#the cartmel masterplan

[rassilon-imprimatur]

I rather like that this is much less the vague "Cartmel Masterplan" "the Doctor has always been something ancient and mysterious," (Remembrance of the Daleks et al) and is a more sinister "the Doctor is turning/evolving/mutating into/WILL BE something mysterious"

[narvin]

[timelxrd-victorious]

So, uh, with the mention of the Flux in "Wild Blue Yonder" and the brief allusion to the Timeless Child and how the Doctor doesn't know xir own species anymore...

I'm just going to post these snippets from the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Unnatural History, published in 1999. (Snippet sources.)

[wanderingmadscientist]

Just watched remembrance of the daleks, and it's so crazy, I love it.

[humandisastersquad]

Listening to The Four Faces of Immortality dr who short story and thank you Gary Russell for legitimising the Here's How The Timeless Child And The Cartmel Master Plan Can Still Work in a published piece of dr who media

[red-of-raxacoricofallapatorious]

sometimes I remember the looms exist then i really fucking hate my life

[dwacademyera]

So I've seen alot of people arguing about making the Timeless Child canon (as in RTD is going to acknowledge it and not push it under the rug like we hoped).

And it's got me thinking that now, the BBC have absolutely no excuse to not make Academy Era stories.

The original reason alot of writers and fans didn't like delving into the academy era was because "it removed the mystery of the doctors origins"

Well... it ain't their origins anymore. You're not going to ruin any mystery, because its just one tiny chapter in a supposedly very long life.

So, more academy era when?

[macbethz]

My controversial doctor who opinion is I actually like the doctor being the Other reincarnated but only if it’s just kind of implied and means absolutely nothing. Like ok this space god-king threw themself into a baby machine but just got remade into Some Guy who occasionally gets angsty visions and uses the name for clout

[doctornolonger]

Stumbled across this smart review of Marc Platt’s classic VNA from the blog Recurring Bafflement, figured some readers here might appreciate.

[call-me-corvid]

Hot take: I ADORE the Timeless Child lore

[arcalian]

Me being fed by rtd once again alluding to the other one and really emphasizing how similar the doctor and toymaker are

[codenamesailordarillium]

Okay also .. is this ep the one where we've decided we're gonna cram in a whole load of character development we'd previously been neglecting for the "fam"?

[narvin]

the tecteun thing like. it is what it is. it’s not that bad. but the old backstory had more verisimilitude, the technobabble was better, and now where exactly does rassilon come in? why would he have been resurrected if he wasn’t the founder of time lord society? it’s so 🤷

[timelxrd-victorious]

So I found this YMMV Harsher in Hindsight entry on the Recap page for “Last of the Time Lords”:

It causes Ten great grief that after the Master's death, he is truly the last Time Lord in existence.  [...] "The Timeless Children" would then later reveal that the Doctor isn't a Time Lord at all, meaning that unbeknownst to Ten, after the Master's death, the Time Lords were for all intents and purposes extinct.

Nope, this is incorrect. Time Lord is a rank, not a species. The Doctor went through the Academy and earned the rank of Time Lord, so they are a Time Lord.

It’s just that they’re not a Gallifreyan Time Lord like the Master.

More specifically: the Doctor is an Oldblood; the Master and Romana are Newbloods. And the Doctor has so much other stuff in their biodata (bc their timeline is a hopelessly tangled mess of a ball of string) that it’s debatable they were wholly Gallifreyan in the first place anyway (even before it became canon in the TV series; this has been canon for years in the DWEU).

[makiruz]

(Oh my god, the Cartmel Masterplan has a Wikipedia page)

[silvereyedowl]

Exactly.

I read a comment (possibly on Reddit) from someone who pointed out that if the TImeless Child reveal had ended with the Doctor revealing in turn that she had been aware of it the whole time, it would have been much more interesting.

Instead we got a plot twist that would have been controversial even if it was executed well which was poorly done and extremely ill-conceived, which also undermines the Doctor's character on top of it.

(Thanks to @idle-speculation)

I can tell you exactly how the Timeless Child undermines the characterization of the Doctor, because it actually does.

First, we need to talk about mysterious characters. In a general sense, they can be broadly divided into two categories: mystery to others and mystery to self.

The mystery to others is, well, a mystery to other people, but is also fully aware of who they are and what their secrets are. This character can fit in any role, and whether or not any of their secrets are revealed really depends on the story: if they're the antagonists, the protagonists have a vested interest in uncovering their secrets, but if they're the protagonist, they may have an equally strong motivation to keep those secrets secret.

The mystery to self is most easily defined through the archetype of the amnesiac hero: they don't know who they are. Although the mystery-to-self character can be used in any role and in whatever story the creator wants to tell, they have a traditional role and story: they are typically a protagonist, seeking answers to their personal mysteries. The amnesiac hero wants to know who they are.

Now that we have defined this, explaining how the Timeless Child reveal undermines the Doctor's characterization is simple: The Doctor is traditionally a mystery to others. The Timeless Child is a poorly-executed attempt to turn them into a mystery to self character, that then doesn't commit to revealing the mystery.

Ever since the First Doctor debuted back in 1963, the Doctor has been depicted as fully aware of his secrets. Some of those have been revealed over the decades, but the aura has usually been there. The Timeless Child rewrites the Doctor as an amnesicac hero, with lifetimes unknown to her, but then declares that this is unimportant and the whole story effectively did not matter.