Star wars scenery timeless4/16/2024 The delivery mechanism for the changes is almost absurdly alien. It is interesting to wonder how these sequences played to casual audiences, the kinds of viewers that Doctor Who needs to survive in its Sunday evening time slot. They are compelling to those fans invested in the core mythology of Doctor Who, who get excited at the revival series’ first mention of “the Shebogans” or “the Panopticon”, as if those words have value of themselves. The flashbacks and lore sequences in The Timeless Children just stop the episode dead. It’s interesting to wonder how much more dynamic and playful these revelations would have been if written by Davies and Moffat, with Davies’ gift for lyrical prose or Moffat’s ability to demonstrate through dialogue. Again, Chibnall has never been as good at exposition as Davies or Moffat. The storytelling is rather dull and generic. Within the context of The Timeless Children as an episode of television, the biggest problem is that the revelations are delivered as mountains of exposition and flashbacks within the Matrix. The revelations themselves are a mixed bag. At the very least, The Timeless Children offers a strong, distinctive narrative vision of Chibnall’s Doctor Who. Indeed, the biggest problem with the Chibnall era is how safe and generic it generally feels, most obviously in its refusal to tackle big themes and ideas, notably settling for “maybe we shouldn’t destroy the planet” as the grand unifying thematic statement of episodes like Orphan 55 and Praxeus. The worst thing that a show like Doctor Who could be is safe and generic. Most obviously, Chibnall finally feels like he’s taking proper ownership of Doctor Who, that he is driving it like he owns it. However, The Timeless Children is structured in such a way that these continuity rewrites end up being the entirety of the episode and an essential part of any discussion of it. This means that any discussion of the episode has to start there, which is mildly frustrating since continuity rewrites are not a story of themselves. The big headline in fan response to The Timeless Children is going to be the way in which it rewrites the internal history of Doctor Who. The Timeless Children is a mess of an episode, but at least it’s a loud and ambitious mess. It seems like the worst of all possible worlds, a story unfolding in the wake of a holocaust consisting largely of stilted exposition that offers unnecessary and overly elaborate explanations for things that don’t really need explanation in the first place. So there’s something slightly perverse in the way that The Timeless Children manages to do a mythology-heavy continuity-rewriting mythos-building Gallifrey-based story even after the destruction of Gallifrey. Gallifrey offered an origin for the Doctor, a way of making the Doctor mythic. While hardly the most elegant of narrative choices, feeling like a clumsy and desperate reversion to the Davies era status quo of “the Last of the Time Lords”, it was at least defensible as an effort to push the show away from the lure of monotonous and suffocating continuity that Gallifrey represented. The season premiere closed with the revelation that the Master had massacred his own people, reducing Gallifrey to rubble yet again. When Steven Moffat resurrected Gallifrey in Hell Bent, he consciously avoided a Gallifrey-based continuity-fest.Īs such, there was perhaps some logic in Chris Chibnall’s decision to destroy Gallifrey once again in Spyfall, Part II. This was a sane and practical choice, given that so many Gallifrey-based stories (notably The Arc of Infinity or The Ultimate Foe) count among some of the worst stories in the series. He did this by removing Gallifrey, by confirming in The End of the World that the Doctor watched his home planet die. Davies shrewdly made the decision to strip back a lot of the show’s internal mythology. When Doctor Who returned to television in 2005, showrunner Russell T. There is something slightly surreal in all of this. The Timeless Children certainly offers some earth-shattering (or Earthshock-ing) revelations about the larger mythos of Doctor Who. I may come back and expand it in a few weeks when I have time. Note: This is a very quick review, as I’m currently in the midst of the Dublin International Film Festival.
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