The Timeless Children

[0:00]

Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to Jody and Terror.

The only Doctor Who flash cast that never doubted for a single moment that Graham Harper was canon.

I'm Nathan.

I'm James.

I'm Todd.

I'm Brendan, and I'm Peter.

I'm just not that, Brendan.

Brilliant.

Well, who was that, Brendan?

We'll never, ever know.

So, um, we are fresh off watching the series 12 finale, the tiresome, the timeless children.

I called the chat, the time from children.

I didn't mean to say that.

What a cheap gag that's staying in.

You just made J.R.

Southall take a shot.

You realise that, don't you?

Because he takes a shot every time you say tiresome.

Well, he's going to be...

Well, he's an alcoholic.

Well, he will be by the end of this episode anyway.

So there's really not that much to talk about today, and so I am just going to ask you all 2 questions.

[01:02]

And let's start with the traditional questions.

How did we feel the episode went?

Let's start, let's start upbeat.

So, Brendan.

Now, look, um, I enjoyed this.

I thought it had structural problems, but I thought it was a case of its ideas were sound, not necessarily the execution of them, but I think a problem we're seeing is how to do a Doctor Who series finale in a way that Russell and Stephen Moffatt haven't already done it.

And I think in that, this episode succeeds.

But the main thing, I think, is the revelations could have been strung out along several episodes.

Also, um, Andrew Ellard on Twitter, who is a very good scriptwriter and critic, with whom I do not often find myself agreeing, pointed out that perhaps, you know, the stuff in the Matrix could have been more about the doctor finding things out rather than the doctor being told beat.

[02:13]

But to be honest with you, I found myself really enjoying the hour and 65 minutes.

I thought the top half was too wordy.

Sounds like an hour and 65 minutes.

Oh, sorry.

Hour and 5 minutes, 65 minutes in total.

Look, I found myself entertained, and that's what I really want from a Doctor Who story.

I think what Orphan 55 was for you, Nathan, the timeless children is for me.

Okay, that's great.

That's great.

Let's um, let's move sort of down slightly with James.

How did you think?

Sorry, what did you think?

Oh, dear.

I don't lost for words.

It's, It's okay.

Um, I really enjoyed the, The constituent parts of it, um, it's a bit of a dog's breakfast.

[03:16]

But, you know, I quite enjoyed eating, which man, that's a mixed maxim. terrible.

Um, Oh, there's so, there's so much happened that so little happened at the same time.

I, I just don't know where to start with this.

Okay, we'll come back.

Give me another 5 years.

We'll circle back around.

Yeah, we'll circle back around in 2025, obviously.

Todd, you've been playing your cards very close to your chest.

I'm going to open the kimono a bit and say that on the group chat.

We were, we were all, you know, furiously, uh, well, me mostly, we're sort of furiously yelling on the group chat and uh, you responded to pretty much everything that I said with, hmm.

So you're required by law to tell us what you think.

Well, Nathan.

Hmm.

Last week, you may recall that I said all I wanted was Chris Chibnall to stick the landing.

[04:24]

Well, we did land, and I'm actually okay with the final destination, but the ride getting there was fairly bumpy.

I didn't love it.

I didn't loathe it, but it had major. problems.

Structurally.

Yeah I think that's probably reasonable.

Look, let's let's go to Peter, I think, if we're continuing to trend downwards.

Nathan, I don't know why you came to me last.

I'm relentlessly positive.

Do you know?

Oh, you're not last.

Okay, well, I'd like to agree with Brendan.

Uh, because, um, I didn't think it had a lot of structure.

You need a plot to have some structure.

Um, and I don't think that I do think that it came up against the problem of doing what Russell and Stephen did in their finales, which was they did good things.

I'd also like to take some good points.

[05:26]

I think this was nicely shot and it was sort of diverting on a running around level.

Um, I think Chidnell's takeaway from last year's kind of missteps, um, is that he had to pace up the scripts and he did that.

Also, Sasha Duan is terrific.

He's really working with kind of the slightly generic characterisation.

But that's sort of about all there is.

I think the big problem here is that it's just continuity porn in search of a story or, you know, characters or themes.

Um, when Moffat garnished the history of the program in episodes like the name alludes me.

Listen, in episodes like, listen, it was still a little bit annoying, but it was usually clever.

It was in service of the character or the show.

Um, I don't know why this exists.

Look, I mean, for me, I just found this desperately unenjoyable.

I hate Gallifrey.

