Doctor Who Series 12: 10 Huge Talking Points After The Timeless Children
6. Is The Doctor Still A Time Lord?
Fans have long debated whether or not Time Lords is a rank or a species. We now know that once upon a time, all Time Lords were Shobogans, and that they had renamed themselves Time Lords as an act of hubris. From that point on it became possible to treat the term as a rank, a badge of honour for the privileged few. Later in Gallifreyan history, the Time Lords would forget that they were once Shobogans, no different from the outsiders living in poverty outside the walls of their cities and the dome of the Capitol.
If the Matrix is to be believed, the Doctor was never a Shobogan like her adoptive mother, but she was inducted as a Time Lord. She attended the Prydonian Academy and looked through the Tempered Schism.
Can we still call The Doctor a Time Lord? That very much depends on how she will respond to the revelation that she was an adopted child from another unknown species. Will she disown her people and go in search of her true origins, or will she refuse to believe the evidence and suspect it is a cover for something else? What matters is how she chooses to see herself. The Doctor has always self-identified as a Time Lord even after she ran away in a stolen TARDIS. It would take a lot to make her completely disown them.
As it stands, there is something quite uncomfortable with this new narrative, so hopefully there is more to it. Was The Doctor really a victim of systematic abuse by Tecteun? As a child she was either terribly accident prone, or her adoptive mother kept killing her in her bid to discover the secret of regeneration? A single mother from a race who until now were considered poor? It’s not a good message.