#like theyre not right but like. both 13 and yazs choices in their relationship make total sense!!

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

imagining an alternate eotd where when asked about her confusing gay crush under threat of daleks one neuron in yazs brain fired differently and instead of going with "i dont know what you mean" she said "yes". same but opposite energy of when the doctor asks if shes a bad date and yaz super boldly just says "no". same but opposite.

because like imagine youre dan. he probably already had a good guess about what the situation was but his assumption being wrong is not out of the realm of possibilities. the idea that they could have talked about is not out of the realm of possibilities! if youre dan! if you just got here. if you didnt see all of s12.

like just imagine that scene! yaz just baldfaced lying as a way to like, bounce the idea off of him plus double duty to affirm her own beliefs that like the doctor never would plus triple duty paralleling 11x4 for 13 to ensure dan is never gonna ask about this again.

and WE'D KNOW. WE'D FUCKING KNOW. it'd be such a doctor move.

"have you ever told her?" "told her what?" "how you feel about her" "...yes." "well what did she say?" "i think you can guess" yaz snaps because she thinks she can. she has guessed or assumed or sort of correctly inferred a while ago that like, nothing is going to happen here, theres no point in her saying anything because the doctor isnt interested. and dan is like "i find her kind of hard to judge actually" because he still wants to hear an actual answer from yaz but yaz just laughs and goes "tell me about it" and then shes saved by a dalek.

of course we still want dan forcing their hand but thats easy to arrange by instead of him going all battering ram with "she likes you" in the next scene he just has to mention it. and i dont really know how he'd mention it because im not really sure how this would look to him.

so particulars to be determined but he does mention it In Some Way and now theres the doctor in a situation yaz indirectly accidentally put her in where shes suddenly having a Lot to process and also shes gonna lie about :) shes gonna lie about it so hard :)

maybe dan's guess is that whatever the doctor said was less-than-definitive ie vague as fuck because hes known her for like a week and has already seen how good she is at explaining herself and also because of yazs bitter "tell me about it" so maybe what he says is like "you better not be stringing her along"

and the doctor, in her perfectly inscrutable grey area between true What The Fuck Are The Humans Talking About This Time and a carefully crafted mask of obliviousness, goes "string her along what"

"i just mean that you gotta make sure your intentions are clear because it's really not fair to keep her guessing, and hoping"

and the doctor says "i dont understand what youre saying dan" because she really doesnt <3

and dan can still say his canon line "i think that you do, but you pretend that you dont" and in this case hes wrong, but he still hits the mark, wrong calculation right answer because the doctor is still like Fuck.

because she does know, of course. she does know about yaz and shes knows about herself and she knows what shes avoiding. and she will still do the same thing in sea devils. and this weird little lie yaz told will probably never come out. the doctor and her talk, dan isnt there, never sees how New this all is. the doctor has no reason to find out what yaz said to dan.

but we know. we know!!! we get to see this whole comedy of errors play out and still somehow arrive at the same answer. we have to live with how clearly none of them correctly assume each other's understanding of the situation. it'd be frustrating as fuck and such a nice encapsulation of what thasmin has been since the beginning. these half-communications that bounce off each other kind of painfully like billiard balls.

they would never find out. sea devils and potd play out exactly as they did and nobody would ever know. except us. it's a portrait of their shared fatal flaw finally laid out for us in broad daylight at the exact moment they come together. and only we can see it.