I am still absolutely not on board with the changes to the cannon that were made in the War Games episode 10.

[06:28]

Like, you know, like, seriously, they were terrible, you know, time lords, like, does no one have any imagination at all.

And I just think that when Doctor Who is trying to be about that, it's being about the wrong thing, because at the end of the day, no matter how many times Sasha Duan says this is going to change everything, everything's going to change from here on in, the doctor's still going to travel around in the TARDIS with companions and fight monsters and do things.

It doesn't matter.

None of this stuff has any stakes at all.

And so learning that instead of the doctor being an alien from a distant planet, she's actually a different alien from a completely different planet.

Like, how do who cares?

And why strap her to a chair for 45 minutes and make her listen to someone explain that to her?

I just think that...

I think the whole thing is just misconceived.

Nathan, I think you're absolutely right.

[07:30]

I was thinking to myself while I was watching it, why would anyone think that the average viewer would find a retconning of the doctor's origin story, however vague, interesting?

That's all it is, just one long info dump about something that we don't care about.

Yeah.

Yeah, I look.

I mean, I've seen people, um, deriving enjoyment from, you know, the the changes in the story.

And the one thing that I will say that I do think matters is the establishment that the doctor has been a woman and has been a member of different ethnic groups over and over again throughout time.

I think that's great.

You know, like I'm super on board with that, and that might have been my favourite part of the episode, apart from the beat where Jody got violent and pushed Sasha to one over.

Well, that was fantastic.

Yeah, awesome.

I've been waiting for her to punch someone in the face for ages.

But I just, I hate Gallifrey, you know, like I just hate it.

So this is not an episode for me.

[08:31]

So what you're saying, Nathan, is that Terence Dix ruined Doctor Who?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, he did.

It's like my feeling about the Star Wars trilogy is the moment that Darth Vader tells Luke that he's his father.

The whole thing just goes to hell.

Like all of the disasters that happened in that franchise after that are entirely predicated on that moment.

And I think, you know, what do we have to thank, you know, the War Games episode 10 for?

We get Ark of Infinity.

Do you know what I mean, as a direct result?

And Trial of a Time Lord. forget that.

Well, I kind of have a massive soft spot for trial of time.

All right, so that's initial reactions, and perhaps I'm going to shut up for quite a while now, because I do want everyone to talk about what they think of, the actual change to the doctor's backstory that happened here.

[09:36]

What do you think, Brendan?

On on a level, I agree with you about who cares?

And then I thought, why do this?

And 1st of all, the reason to do it is, as you say, it is saying to the audience, not only can the doctor look like anyone, the doctor has already looked like anyone.

And it's not a new, and everyone.

It's not a new concept to people who read the new adventures, for instance, with, you know, all the all the canon about the other.

And I think for a general audience.

It's easier to understand than the new adventures idea of it.

That's not to say it's any better or worse.

Um, but I also think that for a general audience, The change is not there for them.

The change is there for the fans. whether they like it or not.

I think the, the, the drama point for the audience is that the doctor discovers that she was used and manipulated.

[10:43]

And that is, that's the point of reference for the audience.

And I've been seeing a lot of people on Twitter say, you know, use this as a catalyst to talk about abusive relationships they've been in and how well observed that element is.

So I'm glad that it has, you know, some kind of resonance for people who don't care what colour, house the Arcaelians are.

You know what I mean?

But as for what I think and what my emotional reaction is, I've said this numerous times when this was a rumour, my only problem with it is it now means that Jodie Whittaker is not the 1st female doctor in the canon.

She is the 1st female doctor in reality, you know, in the world of production.

Um, But the plot even addresses that by saying, you know, does it matter who you were, what matters is who you are now?

And I think that's a wonderful message as well.

So overall, I'm positive about this change.

[11:43]

I kind of lean in the direction of, I think it's wonderfully silly and it means that Rowan Atkinson is canon.

So I'm good.

I kind of tend to agree.

I agree with you on that, Brendan.

On, on the level that, yes, you get to get that, That moment, and it's a brilliant moment between Jody and Joe, where, Joe basically gets to be wise black woman to her.

Um, and and and tell her, you know, It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

I I really hate that scene.

And I think the reason that I hate it is that, um, the, it's, there's this expectation of the masters that the doctor will be destroyed by this revelation and then Joe Martin comes along and says, actually it doesn't matter, and it's kind of like, well, yeah, no, it actually doesn't matter.

Like, so what?

