Funny / Doctor Who — 60th Anniversary Specials

"Well, here we go again!"

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"The Star Beast"

• The Doctor catches sight of a woman struggling to carry some boxes, and as he removes a couple of them to help, he sees it's Donna. The Doctor puts the boxes back and leaves.
  Donna: Oi! Do you mind?
• Donna starts calling for Rose, and the Doctor, naturally enough, thinks she means Rose Tyler:
  Donna: Oh, where's she gone? Rose!
  The Doctor: What?
  Donna: Rose!
  The Doctor: What?
  Donna: Rose!
  Rose: Coming!
• Donna's incredible talent for Missing the Good Stuff kicks in again, as she manages to miss a crashing spaceship while sorting out the boxes.
• Donna's parting shot to the Doctor:
  Oh, word of advice. You can wear a suit that tight up to the age of 35... and no further. ^note  The Doctor being a Time Abyss aside, David Tennant was 37 when he and Catherine Tate did Series 4. He's never been young enough to wear that suit.
• The last straw for the Doctor is when Shaun starts calling for Rose too:
  Shaun: Rose!
  The Doctor: What?
  Shaun: Rose!
  The Doctor: What?
  Shaun: Rose!
  The Doctor: Oh, I give up!
• Fourteen is still adjusting to being a man again, which causes some difficulty with the psychic paper.
  The Doctor: Grandmaster of the Knowledge.
  Shaun: ...That says Grandmistress.
  The Doctor: (Glares at paper and smacks it against car mirror.) Oh, catch up!
• The Doctor meeting Shaun and telling him that he knows Donna through Nerys:
  Shaun: Oh, Nerys. How is she?
  The Doctor: She's fine.
  Shaun: Not after the accident?!
  The Doctor: She's not fine.
  Shaun: It was her fault.
  The Doctor: She's been fined.
  • Nerys gets another mention when Shaun explains to Donna how the Doctor knows them. Donna's reaction makes it clear things haven't changed between the two of them even after fifteen years.
    Donna: Nerys. That viper in the nest.
• Meet Shirley, UNIT Scientific Advisor #56 (The Doctor was #1). Apparently she gets a bonus just for meeting him!
• The Meep pretends to be one of Rose's stuffed animals when Donna comes in. The moment she notices it, she's immediately taken by it, and begins to wax about what a good job Rose did, complimenting her on its amazing eyes. And then it blinks.
  Donna: What.
  Rose: What?
  Donna: Did it just...? (Leans in and pokes the Meep in the eye causing it to scream) WHAT THE HELL?!
• The mere fact that Donna called the Meep a "martian".
• At one point, the Meep clings onto Donna's leg, calling for help. In response, Donna angrily tells the Meep to get off her, calling the Meep a space rat.
• Sylvia trying in vain to convince her daughter that the “skinny man” and the short furry Martian aren’t there.
  Sylvia: No, no, he's not there! You can't see him! And there's no monster! OH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! NONE OF THIS IS REAL!
  • The Running Gag of The Doctor being slapped by his companions' mothers makes a return when Sylvia slaps him again. He even says "Here we go again!" upon being slapped.
• Shaun walks into the house, sees the Noble family all fighting with the Meep and the Doctor...and promptly asks Sylvia what smells so good.
  Shaun: Hey-hey, dad's home- (notices the Meep and the Doctor)
  (beat)
  Shaun: Something smells nice!
  Sylvia: (casually gesturing to the food in question) Tuna madras.
  (beat)
  The Meep: Meep meep!
• The Doctor is saddened when he hears that Wilf is "no longer with us." Then Donna clarifies that he's just moved out and is living in a UNIT-sponsored retirement home.
• The Doctor calls a trial between the Meep and two Wrarth Warriors when he notices things don't add up with what the Meep said, with himself as judge, complete with Judicial Wig. When he questions them on how their seemingly dangerous guns are actually stun guns, the two confirm it, suddenly speaking in a friendly British accent rather than the threatening roars and growls they had in the shootout earlier. They also state their names for the record as Sergeant Zogroth and Constable Zreeg.
• The Meep in general, especially after The Reveal. The sheer contrast of such an adorably fluffy creature being an utterly malicious and intensely hammy Evil Overlord is bound to cause some giggles, especially when it refers to itself dead seriously as "the Beep of all the Meeps".
  • The entire backstory of the Meep and Meepkind. The fact that they are cruel, vicious conquerors who ate the people they conquered is horrific by itself, but the contrast with them being tiny, fluffy aliens loops it back around to hilarity.
  • The Meep has its human slaves build it a suspiciously familiar-looking throne out of girders, and forces them to carry it while chanting praises.
• Turns out Donna gave away her lottery winnings to charity (minus buying the house she and her family live in) because, subconsciously, she knew that's what the Doctor would've done. The second she gets her memory back, she's furious.
  Donna: (brushing her hair out of her eyes) I gave away my money.
  Doctor: Right, but...
  Donna: I gave away all my money. And do you know why, Doctor? I gave it away to be like you. (Sarcasm Mode on full) So I could be kind. So I could be nice. So I could be helpful. I had a subconscious infracutaneous retrofold memory loop making me as soft as you and give away £166 million!
  Doctor: Yes, Donna, but... destruction of London?
  Donna: (cracking her knuckles) Oh, I'll show you destruction, mate!
• While it's largely a heartwarming moment, The Reveal that Donna isn't going to die after the Doctor's mind reactivated inside of her is hilarious thanks to how Catherine Tate delivers the line that shows she's alive. She lies in the Doctor's arms and closes her eyes, followed by the Meep's brainwashed soldiers entering and cocking their guns...only for their Mind-Control Eyes to abruptly disappear after we see a hand flipping a few switches:
  The Meep: ...What?
  The Doctor: What?
  Soldier: What?
  Donna (Abruptly regaining consciousness) What?
• When the Meep is defeated and ejected from the spaceship, as the parachute activates, we can hear the Meep grumbling like an angry Looney Tunes character.
  • The ejection in question is accompanied by a comedic boing sound effect.
• Donna refuses to allow Rose into the TARDIS, in case she ends up stuck on Mars with Geoffrey Chaucer and a robot shark... then stops to ask if that actually happened. The Doctor confirms that it did.
• When Donna goes with the Doctor to visit Wilf, she comments to Shaun that a lot of men would worry about their wife being in a box with another man. Shaun responds with a "Yeah. (whispers) But not him." Fourteen seems rather offended, especially since he has the same face as a previous Doctor who was a Chick Magnet.
• Possibly unintentional, but there's a callback to a joke from the 50th anniversary special. While the three Doctors are cycling through control rooms in the TARDIS, Eleven and Ten get excited about War's use of "round things". When Fourteen enters his new console room, it has more "round things" than any previous version!
• Near the end, Donna explains how she lost her recent job after spilling coffee on her computer. How does she kick start the jump to the next special?
  Donna: Here we are, having a coffee! What’s gonna go wrong-—? (launches coffee onto the TARDIS console, causing an explosion) OH, MY GOD! I DID IT AGAIN!

