#the tIMELeSs cHildReN

[themastergifs]

The Timeless Children // Rogue

[evviejo]

requested by @thirteensfavoritetoy >> thirteen under different lighting colours

[michaelo2k]

Yes I’m tumblr posting about Doctor Who in 2023

[innocet]

It's their own fault for being timeless, there's a price to pay and a consequence

[someonecalledyes]

Even though the Master said he destroyed Gallifrey out of rage because of his jealousy for the Doctor's past as the Timeless Child, I can't take my mind off the fact that he's obviously done it because he hated the Time Lords for having treated the Doctor with such cruelty.

[pluralzalpha]

Random thought: what if Theta Sigma isn't just an Academy nickname, but a designation given by the Time Lords to denote which iteration of the Doctor they're dealing with?

The Doctor doesn't know that, they think it's just a silly Academy thing. They don't know that each time the Time Lords have wiped their memory they've been given a marker: Alpha Alpha, Alpha Beta, Alpha Gamma... all the way until Theta Sigma.

[notyoujamie]

[dandelionjack]

lines that are awesome when divorced from context. as in, yes, this is technically true, but not because of the fucking timeless child. all he is is because of her — and all she is is because of him. to say i’m pissed off at this retcon would be an understatement. in one fell swoop it negates all of the history between them, the way their childhood shaped them and their rivalry, only to say “yeah the doctor is special and more important than the master because they’re the Chosen One” cheapens everything. makes it generic. defeats the point. how do you miss the point this horribly as a SHOWRUNNER

[sapphichymns]

[thetorturedlovergirl]

Aww look how cute they are <33

[idaaliis]

whittakermaster is just a little silly (dhawan!doc isnt saying anything bc w!m muted his little prison chamber so she could monologue in peace)

[themastergifs]

THREE YEARS OF THEMASTERGIFS (November 5, 2020)

Dearest, I've been thinking. We need your TARDIS. We can't go up, but we can go down.

[evviejo]

thirteen's era appreciation: 454/?

[clowns0cks]

the timeless children hits different after listening to Master. "Become death. Become me (as you were always intended to be)"

[mintyimperiatrix]

so wild theory time but what if the Master is Omega's son

ok hear me out because that sounds insane but i think it kinda works? cause first off we know now thanks to the Timeless Children that the Doctor is the daughter of the Other(/Tecteun). the Other is a scientist and explorer and while their morality's differ to the extreme the Doctor does, on the surface level, adopt these traits from them.

we also know that the Doctor, in their first childhood, had a friend on Gallifrey. a friend with no name. a friend who... accidentally killed her during a fight. i know i'm not the first to say that the kid on the cliff is the Master but it's a good starting point

so then we get to Omega, someone who was friends with the other two Founders and yet easily the one who's life we know the least about, at least from before he was chucked into a black hole. he wasn't an explorer like Tecteun, he was an engineer. he wanted to build his own things, be famous for his achievements and use them to obtain godlike power but when his usefulness ended he was thrown aside by Rassilon. does any this sound familiar?

All of those traits are shared by the Master.

lets cut to the End of Time real quick. the Master builds a device to bring Gallifrey back into the universe, allowing the next 'ascension' to take place (before the Doctor broke the machine) but when his moment of glory was about to come Rassilon, like Omega before him, threw him aside. obviously this is all pretty circumstantial and doesn't actually prove anything but then there's this exchange earlier in the episode

"Two Children of Gallifrey" could just be a poetic way to refer to two random Time Lords. except we know it doesn't, because the Doctor isn't a random Time Lord and even if the average Time Lord doesn't know that the Matrix Does. so if the Doctor is the daughter of one of the Founders then she is (almost) literally a 'Child of Gallifrey'. take the same idea and apply it to the Master and logic dictates he would be the child of either Rassilon or Omega

i think the most interesting part happens after that though, when the Time Lord dude refers to them as 'the Enmity of Ages' (which would be an amazing name for a band just saying) and Rassilon immediately knows that this means the Doctor and the Master. the only time we've seen him meet either of those characters before is in passing during the Five Doctors. it's easy to infer that he'd know the Doctor from their role Time War but the Master? he didn't fight in the war, he mostly refused to work with the Time Lords during the War and then hid himself as Professor Yana when it got too much so why would Rassilon, who has only seen the Master once when he was tied up on the floor in the body of a Trakenite, know that the Master was the other half of the Enmity of Ages?