And, you know, we all really like Joe. I think that people really, really liked her doctor and I had kind of wish that she would be a little bit more instrumental rather than just being a sort of lovely, wise woman in the doctor's head.

[12:57]

See, I love that.

You're wrong, Nathan.

Peter?

Um, I love Joe's doctor.

I thought she was a real breath of fresh air and fugitive from the Jitune.

Had to think for a moment there, fugitive from of, um, however, I say this without, uh, without any kind of intent, but I wish I could bring myself to care.

Um, and it's not the fact that I've fallen out of love with the series, because I desperately love Dot 2.

Um, it's just that they felt there were no emotional stakes for me.

If you're going to have a big sort of franchise changing moment where, you know, you want it to be important to people, then please link it emotionally or philosophically on some level to the characters you've got.

The only person I felt an impact at all was the doctor, and I didn't actually see much of that.

Yeah.

I mean, I compare it to the Wargames 10, where there is actually a sort of proper character thing.

[14:01]

You know, the doctor gets involved in something that turns out to be just too big for him.

And after all of the running and all of the sort of silliness and fun he's been having.

He has to sort of go back home and he has to kind of base himself a bit and he knows what that's going to cost him, but he pays that price in order to save those people.

And normally, you know, we don't think of 60s Doctor Who necessarily as having that kind of emotional complexity.

But that's enough, I think, to justify the massive wrecking of the backstory that happens in that episode.

But here I just thought it was kind of like we haven't done one of these for a while and people thought series 11 was boring.

So I'm going to do something that kind of shakes them up.

And the publicity kind of seemed to suggest that that was the motivation as well.

You see, Nathan, I think the War Games is an interesting comparison there because the War Games does do something emotional.

It takes that sort of wonderful impish doctor who delights kind of anarchy and running around and inserting himself into new things, just adventuring, and it brings him back down to earth, and it punishes him, and it also provides a backstory, um, for the 1st time.

[15:17]

I think that's actually a good change for the program, regardless of, you know, how it moves on after that.

Whereas this felt unearned.

This felt like tinkering with backstory, and I wasn't entirely sure why.

And like I say, if it had have had an emotional residence, I would have been on board with it, but I didn't feel it.

I think I think that's, that's right.

Like I, the war games works because.

Those characters, especially Jamie, you've cared about for years.

Uh, despite the fact that, you know, Doctor Who and television didn't really do that sort of level of emotional depth.

You care that, like, Like he's losing his friends and they're losing their memories and, Like, Califre aside, that has a lot of emotional resonance that's missing in this.

And the only, the only sort of attempt at any sort of emotional resonance apart from the doctors, Um, you know.

Oh, you know, like who am I?

kind of thing, is that terrible conversation between Yaz and Graham, which I think you are, you know, not impressed by Peter.

[16:22]

Well, it was just very on the nose.

Mm.

Yeah, yeah, there's no, like, I can't see any reason why Graham thinks that Yaz is better than the doctor.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, you know, yeah, it seems nice and all of that, but there's, it's not part of an arc or part of anything the other episodes of the season seem to have been pushing, particularly.

I could be wrong.

But I do like the idea that after I gave Yaz that little conversation, he then went and gave Ryan the same conversation sneakily on the site.

I hope so. would be really unfair.

See with the Graham and Yaz thing, that they have been paired together several times this series. most notably in Praxius, but throughout the whole of the previous episode as well.

And even though Graham's like, oh, I paid, I said all these nice things about you and you said nothing about me.

Actually, last episode, Yaz did comment on, you know, how much he's changed.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and it was a bit of a callback to that.

And yes, it's on the nose.

It's less on the nose than it was last year.

[17:24]

And if any character's going to be bloody on the nose, it's going to be Graham.

Because he's not, you know, he's not good with this emotional stuff.

He probably only gets up from Corri.

Anyway, that's my tuppence.

All right, Todd, I need to hear what you have to say about this cannon busting episode.

Look, I'm actually okay with it.

Canon has changed before.

Everybody has to deal with it.

You can get upset all you want, but everybody will, in their own way, red content, however they want to do it.

I mean, I just think Christian will set down and sort of just said, well, fans, I'm going to tell you what's been in my head, my canon for the last 30 years, and and here it all is, and I'm just going to tell you it, whether you like it or not.

And he got a bit distracted, I think, because he, he just wanted to, he got excited by his cliffhanger on what's coming next.

