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 This story is the eighth and final story of the main part of Season Thirty Eight (New Series 12) and was written by Chris Chibnall and directed by Jamie Magnus Stone.
Unlike "Spyfall" - the first story of this season - this two-part story has different titles for its two episodes. The first episode is titled "Ascension of the Cybermen", and the second and concluding episode is titled "The Timeless Children".
Executive Producer and lead writer Chris Chibnall has revealed that ‘The reason we didn’t bring the Cybermen back in Jodie’s first year was that there had just been a massive Cyberman adventure at the end of Peter Capaldi’s era. If we’d have brought them back eight episodes later it wouldn’t have felt like a treat. They’re relentless, single-minded and brutal. That’s the essence of their ‘monster personality. The nightmare is, how do you escape them? Because they’re around every corner and they just won’t stop. The humans are desperate and the Cybermen just keep going. I imagined all along that the Cybermen would happen at the end of the series and this two-parter gives them the weight they deserve’.
During the series’ press day Chris Chibnall revealed that ‘The Timeless Child is mentioned as far back as "The Ghost Monument", and the final episode of this series is where some of those questions get answered. We’re delving deeper into the Thirteenth Doctor this year. You’ll see things you didn’t see last year in terms of facets of The Doctor’.
Jamie Magnus Stone directed both parts of this story which comprised the fifth recording block. He also directed the stories in the first recording block, which comprised the first part of "Spyfall" - the opening story of this season - and "Praxeus" - the fifth story of this season.
The concluding shots of The Doctor in her prison cell were recorded in studio with the New Year special, "Revolution of the Daleks", as part of Recording Block 6, on the 23rd and 28th October 2019.
Jo Martin reprises her role from "Fugitive of the Judoon" as another incarnation of The Doctor.
Actress Julie Graham, who played the part of Ravio, guest stars. Julie Graham starred in the 2008 and 2010 BBC post-apocalyptic series Survivors as Abby Grant. The series was loosely based on the novel by Terry Nation, who wrote it as an adaptation of his 1975 series. She appeared in one episode of the Big Finish Production Survivors audio series, which continued on from the original series. Julie Graham also played the part of Ruby White in the 2010 The Sarah Jane Adventures story "Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith".
The beginning of this story has a smooth transition from the short pre-title scene, depicting parts of destroyed cybermen floating in space, into the title sequence, with the scene going through the eye of a Cyber-helmet.
This marks the second time the theme music has been used during an actually story - playing across The Doctor's flashback sequence. The first time was in "The Woman Who Fell to Earth".
The second part of this story used the same kind of pre-title sequence that was used in the second part of "Spyfall" – namely a recap of the preceding episode.
This story’s second episode contains the most extensive use of archive footage in any of the Doctor Who stories or any other media or spin-offs as of 2020.
For the first time in the show's history, discounting full red and full blue from various previous stories, clips from the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton eras have been shown in colour.
This is the second story of the Thirteenth Doctor's era to feature the middle eight section of the Doctor Who theme during the closing credits, following "The Woman Who Fell to Earth".
The Doctor and her three travelling companions (Graham O'Brien, Ryan Sinclair and Yasmin Khan) arrive at a refugee group just before it is attacked by Cyberdrones.
This story brings to light an account of The Doctor's origins in which, prior to becoming the First Doctor, she had lived many forgotten lives as The Timeless Child. This new thread in the ongoing tapestry brings The Doctor, once again, to the forefront of Time Lord history.
In this new account, The Timeless Child was discovered near a boundary to another dimension or reality by the Shobogan traveller Tecteun, who took her in as her own. After an accident the Timeless Child’s regenerative abilities were attentively studied by Tecteun, and eventually replicated. This is put forward as the true origin of regeneration on Gallifrey. A radical result of this retroactive continuity is that The Doctor, in her earliest lives, was the biological template upon which Time Lord society was founded.
It also offers a new explanation for the pre-Hartnell incarnations - like the so-called ‘Morbius Doctors’ - and continues to push the mystery around the unknown incarnation of The Doctor, played by Jo Martin, who was seen in "Fugitive of the Judoon".
In the 1988 Seventh Doctor story "Silver Nemesis" Lady Peinforte threatened to reveal The Doctor's secrets concerning his role on Gallifrey during the Dark Time. She believed this secret would prove The Doctor's downfall.
During the sequence, when The Doctor broadcasts her memories to escape The Matrix, we witness a flashback through numerous scenes from both eras of the show, featuring each incarnation of The Doctor and several companions and villains. Notably the flashback includes the scene, from the 1976 Fourth Doctor story "The Brain of Morbius", when The Doctor and Morbius are hooked to a machine during a battle of wits. The machine briefly flashes up the former regenerations of The Doctor and several additional faces, then implied to be previous versions of The Doctor (in actuality faces of some of the production crew were used). Philip Hinchcliffe, the producer of "The Brain of Morbius", has been reported as saying that the implication of that scene then, but as they wrote in the twelve-regeneration limit, it became difficult to write that in future stories and eventually became considered that these were in fact faces of Morbius. This scene from "The Brain of Morbius" shown during this story, finally confirms that these were the faces of previous incarnations of The Doctor.
The Doctor informs Yasmin that Cybermen are allergic to gold (see "Revenge of the Cybermen", "Earthshock", "Silver Nemesis", "Battlefield", "Nightmare in Silver" and the Big Finish Productions Sixth Doctor audio story "Last of the Cybermen"). In this story they plan to exploit this weakness with a particle projector.
