‘Doctor Who’: What Is The Timeless Child?

Unlike Jodie Whittaker’s debut season of Doctor Who, which stuck mostly to standalone storylines and setting up its own continuity and conflicts, Series 12 has been diving in deep, with the return of The Master (now played by Sacha Dhawan) at the end of the season premiere, and this week’s episode that dropped the name “The Timeless Child.” But what — or who — is The Timeless Child? Let’s do some recap, first.

Though it sounds like the sort of thing The Doctor would have run around shouting about during the Steven Moffat years, The Timeless Child was first briefly mentioned last season in the episode “The Ghost Monument.” Stranded on a military planet called Desolation, they’re attacked by the leftovers of some scientific experiments from years earlier, called Remnants, that are able to invade their prey’s minds and expose their fears. While delving into The Doctor’s, they discover something we’ve never heard about before.

“We see deeper though, further back…” the Remnant says, “The Timeless Child… we see what’s hidden, even from yourself. The outcast, abandoned and unknown…”

The Doctor immediately forces them out of her mind, and fans have wondered ever since about the identity of The Timeless Child. Were the Remnants calling The Doctor herself The Timeless Child? Someone else? What the what?

Well, as of “Spyfall, Part 2,” we have a bit more information about how big a secret The Timeless Child is, if not specifics about who it is. Spoilers for the episode past this point.

After stopping a plan by the Kasaavin, strange glowing aliens who are (wink, wink) definitely not some version of classic villains The Cybermen, even though both are obsessed with technology and upgrading themselves, and love to take human brains and stick them in robot bodies, The Doctor is haunted by words she shared earlier with The Master. At the top of the Eiffel Tower during World War II, The Master revealed that he had visited their home planet of Gallifrey, only to discover it in ruins and everyone dead. Not the first time that’s happened, of course, but still surprising given that Gallifrey was only brought back into continuity in 2015’s “Hell Bent,” and has been barely visited since.

The Doctor isn’t convinced by the villainous Master’s words, but she visits Gallifrey anyway — and yep, the planet, which is currently existing in a sort of pocket universe at the end of time, is totally razed. Reentering her TARDIS, she discovers The Master left her a message: the person who destroyed Gallifrey… was The Master. But not for the reasons you think, as he details via hologram.

“They lied to us. The founding fathers of Gallifrey… Everything we were told was a lie,” The Master says. “We’re not who we think, you or I. The whole existence of our species, built on the lie of the Timeless Child.”

As this happens, The Doctor has flashes in her mind, first to the Remnants telling her about The Timeless Child, and then to a child, possibly of the timeless variety. Later, she neglects to tell her traveling companions about all this, but it’s clear she’s haunted by whatever — or whoever — this is. Can she trust The Master? Of course not. But would he lie about this? When it comes to matters about their youth, I’d say, probably not.

This is definitely something we’ll be coming back to later in the season, it’s safe to assume, as well as The Master being trapped in the Kassavin’s strange dimension, and the (wink, wink) extremely mysterious identity of the Kassavin themselves, who are totally under no circumstances the Cybermen (wink, wink).

But hey, let’s speculate anyway! Assuming The Master is telling the truth about the hugeness of this secret, it’s not something confined to the two of them, i.e. they’re not Timelords, or some other such secret. Instead, it seems to be about the foundation of their entire civilization. There are plenty of wonky directions you can go down, because most of the elders of Gallifrey we’ve met throughout the series are a bunch of bizarre weirdos with an almost religious fanaticism about the nature of time and their place in the universe. But the two clearest directions you could go to redefine the race of Timelords are either with their ships, the TARDIS; or the Timelords identity themselves.

The TARDIS is an interesting one to think about because we’ve been told they only grow (yes, grow) on Gallifrey, and were powered and created by the earliest Timelords. What if they aren’t vehicles at all, but, say, Gallifrey-ans pressed into service, or something similar? Regardless, that might explain why we saw The Master with a TARDIS of his own this episode, something that hasn’t been seen on the show for over a decade. Is it possible that the Timeless Child isn’t a singular child, but actually multiple children, all forced into servitude as TARDISes?

That’s a little far out there, so let’s turn to the more likely suspects, the Timelords. In this case, whatever the secret is it has to be so big and bad that The Master would wreck his home world. That means it isn’t as simple as one child they kept secret, but something that redefines the very way they live and/or time travel. Perhaps they are not Timelords at all? Maybe The Timeless Child is all of them, and they aren’t different beings, but one, singular being that keeps regenerating throughout time? Again, a little bit crazy, but finding out there weren’t multiple Timelords, but one, would explain why The Doctor has those memories of The Timeless Child; and it would certainly piss The Master off to no end that he was his own greatest enemy.

Whatever is going on, it’s something we’ll definitely be speculating about for a good long while… And with the stakes set up, I’ll be eager to see if this truly does redefine Doctor Who forever, or if it just turns out to be another one of The Master’s villainous plots.

Doctor Who airs Sundays at 8/7c on BBC America.

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