TV "Giving a nod to BBC Three's sci-fi adventure Class. If you're part of the fandom you know where its at. Watch now on iPlayer." Why is BBC announcer Duncan Newmarch suddenly boosting the Doctor Who spin-off few people watched and those of us who did wondered why they'd bothered? Ending as it did on that cliffhanger, it's a bit of an oddity to be suddenly confronted by it at the close of the fifth episode of Flux as though it's a hint of something finally being resolved in the middle of everything else next week. Will it turn out that the Governors are a branch of the Division? Is April still stuck in the body of Corakinus, the Shadow King of the Shadow Kin and leader of the War of the Underneath? Class was a weird show and the fact it's part of the Doctor Who universe is even weirder.
No proper review of the episode this week. I'm knackered and Martin Belam over at The Guardian's done a bang up job of covering all the toings. But there are a couple of things I want to talk about and it's you or the wall so here's a couple of paragraphs. Like everyone in my Twitter timeline, I've been watching Get Back, Peter Jackson's exploration of the footage recording during the recording of The Beatles final couple of albums and amid the passive aggressive fun and mid-morning toast eating, there's a real message that noodling around with some unfinished ideas can be just as rewarding and useful as trying to create something which is fully formed from the start. At one point John Lennon sings the whole of Jealous Guy but with a different set of lyrics which are a non-starter.
To the point: can we calm down about The Timeless Child, please? If I see one more tweet or review suggesting that it's "ruining Doctor Who" and "destroying the series" with every new revelation treated as though its retroactive going to wreck our enjoyment of Timelash (as if that would ever be possible). Apart from the Doctor herself tonight giving enough escape clauses as to how her childhood self ended up at the bottom of that tower next to that vortex, the whole notion of her working for the Division just adds another layer of potential stories, just as the introduction of the Time Lords and their whole boring society increased the number of potential stories (for better or worse) and eventually gave Big Finish a reason to keep Lalla, Louise and John employed when Tom was too grumpy to co-operate.
I love it. Flux has now reached the point of absolutely batshit Virgin New Adventures, BBC Books, Big Finish, Doctor Who Magazine not giving a fuck in relation to adding to Doctor Who's origin myth, in other words when I became a fan, at the turn of the century and the programme wasn't even on the air. To suggest that this has nothing to do with Doctor Who, is to take a very television centric approach to the franchise (as opposed to television centre which has now been turned into flats) not to mention pretend that when Russell T and Moffat destroyed Gallifrey then didn't, they weren't doing much the same thing. You could make a similar argument that the Time War was much more interesting when we didn't know what happened, but did it really matter when we did?
Despite what Chris Chibnall is doing now, a new writer will be along soon to give us their own version and we know this because it's happened dozens of times before. It's right there in the opening sentence of the TARDIS Datacore entry about the early life of the Doctor: "There were a variety of different and contradictory accounts of the Doctor's early life before their travels with Susan." Throughout its life, even though the question of were the Time Lord comes from is literally in the title, Doctor Who has forever been using the revelation of the Doctor's origin as a story point with almost every iteration, especially in the Wilderness Years when there was a tendency to believe that it didn't really matter because the show was probably never coming back to television anyway.
It's pointless me creating a synopsis here when Tim Berners-Lee created hyperlinks so you can have a look yourself at how the "Timeless Child" origin is just one of a number of ways in which the Doctor came into being. A number of in-universe reasons for the variance are also offered, the key one being that "the many contradictory accounts of the Doctor's early life were equally and paradoxically true due to the Doctor's biodata being retroactively manipulated by a number of factors such as; Omega, Faction Paradox, subconscious regeneration influences and the impact of the Doctor's own adventures through time" (although to be fair a lot of that is the authors of the Eighth Doctor novels trying to tidy up what many of the same authors had been doing in the Virgin New Adventures.
Probably when the likes of Andrew Cartmel, Lance Parkin, Paul Cornell and Lawrence Miles were writing this stuff they too were receiving brickbats for trying to ruin the mystery. There's also little doubt that Doctor Who is usually at its most entertaining when the TARDIS lands somewhere, its inhabitants have an adventure which is consistent in and of itself and then leave after anywhere between one to thirteen episodes for another another one. But that only goes so far, especially with something of this longevity. Every now and then it has to do some existential stocktaking so that it can refresh its narrative shelves, refurbish itself a little and then re-open, especially when its under new management. That's all The Timeless Child is really, adding to the existing material, to the show we love.
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