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. 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.

Other media

Paramonut Pictures, owner of the Star Trek franchise, does not consider anything other than the live action 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 mentioned "sonic screwdrivers" as Starfleet engineering tools. For instance, the Star Trek: Vanguard novel Harbinger, the Star Trek: Corps of Engineers eBook Wildfire and Star Trek: Titan novel Sword of Damocles.
• 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 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 conflation of the names Rani Chandra and Anjli Mohindra.
  • A ship named the Verity appears, which Bennet claims to have named after producer Verity Lambert.
  • The Shirna, archenemies of the already established Vogon were named after Shirna, the partner of Vorg, who both appeared in DW: Carnival of Monsters.
  • A "large, blue, boxlike artefact" is seen in a Federation storehouse of alien timetravel 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

Due to the two franchises being produced in different countries, 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 TV movie, DW: The Impossible Astronaut, and Torchwood: Miracle Day. Star Trek actors who crossed over because of these productions include Daphne Ashbrook, John de Lancie, Nana Visitor, Mark Sheppard and William Morgan Sheppard.

Conversely, several British actors appeared in the Star Trek franchise after their Doctor Who appearances. Perhaps the most high profile is Simon Pegg, who after appearing in DW: The Long Game and narrating a series of Doctor Who Confidential, went on to star in the 2009 film,Star Trek.

Finally, those such as 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.

It has also been reported that Noel Clarke and Benedict Cumberbatch will be appearing the forthcoming Star Trek film, but production has not yet begun on this project.

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, who played the original Mr. Spock and 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".

Torchwood: Miracle Day writers Jane Espenson and John Shiban have also written episodes for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Enterprise respectively. Other writers, such as Una McCormack, have written for both franchises in other media.

People who have worked in both franchises 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."

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.
• Cast members of both Doctor Who and Star Trek have participated in special editions of the television game show, The Weakest Link, hosted by Anne Robinson.
• Albert Einstein has appeared in both franchises. In Doctor Who, he appears in Sylvester McCoy's debut story, Time and the Rani, and the 2011 mini-episode "Death Is the Only Answer". In Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Decent", he appears as a holographic projection.
• There have been occasional story elements in the franchise that have marked similarities to Doctor Who. The Borg assimilate species in similar fashion to the Cybermen and also use a similar catchphrase ("You will be assimilated"). The Deep Space Nine character of Dax is a member of a joined species that passes a symbiont on as the host body dies. In the series this is treated very much like a Time Lord regeneration, and an episode of DS9 featured one incarnation of Dax, Jadzia, encountering the past incarnations of Dax, much as the Doctor has occasionally met his past incarnations.

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