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