The Doctor is broken. I think it’s safe to say a lot of long-time Who fans agree with me there. I don’t agree with audience members who objected to a Time Lord changing gender. We’ve seen that at least twice before already. I was surprised to see anyone object to a female Doctor.
As for Jodie Whittaker, I think she did a fine job with the scripts she was given. But let me cut to the chase here: the problem with the Doctor is the Timeless Child storyline. Turning the Doctor into an eternal being endlessly regnerating without any real science does more than damage the fabric of the Doctor’s on-screen history. It destroys the vitality of the character itself.
Up until the Chibnall years, the Doctor was always a mortal character. Yes, I know, the Morbius episode revealed past faces of the Doctor – but there were other ways to explain that away. The Doctor could have been messing with the machine, they could have been disguises one of the past Doctors (1 through 4) could have adopted using advanced technology. Or the Doctor could really have had past regenerations, having been awarded more for past service.
From The Five Doctors onward it was clear that the Time Lords had the technology to extend their lifespans beyond 12 regenerations. And the Master has come back from the dead without regeneration.
The rules have always been loose and there was no need to turn the essentially mortal Doctor into an immortal. The Doctor’s universe has immortal characters – we’ve met many of them, including Eternals and Guardians of Time, something that called itself the Devil, Me, and more.
But immortality doesn’t define the Doctor. The Doctor is defined by his or her finite existence. The Doctor is always facing death, knowing that regeneration may save him (or her), but not wanting to give up that contemporary sense of self, or waste another regeneration.
If a Time Lord never dies a premature death, a 10,000 year lifespan should easily be achievable. That’s a long-lived race. The Doctor doesn’t need to live any longer than that. She’s only somewhere around 2,000 years old by pre-Chibnall math.
So, assuming the next showrunner looks for a way to undo the damage done by the Timeless Child without rewriting show history (pretending the Chibnall years never happened), what can the BBC do to save the character of the Doctor and restore balance to the Time Vortex?
1 – Take Us To Another Universe
The Doctor has visited other universes before. They’ve almost collided one or two times (I’ve lost count).
A clever storyline would bring Peter Capaldi back for another regeneration sequence that flashes into a new reality, and then we go on without the Timeless Child storyline.
But does that mean the Timeless Child storyline is true in every universe? It doesn’t have to.
The Timeless Child could be an extra-universal experimentation in regeneration. Our Doctor’s universe could be doing it the old-fashioned way, where the Time Lords developed their own technology without finding a Timeless Child.
2 – It Could Unravel As Another of the Master’s Sick Lies
The Master is always twisting and distorting the facts. The next iteration of the Doctor could learn that the Master made it all up.
That doesn’t explain the pre-Hartnell incarnations of the Doctor but the Time Lord (of the past) could always fess up to a (future) Doctor about granting him/her more regenerations (prior to the bequeathal of additional regenerations to Matt Smith’s Doctor).
The Matt Smith Doctor timeline made it absolutely clear that the Doctor is mortal. We visited his grave on Trenzalore in “The Name of the Doctor”. And then we saw the Time Lords open a crack in the universe and blast him with regeneration energy.
Chris Chibnall’s perverse Timeless Child storyline can be rendered into another of the Master’s deceptions, and fans can go back to loving the Doctor for spending the rest of her/his mortality in defense of the weak, the naive, and the evil. The Doctor always gives the bad guys a chance to choose the high road, even if they don’t.
3 – Time Can be Rewritten
In fact, the entire universe can be rewritten. The Doctor has rebooted the universe 1 or 2 times already.
Who isn’t to say that the Timeless Child isn’t a product of a rebooted universe?
If the Doctor reboots the universe again, the Timeless Child history can be undone and the Time Lords can be restored. That’s probably rolling around in the back of someone’s mind already. Well, I thought of it.
And if the Time Lords can be brought back then so can the original concept that they developed regeneration without the aid of some bizarro naturally regenerative child with no explanation.
4 – Chris Chibnall Could Apologize for the Atrocity
Obviously this won’t happen, but the BBC could run a Doctor Who retrospective that says, “We tried it this way, it doesn’t work, so we’re excising these facts from the Doctor’s official history.”
I’m sure many fans would complain about that, too. And the BBC doesn’t admit to making mistakes, does it?
Also, what would they do with all the archive footage?
And deleting the Jodie Whittaker shows would be patently unfair to her – to all of us – and we’d argue endlessly about how much her run as the Doctor “counted” toward anything.
They could try ignoring the episodes that explained the Timeless Child as being the Doctor – they could shoot another explanation for the arc, preserving it, and then only Chris Chibnall would be left to bellyache about “what they’ve done to my words.”
5 – They Can Leave It As A Mystery
All the Doctor need do is question whether she really is the Timeless Child – or if there ever was one. Yes, aliens dug stuff out of her mind, but that stuff could have been planted there.
The Doctor should be retooled to be less fantastical anyway. The Doctor has become too invincible in some ways. In fact, that is the problem with the Timeless Child arc. It makes the Doctor’s existence rather pointless.
The Doctor ran away from what it meant to be a Time Lord. But he kept his sanity. For the Doctor to be endlessly running away from being the Timeless Child would mean that she or he would be insane.
So the Doctor should question the veracity of the Timeless Child myth, and wonder if there isn’t something else going on. There are beings and creatures with the power to compel the Doctor to do things. One of them might be behind this false origin for the Doctor.
Conclusion
When I saw the spoilers online about the Timeless Child story’s resolution, I chose not to watch the final episodes of Season 12. In fact, I haven’t watched the Christmas Special, either.
I’ve enjoyed watching Doctor Who for many years, always knowing the Doctor was fighting with time itself. Even the Doctor is mortal – should be mortal – and thus I can relate to the Doctor in just about any incarnation.
It doesn’t matter if the Doctor has already lived through 12 prior regenerations or 36. As long as there is a finite point somewhere in the Doctor’s past where he or she began – and there is a biological limit to the Doctor’s lifespan – the Doctor is still a meaningful character.
And that leads me to one more point: the Timeless Child story need not be finished. Just because Chibnall elected to call it the Timeless Child doesn’t mean this being is immortal. There could be more to it than the simplistic explanation fans were given.
But if that is what Chris Chibnall has in mind, he’d better cough up the full explanation soon. Or I may never watch another new episode of Doctor Who. That’s a small loss for the BBC but a great loss for me.
Still, I’ll survive. I’ve outlived other beloved shows and characters. But I was hoping the Doctor would be right there for another 50 years or so, fighting against the clock, knowing that one day there would indeed be a final breath with no hope of regeneration.
To restore my faith in the Doctor as a character worth following, the BBC must find a way to restore the Doctor’s mortality.