Please welcome Will Hindmarch back to WWdN! He’s sharing this special guest post with us while Wil Wheaton is at sea.

This is a thank-you note to Wil Wheaton for sharing his blog with us this week. Thank you, Wil! I cooked this up with a bit of help from other guest authors, this week.

And, yes, this is very much what it looks like: Wil Wheaton fanfic.

Even if Wil gets to play a Time Lord someday, I bet they won’t do it quite like this — which is why I am writing it like this. While I believe Wil could imagine, write, and play a great Time Lord, I thought it might be fun to imagine Wil Wheaton as a Time Lord himself. This is how it turned out: in ten short episode synopses.

1. “A Traveler in Time”

Wil stands alone in a Los Angeles beercade long after last call, playing the only remaining cabinet-edition of the unfinished 1984 spaceship-combat game, Armada, when he hears a sound: the thrumming of a TARDIS! Before Wil’s eyes, what looks like a sit-down video-game pod fades into existence in the middle of the shop — and a black-and-white dog steps out. “Come with me,” says the dog. “It’s time.”

After locking up the beercade, Wil and the Dog journey to the edge of the Milky Way galaxy in the year 7494, where the Dog reveals that Wil is a Time Lord who was hidden away on Earth as a child to await the day when Wil’s TARDIS came looking for him. The Dog explains that it is a facet of this particular TARDIS, capable of taking different shapes to blend with different spaces and times. “I just like being a dog right now,” it says.

Together, Wil and the Dog head back toward Earth’s 21st century so Wil can bring his wife on his adventures, but on the way they are attacked by time-eating aliens called the Vye, who damage the TARDIS and send it careening across time and space — and out of control!

2. “Fix Everything”

Stranded in a deep, rocky quarry in a remote corner of an alien planet, Wil and the Dog attempt to repair the TARDIS. Wil tries to re-harmonize the quantum-flux emitter by reversing its polarity, but Dog explains that it won’t work until the neutrino matrix cools enough to be turned off and on again. So Wil and the Dog venture out to explore, while they can, only to discover they are on 1L-729, a planet inhabited by millions of humans who crash-landed there a thousand years before and are now dwelling in a peaceful but forlorn society governed by a tyrannical and vocal computer system — the Defense Imperative Command Computer — infused into every facet of their lives. Wil attempts to rouse the populace to stand up to the computer, but the populace is too timid, too dependent on the computer’s automated factories, and too afraid to make things themselves, lest DICC leave them to the mercy of the alien monsters that dwell on other planets in the star system. Wil is saddened to find that he can’t make people change.

“We can’t fix everything,” the Dog tells Wil. “Besides, you’re just getting started.”

Unwilling to do nothing, however, Wil goes back to the TARDIS and prints out burrito recipes and shares them with the people. “They help,” he says, before stepping back into the TARDIS and heading back toward Earth.

3. “Every Rose Has Its Gorn”

Headed back to 21st-century Earth, the TARDIS misses its target by a few decades. Stranded for three days in Los Angeles in the 1960s, the Time Lord and the Dog thwart a murder plot on the set of the original Star Trek television series, where it turns out that a reptilian alien monster isn’t a rubber suit after all!

4. “Table Stop”

The TARDIS carries Wil the Time Lord to 6th-century India, where the precursor game that will lead to chess is currently being invented. The Dog takes the form of an elephant, but is captured by alien bandits! To free him, Wil challenges the Bandit Prince to a duel — in the form of a proto-chess match. Along the way, Wil stops the aliens from adding a new rule to the game called “Whoopsie-Poo Takebacksies,” which would make all games terrible forever.

5. “Call A Doctor”

On the ancient planet of Seebeus, where crime is rampant despite the work of a vast array of detectives, Wil and the Dog find themselves apprehended for a crime they did not commit when local law enforcement detects the arrival of the TARDIS. Before long, Wil and the Dog discover they have been mistaken for another Time Lord with a warrant for his arrest on the planet: the Doctor! With the TARDIS and the Dog locked in a prison with notorious interstellar criminals, Wil must prove he is not a regenerated identity of the Doctor by securing testimony from the Doctor himself. But drawing the Doctor to Seebeus could land both Time Lords in a Dalek trap!

6. “Listening to Los Angeles”

With the TARDIS tuned up using the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, Wil and the Dog once again to reach Los Angeles in the 21st century. This time they end up in 1986, and Wil sets out to talk to his younger self, to teach himself how to avoid some of the pains he’d experience later in life. Together, they find young Wil, but when the Dog tries to stop them from meeting, Wil and the Dog have a falling out, leaving the Time Lord to wonder if he really knows how to be happy any better than he did when he was young. Unable to find the Dog, Wil uses the TARDIS circuits to transform the vessel into an El Camino and drives around LA listening to the radio, hoping the Dog will sense the TARDIS. The Dog, lost on his own, tries on several shapes before finally using a payphone to call into a radio show in the hopes that Wil might hear him. On the air, the Dog tells Wil again the we must each make our own mistakes — good and bad — to learn how to be better versions of ourselves. Though they don’t know it, young Wil hears the broadcast, too.

