This week’s episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “The Sehlat Who Ate His Tail,” had a special guest star.
No, not Paul Wesley as James Tiberius Kirk.
The special guest star was the TARDIS from Doctor Who!
It appeared in some FX shots. I circled it in the screencap image above. Maybe at some point, maybe in a Doctor Who novel by Una McCormack, we’ll get the Doctor’s side of this adventure.
Star Trek and Doctor Who have crossed paths a number of times, from the crew watching Tom Baker episodes in Diane Duane’s My Enemy, My Ally and Worf’s appearance in a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip in the 90s to an unfortunately dire crossover comic published by IDW (though it did produce a lovely lunchbox, which I have) and a recent video game, not to mention gobs and gobs of fanfic, some of which I’ve read.
Star Trek has been referred to a couple of times on Doctor Who over the past twenty years, and I think this is the first time Star Trek returned the favor.
And that’s cool.
Sometimes I hope that CBS will become a co-producer on Doctor Who, depending on what happens with the Disney deal, because I have mad dreams of maybe treating Doctor Who like a Star Trek spin-off. A two-hour series premiere, the Doctor lands on a Federation starship or starbase, there’s wild shenanigans, and the Doctor goes off in a TARDIS. But, the Doctor leaves with a difference! There’s a new traveling companion aboard the TARDIS… and it’s a Starfleet officer! No twenty-first century Earth girl here. This is a character who’s already used to the universe being weird and dangerous, and the reaction to say, a Cyberman, would be more likely pulling a phaser than running away.
It would sort of be like Izzy Sinclair in the 90s comics; Izzy was a 20th-century sci-fi fan, so she was already familiar with all the usual Doctor Who tropes through sci-fi, and she could hit the ground running with little explanation in a story. La’an of Strange New Worlds would work well for this, not because Christina Chong has already been on Doctor Who (thus keeping up the occasional tradition of new companion being a previous guest star) but because I think La’an’s attitude would fit the TARDIS… and deflate the Doctor a bit.
Beyond that, I would also like to see a Star Trek-style Doctor Who spin-off with a multi-racial crew in a starship, boldly going in the Whoniverse. Maybe during the 51st-century, the ship has a Draconian captain, that sort of thing. Doctor Who travels through space and time, this series would have a fixed temporal setting and allow a more focused world-building than Doctor Who is capable of, plus with an ensemble cast storytelling duties and development can be spread over more characters than Doctor Who allows.
BBC? CBS? Those are my pitches. Why don’t your people talk to my people and we can make something happen.