Doctor Who Series 12: Ten Huge Questions After Can You Hear Me?
5. Who Are The Eternals, The Guardians And The Toymaker?
Though this is the first appearance in the show for the gods Zellin and Tahira, immortal beings from another realm have featured many times before in the series with three of them getting a namecheck much to the delight of the fanbase. There are no Time Lords here and Zellin makes it clear that he sees the Doctor as belonging to this finite realm. Even so, the Doctor has an affinity with them as if she is neither one thing nor the other, caught between the two.
Zellin mentions the Eternals and their games. These beings first appeared in the Peter Davison story Enlightenment, but they have featured many times in various novels and audios. To compensate for their dull existence they used mortal beings for personal amusement, calling them Ephemerals. Rakaya sounds exactly like one of them when she wonders what it feels like to be human with their “tiny ephermal flashes of existence”.
The White Guardian was introduced during the Tom Baker story The Ribos Operation when he sends the Doctor on a season long quest to find the six segments of the Key to Time. His opposite, the Black Guardian, would become one of the series’ most memorable 1980s villains, as played by Valentine Dyall. But it is the mention of the toymaker that has caused the most chatter.
An obscure one-off villain from the 1960s, the Celestial Toymaker (Michael Gough) faced off against William Hartnell’s Doctor in a bizarre series of games with life and death consequences. A sore loser, the Toymaker rigged his games to ensure he won. He would have made a return in the 1980s were it not for the cancellation of the originally planned season 23.