Cultural references to the Doctor Who universe/2010s

Cultural references to the Doctor Who universe by decade

Occasionally, elements of the Doctor Who universe are referenced in the broader popular culture. This page exists to throw a spotlight on some of these casual references made in television, comics, films and other media which happened during the 2010s.

Television

• In the last episode of season two of The Librarians, the Librarian talks about time travel and a cloth is lifted away by Cassandra Cillian to show the TARDIS as a broken down artefact in a room full of time travelling artefact such as the Delorean from Back to the Future.
• In an episode of the Disney Channel series, I Didn't Do It, a guest actor appears dressed as Matt Smith at a kids' party in order to best the super hero costume wearing regular...with a sonic screwdriver in his hand.
• In House, Season 7 Episode 11, Dr. Taub mentions that he is awake at night watching TV at 3am because that's when Classic Doctor Who is playing on the BBC.
• In one episode of Liv & Maddie, Liv tries to get into the Brain Olympics by showing people that she's smart and references time travel. "He doesn't believe in time travel and he's like Doctor who?"
• In one episode of Orphan Black, a picture of the TARDIS is seen in the background.
• In Insecurity, a March 2012 episode of Young Justice, a police box, clearly looking like the Doctor's TARDIS, is seen as one of the ends of a Zeta-Beam conduit. A character enters the box and teleports to the Cave, the main setting for the heroes of the series. The design of the police box is comparatively detailed. It looks like the TARDIS as seen in The War Machines, because it bears an "out of order" sign. It's unclear how Warner Bros. would have been able to use the police box design legally. The appearance was not clearly parodic nor was it even historically accurate. The scene was set in America and the DC universe had never previously established the existence of British police boxes in the United States.
• In the English dub for the 2011 anime Steins;Gate, Makise Kurisu, while in a conference discussing the possibility of time travel, mentions that while the idea of travelling through time in a little blue box may be charming, it (time travel) is completely impossible.
• In 2016 animated Disney show Milo Murphy's Law the main character is a fan of a show called Dr. Zone's Files which depicts an oddly dressed time-travelling alien and is said to be running for 50 years, going through various incarnations. In the 2017 feature-length special "Missing Milo", part of the plot concerns the recovery of Dr. Zone's missing black-and-white pilot episode from 1965.
• In Cartoon Network's Regular Show, the 2015 Halloween Special, "Terror Tales of the Park V", has the character Pops dressed up as the Fourth Doctor. In the 2016 short "Robot Rap Battle", bronze robots resembling eyeless, legged Daleks are among the audience members attending the titular event.
• The 2017 2017 DuckTales reboot, having cast David Tennant as the voice of Scrooge McDuck, dropped many allusions to time-travel, the intentionality of which was confirmed by showrunner (and noted Whovian) Francisco Angones on Twitter. Among them is Scrooge's ownership of a time machine disguised as a grandfather clock (like the Master's [[[the Master's TARDIS|TARDIS]]) and his ironic distaste for time-travelers in the 2018 Christmas special Last Christmas, whose title is, of course, shared with an earlier Doctor Who Christmas special. The series also cast Catherine Tate (who played a one of the companions of Tennant's Doctor) as the villainous Magica De Spell, a decision which the filmmakers later confirmed was partially spurred by the knowledge that Tennant and Tate verifiably had "great chemistry" together.
• The favourite television series of Hugo the Duck from 2017 Netflix show Julie's Greenroom is Doctor Who. In addition, Hugo only speaks Duck, which another character can understand because he learned it at a performing arts school.
• In Detentionaire, the cloning room Lee and Biffy found is similar to the genius room.
• The 2017 episode of The Thundermans entitled Save the Past Dance features a time machine known as the Time Share, which possesses a button that allows it to blend into whatever time period it visits in a manner reminiscent to the TARDIS chameleon circuit.
• Several references to Doctor Who were made in the 2019 miniseries Good Omens, which starred David Tennant alongside Michael Sheen (with Derek Jacobi also putting in a cameo):
  • the name of Gallifrey is briefly glimpsed among the planets where Crowley (Tennant) considers taking refuge to escape the end of the world;
  • a brief exchange sees Adam Young and his friends chatting about how odd it is that aliens in so-called "real" U.F.O. encounters only ever talk about cosmic harmony, which leads into Brian remarking that aliens would be more likely to say “Exterminate” (a word the child pronounces in a clear impression of a Dalek voice);
  • in his first scene, the character of Newton Pulsifer is wearing a necktie patterned after the Fourth Doctor's notorious scarf, which, according to costume designer Claire Anderson, is meant to be a hint that the character is himself a Doctor Who fan;
  • Adam's father's car's license plate can briefly be seen to read "SID RAT" — a backwards-spelling of TARDIS, also notoriously used in The War Games as the name of the War Lords' own time machines.
• In the Cobra Kai episode "Pulpo", Demitri talks to Eli about the new series of Doctor Who, how Steven Moffat isn't the showrunner anymore and that the new Doctor is "badass".
• Near the conclusion of the 2017 finale of The Flash, Cisco Ramone makes a request over a walkie-talkie to "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow".
• In the Lucifer episode "The One with the Baby Carrot", Lucifer (played by Tom Ellis) is called "Doctor Who" by a comedian due to his British accent.
• In the Rick & Morty episode "The Rickchurian Mortycide", when a character says that Rick isn't a god, he responds "you don't know what I am, or what I can do! I'm Doctor Who in this motherf*cker!"
• In the Bob's Burgers episode Tweentrepreneurs, Mr. Frond mentions that he once had a thriving Etsy store that sold hand-knitted Doctor Who scarves, until he received a cease and desist letter.
• The Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race episode "Hello and Dubai" features a robot heavily resembling a Dalek, called the "Tennis Menace". It shoots tennis balls at players and shouts "PARTICIPATE!".
• In the 2019 continuation of the 1996 TV show The Demon Headmaster (which both featured Terrence Hardiman), the Prime Minister said "Exterminate" when he saw the robot Tyler had created.

