Timeless No More?

Much as I love Jo Martin's Doctor Who, I go back and forth as to whether the Timeless Child stuff is generally A Good Thing or A Bad Thing, and as things stand I'd be happy enough for it to go the way of "half human on my mother's side", to be honest.

Some days I think it's absolutely the clever 'having your cake and eating it' move - expanding to almost allow a multiverse style approach where anyone can be the Doctor in movies or future takes on the show and you can just say they're pre-Hartnell and other days I think it actually ties everything else to a single backstory and that having every other character be a pre-Hartnell Doctor actually lowers the stakes and makes the Doctor less unique and basically invincible.

As I say, I go back and forth on it, and am basically at a Schrodinger's Cat place with it, where I love Jo Martin's Doctor, but would happily see the whole Timeless Child thing just quietly forgotten about in subsequent eras.

All this is assuming Chibnall doesn't perform another rug pull with it before he's out the door; he may well wrap the whole thing up in S13 and the 2022 Specials.

There's still the mystery of where the child originally came from. I could be way off, but that has timeloop/ouroboros written all over it to me.

I think I'd get on with it better if it was something along the lines of "the Doctor" being a branch out of the Timeless Child cycle, the one that got away, and broke the loop to then become the Doctor, with the Timeless Child effectively a closed loop the Doctor isn't a part of.

Jo Martin's then the S6B/Division Doctor during that period they were recaptured, and pre-Hartnell they're all just Brendans. But really this is just me retconning the whole thing away, to be honest, so I guess overall I'm just not that keen on Chibnall's Morbius Doctor trolling.

I do get - and like - the intent that "anyone can be the Doctor" as a ramping up of inclusivity. In a lot of ways, it's a retcon to say 20th Century Who always had that potential for anyone to be the Doctor (it just, er, didn't show it?) but the accidental payoff seems to be that, well, "just any old f*cker with an equity card" can be the Doctor, and William Hartnell's original Doctor is just a sequel to anyone's fanfic.

I probably won't give a monkey's after decades of living with it - I mean, this is just a new Deadly Assassin "what has happened to the magic of..." to a large extent, I recognize that absolutely. I'm probably just in a grumpy mood that'll pass.

But at the moment it feels like a very closed off and limited story (achieving the opposite of the intention) that's very dependent on viewers caring more about long term Who continuity than being entertained.

I guess to me, Doctor Who's future is the blank slate to forge ahead with, the limitless potential of what comes next being more exciting than constantly rewriting the past.