"Wild Blue Yonder"

• The episode opens with an iconic moment from history— Isaac Newton sits down under an apple tree and gets hit in the head by an apple, his "Eureka!" Moment that allowed him to develop his theories about gravity. It is then immediately followed by the TARDIS screeching through the sky and crashing into the apple tree, absolutely pelting Newton with apples.
  • The Doctor immediately sticks his head out and explains to a shellshocked Newton that they crashed because Donna spilled coffee onto the console.
    Donna: But don't worry, he's got a time machine, so he can blame me for all eternity!
  • During this interaction, before the TARDIS departs, Donna forces the Doctor to joke about "the gravity of the situation" to Newton, only for Newton to misremember the word as "mavity". For the rest of the episode, the Doctor and Donna use that word.
  • It becomes even funnier when the Doctor deduces that the ship's Captain was caught in the "gravity field" and Donna reacts with confusion before he corrects himself. The Doctor wasn't affected by the change in the timeline at all, he was just playing along!
  • Even before that, when Donna first uses the word "mavity", the Doctor side-eyes her, mentally noting that he'll have to fix that later.
• After the TARDIS crash-lands on a spaceship, Donna storms out, only to be tackled to the ground mid-rant by the Doctor, just in time for the TARDIS to vent a massive column of flames where she was just standing. While blasting the titular song at high volume.
• The TARDIS HADS (Hostile Action Displacement System) returns once again, leaving the Doctor and Donna stranded on the creepy abandoned spaceship. The Doctor mentions it was specifically after spending three years being teleported into orbit every time they went somewhere they considered interesting that they decided to switch it off.
• While the context makes it creepy, the Doctor looking through the ship's computer to find out what happened and sounding vaguely disappointed with the anticlimactic answers is rather amusing
  The Doctor: Life signs!... none. Oh! Someone opened an airlock door. Three years ago.... Aaaand then it closed.
• Divorced from context, the Not-Things' continual misunderstanding of how our universe is meant to work is amusing, especially when they start delving into Captain Obvious territory.
  Not-Doctor: Oh, I see! When something is gone, it keeps existing...
• The Doctor has the perfect solution to stall the Not-Things: Stop thinking. After a minute of back-and-forth bickering, the Doctor and Donna finally manage to close off their minds... Until Donna raises a simple question:
  Donna: For how long?
  The Doctor: It is a flaw in the plan.
• The Not-Things distorting their bodies because they don't understand the human form yet? Creepy. The Not-Doctor bending over backwards and sticking his head out from under his ass while viciously mocking Donna? Black Comedy at its finest. You could say that he's talking out his ass.
  Not-Doctor: "AUNTIEIRISMUMMYANDDADDYYEHYEHYEHYEHYEH-" WHY DOES HE TRAVEL WITH SOMEONE AS STUPID AS YOU?!

