Doctor Who: Should Russell T Davies Acknowledge The Timeless Child?

It’s not completely far-fetched.

Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction series in history. Except it’s also not. Even before the show was cancelled in 1989 and reborn in 2005, Doctor Who has always been a succession of different shows, with their own aesthetics, values and storytelling interests, and even, to a certain extent, their own continuity. The First Doctor William Hartnell’s “taking school teachers through time and space to learn about history and science” show is not the same beast as the Second Doctor Patrick Troughton’s bug-eyed-monster-of-the-week series, and both are wildly different from the Third Doctor Jon Pertwee’s Bond-esque adventures.

As Chibnall told radiotimes.com, “You’re not carrying a vase across a room – you’ve got to get in there and say what you want about the show, the character and the world,” adding, “It’s one of the few drama series without a written bible, and every era contains a contradiction or left-turn from what has come before. Any future showrunner will ignore it or run with it.”

For starters, this wouldn’t even be the first time Russell T Davies, personally, has disregarded an unpopular pronouncement about the Doctor’s species.

Between the Classic series cancellation and Davies bringing Doctor Who back, there was the ill-fated Doctor Who: The Movie, starring Paul McGann, which announced that the Doctor was half human (on his mother’s side). Davies happily ignored this from the outset, making several references that contradicted that plot point out of existence even as Paul McGann was preserved as a legitimate incarnation of the Doctor.

Just as with the “half-human” twist, Davies doesn’t have to walk into the office on Day One and announce ‘Bollocks to the Timeless Child’. With the 60th anniversary underway, Donna Noble returning and the Fourteenth Doctor suddenly looking like David Tennant again, the Doctor is going to be busy from the outset, and it’ll be no surprise if it’s a while before the Doctor even has time to think about his origins.

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