We don’t need to talk about canon

SPOILERS FOR THE TIMELESS CHILDREN

So obviously that was a lot.

But also: barely anything happened.

A big change in continuity got dropped into that episode - with all the skill I deployed single-handedly destroying the P7 Trip to Arran display in the gym hall during “The Netball Incident” – and it’s pulling focus somewhat. The Doctor’s past is a mystery to both us and her now, and we learned that the Time Lord ability to regenerate was harvested from her.

The Time Lords didn’t want it to be known that the ability they graft onto people when they graduate wasn’t innate to them, so this was hidden deep in the Matrix (like, eight subfolders down and marked ‘Locked Data Do Not open’) and had a Ballykissangel filter applied rather than be redacted or deleted. I think that’s what happened. Anyway it’s a big secret, and then the Time Lords invented Time Travel (which, to be fair, they also lied about how that came about in the official records so they do have form for this – oh, if only they could have squeezed in more exposition).

That’s a brief summary of that, and avoids any real commentary on how this affects the series and whether or not it’s a good thing. I think it’s quite possible to write about The Timeless Children in a critical way and not thoroughly address the changes to the Doctor’s character, because something more important than this happens:

The Master has killed everyone on Gallifrey.

2.47 billion children.

He killed them because the Time Lord ability to regenerate comes from the Doctor and makes her special. This makes her a significant part of the Master’s lineage, moreso than their millennia-long intense friend/enemy relationship.

Irrespective of whether you like the retcon that there are Doctors pre-Hartnell who got their mind-wiped (and Chibnall loves a non-consensual mindwipe), irrespective of whether you like the retcon that the Doctor is a key figure in Time Lord history, you need to justify genocide on such a scale – that the show has already addressed – with one hell of a reason.

This idea that the Doctor is a special figure in Time Lord history is used to justify the Master killing everyone on Gallifrey and putting their bodies into cold storage to create a race of Cyber-Masters. Let’s just skip over the fact that the Master has morgue facilities for the entire Time Lord race, and that dead Time Lords contain the ability to regenerate perpetually (which begs the question ‘What are you doing being dead?’) and furthermore will insist on another change to the Cybermen design (to be fair, that’s quite an accurate portrayal of the Master’s predilection for overly complicated nonsense). Let’s skip over a few things, basically, and then come back to the Master killing billions because of this news. Compare and contrast it to the War Doctor destroying the Daleks and corrupted Time Lords to save the universe.

My reaction upon hearing the Master’s reasoning was ‘Wait, that’s it?’. And the Master, while obviously a long-established villain, has never deliberately committed genocide before. Mainly they’re much smaller stakes than this. I cannot connect my knowledge of the character to this action on either a gut feeling level or an intellectual one. Killing the High Council, maybe, but the entire planet? While the planet is trapped towards the end of time? I can’t buy the Master being that angry about this, but then this is a Chibnall story. The nasty edges burst through.

This action impacts previous stories. At the end of The Day of the Doctor, once the Doctors have saved all the children on Gallifrey, we now know that this isn’t true. Their slaughter is just deferred.

If this Master is pre-Missy then perhaps it makes slightly more sense for his character, but if he’s meant to come after Missy then her end too is diminished; if we know she just becomes this much nastier, brutal character without any of her development (and working with the Cybermen twice) being addressed. This is what I’m used to over the past two series: characters doing things in service of the story, rather than stories being driven by character.

I like Sacha Dhawan’s interpretation of the scripts, trying his best with the material, but Chibnall keeps giving him long laboured punchlines to wrestle with (‘It’s red because it’s drenched in the blood of our people’ rather than ‘There was a lot of blood’ for example) and also the bulk of the dialogue in this episode. There’s a good observation about that here:

Exposition is difficult, but this storyline didn’t help itself by having to cram so much in. The structure of the series was such that we were teased for revelations at the start and middle, then had them explained at the end. These are big ones too, and need room to breathe, especially in the wake of the criticism of the previous series that only two of the four regulars had any character development (as well as the series’ structure this criticism can be levelled at individual episodes too). Indeed, we are told by Graham that he thinks Yaz is great based on no specific examples – the show simply hasn’t devoted time to its characters for this scene to work. All Ryan gets to do is throw a bomb and that achieves nothing. There isn’t any tension over their survival, conversion, or departure.  

