New Year’s Day’s season premiere of Doctor Who ended on a whopper of a cliffhanger, as Sacha Dhawan’s O was revealed to be the Master. Before he left the Doctor and her friends to their apparent doom though, he warned his old friend-turned-enemy that “everything you think you know is a lie.” Today, the second half of two-part story “Spyfall” aired and we learned exactly what the villain was talking about. And it’s fair to say that it goes bigger than any Whovian could have expected.
During a head-to-head between the Doctor and the Master on the Eiffel Tower, the latter drops the bombshell that Gallifrey, the pair’s homeworld, is destroyed (again). When the Doctor visits the planet at the end of the episode, she discovers he was telling the truth. As she re-enters her TARDIS, a holographic message from the Master plays in which he admits he was the one who destroyed it and says he had to do so after the terrible secret he discovered.
“I had to make them pay for what I discovered. They lied to us. The founding fathers of Gallifrey. Everything we were told is a lie. We are not who we think, you or I.”
The dark truth that the Time Lords have kept hidden is all to do with the Timeless Child, a mysterious entity previously mentioned back in season 11’s “The Ghost Monument,” when psychic monsters the Remnants read the term buried deep in the Doctor’s mind. The Master continued:
“The whole existence of our species is built on the lie of The Timeless Child. Do you see it? It’s deep in all of our memories, our identity.”
It sounds like we’ve got a season-long story arc on our hands here, folks. Expect the answer to be teased a couple more times over the next few weeks before being demystified in the finale. Whatever the ultimate reveal, it looks like Doctor Who season 12 is about to change the core mythology of the show in a very major way.