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  • In "The Rescue", Ian remarks that the Doctor isn't getting any younger. Many regenerations would later have actors younger than their predecessors cast as the Doctor.
  • In "The Gunfighters", the Doctor's companions Steven and Dodo wear fairly silly cowboy outfits much as we see years later with Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part III. The Doctor's response is to ask why they can't wear inconspicuous clothing like he does. The First Doctor's costume was a Victorian outfit which, while it could be out of place, was nothing like what we would see in his future incarnations, such as the Third Doctor's velvet jackets and ruffled shirts or the Eleventh Doctor and his tweed jacket/bow tie combo. And then, of course, there's the coat worn by the Sixth Doctor. The less said about that, the better.
  • "The Tenth Planet": The following from Ben, while preparing for a "Die Hard" on an X situation, several years before the introduction of the Sonic Screwdriver:
    Ben: Aww, just imagine trying to tackle one of them geezers [the Cybermen] with a screwdriver!
  • "City of Death": A copy of The Mona Lisa made at the same time and in the same workshop? Only one so far, but it's a start.
  • In "Warriors' Gate", the shot of the freed Tharils walking through the gate in single file towards the end of the story cannot be taken seriously by anyone who's ever played Lemmings.
  • This 1981 Tom Baker interview on Times TV has Tom making the decision to go on television dressed in a slim-cut navy blue pinstripe suit with incongruous cream canvas trainers. That'd be a pretty good outfit for a Doctor to wear, wouldn't it? Maybe in a couple of decades.
  • In "Mawdryn Undead" the Fifth Doctor is horrified when he discovers that the antagonists want to steal his next eight lives from his regeneration cycle, which would cause him to die. This plot seems a "Shaggy Dog" Story after the episode "The Timeless Children", decades later, revealed that the Doctor has—or had at one point—an infinite cycle of regenerations.
  • The Sixth Doctor's debut story, "The Twin Dilemma" features him having to help an old friend named Edgeworthnote , who was friends with the Doctor in the distant past, yet has suddenly become antagonistic and is working with an evil person out of a misguided desire to save people. A little under two decades later, a lawyer by the name of Phoenix Wright found himself in very much the same situation.
  • In "Attack of the Cybermen", a Cyberman fluffs his lines and says, "It is a fat controller." In the revival, they would have a fat controller...sort of. And not long before the episode, there was the TV debut of a different Fat Controller.
  • In "The Trial of a Time Lord" our hero battles his evil counterpart in the Matrix, well before Neo took the red pill.
  • In episode 1 of "Silver Nemesis", the Doctor is briefly seen wearing a fez and holding a mop... and not for the last time...
  • The TV Movie:
    • For one moment, the Eighth Doctor looks at a mask of Nixon intently... and then meets him in person in the Eleventh Doctor story, "The Impossible Astronaut".
    • The Master's device he plans to use to steal the Doctor's body looks suspiciously like a Chameleon Arch.
  • Just before the start of "Dimensions in Time" there is a brief segment of Jon Pertwee (as the Doctor) visiting Noel Edmunds; the Doctor tells Edmunds that he's seen him in the year 2010. 2010 has come and gone, and Edmunds is still on television and currently presents (among other things) Deal or No Deal, the Doctor's answers to Noel asking if he does serious programming ("I don't visit fantasy land!") is another point to consider here. Even funnier considering how Edmonds takes his relatively low-brow daytime gameshow as Serious Business.
  • In the Doctor Who spoof sketch "The Curse of Fatal Death", the Tenth Doctor is portrayed as being so full of himself that he licks a mirror. Later, the series was relaunched and we got a canonical Tenth Doctor who was quite egotistical and liked to lick things.

    That Doctor was played by Richard E. Grant. Grant would star as the Doctor again in a non-canonical 2005 web series called Scream of the Shalka. It contains a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo of pre-fame David Tennant being horribly killed. Around the same time as that, Richard E. Grant was in a cooking/comedy show called Posh Nosh where he played a married man who was very obviously gay. His lover was played by... guess.

    On a related note, Grant's Posh Nosh co-star Arabella Weir voiced the role of a female Third Doctor in Big Finish's What If? audio drama Exile - which also featured David Tennant as an unnamed Time Lord looking for the Doctor. And Weir happens to be a good friend of David Tennant (he's the godfather of her children).

