Doctor Who season 14 is set to open in a big way with the return of Russell T. Davies as showrunner, but there are some loose ends following Chibnall’s introduction of The Timeless Child which RTD will need to resolve. The Doctor has long been established as part of an alien race of extremely advanced humanoids called Time Lords. These Time Lords had found ways to manipulate and bend time and space to their will, allowing them to create incredible technologies, including the development of a unique ability to regenerate and take on a brand-new life when faced with the prospect of dying. This ability was originally thought to have happened as a side effect of prolonged exposure to the untempered schism, or as a result of experiments by one of the founders of the Time Lords, Rassilon, in an attempt to achieve immortality and rule forever.
Despite almost a decade and a half, and three regenerations since 2010, one of the biggest concept changes for the show came in Chibnall’s penultimate season, when it was revealed that the Doctor’s origins are far more complicated than previously revealed. Chibnall revealed an alternative story for how the Time Lords acquired the ability to regenerate with the Doctor revealed to be The Timeless Child. It was a deeply controversial storyline that upended established lore, and long-term audiences are hoping for a reversal. However, there are a few ways Russell T. Davies can fix Chibnall’s Timeless Child mistake in Doctor Who season 14.
5 Doctor Who Season 14 Can Pretend The Timeless Child Never Happened
The simplest and least satisfying way to resolve The Timeless Child mystery, and unfortunately one that has a precedent in Doctor Who, is ignoring the subject completely. Towards the end of Davies’ first run on Doctor Who, he introduced the character of Jenny, the biological daughter of the Doctor thanks to a machine that farmed and rapidly produced offspring based on a single parent’s DNA. The episode concluded by showing Jenny having survived a fatal wound thanks to her Time Lord genetics, and she flew off into space. However, that storyline was never picked up again, despite it being a significant development that the Doctor had a child, albeit a lab-created child he never previously knew about. It’s entirely possible that RTD will opt to do the same with The Timeless Child plot.
While it’s certainly the easiest way to deal with it, it wouldn’t be the wisest. The Timeless Child storyline has made too great an impact and has been too controversial to simply pretend it never happened. Russell T. Davies’ tenure as returning Doctor Who showrunner will be partly judged on how he handles the Timeless Child story arc. Most are hoping he retcons the events during Chibnall’s run, but never addressing it at all would be almost as bad as continuing to let the Timeless Child story play out.
4 The Timeless Child Was A Trick By The Master All Along
After Chibnall era used the Master to reveal the Doctor’s origin, Doctor Who season 13 did almost nothing to further the plot or explain how it was possible. The ongoing silence on the matter may be an indication that the Master was simply trying to manipulate the Doctor, possibly to turn against their race, or possibly just to confuse and bring the Doctor to a breaking point. The Master frequently deceives the Doctor and bends the truth in order to gain an advantage. However, the payoff for these lies does usually appear within a few episodes or at least the same season and that did not happen in Chibnall’s final seasons. With that plot line being somewhat unresolved, Russell T. Davies could run with it as a convenient way to erase the Timeless Child storyline.
3 The Timeless Child Was Just The Toymaker Changing Reality
One theory that doesn’t appear to have a solid footing is that The Toymaker, an old villain from classic Doctor Who who is returning for the 60th-anniversary specials, is behind it all. While The Toymaker is known for their ability to bend and alter reality in an effort to best the Doctor, the amount of planning and coordination for this payoff to be true makes it unlikely. Doctor Who season 12, episode 10, “The Timeless Children” aired on March 1, 2020. However, Chibnall did not announce his intention to leave the series until more than a year later and RTD announced his return more than 18 months after the episode first aired.
Things are often planned well in advance with these projects due to the collaboration between creative teams and the volume of work and time that needs to go into completing each episode, but the principal work for “The Timeless Children” would have happened long before RTD came anywhere close to actually returning to work on the show. That isn’t to say that RTD couldn’t use Doctor Who‘s Toymaker to retcon the Timeless Child narrative, but it is much more likely that he would use The Toymaker to enhance his own stories instead of erasing previous ones.
2 Jo Martin’s Doctor Is Actually The Unbound Doctor
Within the larger canon of Doctor Who audio and published adventures, there is a well-defined reason explaining how The Timeless Child narrative could exist: The Unbound Doctor. Unbound adventures do not adhere to strict canon and create a steady stream of stories outside the firmly established lore. The Unbound adventures have seen other new incarnations of the Doctor, new companions, and plenty of stories that exist in their own bubble. This could be an explanation for Jo Martin’s Doctor and potentially the incident with the Timeless Child is merely a collision between another reality from where Martin’s Doctor hails.
1 RTD Could Just Use The Timeless Child Narrative
As much as it complicates the history of the Doctor and the Time Lords, it’s not an uninteresting origin for how they came to develop powers of regeneration. It provides a unique rabbit hole to dig deeper into discovering the Doctor’s past and adds a whole new layer of storytelling for past and future Doctors. When the series started in 1963, regeneration wasn’t a fully fleshed-out concept until the creators and producers needed to recast William Hartnell’s First Doctor and create an in-story explanation. Since then, the limited number of regenerations for Time Lords has put a ticking clock on how much longer Doctor Who can survive as a show (even though the Eleventh Doctor already started a new regeneration cycle), but The Timeless Child origin could give the Doctor a way to continue regenerating far into the future.