you Could say he learnt of the Master's reputation during the Time War but i frankly don't think he'd care about that? so to me at least it feels like the best explanation would be that he's met the Master before, way back when he was first President. and the reason he's so disgusted by the Master, the reason he finds it amusing that the Doctor's 'final act' is the murder of Gallifrey is because he knows who these two are. he is staring at the children of his fellow Founders, realistically these two are the only people in the universe he might consider a threat to his power or his status, and much like he did with their parents he tries to use both of them before casting them aside but just like before they both come out the other end alive

also saying the Enmity of Ages to me infers a greater conflict than just that of two normal Time Lords. from any single character it would be just a dramatic phrase but this is directly from the Matrix itself, which knows all of Time Lord history, so they are a Big Deal

but now we skip to everyone's favourite episode: The Timeless Children (genuinely one of my favourite finales it gets such a bad wrap). we learn the Doctor has unlimited regenerations, or at least had unlimited regenerations at some point because whether they still do or not is kinda up to interpretation. it was the Doctor's biology which allowed the Time Lords to unlock the power of regeneration, however the Other limited the number of regenerations to 12 lives when giving it to the rest of the population. i think Tecteun's presence in Flux implies that she never limited her own regenerations and you could probably say the same to Rassilon's, with that being his secret of immortality.

now in the episode the Master claims that Tecteun took the ultimate sacrifice by testing the raw ability on herself, but suppose she didn't. suppose she had another test subject first. suppose she promised one of her friends that his son, the best friend of her own child, could become the first Time Lord to receive the gift of infinite life. suppose then that Omega, wanting glory for himself and for his son, agreed to this and allowed Tecteun test her discovery on the boy, who was then granted an endless cycle of regenerations to match his friend's. from there Tecteun, now knowing the ability would work, put into herself, into Rassilon and into Omega before limiting it to a dozen lives per person and spreading it out among the population.

it's a lot of inference i'll admit but it would add a good few extra layers to these lines:

and this of course opens the door to the possibility that other character's we've met of cryptic origin with seemingly impossible knowledge but too dark a morality to be the Doctor could be the Master instead. characters like Lee Clayton or Gat (obviously not both at once) could be an early version of the Master. maybe Magus and Hazel from the Forgotten Lives books are also past versions of the Master. hell if you want to go wild maybe even the War Chief is the Master from before they had their memory wiped (but thats very unlikely)

also as i was finding the right screenshots and clips for this post i found these as well...

the way the Master refers to the Founders as 'our parents' (Tecteun and Omega being referred to as separate parents, as a Thoschei shipper i'm not touching the sibling theory with a forty foot pole) does make me wonder if he found out about his own past too but didn't tell the Doctor, not wanting to admit that he was the reason for the Doctor's first regeneration, the reason for Tecteun's torture and experimentation on her and the reason she could safely discover the ability for herself

so yeah who's to say that the Master isn't Omega's child who, like Tecteun's child, was captured by the Time Lords, regressed into a child, restricted to only 12 regenerations and robbed of all their memories. maybe he isn't any of that though. i mean maybe he is just a whiny crybaby who wants to be as important as his best friend. maybe he was the Timeless Child and the Doctor was the kid who pushed her. maybe he's actually Rassilon's child instead. who knows? not me!

[quantumshade]

man chibnall's re-destruction of gallifrey will never be anything but a bafflingly stupid decision to me. like all it does is serve as a cheap way to artifically raise the stakes early in the season and it actively makes the whole story less interesting. can you imagine what the finale would have been like if the time lords were still around. like i'm imagining the doctor demanding the master take her into the matrix to show her everything and they have to sneak in. like a weird heist episode. that would have been so fucking cool. but i will admit to being a hell bent enjoyer so