#if yaz had been hospitalised for a bit

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

i think the problem with the fam is theyre too obedient. theyre such goody two shoes the hope is that it'd rub off right? on the doctor. but it doesnt bc she hides her badness and they wont question her. okay they'll question her "what happened to never do weapons" "why dont you ever share anything with us" but they wont push back when she says nah ah we dont talk about that. and thats her problem. she wont talk about that. or that. or that. or that. or any of it

i think if you put a limit on their patience. theyre understanding but not forever (i mean theyre even understanding after her "death". "she knew she was gonna do something that might kill her" "she wanted us to live"). watch them grow more annoyed as they call out hypocrisies and less and less willing to accept bullshit answers. it would put a lot of movement in the dynamic i think

like okay, taking yaz out of the equation bc shes not a companion shes a doctor, just considering ryan and graham for now: ryan is young and like, being formed, which is part of his arc, but he also already has a lot of like really life- and worldview-shaping experiences right? black, disabled, unable to count on most of the guardians in his life. those things profoundly shape how you stand in the world, how you approach and are approached

and okay lets put yaz back in for a sec because shes really interesting to like put next to ryan and see like what happens there. because she and ryan share both being racialised and being neurodivergent, if you want to call it that (if depression counts. personally i think depression is more of a like regular human reaction to life than "divergence" from the "typical" so to say, but then i also think the secret underlying reason she was bullied and thus depressed was the autism. so it cancels out for me. but like thats sort of weaving in and out the text. and depression also is something very different from dyspraxia. BUT these are both things about them that like have been Underlined for us the audience, same as the conversation behind the bins in rosa, so i think im justified in putting these two things together as comparison. okay tangent over)

ryan and yaz both have had experiences of not being able to count on the people around them, for various reasons but all the same. it would be fairly understandable i think for ryan to be sort of like, fuck adults fuck people who have authority over me based on nothing. whereas yaz,,,,becomes the authority

RYAN: Yeah, see? It's not like Rosa Parks wipes out racism from the world forever. Otherwise, how come I get stopped way more by the police than my white mates? YASMIN: Oi, not this police.

and you could really have put them like,,not opposite per se but like clashing in some way over this. not clashing like in fighting necessarily, though yes as in conflict. clashing as in different ideals, different conclusions drawn from similar experiences

yaz says to do good in the world i must have the power of the state. which also implies the power of the state can be good and is meant to be good. ryan i can easily imagine having been someone who no authority was worth counting on so fuck them all. that wouldve been a reaaally interesting tension to see play out throughout s11 and s12 i think

and thats just two of them. we've got a team of four. imagine both of their reactions to the doctor. we dont have to imagine with yaz, but ryan couldve been more like well whos she. you know? why are we listening to her? what just because she says so? let her prove herself first.

and then theres graham who has like half a lifetime of experience of Being A Human on them, who isnt in the coming of age phase anymore, who must have a lot of his own worldview, ideas, politics. we see like, a tiny bit of that with like edison or whatever but how does that play with a Time LordTM?

like theres a lot of interesting ways to pair up and to clash them! 13 and yaz with suicidal ideation, 13 and ryan on the dad thing, 13 and graham on survivors guilt. 13 and yaz vs ryan and graham on authority and law. ryan vs graham and 13 on guardians. ryan and yaz vs 13 and graham on being racialised. 13 and yaz vs ryan and graham on sexism. this couldve been a wildly dynamic team i think. if only you'd let them fight! if only you'd let them have their own opinions and Speak Them. this would put like so much schwung in like,, every plot, every episode

because it's all there! right? it's all already there, just look at the episode list of s11, it's all there, racism, sexism, workers, colonialism, big fucking spiders i dont know! wait thats a worker one again let me revise big fucking spiders capitalism! it's all there, you just gotta make it a bit dialectical. have them argue their sides and disobey and have 13 be like herding cats

imagine the way this would have challenged the doctor and the doctor's politics, then to follow it up with s12 "gallifrey is not what we think it is. we are not what we think we are"

and then revolution of the daleks, ryan and graham gone, and in that episode the police was very obviously like sided with the daleks and the capitalist and that politician right? the police was the fascists. hi, yasmin, how are you. oh, crazy? right, good, the doctor is too.

yaz and 13, now alone, ten months between revolution and flux, time to grapple with what it means to be both victim and agent of an empire. do we accept that? do we refuse that role? how do we refuse that role? how do we be good? what does it mean to be good if police clearly isnt it? how do we take off the uniforms. what moral framework do we build and then commit to, and hold each other accountable to, as copilots of this operation. what do we want to do in the universe. what is our impact. what do we want to avoid doing. how do we do that.

had the doctor said "i was in prison for being me" to yaz, imagine how that would have shaken up her ideas about prisons and how and why people might be in them. might have started her thinking. but then we're back to where i started this post before i totally lost control of it: The Doctor Doesnt Talk About That. and if the fam had been slightly more disobedient in s11, maybe in revolution there would have been place for it