    Back to "Fatal Death," that spoof also featured a female incarnation of the Doctor falling in love with a male incarnation of The Master. Fast-forward fifteen years, and we get a female incarnation of The Master sharing Ship Tease with a male incarnation of the Doctor.

    Then there's the fact that thanks to the Doctor going through a rapid succession of regenerations in "Fatal Death", the female Doctor is the Thirteenth. Despite some complications in the numbering scheme, the canonical Thirteenth Doctor ended up also being a blonde woman.
  • The old Whovian adage "Don't skip Nine" becomes funnier when we find out that there was a forgotten incarnation of the Doctor after Eight. In other words, we all skipped Nine.
  • In "The End of the World", Jabe at one point asks if Rose is a prostitute the Doctor hired. Billie Piper subsequently went on to play one in Secret Diary of a Call Girl...and to make it even funnier, one of her clients was Matt Smith.

    Related: In "Aliens of London", the Doctor tries to talk his way out of the trouble he's in for "borrowing" Rose for a year instead of a day, saying he'd hired her as his "companion."
    Policeman: When you say "companion," is this a sexual relationship?
    The Doctor and Rose: No!
  • In "Aliens of London", when discussing Jackie's distress, the Doctor adds "Well, she's not coming with us. I don't do families." Give it five seasons, Doctor.
  • In "World War Three", Jackie banters about how the Doctor and Rose should be knighted and wonders whether or not the Doctor even eats normal food.
  • "Dalek":
    • The Doctor refers to a Cyberman head as "old friend", before correcting himself by saying "old enemy". In "The Time of the Doctor", the Doctor ends up befriending an actual Cyberman head, Handles.
    • An otherwise throwaway line used in Van Statten's Establishing Character Moment successfully predicted the results of the 2012 election.

      Similarly, there is mention of a meteor landing in Russia in 2013. Fast forward to 2013 and...

      There's also his remark about owning the internet. Fast forward to 2012 and SOPA, and it nearly became a reality.
  • In "The Long Game", there's a news report on how the Face of Boe is pregnant. Then watch the end of Last of the Time Lords where it's implied that Jack will become the Face of Boe in the future. Makes his comment from Torchwood about never wanting to get pregnant again even funnier.
  • "Father's Day", set in 1987, contains contemporary background music, including a late-80s hit record by a Lancashire-born pop singer. The song? Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up".
  • Not long after The Weakest Link was launched, an editorial cartoon depicted a Dalek trading its catchphrase for "You are the Weakest Link...Goodbye." Of course, the Daleks would not do so well when meeting the Anne Droid,
  • In "School Reunion", when Sarah Jane mentions that the Doctor has regenerated, he says he's done it "half a dozen times" since he last saw her. At the time the episode was broadcast, it was taken to mean that the last time he saw her was when she left the Fourth Doctor in "The Hand of Fear", which people considered odd, given that she met his fifth incarnation in "The Five Doctors". Following the reveal during the show's 50th anniversary, that line takes on a whole new meaning.
  • The same episode has the Doctor trying to figure out what to call himself, Mickey, and Rose. "Oh, I hate people who say team." About a decade and three bodies later, the Doctor will still be having trouble trying to figure out what to call his/her companions, with "Team TARDIS" being a prominent fan nickname.
  • "Rise of the Cybermen" featured rounded devices inserted in the ears, called "EarPods." Only five years later, Apple began making EarPods. Also, the "handlebar"-like devices on Cybermen's heads look suspiciously like those huge clunky headphones (like Beats by Dr. Dre) that have become popular in recent years. Apple's own AirPods, their wireless take on the EarPods, look very much like the Cybus EarPods.
  • Matt Smith carrying the Olympic Torch.
  • In "Army of Ghosts", the Doctor and Rose reference the movie "Ghostbusters". Years later, the movie got an all-female reboot. And now, we know that the Thirteenth Doctor is a woman. Did the Universe choose this way to tell us something?
  • In one of the Doctor Who New Series Adventures, Forever Autumn, published in 2008, the Doctor tells Martha that Star Wars is actually real (though it's implied that he may have just been messing with her), but "George Lucas was way off the mark with all that stuff in Episode IX." At that point, it was meant to be a gag, since Lucas had stated that there would be only six episodes, and indeed there were at the time. Fast-forward about five years, and it was announced that Disney would be buying the franchise, including the announcement of another three movies. Meaning that perhaps the Doctor was telling the truth after all!note 
    • Also in this episode, the Doctor says of Harry Potter "Wait 'til you read book 7. Oh, I cried!". Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published 3 months later, in the epilogue of which two of the main characters have a daughter named Rose. (The Doctor spends a lot of Series 3, including this episode, pining after his lost companion Rose Tyler.)
