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butchthirteen · 8 months

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what’s your pitch for good!Flux? And good!Power of the Doctor?

okay so i'm going to preface this by saying i have not rewatched flux or power of the doctor since potd aired and that is because potd dealt so much psychic damage to me that it retroactively ruined the entire chibnall era and now i can never watch it again. so this is going to be extremely vague/broad strokes because i don't remember what happened very well.

on the other hand, this means that the bar for a good version of both of these is very low.

overall, flux should be entirely about the doctor's reaction to the timeless child news and her subsequent identity crisis, and secondarily about how she is in absolutely no shape to have any kind of relationship with another person.

to make room for this, we're cutting out like half the plot lines. i liked bel and vinder but what were they doing there. we don't need the unit thing either, and i think i'd also cut the lupari, or at least, i might keep karvanista as a figure from the doctor's past but i'm not sure connecting that to a species that exists to guard humans makes literally any sense. i'm not sure we need swarm and azure either, and i would maybe replace them with a lackey for tecteun who's responsible for creating/spreading the flux. the weeping angel thing can take up more time, that was one of the cooler parts of flux, and it could also build up some suspense (ie. the angels are stalking the doctor, what do they want with her, finally she's in the 60's and this town is crawling with them, etc.) and we keep dan so yaz can have a companion.

plotwise like... i feel like the flux itself has to feel personal. like... okay, planets are disappearing, but they're planets the doctor cares about. she drags yaz to some planet or another because she thinks it might give her more clues about what division is, and the planet is just full of refugees. and something is clearly extremely extremely wrong. and they go back to earth to check on it and they realize the streets are strangely empty, i guess i'm lifting from the dimension cannon audios to say the flux got the sun. which also gives them a time limit on fixing it because pretty soon the earth is going to be uninhabitably cold. and they pick up dan somewhere in there. but as they like. go around the universe trying to figure out what's wrong it's clear that like. places that have a particular significance to the doctor are gone. you could pull a ton of different references from past seasons. and then she realizes she keeps seeing the angels.

you need to either do way less or way more thasmin, and i'm a dyke, so i would make the thasmin way more explicit, but also way more toxic/codependent. yaz knows thirteen is hiding something, knows it's massive, knows thirteen is running away from her, but can't leave because 1. she's never felt this way about anyone and she doesn't want to lose what she has and 2. she knows that whatever thirteen is hiding is clearly devastating and rooted in trauma etc which makes her 100% more likely to forgive thirteen. and thirteen for her part is like. perfectly nice until yaz tries to challenge her/ask questions and then she falls back on the "haven't i shown you amazing things!!" thing that we get like. one line of.

also like yaz having WWTDD on her hand was a clear attempt to show that she looks up to the doctor and wants to be like the doctor but it's like. extremely on-the-nose and stilted. "show don't tell" isn't universally useful advice but it would be useful advice in this specific instance. show us that yaz is becoming like the doctor!

for example. i kind of want to keep some of the stuff with the mouri, maybe the doctor goes to them to figure out whether something's wrong, realizes a couple are missing, but crucially yaz is like "wait if you get another person in there will it stop the universe from being so fucked up." and jumps in. because she thinks she can handle it. and the doctor is like. oh shit i don't want to lose yaz and jumps in too. because then you can have all the flashbacks, maybe you give yaz glimpses of a possible future for herself (without the doctor... but with the doctor's constant intrusion) (also in good!flux yaz has already quit being a cop and she's an emt in the future thing) and then that can parallel the doctor's glimpses of a possible past for herself, with the present as an intrusion (ie. she's seeing yaz instead of her actual partner or whatever).

yaz's separation from thirteen (and her watching thirteen turn into an angel) needs a lot more narrative and emotional weight, we should see her sobbing and wailing, and then we should see her stand up and figure out what needs to be done. the doctor doesn't give her a hologram (because thirteen being like "well i think we might get separated!" and planting a hologram makes NO sense) but she does have like. a silly souvenir hologram of the doctor from some amusement park or something so it's literally just the doctor grinning and going like "hi yaz!!"

and she has dan with her but i think i'll leave jericho out honestly because the main thing i remember about him is yaz taking a historical object out of a dig site type of place and going "we should return it" and jericho going "no no it's a discovery!!" and like. i think maybe i'm actually not going to have a character of color say "hey stealing this cultural item kind of sucks" and then an older white man from the 1960's who's just there to go "no it's great." i mean if i do keep him in i take out that line and i give his death way more impact. but anyway . we can keep dan as companion for yaz and also like. general emotional support guy. this also means that he gets an extremely one-sided picture of yaz's relationship with the doctor. i also think he assumes they're dating/partnered just by how desperate yaz is to get back.

but anyway without the hologram yaz doesn't have a mission from the doctor, but she does have a mission, which is to get back to the doctor, and she's spent enough time with the doctor that she knows if she looks hard enough eventually she'll find a time traveler, possibly another version of the doctor, and she can get that person to get her back to the doctor. i think also if we keep the tunnels she needs to discover them through research etc., like she needs to read somewhere about this guy in liverpool who keeps saying these tunnels are going to weird times/places, and then she needs to follow up on those rumors and seek out the guy and ask him about the tunnels and convince him to show her the tunnels and then she gets back. and dan is there to be like "hang on i know about these tunnels!!"