And he realised that, you know, by talking to us fans about the matrix and the, the, and having um, Tamagotchi and her lifeless children's story.

[18:29]

He was going to possibly loop, possibly lose, um, the, the, the greater audience, not the fans.

And so he, so he then had to work in the whole, um, battles with the, with the cyberman to keep the general audience interested.

And, and of course, they couldn't shoot a damn thing.

You'd have jab of the hut in front of them and they wouldn't kiss.

Sorry, I'm going a bit scathing here, but, but, you know, just to have, 0 my god, I was grateful that Jody didn't have to do all that explanation stuff. that poor Sasha had to wade through.

But even by the end of all the stuff that he did, I was beginning to lose it with him because there's only so much eye rolling, hair over to one side, twirling around, moustache, twirling that you can actually cope with.

And I really felt for both of them, and she had to stand there pulling gormless faces, saying, and saying inane dialogue and talking to herself, stuff that I absolutely detested from last year was back again.

[19:29]

But thank God she got to tell the master.

Well, you know, it didn't really work and, you know, love, so suck on that.

And that was great.

I think Sasha deserves a medal for his services to exposition in this episode.

It was incredible.

I do, but I got to the point where I said, look, enough is enough.

And only at that point, did then Chris realise I've got to join these stories together.

So he can be obsessed with the silver nemesis and have all these cyberthalias turn up.

Yes, I was thinking the other day that Chancellor Flavia is in there that one year Moffat drags up the body of Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart and puts it in a cyber costume.

This year, you know, we're digging up Chancellor Flavia and putting her in a cyber costume.

It's very disrespectful. love them.

I love the cyberfaliers.

I didn't say I didn't.

Oh, no, I didn't.

[20:30]

No, right?

Like, you know, I'll give him points for that.

I mean, my favourite sequence, I think, was when Ang, the angriest side of them all was looking for, um, the, all of them hiding, like in the, in the cyberman, and I thought that was fantastic.

Yeah, that was pretty good.

That was pretty good.

I'll grant them that I think my favourite moment still was Jody pushing the master over.

I think, you know, she, you know, they've been, I don't know, they've been kind of tentative.

The doctor hasn't been physically violent for like very much, I think, in the new series.

Am I wrong?

You know, Capaldi punched a Nazi in the face, which we're all grateful for.

But it was nice to see them give a bit of physicality.

Do you know what I mean?

to get Jodie properly angry at the master.

I thought it was great.

I was really on board for it.

But, yeah.

Especially given how much of a misogynist tears to her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do kind of like the way he calls a love all the time.

[21:30]

I like that too.

I like how Joe Martin called the Dr. Deer, you know, or love as well.

Like, I like that.

I think that's really good.

Yeah.

Maybe we were eating it as misogyny, but it's actually just northernness.

No, I think it's misogyny.

And like, I think there's a kind of weird S&M thing about, you know, making her kneel and all of that in SpyFall too.

I think that, you know, he's evil.

Of course he's a misogynist.

I think he was only like one step away from telling her to pop on clogs and go feed whip it.

Wow.

All right, does anyone have an urgent closing statement?

Doctor Who is dead to me?

Yeah, no, it's over.

I'm very upset.

Could I point something out about just symmetry?

Yeah.

So we, uh, we alluded to the kneeling scene a moment ago from Spy Fall 2, at the conclusion of this story, the doctor makes the master kneel while she holds a bomb to his head.

[22:34]

Yeah.

And, you know, we know that she's not going to do it.

I like that Ko Shamus rescued her, but I was expecting him to be a doctor because he wanted to touch the title's controls.

I was expecting him to run it and say, who do you think it'd look after all these humans?

Off you go.

Um, the other, the other bit of symmetry that I really liked and was actually a great piece of subtlety from Chipnell, was giving Ryan a bomb shaped like a basketball.

Because of course, he misses the basketball shot the 1st time we see him in at one and here, he does the basketball shot and blows up to, blows up 10 or 12 cybermen.

So I appreciate those moments. foreshadowing, guys, foreshadowing.

Yeah.

There you go.

And I just say that I think I've been the most negative.

Maybe Nathan has, but, you know, I can pretty neck about these episodes.

Um, but um, there was, there was a lot to enjoy on the surface level.

There was some nice little touches, there was some good action.

It was lovely in the way it was shot.

And I don't mind the changes in the canon at all.

[23:34]

I just needed something more to them.

I needed some emotional or intellectual reason to be on board with it and that's why I didn't have.

