alright sure lemme go through this point by point. also i'll lay out an initial disclaimer that i know plenty of people, especially immigrants and folks who were adopted, do connect with what The Timeless Children did. i don't mean any disrespect by this, and if you found something to enjoy in this, genuinely, i'm really happy for you. that being said, here's my take on why the whole thing sucks from my own perspective.
"Not a single line of the series needs to be rewritten to accommodate it. There have been far more impactful retcons in the past, where a new plot point directly contradicts previous canon."
ok, so retconning is actually the thing i have the least issue with wrt Timeless Children. if you need to scrap some previous continuity for a good story, whatever, go for it, especially in a series with a canon as messy as Doctor Who. that being said, as a defense of Timeless Children, this isn't true. we saw in Fugitive of the Judoon that the Fugitive Doctor has a police box TARDIS, but the TARDIS didn't get stuck like that until the second episode of the classic series. the Doctor explicitly says that it should have changed, but it didn't. it doesn't make any sense that pre-Hartnell, the TARDIS was also a police box. that absolutely is something that conflicts with previously established canon, and worse, the show doesn't even bother to excuse the fact that it has very basic information about the rest of the series wrong. to me this part always smacked of cynically trying to drum up fan speculation and social media buzz during Series 12's airing about who the Fugitive Doctor is, with no regard for actual continuity. have there been bigger retcons? sure, but this is a retcon, and a badly integrated one at that.
"This is not the case with the Timeless Child. We've already seen Time Lords regenerate into children, so nothing from the Doctor's childhood needs to be adjusted."
i don't think anyone had an issue with the idea that the Doctor would regenerate into a kid? we already knew Time Lords could do that, River did it at least once. i could be wrong though, i haven't seen every complaint about this plot point
"One could say it retcons the whole Time Lord / 12 regenerations thing, but it does so in an interesting and logically sound way."
i would say it does so in a redundant way! Moffat already took care of the 12 regenerations thing in Time of the Doctor, and Kill the Moon explicitly floats the possibility that the Doctor doesn't just have a new regeneration cycle, he might just be able to regenerate forever. what was the point of the Time Lords giving the Doctor that last minute save if they could have just regenerated forever anyway? The Timeless Children removing the regeneration limit was pointless because it had already happened. worse, i think confirming the limit is gone is shittier than the Doctor thinking but not knowing that it's gone. we the audience know the character will keep going as long as the BBC wants them around, but in-character the Doctor not knowing for sure if they have unlimited regenerations mean death still carries a personal stake for the character.
"And think about it: the Doctor has always been unique among Time Lords. He has been praised and sought many times by Time Lords for his unique abilities. He alone was targeted by the Black Guardian, and we still don't know why. He alone saw the only way to end the Time War, and he alone survived.
So after several thousand years of being the most unique Time Lord in history, we finally find out why.
What's the problem?"
this is the core of my problem with The Timeless Children. retconning i can forgive, redundant storytelling i can forget, but i think this story fundamentally fucked up a core element of the Doctor's character in the service of cheap intrigue and hack-y chosen one writing. because pre-Timeless Children, the vibe was that the Doctor was not unique among Time Lords for any other reason than that they were the one who walked away. the Doctor chose to leave Gallifrey, to see the universe, interfere and fight evil while the rest of the Time Lords sat passively by, above everything. the Doctor's power was in the choices they made, the strength to go against the flow of what society told them to do. and that meant that when the Time Lords needed a pariah to do their dirty work, or when the Time War needed someone outside of Gallifrey's rotting imperial apparatus to do what it took to finish it, the Doctor was there. the core theme of the character was that you can choose your identity, that where you come from doesn't have to matter if you don't want it to. the Doctor chose to leave Gallifrey, chose to leave their name, and defined themself by their drive to save people, to be a doctor. i'm biased of course, because for me as a trans kid who didn't know it yet watching this show, that was the element that connected most with me, but i really feel that this is such a core component of who the Doctor is.
then The Timeless Children fucked that up. across 65 minutes, Chibnall's script dismantled this conception of the Doctor, utterly. no longer are they just a normal Time Lord who chose to do the hard thing, the right thing, and walk away from an unjust world. now they are the Timeless Child, an interdimensional superbeing whose mere birth resulted in the creation of Time Lord society. they are the source of regeneration, they are an essential component of the Division, and fast-forwarding to Flux, they are such an insanely significant being that Tecteun tried to burn the entire universe just to kill them. if this twist had been executed well, i would still kind of despise it. it accepts the logic that to be special, you have to be born special, that to be exceptional must be due to something in your blood. it devalues the Doctor's decisions and treats them as natural extensions of their god-given natural specialness.
but it wasn't well-executed either; Russell is finally doing the character work with the Timeless Child that Chibnall never did, because the Doctor never had a substantive reaction to this revelation other than "omg,, im not who i thought i was,," in the ten entire episodes that came after The Timeless Children. the episode was, in concept and execution, a cheap twist for the sake of having a cheap twist, a cynical attempt to create an "oh shit" moment for the audience by fucking with the show's canon and in the process wrecking the thematic core of the character. even though RTD2 is finally taking this idea somewhere more characterful, i still don't connect with it because i fundamentally hate what it does to the Doctor.
the connection will always exist in my head because of how closely they released, but to me it really recalls Rey Nobody becoming Rey Palpatine in Rise of Skywalker. a character can't just be special because of how they choose to define their identity, it must always have a root cause in their fucking blood. it's a sentiment absolutely typical of the kind of vile, racist, socially conservative writing that Chibnall's era was lousy with, and i hate that it seeped so far into the core of the character that we now can't get rid of it going forward.
The Timeless Children tries to tell the audience the Doctor is special because of who they were born as, and i absolutely reject that. i already knew why the Doctor was special. it was because of who they chose to be.