7. “Octopi”

Reuniting with the Dog and ready for a new adventure, Wil and the Dog head to an interstellar bazaar on a distant planet for what the Dog promises Wil to be the spiciest burritos in all the galaxy. But, since the bazaar only exists tens of thousands of years ago, the Dog takes on the form of an air-breathing, walking, talking octopus (“because dogs haven’t been invented yet and I don’t want to get weird looks”). The next day, while Wil is recovering from the burrito’s super-hotness, evil Vye time-eaters looking to feed on the TARDIS attack, draining the TARDIS of vital energies and trapping it in a diagnostic cycle until it can calculate pi to the last digit. Wil chases down the cruel Vye but they reveal that they cannot turn time back into raw potential — and Wil discovers that by meddling with the Vye he has fallen out of temporal sync with the Dog and the TARDIS. He’s been gone a few minutes, but they’ve been losing time and energy for more than a year without him! Almost drained, Wil and the Dog may be stranded in the distant past…

8. “Stand By You”

With the TARDIS almost drained of energy and the Dog — as a facet of the TARDIS — withering away, Wil attempts ventures to a library near the bazaar to learn what he can of Vye technology. Can their attack be undone? The Vye, he discovers, are a kind of temporal and creative paralytic, stealing time and vital essence from other beings not for any rush but so that creative beings all over the galaxy won’t make things to challenge Vye complacency. The Vye cannot abide change and they attempt to secure complacency throughout the cosmos by paralyzing civilizations through fear and by robbing creativity of the time to create. Because the Vye are so few in number, though, they automate systems to do a lot of their work for them, and have become trapped forever in their own stagnancy, as afraid to change as they are to die.

Wil, armed with a new idea, returns to the TARDIS to discover it almost utterly drained.

“It has but one reserve power supply left,” the Dog says. “Me.”

With no other way out, the Dog insists on fusing himself back to the TARDIS, which will effectively end the Dog’s existence as the TARDIS’s personality and creativity, but could buy Wil time to get the TARDIS to a place and time where it can be refueled. At the last minute, Wil realizes that he can try to fuse himself into the Dog/TARDIS link, too, but the Dog undermines the attempt, telling Wil “you have a home already. This isn’t it.”

Fused as a single entity, the TARDIS sends an arc of energy into Wil’s arm, energizing and animating his octopus tattoo. Then, as the TARDIS activates and fades across space and time, Wil notices the heartbeat on his left arm animates, too…

9. “O, Free Burrito”

The TARDIS brings Wil back to the sunshine of 21st-century Los Angeles, the morning after he left on his first adventure. There, he reunites with his family, telling them stories of his adventures and showing them the TARDIS. The TARDIS informs Wil that their adventure together is at an end — that the TARDIS just doesn’t have the capability left for many more journeys. “And besides,” says the Dog, trapped in dog form and forever within the TARDIS, “you have a good thing here.”

Wil agrees but insists to the TARDIS that they have one more stop to make: back to planet 1L-729. “I know how to help them now,” he says. “I gave them the wrong kind of burrito.”

Together, Wil, his wife Anne, and the TARDIS travel to the skies above 1L-729, materializing in thrumming light. There, Wil uses equipment aboard the TARDIS to broadcast images, text, and his voice to the people, telling them that there’s more on the other side of their fears than pain. “It’s okay to be afraid, but the DICC wants you to be only afraid — and you deserve more than that,” Wil says. “Don’t listen to its voice. It lies. It wants you to be afraid to make things and make things better. You need to get excited,” Wil says, “and make things!”

Before Wil and Anne can see if the message has gotten through, dozens of Vye ships come careening out of deep space again, slamming into the TARDIS and sending it plummeting back into the gravel of the quarry below. Anne finds Wil amid the wreckage of the TARDIS — and he’s glowing on the verge of regeneration…

10. “Get Excited and Make Things”

In the series finale, Wil the Time Lord regenerates into a new version of himself — with the same look, but refreshed — and helps the people of a futuristic civilization tear down the tyrannical Defense Imperative Command Computer, which they discover was infected by a memetic virus written by Vye time-eaters. When the TARDIS and the Time Lord help the locals clean their network of the Vye contagion, as the citizens of the society help each other to make things and rise above raw fear, they discover the Vye are also humans, but transmuted by a memetic virus similar to the one that affected the planet’s operating system. The cured Vye return to their home colony, hoping to cure the rest of them.

Finally, the TARDIS carries Wil and Anne back home to 21st-century Earth before saying its goodbyes. “Maybe we’ll see each other again … in time.”

And as the TARDIS begins to fade away, Wil and Anne walk together, into the future, to get burritos.