Doctor Who: The Timeless Child Arc Started Much Earlier Than We Noticed
The Timeless Child story arc was the biggest plot twist of the Thirteenth Doctor’s era, and yet they were clues long before.
Doctor Who is no stranger to rewriting the history of the universe and the show itself. Take Gallifrey, for example. So much has happened to it throughout the series’ 60-year-long run – only in the New Who, the home world of the Time Lords was destroyed, then brought back, frozen in time, unfrozen but hidden, and finally free.
Since viewers were getting tired of the endless shenanigans with Gallifrey, showrunner Chris Chibnall decided to give people something else to be mad about. Thus, season 12 was devised to feature a peculiar sub-plot that unveiled the mystery of the Timeless Child.
Turns out, the Doctor wasn’t who she thought she was. In fact, she was a lot older than she remembered and not exactly a Gallifreyan. When the Doctor was just a child, she was discovered on another planet by Tecteun, an ancient explorer and one of the founding fathers of Gallifrey (in the next regeneration).
Tecteun brought the Doctor to her home world and used her genetic code to create the Time Lords, an alien race who now had the ability to regenerate. This was well before William Hartnell’s First Doctor, the first reincarnation that the Doctor remembers in her current state.
The biggest revelation that came from the Timeless Child story arc was that the Doctor had a lot more regenerations than previously believed – the audience even got a sneak peek at Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor, who supposedly existed even before Hartnell’s.
Many fans are furious with Chibnall over such a major change to Doctor Who’s history. However, one episode actually hinted at the storyline long before Chibnall even got the showrunner gig.
2011’s The Doctor’s Wife, written by Neil Gaiman, explored the TARDIS, even giving her a human form for a little while. At some point, the TARDIS, aka “Sexy” (as the Doctor calls her in private), revealed that she didn’t delete the previous console rooms – instead, she archived them just in case.
The Doctor’s oldest companion then said that she had “about 30” console rooms by that point, claiming that some of them were from the future in response to the Doctor’s confused expression. This episode also proved that the TARDIS didn’t fully comprehend the concept of time and got the past and the future mixed up rather often.
So what if some of those 30 console rooms didn’t belong to the Doctor’s future incarnations, but instead were relics of the past that the time traveler simply forgot? The TARDIS’ core is the Time Vortex, which allows her to be aware of certain things that are even beyond the Doctor’s scope, and she could’ve easily known all about her favorite “thief” being the Timeless Child.