Doctor Who: Version Control Part 4, Episode 2: A Simpler Time

A boy, his grandad, and a kettle that's always on.

This is the episode where the Editor stops being an absence.

The YouTube edit gave the Doctor and Mia a destination, but not a person. They follow the trail back to a small town, a few decades before anyone had a phone in their pocket, and find a young man living with his grandad. Nobody knows his name. Nobody is watching him. For a while it looks as if the thing everyone has been so afraid of is just a kid trying to get away from it all.

The episode is told from both sides.

With the Editor, it's quiet, and it's good. People here live real lives, not online ones. The air is cleaner, the food is better, and everything is simpler. Best of all, he gets time with his grandad that he could never have had otherwise: the tea, the stories, the quiz shows, an ordinary Tuesday that was never supposed to be his. He's decided this is where he wants to stay, away from the trolls, the technology and the pressures of his old life. The equipment sits wrapped in a towel at the bottom of a wardrobe, and he's thinking about getting rid of it for good. We watch him think about it. He's a normal twenty-something, and for the first time in the series he looks like he might be fine.

With the Doctor and Mia, it's the opposite. They keep dipping back into the same stretch of time, a week earlier, a month later, the same Tuesday twice, trying to work out what they're looking at. Mia knows what a lost afternoon looks like. The Doctor doesn't want to say out loud that a boy with this much power and nothing to do is the most dangerous thing in the room.

Somewhere in all that dipping, the Doctor has to tell Mia the thing she doesn't want to hear: he might not be able to undo what happened to her. He doesn't say it's impossible, and he doesn't say he won't try. He just can't promise her, and she hears the difference. The episode never says whether her hand was taken by the Editor or by the Doctor and Mia's own meddling, and it doesn't let either of them off the hook.

By the end they believe they've stopped him. They watch him make the decision, and the Doctor, who has no reason to doubt it, takes them away.

Meanwhile the Editor is happy, feels at home, and it looks over.

I'd like you to believe it too, for about a day.

Tomorrow: Episode 3, Pyramids.

Doctor Who: Version Control Part 3, Episode 1: Deadstream

Preface: Before deciding on McGann I'd also considered 6 different Doctors from the past, one in each episode, maybe standalone or maybe all working towards the same thing, kind of like the Picard versions at the end of Star Trek: TNG and of course The Day of the Doctor. Either way this was always the opener.

Deadstream is where the whole thing begins. It takes its name and central idea from a short script I published on this site, also called Deadstream.

A man goes live on a streaming platform for a comeback. The camera is strapped to his chest, so we see his hands, the road ahead and his phone screen. We never see his face. A chat full of regulars cheers him on, with a few trolls scattered among them.

At first, everything seems normal. Then the viewers start noticing things. The cars are old, the streets look different, and the streamer appears to be walking through a version of their town that no longer exists. He seems to be in the past, and he has the power to change it.

The viewer count climbs, then starts to fall. People aren't closing the tab. They're ceasing to exist. Some viewers in the present notice people disappearing from their lives, while others can't understand what all the fuss is about. The chat becomes increasingly desperate as the numbers dwindle.

Only after the stream has begun do we meet Mia Baravik, a waitress in a Norfolk café. Something that happened to someone, somewhere in the past has been undone, and the consequence lands on her. She loses her hand. It literally disappears in front of her. The hand that was holding the phone playing the stream to her. It drops to the floor, she screams. Some people are horrified; others insist she's always been that way. The world has quietly rewritten itself, but not everyone remembers the same version of it.

Mia obviously knows something is really badly wrong, and she's not alone in noticing. But knowing something has happened and being able to do anything about it are two very different things. Half the café is stunned and the other half is shrugging. The only person who crosses the room to her is a stranger who came in for a cup of tea. He's the one who sees she's in pain, and he's the Doctor. He has the knowledge to investigate and the ability to act, but it's empathy that gets him across the room first.

It's Mia who picks the phone up off the floor, screen cracked, the stream still running. She can't stop looking at it. The old cars, the different shopfronts and the street corner all belong to her town, in a year she can date from a poster in a window. The Doctor has the TARDIS, but Mia has the map.

While they're trying to make sense of it, her thumb slips and hits the YouTube link under the stream. The finished video is already there, even though the Twitch stream is still live. They press play and see themselves in the footage, the Doctor and Mia, in the past. They haven't been there yet, but the video shows them there all the same.

They look at each other. Whatever is happening, they've just found their destination.

The Doctor might know the universe, but Mia knows people, and that makes her more useful than she realises. When the investigation takes them beyond Norfolk, she decides to travel with him, to find out what happened to her. She wants answers, and she's not the sort to let a question go.

The Editor is in this episode, but he's more of an absence than a person. You feel what he's changed long before you understand who changed it. That's the point of starting here. History can be cut like footage, and nobody notices the cut except the people it lands on.

Tomorrow: Episode 2, A Simpler Time.

Also on Mental Ramblings: Doctor Who: Version Control Part 2, The Pitch

Doctor Who: Version Control Part 2, The Pitch

Yesterday, the Doctor. Today, the idea.

*Version Control* is a six-part *Doctor Who* series, followed by a special.

Here's the basic idea: what happens when someone gets the power to rewrite history but hasn't got the first clue what history actually means?

Meet the Editor. He's a bored, lonely young bloke from a small town in Norfolk. During lockdown, he stumbles into time travel in much the same way people stumbled into livestreaming: by accident, with a camera pointed at himself and an audience he may or may not have. He's not planning to conquer the universe. He's a kid who's found a new toy. Unfortunately, the toy is the past.

The Editor thinks of history as footage. You can cut it, rewind it, delete it and have another go. We've all done that with a video. Most of us haven't done it to somebody's life. He starts out with malice, seeking revenge on his online tormentors, then he gets bored. There's no convenient redemption waiting for him at the end. He can have the power of a god and still think he's just messing about with his own recordings.

Standing in his way is the Doctor. I'm bringing back Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor, a man who knows perfectly well that he can change things but understands why he shouldn't do it every five minutes. He's curious, kind and stubborn, and sometimes doing the right thing means accepting that you can't put everything back the way it was.

Then there's Mia, a waitress who knows her town and the people in it. In the first episode, something happens to her that simply shouldn't be possible. She doesn't join the Doctor because she fancies a trip round the universe. She needs answers. And she understands something the Doctor can sometimes overlook: these changes aren't just dates on a timeline. They're happening to real people, in real places.

The six episodes each have their own flavour.

1. Deadstream. A livestream, a Norfolk town and something very wrong with time.

2. A Simpler Time. The Doctor finds the person behind the edits is not what he expected.

3. Pyramids. The Doctor and Mia think they've corrected things. Time for a little sightseeing, then. What could possibly go wrong?

4. Red Who? Thrown out of his own universe, the TARDIS ends up somewhere unexpected, and The Doctor meets Cloister the Stupid. Meanwhile, Mia has problems of her own.

5. Ripple Effect. Every change has consequences. The Doctor is about to discover just how far they spread.

6. Final Cut. Every edit has a cost, and this one comes due.

The Special: The Last Supper

There's one thread running through the whole thing. Every little edit creates another problem, and fixing that problem creates another. Nobody needs to set out to destroy the universe. They just need to keep pulling at the same thread.

Eventually, the rest of the universe takes notice. And somewhere in all this mess, the seeds of the Time War begin to grow.

I'll take the episodes one at a time over the coming week, starting with the story that kicks the whole thing off.

Also on Mental Ramblings: Doctor Who: Version Control Part 3, Episode 1: Deadstream