Star Trek (franchise)

An oft-noted Star Trek reference to Doctor Who is this computer screen in the TNG episode, The Neutral Zone, which listed several prominent Doctor Who actors

The Star Trek franchise has made several references to the Doctor Who universe, and the two also share some behind-the-scenes commonalities.

Overview

References to Doctor Who in Star Trek narratives

Television

• A computer console seen in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Neutral Zone" shows the names of the first six actors to play the Doctor. Despite this being an obvious reference, a basic mistake was made where Peter Davison's name was misspelled as "Peter Davidson".
• The Argolis Cluster, first mentioned in the Next Generation episode "I Borg", was named after the planet Argolis. (DW: The Leisure Hive)
• "Future Tense", an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, features a TARDIS-like spacecraft that can travel through Time, is bigger on the inside than on the outside, and has an interior design featuring TARDIS-like roundels. The show's production team has acknowledged this as an homage.
• San Francisco is the main setting of the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie. In Star Trek, San Francisco is where Starfleet Headquarters is based.

Other media

Paramonut Pictures, owner of the Star Trek franchise, does not consider anything other than the Star Trek television series and films canon. Nevertheless, there are licensed comic and prose stories, and these have very occasionally referenced the DWU.

• The Star Trek novel "Ishmael" makes an indirect reference to the Time Lords, a direct reference to Metebelis crystals, and features cameos by the Second Doctor and the Fourth Doctor.
• Several Star Trek stories have made mention of the use of "sonic screwdrivers" as Starfleet engineering tools.
• A direct reference to the Doctor Who franchise is made in the novel My Enemy, My Ally which describes USS Enterprise crewmembers watching a Fourth Doctor episode.
• The novel Watching the Clock features a number of minor, but authorial intentional, references to the DWU. These connections are known because writer Christopher L. Bennett made them known in a set of online annotations to the novel.
  • Time is described as "a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, time-wimey . . . stuff", as in DW: Blink.
  • The character of Rani Mohindra is a conflaion of the names Rani Chandra and Anjli Mohindra.
  • A ship named the Verity appears, which Bennet claims to have deliberately named after producer Verity Lambert.
  • The Shirna, archenemies of the already established Vogon were named after Shirna, partner of Vorg.
  • A "large, blue, boxlike artefact" is seen in a Federation storehouse of alien time-travel devices.
  • A planet is described as having "silver trees and an orange sky", with inhabitants who have been monitoring history for thousands of years — thus making it an apparent analogue of Gallifrey.
  • The Tigellian chronic hysteresis is a reference to Tigella.
  • Other extremely incidental references are also in the book, but they are obscured by bad spelling on the author's part (such as the fact that a character is supposedly named after Peter Purves, but spelled Purvis) or deliberate obfuscation (such as a unit of measurement named the "maloc", which is supposedly a tip of the hat to the "malcolm" from DW: Planet of the Dead)

Cast connections

Because the principal filming locations for both franchises are typically thousands of miles apart, shared cast members are rare. Most of the connections between the two franchises have occurred as a result of the three productions with extensive North American filming: the 1996 tele-film, Torchwood: Miracle Day and DW: The Impossible Astronaut. Star Trek actors having crossed over because of these productions include Daphne Ashbrook, John de Lancie, Nana Visitor, Mark Sheppard and William Morgan Sheppard.

A special case is that of Star Trek (2009) actor, Simon Pegg, whose British location allowed him to not only participate in an episode of Doctor Who, but also to be the host of Doctor Who Confidential for a year.

Finally, a few actors, like Alexander Siddig and David Warner have crossed over into the DWU by virtue of voice acting work, typically for Big Finish Productions. Rarely, people like Anthony Head have gone in the opposite direction with voice work, by reading audiobooks for the Star Trek franchise.

The following actors are known to have worked, in some capacity, for both franchises:

Crew connections

According to The Nth Doctor, in 1994 Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played the original Mr. Spock and who also directed two Star Trek feature films, was reportedly under consideration to direct one of the many aborted Doctor Who feature film projects under consideration during the 1989-96 interregnum.

TV movie composer John Debney also composed scores for the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Pegasus" and the Star Trek:Deep Space Nine episodes "The Nagus" and "Progress". Tony Dow, who worked as visual effects producer for the TV movie, later directed the Deep Space Nine episode "Field of Fire".

A couple of writers have been shared between the televised incarnations of both franchises. Torchwood: Miracle Day writers Jane Espenson and John Shiban have also written episodes for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Enterprise respectively. A few other writers have written for the franchises in other media.

People who have worked in both franchise include:

Potential official crossover

In April, 2009, Russell T Davies revealed in an interview that he had considered writing a Doctor Who episode that crossed over with Star Trek Enterprise.

"I would have loved to have done a Star Trek crossover," said Davies. "The very first year, we talked about it. Then Star Trek finally went off air. Landing the Tardis on board the Enterprise would have been magnificent. Can you imagine what their script department would have wanted, and what I would have wanted? It would have been the biggest battle."

Given the vast settings of both franchises and the number of companies involved in the international rights, it is highly unlikely such an episode would have been made. In addition, there have been several references made to Star Trek as an entertainment franchise in Doctor Who — most notably when Rose Tyler dubs the Doctor "Mr. Spock" in DW: The Empty Child — which could have presented a continuity challenge. Star Trek, for its part, has never made a direct reference to Doctor Who in any TV episode or film, beyond a few visual references and in-jokes not intended to link to the canon; the direct reference to the series that occurs in the novel My Enemy, My Ally has no bearing on canon as in the 1990s Paramount Pictures took the (for some) controversial step of announcing what aspects of the Trek franchise would be considered canon; the novels, Paramount decreed, are not.

Other information

• The fan novella The Doctor and the Enterprise by Jean Airey, initially was published privately as a stand-alone fanzine and then in a professional edition in 1989 by Pioneer Books. Many other amateur fan fiction crossovers between the two universes have been written over the years, though Airey's book remains (as of 2009) the only one to be published professionally, if unofficially.

External links

• Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki focusing on the television and films
• Memory Alpha's page on Doctor Who
• Memory Beta, a Star Trek wiki focusing on the expanded media, such as books and comics.
• Memory Beta's page on Doctor Who

References