Doctor Who's Wild Blue Yonder includes nod to Timeless Child reveal

As part of Chris Chibnall's season 13, it was revealed that the Doctor is not a Time Lord at all, but the Timeless Child, a being of unknown origins, upending everything we thought we knew about them and their past regenerations.

Doctor Who's second 60th anniversary special, Wild Blue Yonder, saw David Tennant's Fourteenth Doctor and Catherine Tate's Donna Noble faced with eerie doubles of themselves in a spaceship slowly counting down to self-destruct - with a bit of body horror for good measure!

One scene saw the pair of them separated, struggling to figure out if each other were the terrifying doubles or the real Doctor and Donna - so the questioning begins.

With the Doctor claiming he's from Gallifrey, the double of Donna rejects that answer, saying: "You don’t know where you’re from."

The Doctor responds: "How do you know that? How does anyone know that? How does Donna?"

The fake Donna says she saw into his mind when she reverted to being the Doctor-Donna, and saw the Flux.

"It wasn't your fault," she tells him. "It destroyed half the universe, because of me," responded the tormented Doctor.

Doctor Who: Flux marked Jodie Whittaker's final season as the Thirteenth Doctor and saw her navigate a universe-ending anomaly called the Flux. It also marked Chibnall's final season as showrunner.

Returning showrunner Russell T Davies previously confirmed that he would reference Chibnall's work in the second anniversary special, telling Doctor Who Magazine: "The history of the Flux and the Timeless Child is dealt with very slightly in this episode to acknowledge the brilliant work Chris did and to say that’s absolutely part of our history as well."

Chatting to RadioTimes.com ahead of the episode airing, Chibnall said: "[Russell] had told me that there was a reference to Flux.

"It's really beautiful when things like that happen, definitely. It was one of the things we talked about, Steven [Moffat], Russell and I, when we met up, and it was a thing Steven was saying, you don't feel like the work you've done on the show is Doctor Who, because that's the work you've done.

"So he's like, all of the episodes he's written, all the episodes he’s showrun, it’s like everything else is Doctor Who and then his bit is just the thing he did, and it doesn't feel legitimately part of Doctor Who, and it's really weird.

"So when you do get things that crop up, that kind of reference and actually, when I would drop in references to Steven’s stories, or something Russell had done, I would get texts from them, Steven would go, ‘I was mentioned in Doctor Who! Something I thought of was mentioned in Doctor Who!’ It's great. You know, ‘I exist!’ It's really true.

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"Russell as well, [I] would get messages going, ‘Oh, I got mentioned! The thing I wrote got mentioned!’ So it's really lovely when that happens and I definitely felt that when we did that in The Power of the Doctor as well. It's really powerful and how you deploy that, and when you deploy that, is really interesting because it's that weird push and pull between being new and being part of a continuum. And that's one of the great, great things about Doctor Who."

There's one 60th anniversary special remaining, The Giggle, which will see Neil Patrick Harris take on the role of The Toymaker and will finally introduce the world to Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor.

Doctor Who's third anniversary special The Giggle airs at 6:30pm on Saturday 9th December on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. Classic episodes are available on BritBox – you can sign up for a 7-day free trial here.

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