"The Giggle"

• The Doctor's attempt to talk to a Giggle-infected civilian to figure out what's going on has some great Black Comedy:
  [Civilian storms in front of a speeding car.]
  The Doctor: Excuse me! Can you tell me, what are you doing?
  Civilian: I can't drive!
  The Doctor, extremely confused: Ok, so, which means?
• Finally, the Doctor learns that everyone else in the world is under some kind of effect that makes them unable to change their mind on anything. But not this guy. He's always been right! ^note (unless the "always" implies he was sufficiently opinionated beforehand that the Giggle didn't do anything to him, which is almost funnier)
• TV footage shows the affected Prime Minister declaring "why should I care about any of you?"
  Donna: No change there, then.
• Apparently, Sabalom Glitz went out slipping on a whiskey bottle at the age of 101, which sounds on-brand for him.
• Apparently, Rose came out to Donna as trans after the latter tried spending six months teaching her to play the recorder.
• While it’s in the middle of a tense scene, after throwing juggling balls at the Doctor, which Donna catches, the Toymaker calls her “the one with ze balls”.
• Doubles as a Moment of Awesome, but in the Toymaker's realm, Donna gets attacked by Stooky Bill's rhyming, flesh-eating puppet family. She promptly turns the tables with a rhyme of her own.
  Donna: Hello, Stooky. / My name's Donna. / Now I think that you're a goner. [batters Stooky Sue against the wall with enough force to literally knock her block off]
• In a subtle meta joke about how even some of the most affecting Doctor Who plots sound ridiculous in concept, the Toymaker reduces Clara's death to being "killed by a bird". He even briefly glances aside and looks confused as he says it aloud.
  • Every time the Doctor corrects the Toymaker, pointing out that all of his companions lived on in some way after their "death", the Toymaker snaps, "WELL, THAT'S ALRIGHT THEN!", abruptly changing his German accent into a thick American one each time. It's equal parts funny and unnerving.
• After a tense scene with the Doctor in his domain, the Toymaker vanishes, and the ground begins to shake.
  The Doctor: Donna!
  Donna: I'M ALREADY RUNNING!
• Once again, the Big Bad has a showstopping Signature Scene set to pop music, this time with the Toymaker invading UNIT while rocking out to the Spice Girls. No scenery was left unchewed.
  • For added humor, from the Doctor's perspective this is coming less than 15 hours after the Master pulled the same thing in "The Power of the Doctor", at least according to the novelisation. That might explain why he looks 110% done with the Toymaker's shit in this scene.
• The Toymaker, hamming it up to the maximum, with his big Spice Girls dance number set to "Spice Up Your Life", while casually warping reality, murdering UNIT soldiers by turning them into rubber balls, changing bullets into flower petals, making snow-angels in the aforementioned petals à la American Beauty, and nonchalantly throwing and bludgeoning every woman in the vicinity into walls or random furniture right as the song's lyrics suggest "Slam me to the left" and "Shake it to the right". Absolutely hilarious, or pure unleaded Nightmare Fuel? Yes.
  • The subtle Bait-and-Switch that's pulled when the Toymaker grabs Mel and starts spinning her around, wherein it sounds like she's about to let out her signature scream before she hits the floor.
  • Slightly funnier in the novelisation, wherein the lyrics aren’t allowed to be written down due to an attorney appearing to tell the Toymaker he can’t use the song. Which prompts him to point out the Spice Girls… riding in and driving his toy train, so therefore he doesn’t need to ask for permission.
    • Another funnier thing in the novelisation. The Doctor confirms this incarnation has existed for about 15 hours (in his own chronological timeline), which means that the Doctor has had to witness two musical numbers from his enemies in less than a day!
• Kate asks the Toymaker where the UNIT staff manning the helipad went. His response?
  Toymaker: Oh, I think they're still falling.
  (cue the faint sound of something hitting the ground many stories below)^note  this becomes even funnier when you know that Megan Shirley, who plays Megan Williams in the DW 2012 Doctor Who fan series, was one of the guards. Once again she's falling to her death.
• The Toymaker explains how he has fallen in love with humanity managing to turn pretty much everything into a game of some kind, going on a tangent about sporting events, gambling, and even video games, with a Shout-Out to Tetris with his description of "a game where bricks fall on other bricks". He just finds it all so amusing and thus considers Earth his ultimate playground.
