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. He's happy, he's home, and it looks finished. I'd like you to believe it too, for about a day.

Tomorrow: Episode 3, Pyramids.