children is bad. It's really bad. Let me be clear at the outset. I don't care about Doctor Who's internal continuity. It's been chopped up, messed around, and large swathes of it healthily ignored throughout most of the show's history. The problem with this episode is not that it represents the biggest shift in canon since The Deadly Assassin, the story that first introduced the regeneration limit and gave us what was up until yesterday the accepted history of the Time Lords. The key difference is that, in that episode, Robert Holmes wasn't setting out intentionally to fundamentally alter the history of the show. He was just coming up with narrative fixes to help the story he was trying to tell. The Master needs to have run out of regenerations, so let's introduce a regeneration limit. You get the idea. But with The Timeless Children, there is no story that goes alongside the continuity. The continuity is the story.

The big reveal itself, and it's worth pausing on this for a moment, is as follows. The Doctor is not in fact a native born Gallifreyan, but is instead an immortal(?) being from another world whose DNA is stolen by The Time Lords so they can gain her regenerative powers. It's total and unmitigated nonsense. It's the kind of bullshit that Big Finish couldn't come up with in their wildest dreams. The lore that the show is selling here is so bad as to be actively hilarious.

Not only is the content of the reveal total hokum, it's delivered in the most boring way imaginable, through an endless exposition dump that lasts roughly half the lifetime of the universe. It's just poor storytelling, and despite Sacha Dhawan's best efforts to make this information overload compelling, it isn't because we're just being told it without any reaction at all apart from the Doctor occasionally crying "no". There's no dramatic weight at all. I don't normally like to set about rewriting episodes (where we would you even start with this...) but why not have the Master trap the Doctor in the matrix where she has to discover the truth for herself? That might add some tension, or at least sense of agency, to what's going on here. But no, we get half a sodding hour of the Master going, "I'm telling you things. Big things. Important things."

But the very worst thing about this whole sorry affair is that, despite being billed as a finale with reveals that will change everything, and that "nothing will ever be the same again", what we get changes almost literally nothing. The Doctor is still the Doctor. We go through this whole continuing wrecking ball for no reason at all. We know that none of this matters because the Ruth!Doctor turns up and tells us as much, which is the closest this episode gets to being self-aware at any point. I find it very hard to believe that this will materially affect who the Doctor is going forward, or how she operates. She will still be, to coin a phrase, "an idiot, with a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out." If she isn't that, then what you're left with isn't Doctor Who anymore. Which begs the question: what the hell is the point of any of this?

Speaking of the Doctor, Chibnall era Who has reconstituted the character as an ineffectual bystander who does almost nothing in the face of death and atrocity. Here is an almost perfect example of that. The Doctor is so passive in this story as to be almost entirely inconsequential. The Master might as well have been spouting his revelations to a cardboard cutout of the Doctor. She stands around for almost the entire runtime while the Master explains her new Wikipedia entry to her. Jodie Whittaker deserves great credit for her performances over the last ten episodes, but the characterisation is so flimsy here, I barely even registered she was there.

What plot there is alongside this narrative farce is every bit as abysmal as what's going on inside the Matrix. I'd like to be able to say that the worst thing about the Cybermen is that they revert to being the mindless cannon fodder that they were in the 1980s and most NuWho finales up until now. But it's even worse than that, because the Master's dastardly evil plan involves upgrading Time Lord corpses into Cybermen to create a race of unkillable superbeings. It reads like bad fanfiction I know, but that's what happens. Suddenly the non-reveal of what the Hybrid was in Hell Bent looks like an absolutely genius move from Steven Moffat. 

But it's all fine because Ashad, now conveniently killed and miniaturised, and left just lying around on the floor of his spaceship, has a "death particle" (stop laughing at the back) stowed handily about his person. Even more helpful is that random old guy character turns up, exposits his entire backstory in about four and a half seconds, and sacrifices himself to save the day. That was lucky. The Doctor doesn't have to confront the moral dilemma the episode poses because she instead actively runs away from it. In trying to recreate the denouement of The Day of the Doctor, this ends up being its antithesis. Instead of deciding that there had to be another way and that the genocide they thought they committed in the Time War could never really be justified, the Doctor just lets someone else do the genocide thing for her. It's an ending so obvious and signposted, Chekhov's Gun may have just been replaced with Chekhov's Atomic Bomb.

This story is the Cartmel Masterplan on steroids. For those that don't know, the script editor of the final three seasons of Classic Who, Andrew Cartmel, had a plan to reintroduce the mystery of the show by making the character of the Seventh Doctor darker, more mysterious and manipulative. This was all building up to the big reveal that the Doctor was one of the founders of Time Lord society. Cancellation saved the Cartmell Masterplan because you got all of the interesting character work without any of the dumb reveal. This story is the dumb reveal without any of the character work and unsurprisingly it doesn't work in the slightest.

The Timeless Children is a dismal misfire in almost every conceivable way. Like being trapped on a 400 mile long spaceship reversing away from the gravitational pull of a black hole, time did funny things while I was watching this episode. It honestly felt like it lasted about three hours. It sprays great jets of continuity at the audience, with references that even I wasn't immediately able to place. Chris Chibnall has written an entire season of Doctor Who in order to canonise the Morbius Doctors. The fact that this was broadcast at primetime on BBC1 on a Sunday evening is legitimately hilarious. It's an expanded universe aficionado's idea of heaven. I've got a lot of time for the expanded universe material in the form of books, audio adventures and all the rest, but it should always kept firmly away from the main show. I pity any casual viewer watching this, wondering what the hell was going on and why they were supposed to care about any of it. 

I hope that this can be just one of those continuity defining moments that we can collectively move passed. Sadly I feel like that hope is misplaced. Whatever happens now, it feels almost inevitable that we are heading into a period of almost endless extended universe media about this new history of Gallifrey and the Doctor, let alone what future seasons of the TV show have planned. So much of what comes after is going to be defined by The Timeless Children and I feel exhausted just thinking about it. Is it bold and ambitious? For sure. Is ambition alone enough to make up for shockingly poor storytelling? No, of course it isn't. And so here I am, desperately hoping that nothing will come of this, because it would be rubbish if it did.

Random musings

• So, any redeeming features? As I say, I like the Ruth!Doctor's cameo, even if it only serves to highlight how absurd the whole thing is. Graham and Yaz get a nice scene together. If only they had interacted just a little over the past 21 episodes, I might have even been willing to buy it.

• Speaking of the companions, they are totally sidelined here. Again. It seems the show is not quite done with the fam yet, but we've got the measure of them. An enormous waste of potential. I'm all for constructive debate about the relative merits of companions, but is anyone out there arguing that Ryan is a more compelling character than say Bill? I'm not even sure how you would argue that.

• I tried to count how many narrative beats were stolen directly from other, better, Doctor Who episodes, but lost count. I got The Witch's Familiar, The Doctor Falls, The Day of the Doctor, The Parting of the Ways, The End of Time and, of course, the final few seconds of every David Tennant season finale. I'm sure there were others.

• The Doctor seems very angry through a lot of this that she's had her memory erased. So, we're back to saying mindwiping people is bad are we? Nobody tell Ada Lovelace.

• Series 12 has been an odd one. It felt at about the half way point that we might be starting to get somewhere, but it has pretty much fallen to pieces towards the end. For me, it's repeating many of the same mistakes as Series 11, but covering them up with continuity overload. It's a shame, but this finale has catapulted Series 12 right down to the bottom of my season rankings alongside its immediate predecessor.

Rating

2/10