  • The elderly John Smith in "The Family of Blood" sure looks a lot like Peter Capaldi doesn't he?
  • Going back and seeing a pre-Amy Pond Karen Gillan and a pre-Twelfth Doctor Peter Capaldi can make "The Fires of Pompeii" either hilarious, confusing, awesome, or possibly all three.
  • David Tennant married Georgia Moffett, his co-star in "The Doctor's Daughter", wherein she played... his (clone) daughter. Her real-life father is none other than former Fifth Doctor Peter Davison. And, growing up, was friends with Colin Baker's daughter. The mind boggles.... She's the Doctor's daughter, who was friends with the Doctor's daughter, then played the Doctor's daughter, then married the Doctor, and then had the Doctor's daughter. And now the Doctor is his own father-in-law. David Tennant is the ultimate case of a Promoted Fanboy.
  • In "The Poison Sky", Martha, wearing the Doctor's Badass Longcoat, remarks that she feels like a kid in her dad's clothes. This leads Donna to reply that if she's calling the Doctor "dad", she's "definitely getting over him". Fast-forward a few years, and referring to your male crush as dad(dy) has come to mean you're doing the exact opposite of that...
  • "Silence in the Library", which introduces the Vashta Nerada, has the character Dr. Moon, played by an actor who appeared in Resident Evil (2002) as someone named Shade.
  • "The End of Time":
    • A few people had fun comparing the Master's Saxon persona to Barack Obama. Then came this episode, in which the Master transforms Obama (and the entire planet) into, well, (clones of) himself!
    • In light of the revelation that cross-sex regenerations are possible as well as casting a woman as the Thirteenth Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor's exclamation of "I'm a girl!" becomes a lot funnier. On a similar note, The Master's clones in women's clothes became funnier after the Master himself regenerated into "the Mistress," or "Missy" for short.
      • As well as the fact that Thirteen is "...still not ginger!"
    • The Doctor spends the two-parter terrified of regenerating, unsure of the man he will become and not wanting to die... completely unaware that he's already met his successor (and his Time War incarnation as well) during the Zygon Gambit with Queen Elizabeth. However, it's due to the out-of-sync timelines that Ten doesn’t recall these events, and won't until Eleven reaches that point in his timeline. As do the audience.
  • In the booklet accompanying the Complete Specials set that concluded David Tennant's run, it begins with a foreword by Tennant where he writes about going back to meet his eight-year-old self and telling him of how an amazing ride it'll be when he plays the Doctor. Eight-year-old Tennant is a little disappointed that the Zygons won't be among the rogues gallery he faces. Flash forward four years later, where Tennant returned for "The Day of the Doctor". Guess who happens to be one of the key antagonists of it?
  • Any time Amy made a suggestive joke about River and the Doctor in the early Eleventh Doctor episodes, especially her line in "The Time of Angels" ("Oooh, Doctor. You sonicked her") becomes so much funnier when River is revealed as her daughter.
  • In "The Eleventh Hour", Rory says, "We were kids! You made me dress up as him!" In "The Girl Who Waited", Future Amy hits on Rory and says "How many times did we play Doctor and Nurse?", suggesting they weren't just kids...
  • "Victory of the Daleks" established that the Doctor knew Winston Churchill, and supplementary materials establish that Churchill met, at one time or another, almost all of the Doctors. Two years later, a long-buried interview with Jon Pertwee established that during the war Pertwee was a spy for the British and personally reported to Winston Churchill, even getting some advice from him that inadvertently helped him in his post-war acting career.
  • The Doctor's offhand comment in about being on Virginia Woolf's bowling team becomes much more of a howler after you see Matt and Company participate in "The Time of Angels" a celebrity bowling contest, especially since Matt Smith is an absolutely horrible bowler.
  • In a Black Comedy sense, Rory tells Alaya in "Cold Blood" that he trusts the Doctor with his life. That proved not to be a great idea.
  • In 2013, a new Van Gogh painting entitled "Sunset at Montmajour" was discovered. In the background, there's something that looks a lot like the TARDIS.
