‘Doctor Who’ needs to retcon the Timeless Child to save the series, and professional courtesy be damned

Ncuti Gatwa’s first season as the Fifteenth Doctor is supposed to serve as a soft reboot for Doctor Who, but can we expect Russell T. Davies to use this opportunity and retcon the Timeless Child?

Davies picked up the mantle of showrunner after Chris Chibnall’s divisive tenure — a five-year run marred by inconclusive plot developments and controversial lore changes — came to a close last year. One of the fandom’s biggest gripes with Jodie Whittaker’s story was The Timeless Child, which revealed the titular protagonist as having come from a whole different universe, brought here by forces beyond her ken and brainwashed into thinking their life had started with William Hartnell’s First Doctor, and their story with “An Unearthly Child” — when in truth, the Doctor has lived through many incarnations before that.

You can imagine the sorts of hell this revelation unleashes on the lore and the show’s established history, so fans are still hoping against hope that Russell will find a way to write it out of the narrative. The producer has already explained that he’s going to honor what came before, going so far as to allude to the events of The Timeless Child and The Flux during the recent 60th anniversary special, but as much as I respect the man and cherish the fact that we got him back, it is in the show’s own best interest to retcon The Timeless Child and save the story before it’s too late. Here is why.

Why Doctor Who needs to retcon The Timeless Child

Hearing Russell explain it, it almost sounds like the man is only keeping The Timeless Child out of respect for his predecessor. “Let’s stare that question right in the eye,” he recently told SFX. “I’m not going to unwrite my good friend Chris Chibnall’s work on The Timeless Children. I’m not going to deny what he wrote. I’m going with it. It’s absolutely fine.”

The mere fact that this question is repeatedly brought up and Russell has to “stare it right in the eye” implies even the BBC knows how unpopular the Timeless Child is among the fans. In the professional sense, we can understand why Russell would decide not to undermine what his fellow television producer did on the series, but I’m still not convinced if such a courtesy should be extended to such a narrative-killing twist. Franchises and grand stories have fallen out of favor for less, so even if RTD isn’t going to allow himself to retcon it outright, he should still find a way to wiggle out of the implications it has for the character.

What Chris Chibnall attempted to do with The Timeless Child is a classic storytelling mistake when it comes to characters like The Doctor. If you wish to reinvent a protagonist who is essentially as old as its medium, changing their pasts or established origin story is a twist done in the most amateurish way imaginable. In fact, the only way you can pull off a twist of this magnitude is if you can build it up somehow in the course of the seasonal story arc, and then spring in on the plot at the last moment. 

The Timeless Child requires Chibnall to go back in The Doctor’s history and change pivotal moments — which he can’t do, of course — so he settles for the next best thing: An exposition dump by The Master in the course of five minutes, upending 50 years of continuity and not deigning to answer any further questions, neither in the “Timeless Children” finale itself nor the entire six-episode season that followed it.

And that’s just one side of the problem. What made The Doctor so compelling as a character for all these years was the fact that despite his conviction to the idea of being an alien, he was the most human of all his companions. Trying to make The Doctor more mysterious by saying that he is quite literally an alien in this universe doesn’t do much to grow his human side, a thing that Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat both did in their respective tenures.

The solution is rather simple. Russell doesn’t need to retcon The Timeless Child; he only has to make it irrelevant. Perhaps The Master was just tricking The Doctor, as The Master usually does. Perhaps he himself was tricked by some other force who wanted to see Gallifrey destroyed again. It could even be the villain Russell has been teasing through the 60th anniversary, a creature that scares even the seemingly omnipotent Toymaker. 

The creative possibilities are essentially endless, and all Russell needs to understand is that The Timeless Child only serves as unnecessary baggage for a body of lore that has already left hundreds of questions unanswered and dozens of enigmas buried in its wake.