Some of Doctor Who’s most memorable stories occur when the TARDIS takes a trip back into the past. We list 12 moments in history that would make exemplary episodes for our Twelfth Doctor.
Witnessing the colonization of Mars or driving hover cars with cat-people in New New York is all well and good, but we’ve always had a soft spot for meeting iconic figures and seeing how the Doctor has secretly affected human history as we know it. It’s been a couple of years since our last go at this, but as we usher in Peter Capaldi, there’s no better time to revisit the concept – here’s our brand-new top 12 pitches for a Twelve historical episode.
Ancient Greece (800 – 150 BC)
Let’s go way back to one of the greatest civilizations in human history – Ancient Greece. We’ve done Rome (well, Pompeii – hi, Caecilius) in the reboot era, but not Greece, and although the Doctor has mentioned various visits: attending the first Olympic Games, meeting Theseus and Alexander the Great – the TARDIS hasn’t actually touched down on-screen in Ancient Greece since “The Myth Makers,” a 1965 First Doctor story arc about the Trojan War.
The historical period of Ancient Greece lasted for around 700 years, so there’s a lot of opportunities to choose from: the birth of modern medicine with Hippocrates, philosophical chats with Socrates or Aristotle, helping Homer add the finer details to the Iliad, visiting Sappho’s island community, witnessing the first Marathon run, or discovering the origins of a famous myth, like Hercules, Medusa or the Oracle of Delphi.
One thing’s for sure – we’ll need to see Twelve angrily donning a toga.
Roanoke Island (1589)
In the late 1500s, the Doctor’s almost-wife Queen Elizabeth I granted her new beau, Walter Raleigh, a charter to colonize North America. One of the attempted settlements was on Roanoke Island, Virginia, where a man called John White led a group of 115 people to start a community in the Chesapeake Bay area. White was appointed governor, and in 1587 he sailed home to England for official duties.
When White returned to Roanoke in 1590, his entire colony had vanished, with no signs of struggle. The houses were carefully dismantled – they didn’t leave in a hurry – and only clue was the word CROATOAN carved into a tree. Many people assume this carving holds the answer – that the settlers integrated with the Native American tribes on the nearby Croatoan Island, but the mystery of this disappearance is still officially unsolved today.
We’d like to see the Doctor visit Roanoke in those three years of John White’s absence – he could have been a key part of the mystery. Maybe there was an alien invasion, maybe the island was sentient – but we’re sure the Doctor knows why those people left Roanoke.
Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride (1775)
We’re not too sure how this intrinsically British show would feel about covering the American Revolution, but a national hero on a mission is a national hero on a mission, and the Doctor has a notorious soft spot for people like that.
In 1775, Paul Revere rode furiously through the night to warn the rebel leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock – as well as every patriot he met along the way – that the British military was preparing to mobilize against the rebellion. Because of this, Paul Revere is credited with rallying the local militia to defend themselves in the lead-up to the “shots heard ‘round the world” at the battles of Lexington and Concord. But here’s the twist. There were other riders doing the same job, sending the same warnings out via different routes, but – rightly or wrongly, due to history glorifying certain moments – those other riders go largely unremembered, and Paul Revere is the icon.
There’s a timey-wimey Doctor Who story in there somewhere – clones, aliens, time travel (of course), or an emergency that led to the Doctor and his companion filling in as the unknown riders on the famous midnight ride. They could even encounter Sybil Ludington, a Revolutionary heroine who pulled off a similar job, riding twice the distance of Revere’s journey when she was just 16 years old.
Victor Hugo in the June Rebellion (1832)
If you’ve read every piece of Doctor Who media ever written – comics, novels, the lot – you might have come across a few glib mentions of Victor Hugo and how an interaction with the Doctor caused him to change the plot of Les Miserables from a comedy, but it’s never been addressed on-screen, and a take on the real story could make for something a little bit more pithy.
In 1832, while walking home through Paris, Hugo encountered the barricades of the student uprisings and had to find shelter from the gunfire. Other incidents throughout his life would eventually colour the pages and characters of Les Mis, but it all started there – with groups of naive and untried insurgents attempting to make a difference in the wake of the French Revolution. There are a few ways a visit from the Doctor could play out here – he could meet Victor Hugo himself on that fateful date and save Hugo’s life, leaving him to go on to write one of history’s most influential stories, or the National Guard could be clockwork alien robots (France is still using those?)
To continue the Les Mis angle, perhaps the current companion, like Clara, could have an infatuation with the famous musical, and Twelve, impatient about her romantic delusions, decides to give her a first-hand look at the situation. Perhaps she could even befriend one of the real secret student societies while the Doctor’s off meeting Hugo himself – a Clara/Revolutionary romance could ensue – and we’d get one of those awful “we have to leave now and let them all die” moments due to fixed points in time. Sadface.
On page 2: The Doctor meets Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde and more
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.
On page 3: The Doctor visits WWI, the Russian Revolution, and more
World War I Christmas Truce (1914)
2014 marks the centenary of the First World War, which means that this December is the 100th anniversary of the legendary Christmas Truce – the series of unofficial ceasefires that took place between the British and German armies, where tensions decreased so much that the opposing sides crossed No Man’s Land to talk, exchange gifts, sing carols and, famously, play football.
