When did my life turn into a Doctor Who episode?

I had a big personal loss this past week. Some people – those who’ve never had a close pet – won’t understand this, I suppose, but we had to put our dog down, and my life feels forever changed. Zoë was a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old Rottoyed. That’s what we called her; she was half Rottweiler, half Samoyed, and a sweet a soul as you could wish. She’d been with us since the age of 11 months, and was my first “baby.” I didn’t become a mom to human babies for the better part of a decade after we got Zoë, so she was our fur baby – a real and vital part of the family. And now she’s gone.

I mentioned to my husband that I was having trouble concentrating on my work (as I write, it’s been a mere two days since she passed), and that my grief feels like a physical presence in my skull. When he said that “in a Doctor Who episode, that would be literal,” I had to laugh. And start writing. It’s simultaneously scary and funny that this show I’d barely heard of four years ago has crept so thoroughly into my life.

So now I’m mentally outlining an episode about how certain pets have some alien (or otherwise advanced) genetic component that allows them to make a psycho-physical, trans-dimensional bond with a human (yes… that will do nicely). When successful, a Dog (or Cat, or other Pet – but I’m going to stick to Dogs because Zoë was a dog, and it’s easiest to write without too many caveats) can use that subliminal ley line to control the behavior of her human bondmate.

When a particularly strong bond forms – due to a natural affinity, a long association, or both – it allows such a Dog to channel a portion of its Chi backward along the ley line to create a Presence (it would have to have a cooler-sounding name than that) in the bondmate’s brain, sharing space in the portions that are normally unused by humans (see, you can picture a Who episode something like this, can’t you?). When the Dog’s body ceases to function and dies, the Presence begins its true symbiosis with the bondmate, becoming the Dog’s remaining consciousness. This has been going on for millennia, ever since Dogs first perfected the technology and thus domesticated humans in order to cultivate a larger number of Bonds. (Obviously, I’m stealing this general concept from several science fiction classics in which someone’s “self” is preserved in a computer somewhere.)

Now the TARDIS, having recently enjoyed a bit of facetime with her Doctor, is eager to establish a more directly communicative bond with him on a regular basis. In her best attempt to show him what she wants, and understand the process better herself, she brings him to Earth again and promptly sets up shop as a third wheel in a Bond. (How am I doing? No Moffat, obviously, but I’d like to think there’s potential…)

The human (and Dog) brain having not been built to cope with the across-all-time-and-space aspects of a TARDIS consciousness, naturally the bondmates cannot withstand the intrusion at the key moment. The normal grief of the bondmate at the Dog’s passing is exacerbated by the physical neural processes as the Presence fully awakens and the TARDIS unintentionally interferes. There is something inside the human’s skull – and it is impairing normal function. They come close to death before the TARDIS extracts herself, with the Doctor’s help. He finally understands what she was trying to show him, but knows that kind of Bond won’t work for them. There’s certainly something to work for now, though…

Is it pathetic that I see Who everywhere? Maybe. Is it helping me put a slightly silly face on my real, emotional pain? Definitely. Personally, I think it’s just great that something like a television program with such overall good storytelling can inspire me to move forward by telling my own story in a new way. Such is the power of imagination.

Zoë: 1996-2011 RIP, my sweet girl.