To help defeat the Cybermen attack, The Doctor has given Graham a neural inhibitor system, which is intended to act against a Cyberman's emotional inhibitor. Yasmin has been given a particle projector, which should project gold particles into the air, as an affront to the Cybermen. While Ryan has a rudimentary force field device, to shield the area when the Cybermen arrive. All three devices are destroyed before they can be used when the Cyberdrones attack the encampment.
The Doctor tells Graham that the Cybermen can be driven mad if their emotions are ‘unsuppressed’ (see "The Invasion", "Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel" and "Closing Time").
Similar to the Cyberdrones, Cyber-heads were previously seen to function without a Cyber-suit, most notably Handles (see "The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang" and "The Time of The Doctor").
The Doctor refers to the Lone Cyberman acquiring the Cyberium from her (see the previous story "The Haunting of Villa Diodati").
It is revealed that Ashad was denied a full conversion, similar to the ‘rejects’ on Telos that appeared in the 1985 Sixth Doctor story "Attack of the Cybermen".
Ashad is addressed by his guards as ‘Leader’ (see "Revenge of the Cybermen"). Earlier Mondasian Cyber-Leaders appeared with silver side handles rather than the distinctive black. Similar to the converted Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, the corners of Ashad's side handles are black (see "Dark Water/Death in Heaven").
The two Cybermen, that accompanying Ashad, use the same voice as the Pete's World counterparts before its change in "The Next Doctor".
The Cybermen's battle cry ‘Delete’ makes a return. It was last heard in the 2010 Eleventh Doctor story "The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang".
The second part of this story brought another redesign of the Cybermen not long after the warrior-class Cybermen seen in the first part - in the form of CyberMasters - a branch created by The Master with the ability to regenerate.
The Cybermen use transmat (see "Revenge of the Cybermen", "The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang" and "Nightmare in Silver").
The Master, who appears at the end of the first episode, once again affirms that ‘everything is about to change’ (see "Spyfall") and, as The Doctor suspected, he has somehow escaped from his imprisonment by the Kasaavin (see "Fugitive of the Judoon").
The Master refers to the Great Cyber War, which he claims to have lived through. (see the 1975 Fourth Doctor story "Revenge of the Cybermen" and the Big Finish Productions Sixth Doctor audio story "Last of the Cybermen").
The Master recalls fleeing from Borusa when they were young (see "The Deadly Assassin" and "The Five Doctors").
The Master double-crosses Ashad and kills him as he previously did to a Cyber-Leader in the Death Zone in the Twentieth Anniversary story "The Five Doctors".
An incarnation of The Master is once again instrumental in creating a race of Cybermen (see "Dark Water/Death in Heaven" and "World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls").
The Master names his Time Lord-converted Cybermen under his command the ‘CyberMasters’. Previously, in "The End of Time", he transformed humanity into what he dubbed the ‘Master Race’. Before that, he named himself ‘Cyber-Master’ while posing as a converted Cybermen in the Big Finish Productions audio story "Master of Worlds" - the fourth and final story in the audio anthology, UNIT: Cyber-Reality.
Incidentally, in the 1988 Seventh Doctor story "Silver Nemesis", Karl (De Flores’s second in command), believed the Cybermen to be ‘the master race’.
The Master and his army of CyberMasters mimic the rallying speech of Rassilon at the end of the last Great Time War (see the 2009/20 story "The End of Time").
When The Master requests an alliance with the Cyberium, he references the television show The Apprentice, claiming he ‘deserves to be its business partner, because he has performed well in all the tasks’, which was a common excuse used to become Lord Sugar's business partner.
The Master reminisces about assassinating the President in the Panopticon (see the 1976 story "The Deadly Assassin").
The Master reveals the truth of the Timeless Child (see "The Ghost Monument", "Spyfall" and "Can You Hear Me?").
The Master reveals that the original inhabitants of Gallifrey were the Shobogans who later genetically altered themselves into the Time Lords thanks to Tecteun's research.
Shobogans is a term which, by their time, had come to be used by a group that lived outside traditional Time Lord society (see "The Deadly Assassin", the Virgin Books' The New Adventures novel "All-Consuming Fire" written by Andy Lane and the BBC Books' The Eighth Doctor Stories novel "The Eight Doctors" written by Terrance Dicks).
The Timeless Child's species are from another reality or dimension that have the ability to regenerate infinitely and continuously change their appearance. Because of Tecteun's research, their DNA was placed into the Shobogans's DNA and thus created the Time Lords.
Tecteun's and the Timeless Child's regenerations mark the first time female to male regeneration has been seen onscreen. However, the first depiction of a female regenerating into a male was in the Big Finish Productions Gallifrey audio story "Enemy Lines". In the case of the Timeless Child multiple regenerations were shown, both female to male and male to female.
The premise of this story fulfils several elements of The Hybrid prophecy from Season Thirty Five (New Series 9).
This is one of eleven television stories to-date in which the TARDIS does not appear at all. The others are: "Mission to the Unknown", "Doctor Who and the Silurians", "The Mind of Evil", "The Dæmons", "The Sea Devils", "The Sontaran Experiment", "Genesis of the Daleks", "Midnight", "The Lie of the Land" and "The Woman Who Fell to Earth".
The Doctor, Ryan and Ethan steal a Cyberfighter to escape from the Cyberman. The Doctor reveals that a Cyberfighter is a class of Cyber-shuttle, which is itself a type of small Cybership. They run on warp drives.
When stealing the Cyberfighter, The Doctor is heard saying that that she used to hot-wire warp drives as a teenager on weekends, though she quickly points out that in her early life on Gallifrey, there were no teenagers, or weekends.
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