The Christmas Truce is a moment in history where humanity wins out in the most desperate of circumstances – the Doctor’s favourite treat. It might be interesting to have the TARDIS land among the Germans, and due to the translation circuit, Clara wrongly assumes that the tired and friendly young men she’s meeting are British troops. It would hammer home the most important factor of the truce – that at this point in the war to end all wars, these soldiers were just boys being told what to do by their governments, that they were all the same, that the men on each side of the line were not each other’s true enemy.
The Doctor has, according to canon, witnessed plenty of WWI moments, but we haven’t had a reboot-era episode that took place on the Western Front, aside from a fleeting moment in “The Family of Blood.” Wouldn’t this be the ideal setting for this year’s Christmas Special? There’s actually a comic in which the Ninth Doctor is responsible for initializing the fateful football match, and that’s a story that could either be reworked or retconned – it would be more heart-warming, for us and for the Doctor, to see the soldiers truly come to this moment of peace naturally.
The Lost Princess (1918)
The whereabouts of the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest princess of Imperial Russia, has been a source of conspiracy and intrigue for nearly 100 years. In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, the Tsar abdicated and the Romanov family was put under house arrest in exile. A year later, the household was shot in an extrajudicial execution, but for many decades, Anastasia’s body was never recovered, and rumors of her survival abounded.
In the real world, modern forensics have pretty much cracked the case, but this story has such a fairytale notion – a lost princess, imposters and secret identities, innocent victims of circumstance – that it’s hard to accept the sad truth that Anastasia died that day with the rest of her family. We’d love to imagine the teenaged Grand Duchess, who was a sharp, sassy and vivacious girl, as one of those “just this once” people the Doctor can actually change history for – stealing her away in the TARDIS and planting her elsewhere in time to live somewhat normally, or instating her as the ruler of a far-off ice planet.
To tie this into former Who canon, did you know that Queen Victoria was actually Anastasia’s great-grandmother? The Romanov children suffered from the hereditary hemophilia – or, as we learnt in “Tooth and Claw,” werewolfism – that Victoria passed down, and the treatment of this illness was a major part of the Russian royal family’s relationship with the infamous Rasputin, who was, by varying accounts, corrupted and cultish or innocent and holy. Was he a werewolf hunter? Was he a supernatural veterinarian? You decide.
Alan Turing at Bletchley Park (1940s)
World War II is familiar territory for the Doctor Who reboot era – from gas masks and “Are You My Mummy?” to the War Rooms and tea-serving Daleks, but the blue box has yet to touch down at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre. Around 12,000 people were assigned to Bletchley during WWII – 80% of them women, so there’s a whole story about kick-ass lady spies there – but the most famous figure to have worked there was the mathematician Alan Turing.
Turing was already in training as a government codebreaker in 1938, and he reported for duty at Bletchley on the day war was declared, becoming a leading participant in the breaking of German ciphers. He later became the father of artificial intelligence – the Turing Test, which debates the basic question “can machines think?” is a subject that the Doctor (and the TARDIS!) will be sure to have some opinions on. The issues Turing faced less than 10 years after the war – prosecution for homosexuality, chemical castration, death by suicide – are somewhat intense for a family show, but telling Turing’s story while glossing over these cruel aspects does him a great injustice.
“Vincent and the Doctor” proved that reboot Who has the guts to tackle this kind of darkness head-on with respect and delicacy – a Turing episode would be another step forward and an opportunity for some real frustration and anger from Capaldi. We’re picturing the Doctor mouthing off at his difficult old friend Winston Churchill – who was quoted as saying that Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany – when Churchill does nothing to prevent Turing’s trial and punishment.
Harold Holt’s Last Swim (1967)
In 1967, Harold Holt, Australia’s currently-serving Prime Minister, went for a swim and never came back. Vanished without a trace. That’s it. That’s the story. Prime Ministers don’t just disappear while in office. What was waiting for him in the ocean? Did he join the lost city of Atlantis? Was he abducted by aliens? Was he, in fact, an alien himself – did he just, to paraphrase Men In Black, go home? Was he a mermaid? Who knows? Australia sure doesn’t – all they did was name a swimming pool after him in commemoration. (Yes, a swimming pool. The irony.)
Doctor Who actually suffers from a lack of historical episodes set in the recent past, and Australia in the 1960s was a time of massive social upheaval for the southern outpost of the British Commonwealth, full of anti-Vietnam war protesters, women’s rights, pop music fads, deliciously seedy nightlife and multiculturalism. The Doctor could also swing by Brisbane and catch a glimpse of his old companion Tegan, years before their paths will cross in her timeline.
Plus, we know that Peter Jackson is keen to direct an episode of Doctor Who, and while we’re not trying to imply that Australia and New Zealand are one and the same, it wouldn’t be hard for him to just pop across the Tasman and direct some on-location stuff, right? Andy Serkis for the Monster of the Week, and the Twelfth Doctor disgusted by a Vegemite sandwich.
So you’ve heard ours – what’s your dream historical Doctor Who episode?
Doctor Who returns with “Deep Breath” on August 23, 8pm ET/PT on BBC America.