Doctor Who: How Old The Doctor Really Is (After The Timeless Child Retcon)
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| The Doctor is Over Billion Years old |
Doctor Who's Timeless Child retcon rewrites the date of the show, but how old is the doctor now? Showrunner Chris Chibnall promised Doctor Who that season 12 would have a lasting impact on show lore, and he was right. He revealed that the doctor is indeed The Timeless Child, a being discovered by an ancient Gallifreyan explorer called Tecteun, who has become the primary genetic code for the entire Time Lord race.
This naturally raises a curious question; How old is the doctor? There was always a degree of confusion about the doctor's age, even before the Timeless Child retcon. In "Dr. Who and the Silurians," the third doctor said that he had lived "for several thousand years." In the movie "Time and Rani", the seventh doctor claimed to be 953 years old. The 2005 relaunch took the most conservative approach overall, with the Twelfth Doctor suggesting he has aged somewhere close to two thousand years. But how much should a doctor be considered after returning the Timeless Child?
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| End Of Time Part 2 |
The Doctor Who season 12 finale"The Timeless Children" provided an important clue. Tecteun discovered the timeless child before the founding of the Time Lord civilization. This means that the doctor is older than the Time Lord race. Fortunately, it is possible to find the approximate lifetime of the time lords. As Gallifrey's greatest Leader, and a near-immortal at that, Rassilon is perhaps the most reliable source at this point, and at "End of Time Part 2," he says, "A billion years of Time Lord history riding on our backs." Consequently, as a result of Timeless Child retcon, the doctor is just over a billion years old.
Of course, the doctor can be much older. Tecteun has discovered the Timeless Child on an unknown faraway planet, standing deserted near a boundary to another unknown dimension or universe. The Master observed: "and beneath the monument, she found - a child." and There is no way to know how old The Timeless Child was at this point, not even if there were prior regenerations. The Time Lords have been known to be able to regenerate someone to childhood, so this could have happened before.
However, this indicates the scale of the Timeless Child's retcon. Before Doctor Who second 12, the estimates of the doctor's age varied wildly, but there was no indication that they could be a billion years or more. Viewers saw only a fraction of the Doctor's lives, which means that great chunks of the past have yet to be revealed.
Source: Screen Rant
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