Warning: This article contains spoilers for Doctor Who: ‘The Giggle.”
In the run-up to the Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials, returning showrunner Russell T. Davies said he would not retcon The Timeless Child. Now, the third and final 60th anniversary installment, “The Giggle,” is available, and it seems that Davies may just have waved away the controversial plot twist after all.
Even if you’re a novice Whovian, you’re probably aware that Doctor Who is a show about a renegade Time Lord called the Doctor who stole a TARDIS and ran away from his home planet, Gallifrey. Since then, the character has traveled through time and space, righting wrongs, with a veritable lazy susan of typically human companions — and in the first few seasons, one character actually named Susan.
That’s how the story went, at least, until Chris Chibnall (Davies’ showrunner predecessor) came along and introduced The Timeless Child, which — it’s no hyperbole to say — changed everything.
What is The Timeless Child?
Under The Timeless Child, the Doctor was, in fact, a creature from an alternate dimension discovered by the Gallifreyans as an infant and who gave the Gallifreyans one of their most potent superpowers: the ability to regenerate their bodies, making them practically immortal.
When asked if he’d walk back the divisive plot development, Davies told SFX magazine, referring to Chibnall’s idea, “I’m not going to deny what he wrote. I’m going with it. It’s absolutely fine.”
But in the end, Davies may have retconned the twist, anyway…
Could what’s true for one Doctor not be true for another?
Now that “The Giggle” has aired, it’s clear that Davies — the man behind the Who revival circa 2005 — had plenty of mythos-changing to do of his own. Rather than regenerate, David Tennant — returning to the role as the Fourteenth Doctor: same face, different incarnation — seemed to sprout Ncuti Gatwa — taking over as the fifteenth actor to play the part, depending on how you count, in a never-before-seen process called “bi-generation.”
How bi-generation works is unclear: What will happen to Tennant’s “retired” Doctor on Earth while Gatwa adventures in the stars? Does bi-generation establish the possibility that The Timeless Child may be true for the Tennant-timeline Doctor but not necessarily true for Gatwa? We have, after all, watched the Fifteenth Doctor’s origin story presented plainly on the screen.
Or maybe not — in “The Giggle,” cheeky Davies is careful to have Tennant and Gatwa share a walk down Doctor Who memory lane together, confirming they share the same memories and suggesting the two Doctors share the same experiences — including The Timeless Child arc.
It’s all in the cards
In the epic card game face-off between the Doctor and the Celestial Toymaker, however, played by Neil Patrick Harris, Davies does more directly retcon The Timeless Child. In that sequence, the Toymaker — a classic Who baddie not seen on screen since 1966 — tells the good Doctor, “I’ve made a jigsaw of your past.”
In a video interview on BBC iPlayer in the UK, Davies confirmed that line refers to The Timeless Child: It was all the Toymaker’s meddling and not the actual backstory of the character.
Either way, The Timeless Child and bi-generation are two massive upheavals in Doctor Who canon. There is symmetry, however, in Davies’ choice to cap the Doctor’s 60th anniversary by introducing a new way to reboot the character — just like in 1966 when Who producers had to find a way to replace the beloved Doc No. 1 William Hartnell with Patrick Troughton, Doctor No. 2.
Regardless of how you feel about The Timeless Child arc, whatever this “bi-generated” Fifteenth Doctor happens to be, he stole a TARDIS and ran away just like the old story goes, just this time from himself.
Bi-generation could also be a way to clear the gameboard on the venerable character first seen on screen in 1963 and start anew, dovetailing with Davies’ stated intention to move the show into a fresh, Disney-fueled era called the Whoniverse.
Maybe we’ll know more when the Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Church on Ruby Road,” premieres Christmas Day, starring Gatwa and introducing Millie Gibson as the Doctor’s new companion, Ruby Sunday.