Emotional weight is also difficult, and frankly we’ve been spoiled by RTD and Moffat, but in the wake of their storylines the pathos seems especially hollow here. The Doctor – given all that has happened in the stories since 2005 – is faced with going back to the planet she saved, now destroyed by her former best friend who she thought redeemed, in order to destroy all life on it again as she did on her darkest day because she sees no real alternative…it feels like this should be a bigger deal, but the end result is a predictable self-sacrifice that also comes with its own special additional bit of exposition while the Master and the Cyber-Time-Lords stand around letting them chat.

Ah yeah, the Cybermen.

Who could possibly have predicted that Chibnall’s take on the Cybermen would be to make one really nasty and brutal?

Everyone, because that’s his main thing. He takes the potentially interesting idea of an emotional Cyberman and just has it be angry and edgy and GRRRRRRRRR. He has it be Tim Shaw. I know the Cyberman has a name but it was so dull I’ve forgotten it (this is Chibnall’s second thing). The storytelling potential of someone who wanted to be converted, who has a religious zealotry for the Cybermen, that’s decent, but all Chibnall does is have him tell the Master that he wants to be a robot. Because when you want to be converted into a Cyberman clearly it’s because your end goal is to become a robot. This is a plan so bad that the Master takes the piss out of it and then shoots him.

"oh no"

Oh, and he had a MacGuffin in him which was conveniently a really specific and correct legend. And he drilled a hole in another Cyberman for no reason other than Chibnall’s edgelord tendencies. FUCKING HELL, we’re meant to think, HE’S WELL HARD. THIS IS WELL GRIM. JESUS. WHAT WON’T HE DO NEXT?

Anything of note.

These episodes raised the notion of Cybermen being able to use dead bodies for conversion. In Death in Heaven this was seen as a new and rare idea, but now seems to be a fairly standard process. I’m intrigued as to why the Cybermen have never just stunned people and converted them, but now I know. Whether they prefer their bodies dead or alive, they just can’t fucking shoot anything. They hit two people over the course of the episode, one of whom is hit about 14 times and isn’t even killed. Yeah, the Cybermen are scary again. They’re big clanky cyborgs who kill you by shooting like a 9-year-old at Laserquest, which is definitely the scariest thing you can do with the Cybermen. This is a fitting use for the current version of the show. The Cybermen are an interesting idea, but all the show does with interesting ideas at the moment is swing a mirror by them, so you don’t really get any investment in them but have to admit they are technically there.

In the face of such monotonous grimness, do we get a Doctor who is a counterpoint to this?

No, we get another case of Thirteen being written as passive and powerless. Nigel Auchterlounie, who writes Dennis and Gnasher for The Beano, offered this as a possible alternative:

Just for fun... an alternate end to #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/JLXXCla7ni

— Nigel Auchterlounie (@spleenal) March 2, 2020

There’s nothing wrong with having the Doctor on the backfoot, under pressure and having a bad day, but usually that works because it’s a contrast. Thirteen hasn’t had an ‘Everybody lives!’ moment. She’s not even had a ‘Life will out! Hah!’ moment. She has, at least, blown a kiss to a giant frog. That’s not nothing, but her victories haven’t been cathartic moments of joy. So we have a series where the series finale presents this as the good guys winning:

The heroine cannot bring herself to destroy the animated corpses of her entire species, so Joe off of Derry Girls has to do it for her. Hooray. An entire planet now a lifeless husk. Yay Doctor Who.

So no, overall I’m not that bothered about the big shifts in continuity. I’m bothered that the lead writer is sucking the joy out of Doctor Who and replacing it with one where hope and triumph and joy and characters that actually resemble real people are being gradually replaced by this cold, clanking monstrosity that makes me long for a forgotten humanity.

Doctor Who, at least, is Chris Chibnall doing the Cybermen right.