Gallifrey Time War 2 AU where instead of trying to assassinate Rassilon (boring, overdone, doomed to fail) Romana defects to Faction Paradox (innovative, exciting, much better dress code than Houseworld, you get a cool sword)
DOCTOR WHO: FLUX: THE HALLOWEEN INVASION: The cataclysmic, the impossible. The voice-activated handcuffs not recognizing the Dr, the TARDIS leaking….what. Crude oil? Black bile? Azure disguised as human and the TARDIS interface looking so very much like a chameleon arch. The tunnels being dug under Liverpool, Dan with his helpful special interest above ground. Plenty of people need soup more than me. The teethgrinding misery and loneliness of poverty and a talking dog. The Division, again. Yaz’s apologetic look to Claire as they leave her behind. Have we not had fun together? Vinder! The drifting TARDIS door, the Sontarans opportunistically descending on the Flux’s tail. Swarm’s matador outfit. 13, who has some practice in non-consensual psychic contact, now having their own head invaded. Swarm being SO sure that he isn’t just Some Guy, just one asshole in a very very long line. The Lupari shield and the most begrudging type of soulmate. Dan now carrying his tiny house in his pocket. Diane who is not pulled or dragged but made to walk into the Passenger; Claire’s Angel; Vinder cutting himself adrift. Genuinely very good setup of the pieces & that ending montage is the most fun the editors have had since “Heaven Sent”. The end of the universe, I always wondered what that would feel like oh girl like you’ve never been there before?
“Romana tries to fix the CIA and it’s not so much her personal efforts or relative success that matter because even if she does somehow manage to change an intrinsically fucked organization, the hydra will grow another head and the military will sell weapons to Space Afghanistan or whatever in the CIA’s place because imperialism is as much the self-fulfilling prophecy here as Romana’s trauma wrt abandonment, and the only course of action is to leave the system, even if she can’t admit it, even if she’s half-consciously maneuvering herself into being exiled alongside the man she thinks she pushed into finally rejecting her, who is himself a half-severed head of the state” is a uh remarkably chunky arc considering how catastrophically stupid Big Finish (and the franchise in general) can get
