#the last social context she defined herself by was bill missy nardole and university

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

hi im back on my “is this normal for you” bullshit:

it’s YAZ of course it’s yaz who asks, of course it’s her who has been watching the doctor for the past week, who has seen the ease with which she gets people to do what she wants without ever answering the questions she doesnt want to answer

has watched the doctor dance the line between lies and deflections and lies by omission, has seen her weave them into a story of that night entirely parallel to what actually happened but so persuasive that yaz feels like she can remember that fake night too. like it’s not even hard to lie about it, like the story has its own truth, its own momentum

shes watched the doctor do this and seen the way over 10.000 hours that mustve gone into honing this skill and shes drawn her conclusions and shes imagined what kind of life, what kind of person, and then theyve got a bit of time and shes like time to find out, because whats the thing you tend to do after getting to know someone? you try to get a look at their environment, their circles, where are they from, socially speaking, who is around them. so she asks “have you got family?” and what she learns is nobody. there is nobody around the doctor they live in isolation

in some ways this is true for the doctor always but it’s way more of a sort of obstacle with 13 because she emphasises that isolation. she draws a picture for them of where shes from and all it is is absence. what she says here:

YASMIN: Have you got family? DOCTOR: No. Lost them a long time ago. RYAN: How do you cope with that? DOCTOR: I carry them with me. What they would've thought and said and done. I make them a part of who I am. So even though they're gone from the world, they're never gone from me. GRAHAM: That's the sort of thing Grace would have said. YASMIN: So everything we saw, everything we've lied to people about, is this normal for you? DOCTOR: I'm just a traveller. Sometimes I see things need fixing, I do what I can. Except right now, I'm a traveller without a ship. I've stayed too long. I should get back to finding my Tardis.

is anathema to social connection. she doesnt expect to stay. shes not reaching out to them as if theyre potential companions. these are Victims Of The Week relations and shes tying up loose ends. shes giving cryptic answers the way the doctor does at the end of episodes like the return of doctor mysterio (”things end. thats all. everything ends, and it's always sad. but everything begins again too, and thats always happy. be happy. i'll look after everything else”) or the planet of the dead (”people have travelled with me and ive lost them. lost them all. never again”)

these are “im the doctor. i will do everything in my power to save all your lives. and when i do, you will spend the rest of them wondering who i was and why i helped you” answers

the doctor might often give answers that companions dont understand, and companions may complain about it, but even a

CLARA: What is going on? Is this real? Please, tell me what is happening! DOCTOR: I'm the Doctor. I'm an alien from outer space. I'm a thousand years old, I've got two hearts and I can't fly a plane! Can you?

string of unbelievable nonsense tells you something of their context. mostly that it’s not yours and you can immediately adjust your expectations from ‘normal human stuff’ to ‘do you know any scifi’

by the time 13 gives up this most general bit of biographical information it’s kind of too late. “who are you really” is right. it’s like they got an inverted pyramid. where normally you’d get this general base of social information to interpret someone with and you build your more nuanced impression of them on top of it, ryan graham and yaz got to learn entirely who the doctor is as a person but in isolation, and then got the base of the pyramid dropped on top of them

of course they know her, and of course they dont. they get to see her act every day the way she does but they have no idea of the social contexts influencing any of that behaviour. she feels distant and ungraspable not because she is, but because she wont let her social environment be known to them. absence is all they know of her. not human, no family, no home. what is a person without their context.