meanwhile!! first of all we make a much bigger deal about the angel thing, we see thirteen left there for much longer, and it's tecteun who comes and turns her back. also the conversation with tecteun starts with tecteun addressing thirteen in gallifreyan and then switching to english when thirteen absolutely refuses to engage. this is the "reveal" that yes, the flux was about the doctor, and it's all so the doctor can have a beautiful new universe to play in, etc etc etc. honestly i don't think i'd change much about this bit, it's just all the stuff around it needs to give it way more weight. i'm honestly not sure how this resolves, though. i think thirteen needs to think tecteun is right for a moment, and then she's like wait fuck this and figures out an escape. probably she figures out tecteun has an escape plan and uses that. to be honest i don't worry a lot about the technicalities of stuff like "how does she escape" because i feel like that's secondary to the actual plot. like in doctor who the technical stuff never makes any sense but you buy into it because the emotional story is good. unless the emotional story is bad.

and then like. we're back on earth with the sun gone out. it is extremely crucial that thirteen does not get trisected after the interaction with tecteun because this means that yaz is now in the right century, directly in front of the tardis, but the doctor isn't there. which means that we can use the chekov's gun of yaz knowing how to pilot the tardis (!!!) and have her get in there, get out her big binder and all her sticky notes or whatever, and figure out how to find the doctor. and honestly i think it takes most of the episode for her and the doctor to find each other. meanwhile they're both trying to figure out how to solve the problem of the flux. they find each other, have their moment, thirteen is absolutely wrecked emotionally and physically, yaz is doing a little better but like it's been a long four years. and there's a moment where thirteen is completely defeated, yaz starts throwing out solutions, like "maybe there's an antidote" "maybe there's something that works against it" "maybe we can turn back time" etc etc etc.

and here's the thing... i think maybe this is where the heart of the tardis could come in. like when it's used at the end of the first episode of flux, it's so anticlimactic. but in s1, it's established that the heart of the tardis gives you what you need. and i feel like thirteen looking into the heart of the tardis could like. do some things. for the universe. particularly i think thirteen coupled with the tardis could fuck with the timelines to reverse the progress of the flux, there's still lots of loss but she manages to save earth (and the sun) and get the flux out of the universe. honestly i'm not sure if this would actually work but again it's one of those things where the emotional storyline needs to really sell it.

so that's flux. and you know what you could just have the doctor regenerate right there, considering the heart of the tardis has a track record of killing her, but let's say instead she expends it all trying to fix what the flux did and then she's just so fucking tired. and yaz is like "okay let's have a beach day. do you want to invite dan."

and then we get eotd/lotsd. i won't go into too much detail here except that these episodes need to like. foster actual conversation between thirteen and yaz. like they need to actually talk it out. thirteen needs to tell yaz what she's been hiding, yaz needs to express how it's hurt her. which sets them up for potd.

good!potd involves a few things. first of all, tegan and ace are both explicitly dykes. none of this "i have two ex-husbands" whatever. she's married to nyssa and we all know this. secondly, we need an actual bodyswap between the doctor and the master. what actually happened was way too confusing. thirdly, if you are going to open on a random child and then not use that to talk about thirteen's childhood trauma. what is the point. fourthly yaz needs to either choose to leave on her own accord (because thirteen mistreated her, because even though they're talking now it's too little too late, because her time in the past made her realize she really missed normal life) or there needs to be tragedy. like she needs to die. we also need an emotional kiss either right when she's about to leave or while she dies. honestly i don't remember what the actual plot of potd was but like. fewer plot lines more of the master and the doctor goofing around in each other's bodies, more dykery, more tragedy. and also thirteen needs to die as a direct result of the forced regeneration. honestly i only watched potd once and since then i've been trying to wipe it from my brain because i hated it so much so i have fewer thoughts on this one.

anyway i hope you enjoyed that. i gave myself real emotions thinking about thirteen's emotional journey in my own personal version of flux. if anyone has thoughts or wants to add anything let me know. i thought about adding jack to both flux and potd because according to the released shooting script for rotd he was supposed to come back at the end and deliver a cliffhanger into flux (presumably written before the bbc blacklisted john barrowman) and like if we're living in a perfect world where no one sexually harasses anyone else having jack there (particularly as someone who knows the doctor very well from a very different point in their life) would be cool so there's also that.

this is long but i'm not putting it under a read more. woe! good!flux and good!potd be upon ye!

#doctor who #chibnall era #flux #power of the doctor #headcanons #<- i guess #criticism #<- also i guess #if i had time and energy and fewer long wips i would try and fic this but. nah #sorry for not answering earlier also. but again time and energy are at a premium #edit. i just remembered there were sontarans in flux. cut them out too i guess

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