Doctor Who’s Timeless Child could be the one who created the Eye of Harmony - the power source of all the Time Lords’ TARDISes. The identity of the Timeless Child is the driving mystery of Doctor Who season 12. According to the Master, this unknown being is the dark secret at the heart of Time Lord history.
“They lied to us,” the Master told the Doctor. “Everything we were told was a lie. We are not who we think. You or I. The whole existence of our species - built on the lie of the Timeless Child.” Whatever the Master discovered, this led him to conduct an act of genocide against his own race, literally destroying his homeworld of Gallifrey. Since then, the show has been reluctant to reveal much more, but showrunner Chris Chibnall has promised the Doctor Who season 12 finale will address the Timeless Child mystery.
The latest episode, “Can You Hear Me?,” dropped an important clue to the Timeless Child. It featured an extended version of the Timeless Child vision, confirming the Timeless Child is indeed stood at the foot of a deserted Gallifreyan citadel. Importantly, though, the vision also looked to the heavens, with the Doctor focusing on a mysterious energy field in the sky. It’s unclear what this is; it could be a portal, or else some kind of restrained energy sphere. Whatever the case may be, it looks as though the Timeless Child has been abandoned to it. This dovetails perfectly with the first mention of the Timeless Child, in Doctor Who season 11, episode 2, in which monstrous beings known as the Remnants peered into the Doctor’s mind and described her as “the outcast, abandoned and unknown.” But just what was that energy field?
The Doctor Could Be Seeing The Creation Of The Eye Of Harmony
The words of The Master seem to imply the secret of the Timeless Child is somehow bound up in the origin of the Time Lords. That immediately means you’re looking at the development of Gallifrey’s time travel technology, the science that led the Gallifreyans to become the Lords of Time. It’s reasonable to suppose the Timeless Child is a contemporary of Gallifrey’s founding fathers, such as the Time Lords’ greatest leader Rassilon or the solar engineer Omega. If this is indeed the case, then that energy in the sky may be the creation of the Eye of Harmony.
Sometimes referred to as Rassilon’s Star, the Eye of Harmony was created when the Time Lords artificially induced a star into going supernova; they then suspended time around the star as it began to collapse into a black hole, turning it into the ultimate power source. It was placed beneath the main floor of the Panopticon at the center of the Gallifreyan Capitol, powering the fleet of TARDISes, and gradually became seen as a myth - until the Master learned of its existence, and attempted to steal its power in order to begin a new regeneration cycle in the classic episode “The Deadly Assassin.”
It’s possible this vision represents the ancient history of the Time Lords, and the Doctor is watching the creation of the singularity that is the Eye of Harmony. Indeed, that would explain why light is distorted in parts of the vision; because light itself is bent and twisted by the intense gravitational pull of the black hole. Perhaps this mysterious Gallifreyan citadel was part of the process of solar engineering that fashioned the Eye, housing the technology that trapped time around the black hole. That would certainly why the energy effect looks a little like a time-space vortex; the Timeless Child could be someone who was intentionally sacrificed to monitor the device and ensure it worked.
This Would Perfectly Explain The Timeless Child
This theory would certainly explain why the character is called “The Timeless Child.” If this is correct, then the Timeless Child is trapped inside the Eye of Harmony, within the event horizon of the restrained black hole. Such a black hole distorts both space and time, to the extent that time effectively ceases to pass inside said event horizon. To all intents and purposes, anything or anyone inside it would literally be “timeless.”
This also explains why the Master destroyed Gallifrey. He presented it as an act of revenge, the frustrated reaction of a psychotic narcissist who learns he has been deceived. In reality, though, the destruction of Gallifrey may well simply have been a side effect of the Master’s attempting to investigate the Timeless Child by accessing the Eye of Harmony. As demonstrated in the “The Deadly Assassin,” the Master is one of the few Time Lords to have figured out how to open the Eye - but doing so almost tore the entire planet apart, because it risked unleashing the power of a singularity on Gallifrey itself. This time round, the Master could well have achieved his objective, with catastrophic - and, frankly, genocidal - results.
Why Would The Time Lords Fear The Timeless Child?
In this scenario, it’s easy to understand why the Time Lords would be ashamed of the Timeless Child; but Doctor Who season 12 has been quite insistent that they fear her. A possible explanation for this can be found in the classic stories “The Three Doctors” and “Arc of Infinity,” which featured the return of one of Gallifrey’s founding fathers, Omega. Omega played a key role in creating the Eye of Harmony, developing the technology to manipulate solar reactions, but he paid a disturbing price for his creativity and genius. Omega’s vessel was trapped inside the collapsing star, and he too became stranded within the event horizon. Somehow he wound up cast into an antimatter universe, one he learned to control by sheer force of will, and his exile and solitude drove him insane. It’s entirely possible the Time Lords feared something similar had happened to the Timeless Child; that they believed the process of being trapped inside the event horizon of the Eye of Harmony had turned her into a cosmic being of unprecedented power.
All this raises the disturbing question of whether or not the Master has already freed the Timeless Child. As noted, the destruction of Gallifrey matches perfectly with the idea he has been meddling with the Eye of Harmony, and he’s quite insane enough to have unleashed such a power on the cosmos. The Doctor has reportedly been returning to the ruins of Gallifrey, desperately attempting to find answers, but she could well be looking in the wrong place - because the Timeless Child isn’t in the Eye of Harmony any more, but is instead roaming the universe.
It’s true this is a deep cut into Doctor Who lore, but it’s worth remembering Chris Chibnall doesn’t seem to mind this kind of approach. After all, “Can You Hear Me?” features the return of the Eternals, other-dimensional beings last seen in the Peter Davidson era, and even retcons a character from 1966 as an Eternal as well. What’s more, a lot of this could be handled in quite a throwaway manner, in a brief infodump setting the scene for the confrontation between the Doctor and the Timeless Child. Viewers who were familiar with the old-school stories would be thrilled, while newer audience members would know just what they needed to in order to make sense of the story. Meanwhile, Chibnall could present the Timeless Child as a friend, a foe, or even a more ambiguous being; the potential in Doctor Who terms is massive.
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