I haven't been as negative as you, and I'm fine with the changes, and I'm fine with the overall, like where we've ended up.

I just struggled with half an hour or 30 minutes of Jody having to stand there and pull faces whilst she got dictated to, and that's a part of the story I was talking with.

At least he realised that he had to intercut it with action.

And so I enjoyed going back to the to the cyber action stuff.

Now, before we go, I'll just say, as Richard can't join us tonight, um, this is, these are some comments he he put in.

Um, So, it doesn't make much sense, and I'm not sure that I want the doctor elevator to Joel Shuster and Jerry Siegel level superhero, but it does give us some nuts to crunch into.

If Chippers pulls the cape out and it's all batwee next year, he really will lose his base viewers or not.

[24:36]

Perhaps it'll all make sense in post-Brexity Bitty Britain.

I actually think he's right.

It is one thing that we didn't mention is like exalting the doctor to be not just any time lord, but the most important time lord or, you know, the source of something.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, like, Chipnell started by decentering the doctor and, you know, not fetishising her the way that, you know, maybe Russell and Moffatt had.

And then suddenly she's, you know, the god, you know, or the, she's suddenly the sort of source of all time lords, regenerations and stuff.

It seems like an odd choice.

But does that mean that we're now going to have her looking for her people or where she's come from?

Like, I'd find that very tiresome.

I think that the next thing is the division.

I think that she now has, she's now Jason Bourne and she has lost years in her head and we're going to have a tiresome quest about that.

[25:42]

But I think mostly it's going to change nothing and we're just going to be finding monsters and the usual thing.

The thing is, I think in reasserting her identity that no matter what planet she's from, what dimension she's from, she's a doctor.

I think she pretty firmly rejects that godhood status.

Right.

You know, she, she just wants to travel and knock about.

But of course, now she's locked up on Shada.

So we'll see what happens at Christmas.

Oh, she'll be fine.

All right, I've got some things to plug.

So the most important of these is, of course, flight through entirety, our series 4 coverage will be starting in a very few weeks.

I don't want to commit to anything because I might just decide I'm too exhausted one Sunday to edit, but it really won't be very long now.

So make sure that you are properly subscribed and you can go to flightsthroughentirety.com to do that.

And I also want to plug the randomiser.

[26:43]

So, um, Brendan's been plugging the randomiser on his YouTube channel from time to time, and it's a website at the randomiser.net, but I've just reactivated its Twitter account, and now every 12 hours or so it picks a Doctor Who story at random for you to watch, uh, and that's really all it does at the moment, although I have extravagant future plans for it, so you can follow that at at DW Randomiser. on Twitter.

Um, I know that Brendan has something important to plug too, because it's March.

Yes, so in a few weeks, dear listeners, I will be um, reviewing weekly, the Christopher Eccleston series on its 15th anniversary, and I would like to incorporate viewer comments.

So if you have any comments for any episodes in series one.

Please send them to me at Brandy Bongos on Twitter.

You can also comment on my YouTube videos. in order to do that.

[27:44]

But I figure sending them to me on Twitter is probably going to be easier for you and easier for me to keep track of as well.

But yeah, any story in series one because obviously I'll be recording them ahead of time.

Thank you very much.

Brilliant.

Okay.

So until next year.

Stay away from cliffs.

Nothing good ever came from playing near a cliff.

Thank you very much for listening and good night.

Good night.

I think a vicar might disagree with you.

Good night.

Good night.

See you soon.

Okay.

Did everyone do one?

I'll rearrange them.

Is that all alright?

Does anyone feel everyone got to say things?

No, it was wholly negative as ever.

I thought I would out negative you at one.

I thought it was really terrible.

Like, really, barely an episode of television.

But, yeah, anyway.

[28:45]

All right.

Okay.

Barely an episode of television.

I want them to put that on the DVD cover.

I gave the combined episodes 8 out of 10.

Okay.

Well, I don't do that, but 2 maybe?

No.

Point eight.

Well, things happen in Rand Square, Colos, at least.

Seven.

Okay.

Nice.

I thought I thought the Simon stuff was like super generic.

Like I just thought it was sort of terribly boring, and then they throw a shard away really quickly, and he's probably the best thing the episodes got going for it, but it never sent us around him.

Do you know what I mean?

Like the master says, robots, they're dumb and then kind of kills you.

I just sort of think.

I don't know.

The master's very good.

Like, I think he's very cool.

Yeah.