  • The "I'm quite the screamer" line was hilarious enough the first time, but in 2014, when Alex Kingston participated in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge,note  the second the cold water hit her, she shrieked like a tea kettle. Quite the screamer, indeed.
  • In "The Almost People", the Doctor's Ganger at first spontaneously adopts the mannerisms of past incarnations as he stabilizes to cope with the Doctor's regenerations, to the point of arguing with himself when he echoes the Tenth Doctor. Among those who witness the outburst is Jimmy, the character played by Marc Bonnar who would later provide the voice(s) of the Eleven in Doom Coalition, an insane Time Lord plagued by a Gallifreyan multiple personality disorder which enables his previous incarnations to remain and persist within his mind as he regenerates.
  • While on some talk show, Catherine Tate looked at a picture of Matt Smith and joked that he was so young he would be the first Doctor who would have to travel the universe with his parents. (contains spoilers) Turns out Amy Pond, his companion, became his mother-in-law, and Rory his father-in-law.
    • Due to his marriage to Elizabeth I and her accidental engagement to Henry VIII, this makes her his mother-in-law twice.
  • "Night Terrors": A French parody of Doctor Who already had the Doctor dealing badly with a Rubik's Cube.
  • The Doctor faking his own death in "The Wedding of River Song" becomes this after the same thing happened on Steven Moffat's and Mark Gatiss' other show, Sherlock.
  • David Gyasi had a bit role in "Asylum of the Daleks" as Harvey, the Alaska crew member who meets up with the Doctor and the Ponds on the snowed-in surface of the episode's alien planet. Two years later, Gyasi plays Romilly in Interstellar and gets to walk on the surface of another icy, snowed-in alien planet that has a dark hidden secret.
  • Back when Primeval started, some criticisms against the series accused it of stealing Doctor Who's formula. In "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", the dinosaurs are animated by the team behind Primeval, with the Raptors being lifted straight off the show. The weapons used to bring down the raptors also resembled the electro-muscular disruption guns introduced in the fourth series of the show.
  • Before Peter Capaldi was announced for the role, Burn Gorman was among the list of rumoured candidates, but was quickly shot down for being a principal cast member of Torchwood. Peter Capaldi, meanwhile, portrayed an important recurring character during the Torchwood: Children of Earth mini-series.
  • There was a line in the show Castle: "A doctor who drinks coffee?" However, it sounds like "Doctor Who drinks coffee?" Peter Capaldi as the Doctor seems to enjoy coffee very much.
  • This compilation of Peter Capaldi's time on The Thick of It. The words "time travel" and "kidneys" pop up.
    • In the Loop had him say "Right, I'm off to deal with the fate of the planet."
    • At the beginning of In The Loop, much is made of a character's use of the word "unforeseeable". In "The Zygon Inversion", the Doctor's anti-war speech has him saying "Well, here's the unforeseeable..."
  • Before Peter Capaldi was cast, IGN ran a list of actors they would like to portray the next regeneration of the Doctor, even running a poll so fans could pick their personal favourite candidate out of the list. One of them was David Tennant (who also happened to win the poll), with IGN reasoning that in time the Doctor may need to revisit past forms he's regenerated into and been used to in the past. Based off the appearance of Tom Baker in "The Day of the Doctor" and how he'll be able to reuse some "personal favourite" faces, apparently sometime long into his future he does just that. And, it's announced that Tennet will return as the 14th doctor....
  • The Affectionate Parody Inspector Spacetime is chock-full of similar-but-not-exact references to this show, such as the classic companions Irma and Bart, the maths and English teachers. Clearly designed as a reference to first companions Ian and Barbara, the show's science and history teachers, but come 2014 and thanks to Danny Pink and Clara Oswald, this show has maths and English teachers on board the TARDIS, too.
  • "Kill the Moon". Turns out declaring war on the moon because of its tactical advantage may not have been as silly as it seemed. Strax was right this whole time!
  • "Death in Heaven" aired shortly after the release of Interstellar, which features a similar treatment of love as a powerful physical force.