Audio

Bleak Expectations

• In Bleak Expectations, series 4 episode 6, Harry Biscuit's childhood asthma comes back when they travel back in time, sounding just like the TARDIS. This is one of a number of references to fictional time travel in this episode, such as "88 camomiles per hour".

Prose

• In The Serpent's Shadow, the British character Sadie tried to create a Shabti out of a Thermos, which resulted in it flying around, yelling "Exterminate". In another part of this series, a challenge posed to Sadie is completed by stalling a huntress with tales of "fearsome" jelly babies, similar to the Fourth Doctor.

Comics

Adventure Time

• In one issue, after Jake failed to fix a broken time machine, he stated it didn't do "the timey wimey thing" anymore.

Disney Comics

• Scrooge McDuck writer and artist Don Rosa created Ducktor Who and Tardis for Sale in 2012 and 2015, where his version of Scrooge comes into possession of the TARDIS and uses it to travel to his past, before selling it away at a "used TARDIS lot".
• In one 2018 Italian-produced comic story, a flashback panel to Flintheart Glomgold's scientists' numerous attempts to develop a working time machine feature the Fourth Doctor and the TARDIS among the crowd (as well as Back to the Future’s Doc Brown and his DeLorean).

DC Comics/Wildstorm

• In Blue Beetle Vol 10 9, Teri Magnus is led by Doctor Fate to the Tower of Fate. Upon arriving, Teri notices the tower is bigger on the inside. Then, she recalls the concept is named dimensional transcendentalism, "just like on Doctor Who", to which Doctor Fate responds "Doctor who?".

Out-of-universe references

• An episode of The Big Bang Theory had a copy of Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition: The 2017 Yearbook on Sheldon's table.
• The 13 May 2010 episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is titled "Doctor Who."
• In the 20 August 2010 episode of Eureka on SyFy ("Stoned") Zane, while searching through government files mentions TARDIS blueprints as something he might be searching for.
• The 2017 sitcom One Day At A Time references Doctor Who in its second series. In the episode Locked Down, teenage daughter Elena and her friend Syd are preparing to attend Comic Con, dressed as the Fourth Doctor and the TARDIS respectively. The episodes includes jokes about Doctor Who, and the TARDIS costume is later used as a hiding place by another character.
• During Where Do You Belong?, a song from the Mean Girls musical, Damian says the mathletes are all "college applications and Doctor Who quotations".