Ada Lovelace: Childe Byron (1840s)
Ada Lovelace – the only legitimate child of Lord Byron – was basically the Frances Bean Cobain of the early 19th century, but more importantly, she was also the world’s first computer programmer. Ada is a fascinating character – she never knew her notorious father, and her mother, who resented both Byron and Ada, encouraged Ada’s interest in mathematics and logic in an attempt to distance her from developing what she saw as Byron’s “insanity.”
Despite this – or perhaps because of it – Ada remained interested and sympathetic towards in her scoundrel father and eventually requested to be buried by him, but she also was also genuinely passionate about her lifelong scientific research. Ada seems like just the kind of woman that our new Doctor would admire and want to meet – whether it’s an Ada in her late 20s, writing the first algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine, or a sickly and lonely 12-year-old Ada, desperate for the freedom of flight, methodically researching and testing data to develop a set of wings.
The Doctor and Ada Lovelace would be equally fascinated with each other, and there’s no lady more deserving of a quick spin in the TARDIS.
Darwin’s Theory of Alien Evolution (1850s)
The Doctor has actually met Charles Darwin before – not on television, but he became a friend of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor in “Bloodtide,” one of Doctor Who’s more popular audio plays. In that story, the young Darwin, adventuring in the Galapagos Islands, encountered the Silurians, which surely gave him a lot to think about in terms of evolution!
But Charles Darwin was a young man then, and full of wonder. Skip ahead 20 years, and the great scientist is a grief-stricken emotional wreck, full of guilt and self-hatred after the death of his 10 year old daughter Annie.
Everyone loves episodes where we see get to see the Doctor’s existing relationships scattered throughout time, and in the years following Annie’s death what better than a visit from an old friend – and maybe a few evolving monsters that add extra weight to Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection – to get Charles back on track towards publishing his life’s work, On The Origin Of Species. Maybe the Doctor has a special signed copy in the TARDIS library, with a few extra chapters that couldn’t have been included in the already-controversial book.
Oscar Wilde: Portrait in the TARDIS (1880s)
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, but he dominated London society in the late Victorian era with his celebrated plays, publications and personality before his love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas led to his imprisonment. To his readers, he has – as he always predicted – just one name, consisting of five letters: to his critics, it’s Wilde; and to his friends, it’s Oscar, and the Doctor would certainly fall into the latter camp.
Perhaps Oscar Wilde – seen today as a tragic figure, a gay icon and one of the most quoted writers in the English-speaking world – was still too taboo to have featured in an episode of classic Who, but it’s frankly surprising that neither Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat have chosen to include him as a historical figure. It’s a missed opportunity to not have seen Oscar in the tenure of Ten or Eleven – imagine a youthful, flirtatious, never-aging Doctor popping in and out on Oscar during his teens, 20s and 30s – can anyone say Dorian Gray? But this storyline could still work, with the help of a young male TARDIS companion – or, dare we say it, a return from Captain Jack Harkness.
Doctor Who has visited the Victorian era many, many times – the Beeb must have plenty of spare costumes and set pieces lying around so it’d be pretty easy to pull this one together, and any TARDIS trip to this period could feature a Paternoster Gang cameo. Oscar had a lot of famous friends who could also make an appearance – a meeting with Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, is said to have been integral to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Sounds like a plan.
Nikola Tesla’s Unmatched Genius (1900s)
The Doctor would be very angry at the way the world treated Nikola Tesla, and it must be said that Tesla deserved better than he got in life. He was quiet and curious, a mentally ill “mad scientist” with a good heart, a generous nature, and, eventually, a strange attachment to pigeons. There’s so much, in terms of sci-fi, that could be done with Tesla’s genius, and a Tesla episode comes with a perfect enemy in the form of Thomas Edison, inventor of (the way to sell) lightbulbs.
Edison once offered Tesla the era’s equivalent of a million dollars to fix his crappy generators and when the Serbian-born Tesla completed the work and requested payment, Edison laughed in his face and told him “oh, you don’t understand our American humor.” Later in their careers, Edison stole family pets and publicly killed them with Tesla’s alternating current to prove it was “unsafe” (it wasn’t, anything’s gonna die if you electrocute it. It was just less expensive to run than Edison’s direct current.) Tesla invented x-rays but refused to do medical experiments because they weren’t yet safe – Edison went ahead and used them anyway and killed a bunch of his assistants. Get the picture? Let’s make Edison the worst kind of evil alien possible and kill him in a variety of ways.
There’s some other great options too – like protecting the dangerous “death ray” technology that Tesla never released to the world (Daleks!), his attempt to build a tower that provided free energy to the entire planet, or his pet pigeon with imaginary laser-beam eyes. Oh, and there’s this biographical quote, about an injury: “Tesla refused to consult a doctor – an almost lifelong custom.” You can just see him refusing to engage and trying to shut the Doctor out of his lab before eventually teaming up.
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