  • A meta-example: the Abandon Shipping that occurred for Doctor/Clara (Whouffle) when it was initially announced that Peter Capaldi (a much older actor) would be replacing Matt Smith as the Doctor. This was spurred further by a false rumor (that both Capaldi and Moffat have since denied) that Capaldi had adamantly insisted that there be no flirting or Ship Tease between his Doctor and Clara. Then Series 8 came out...and it was loaded with Ship Tease between Capaldi's Doctor and Clara. Many of the Doctor/Clara Shippers who'd initially abandoned ship eagerly came back aboard along with new Shippers who'd never shipped 11/Clara but now shipped 12/Clara (Whouffaldi). By the end of Series 8, 12/Clara was right up there with 10/Rose, 11/River, and Doctor/TARDIS as far as canonicity went and Series 9 reconfirmed that over and over on the way to its Bittersweet Ending. For bonus points, the Christmas Episode that followed Series 9 was a poignant Romantic Comedy that established 12/River as a canon pairing, meaning the Doctor who initially inspired Abandon Shipping has two canon human(oid) lovers, making him as bittersweetly lucky in love as any incarnation's ever been.
  • After revealing Matt Smith's role in Terminator Genisys as Skynet, it puts a hilarious new spin on his performance in "Nightmare in Silver".
  • When Romana regenerated in the Classic Series, Four protested very loudly that it just wasn't right to take the form of someone they had seen during a previous adventure, but Romana wasn't at all bothered. A few regenerations later, The Doctor pulled the same stunt she did, taking the appearance of a fellow he ran across in the past (then did it again as Capaldi). One wonders what Romana would say to him now.
  • When the Doctor visits the last planet in the universe in "Listen", he comments on a marooned time traveller, "The last man standing in the universe. I always thought that would be me." Fast forward to "Hell Bent" and we reach the very last little fragment of the universe, only five minutes to go, and what do you know, the last one standing in the universe is...Me.
  • The music video for Billie Piper's "Because We Want To" seems to be almost LOADED with references to the show, especially from the revival onward. One would think it was deliberate... except for the fact the video was made in 1998, while the revival started airing in 2005. Seeing her zap and melt a Dalek-shaped trash can alone is bizarre, let alone a figure resembling an Auton, though the nightclub bouncer being a rhino man that resembles a Judoon is even weirder.
  • Four years before being cast as the Doctor, Jodie Whittaker was photobombed by a Dalek at the BAFTAs.
  • "Nightmare in Silver"'s villain being called Mr. Clever can bring the Mr. Men-themed Doctor Who stories to mind.
  • The announcement that the Thirteenth Doctor's first season would air on Sundays, a change to the show's long-standing tradition of airing on Saturdays, brings a new hilarity to some comments made by the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors. In "Silence in the Library", Ten comments that he never lands on Sundays because he finds them "boring", and at the beginning of "The Stolen Earth" is pleased to find out that it's Saturday. In "The Impossible Astronaut", Eleven describes Saturdays as "big temporal tipping points".
  • In "Silence in the Library", Ten tells archaeologist Dr River Song that as a time traveller, he "points and laughs at archaeologists". In "A Good Man Goes to War", Eleven's reaction to seeing Amy's baby, who would grow up to become River Song, is to point and laugh at her. Mostly because she's an adorable baby, but still.
  • "The Family of Blood" has the Doctor briefly wear a tweed jacket and bow tie after shedding the John Smith persona. However, he very swiftly changes back into his normal clothes. It seems like he's not too fond of that ensemble. Just give it a few years...
  • In "Let's Kill Hitler", Amy asks, "Who steals a bus?" Five series later, the Doctor steals a bus in "Rosa".
  • The novelization of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" accidentally misnames David Campbell as David Cameron. Awkward.
  • Steven Moffat famously stated that the great thing about the Doctor was that "they didn't give him an X-Wing, a lightsabre or a tank, they gave him a screwdriver". "The Magician's Apprentice" (written by Moffat, no less) has the Doctor riding a tank into a medieval tournament.
  • "Pyramids of Mars" and "Horror of Fang Rock" both have characters make reference to the writings of H. G. Wells. In "Timelash", the Doctor meets Wells as a young man and inspires him to become an author.
  • Crossed with Heartwarming in Hindsight: In an interview with the "Reality Bomb" podcast, Chris Chibnall stated that he fully expected the Timeless Child story arc and plot twist to be "ignored, contradicted, doubled back on, it could be anything". Incoming showrunner Russell T. Davies stated that he had no intention of doing this and incorporated the Doctor's lingering trauma over the Timeless Child into "Wild Blue Yonder" and "The Church on Ruby Road".


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