What Would Be The Ultimate Doctor Who Crossover?

James Lomond is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Recently a Film & TV student posted their ideas for a Doctor Who crossover with Harry Potter. Freeing himself from the constraints of brand management, budget and -um- plot, he waxed lyrical on the MA-HOOSIVE fangasm something like this would cause.

And in fairness to him, Russell T Davies did consider something vaguely along these lines back in the early years of the NuWho revival – he went as far as asking J. K. Rowling whether she’d like to pen an episode and wanted to have her star in it as herself… He said himself, “that’s either brilliant or more like a Blue Peter crossover…”

While this scheme to team-up Missy and Voldemort against any number of Doctors may lack some of the substance that the license holders would be looking for, it does raise the question of how and when a crossover could work…

The two most speculated crossovers into the Whoniverse seem to be Moffat’s Sherlock and America’s archetypal sci-fi show, Star Trek. The reason for Sherlock seems partly to do with the fact that the same people make both shows which might remove some of the hurdles along the way. Beyond that they’re both shows with a quirky clever lead, fighting bad guys with a companion in tow. And there seems to be a curiosity about how solitary, powerful personalities like the Doctor and Sherlock Holmes would react to eachother should their paths meet.

There’s a precedent for this in the superhero/ caped-crusader comic world where DC’s Batman/ Superman and Marvel’s Avengers characters can share adventures and interact outside of their own individual franchises. And now both are being realised on the big screen… It almost feels like that “who would win out of a werewolf and a vampire” mentality from high-school conversations across the world. Oh, and the Underworld franchise [ahem].

Personally I think this is a risky business. Studios might be keen because, as our Film & TV student notes, LOTS of fans would be interested. And as you and I know (our bank accounts bear the scars) fans will part with MONEY. Lots of it. But every series is set up the way it is, with the characters, rules and world it uses for a reason…

Take an example: If Sherlock and the Doctor were to meet it would (usually) imply that their narrative *worlds* had also met and the kinds of things we expect to happen, the kinds of explanations that are used in each world are very different. If an hospital turned up on the moon in Sherlock, the narrative world would require it to be something vaguely plausible without resulting to the science-fantasy plot devices of Doctor Who. As with the apparently super-natural events in The Hound of the Baskervilles episode, it would usually be some kind of deception, hallucination or other non space opera event… You couldn’t have intergalactic Rhinos behind it.

The second problem is the bringing together of lead protagonists. I’m not saying this would necessarily get in the way but the Doctor and his interaction with the companion is at the heart of the show, as is the Sherlock/Watson relationship. When you bring multiple lead characters together you have to find a way for them both to be the hero and the “most interesting thing on the screen” without stepping on each other’s toes. Not impossible – as multi-doctor stories and the Avengers Assemble demonstrate. But tricky. You certainly need to find a way where neither of the heroes loses face to the other, unless it’s to bring out their individual character traits and foibles.

That said Doctor Who arguably has a rich history of cross-overs. Every multi-Doctor story, while using what are notionally the *same* characters and taking place in the same narrative world, they do involve bringing two different versions of that world together. And I think that’s what makes The Day of the Doctor, The Five, Two and Three Doctors exciting, is that characters (or different versions of the characters) get to interact. Seeing what the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors make of each other does for Who-fans what Superman and Batman meeting does for DC fans.

And then we’ve had the re-uniting of Who spin-offs like Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures with the parent show. Both series crossed over back into Doctor Who in Series 4’s Journey’s End and Martha Jones popped up in both Doctor Who and Torchwood, spanning the watershed…

But could a crossover with an unrelated franchise work? Are there narrative worlds out there where it would tell an interesting story to have them come together with the Whoniverse? Could we see the TARDIS materialise on the Bridge of the Enterprise (not just in comic book form) or a fugitive named Blake turn up in Who? Or is this a disaster waiting to happen? Tell us your thoughts below…

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