Doctor Whos Timeless Child Retcon Broke River Songs Origin

Doctor Who’s Timeless Child Retcon Broke River Song’s Origin

Doctor Who season 12’s Timeless Child retcons had major implications for the show’s canon and continuity, including the origins of River Song.

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Doctor Whos Timeless Child Retcon Broke River Songs Origin

The Timeless Child retcon in Doctor Who season 12 has impacted the entire canon, and that extends to changing just how River Song’s origin story works. While Doctor Who had had countless changes to its continuity over the course of its almost 60-years on TV, season 12’s Timeless Child is arguably the biggest retcon of them all. Making a direct change to everything viewers thought they knew about the Doctor, Time Lords, and regenerations, it was revealed that, rather than being an actual Time Lord, the Doctor was a different species who was found at the gateway to another universe and taken to Gallifrey by Tecteun, one of the planet’s early explorers. This child already possessed regenerative abilities, which were harnessed by the would-be Time Lords; this information was then hidden away from the Doctor, with the lie of a regeneration limit invented, until it was exposed by The Master (Sacha Dhawan).

Understandably, this has serious reverberations on Doctor Who history, because nothing is as it seems. The Timeless Child retcon changes both the classic and new versions of the show, and extends to not just the Doctor’s past but various other characters too, including River Song (Alex Kingston). First introduced in Doctor Who season 4, River Song’s backstory and timeline were already complex: a time traveller who was moving in the opposite direction to the Doctor (who she would also marry), it was later revealed that she was Melody Pond, the daughter of Amy and Rory (Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill), conceived aboard the TARDIS.

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The explanation for River Song’s ability to regenerate was put down to her being conceived while the TARDIS passed through the Time Vortex. It had previously been established in Doctor Who canon that exposure to the Time Vortex, which is the intersection of time and space, via the Untempered Schism (a gap from which the vortex can be accessed), is what led to the development of the Time Lords as a race, contributing to their great advancements and, more specifically, their abilities to regenerate. With that, it was then believed that River Song herself had this ability because of her exposure to the Time Vortex. However, if the Time Lords themselves never gained regeneration from the Time Vortex, but it instead came from the Timeless Child, then River Song doing so doesn’t make any sense either.

Of course, the Time Vortex wasn’t the sole reason for River’s enhanced DNA, which also in-part came from her genetic code being manipulated by the Silence, in order to turn her into a weapon to use against the Doctor. But even for all of the Silence’s meddling, the root of her being part-Time Lord was underpinned by the exposure to the Time Vortex; that was the starting point from which everything else happened. In the wake of the Timeless Child retcon, that chain is broken, meaning there’s nothing to connect the conception of Melody Pond to becoming a partial Time Lord.

It is possible that Doctor Who season 13 will look to address this. After all, the Timeless Child retcon happened in the season 12 finale, so there is still room for it to be built upon considerably (though whether that’s a good thing or not is a very different matter). Since she was conceived on the TARDIS, then it may be that itself is more responsible for providing the genetic link between River and the Time Lords (or Timeless Child). But until such an explanation is offered and properly detailed, then right now River Song is back to being even more of a mystery than before in Doctor Who.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/doctor-who-timeless-child-river-song-regeneration-retcon/

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