• The Running Gag of people saying "What?" three times reaches its zenith with everybody's reaction to the Doctor's bi-generation. Including the Toymaker:
  Fourteen: What?
  Donna: What?
  Toymaker: ...Vhat?!
• As soon as he's done celebrating his appearance, the Fifteenth Doctor asks exactly what everybody else is wondering;
  Fifteen: Now, could someone tell me what the hell is going on here?!
• Thanks to the bi-generation, not only does the Doctor split into two Doctors, but so do his clothes. For the Fifteenth Doctor's first appearance, he's not wearing trousers (not that he seems to mind much).
  • Which also means Fourteen was Going Commando from that moment onwards since Fifteen took the underwear.
  • Also a bit of a Brick Joke and Call-Back, as David Tennant once again has to spend a chunk of an episode barefoot, as Fifteen ended up with his shoes.
• Even better is the framing when Fourteen and Fifteen are still halfway through splitting apart. After a moving overhead shot, they turn towards each other...and for a good 20 seconds, the glowing line between them is out of frame. This, combined with Fifteen examining his hands in a way that looks like he's admiring Fourteen's torso, the angle their torsos are at, Fifteen's overall excitement, the way Fifteen grabs Fourteen's neck after they've fully split, and some of their lines ("Does this work?" "I don't know!"), creates a rather...suggestive effect.
• The Novelization version of the bi-generation scene takes place from the Toymaker's perspective and he has some... interesting thoughts about it:
  "Poking out of the right of the flame was a New Doctor! So young! So handsome! Born laughing, he was wearing the old Doctor's shirt. And not much else. Oh dear, will no one think of the gifs?"
  "... And now, here they were, shoving and shoving until they broke apart, the glowing energy dissipating, leaving them standing there panting and exultant and... pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, make me a Doctor! Uh-oh. They were in a winning frame of mind. The Old Doctor had won the jacket and trousers. The New Doctor had the prize of the shirt and tie, the boxers, the socks and the shoes. (Excuse me, I must just go over to the fan fics to see what they made of this. Back in a few hours.)"
• After the bi-generation, Mel says the Fifteenth Doctor looks "beautiful". Then Fourteen leans into the frame:
  Fourteen: Still beautiful..?
  Mel: Yeah.
  • Donna follows up with this zinger:
    Donna: Do you come in a range of colors?
    Fourteen and Fifteen, in unison: Yes.
• The tooth containing the Master is picked up by a mysterious hand with red fingernails. While a call back to a previous Master outing written by Russell T Davies, the sheer ridiculousness of this happening a second time, practically in front of the rest of the cast who somehow fail to notice it, elevates it to hilarious and potential Self-Deprecation on Russell's part.
  • Becomes even more hilarious when you realise that for the hand to work, the person in question must be off the side of the building and hanging in midair.
• How does the Fifteenth Doctor split off a new TARDIS? Take the Toymaker's reality warping mallet from the original one and whack it while the world is still within the playing field. He does apologize to it afterwards though.
  Fifteen: We won the game! You get a prize, honey. And here... is mine!
• One of the first changes the Fifteenth Doctor makes to his TARDIS: Adding an old-fashioned jukebox to the main control room.
• Fifteen's very sassy farewell to Fourteen and Donna:
  Fifteen: Now, you two, if you don't mind, there is a great big universe out there calling and I've got to get going. So off you pop, old man.
  Fourteen: You're the old man; you're older than me!
  Donna: Actually, that is true. He's younger 'cause you came after him, so... you're the older Doctor.
  Fifteen: OK, kid. I love you. Get Out! [points to the door as he flicks the switch of the TARDIS]
  • This is immediately followed by Donna fleeing for the door saying "I'm not doing that again!"
• Though he was supposed to be taking it easy, by the time of the dinner in the epilogue Fourteen has already taken Mel to New York and Rose to Mars (behind Donna's back).
• After the Doctor refers to Sylvia as a Wicked Stepmother, she light-heartedly points out she can be much worse than he’s seen.
• When asked where Wilfred was, Sylvia mentions that he was off shooting moles, followed by a gunshot. The Doctor apparently anticipated this and gave the moles a force-field to protect them.
  Fourteen: Don't worry. I gave the moles a force-field. I love the moles.
  Donna: You love the moles?
  Fourteen: I love them.

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