Trivia / Doctor Who S29 E7 "42"

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• Completely Different Title: The French title is "Brûle avec moi" (Burn with me).
• Dueling Movies: Or "Duelling Episode and Movie", as the basic plot of this episode shares a striking similarity with the plot of Danny Boyle's film Sunshine, which came out a few months after the episode aired. This episode was even edited after filming to change the name of the ship to Pentallian — originally, it was "Icarus", the same as in Sunshine! In fact, in a brief close-up of the Doctor in his orange space suit at around 31 min, you can read the word "Icarus" at the top of his helmet (and the word "Transtellar" at the bottom).
• Prop Recycling: The stasis chamber from this episode is the MRI machine from "Smith and Jones" with some minor redecoration.
• Release Date Change: The transmission was postponed to the 19th of May, rather than the 12th, because of The BBC's broadcast of the Eurovision Song Contest.
• Technology Marches On: The scene of Martha calling her mum up has two instances:
  • Martha calling up her mother to cheat in a trivia pub quiz would be impossible in The New '10s onwards, as smartphones became the de-facto way of researching answers, and quiz nights often have a "no phones" rule or ask participants to give it up before entering. That said, phones still had internet capability back in 2007, but it was expensive to use (often being charged a fee per-50 MB used), making it undesirable.
  • The dongle used on the laptop is very clearly a USB mobile broadband dongle that would connect to a mobile network. These were superseded by laptops' internal wifi, or Wifi dongles that connected to your home router, and from 2017 onward, portable wifi hotspot devices became popular.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, the story was set on a generational space station, whose crew had grown up on the ship their whole lives. However, Russell T Davies realised not only the absurdity of the crew never discovering that the sun was alive, but that New Who had never done an episode entirely on a spaceship. He asked Chibnall to amend his storyline appropriately.
  • It was suggested that Chibnall's script would be set in the same era as "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit", and for a time, consideration was given to including the Ood. Those elements were cut early due to budget constraints.
  • The story was going to take place in the Peony system, before being changed to the Torajii system because the original name sounded too much like “penis”.
  • A set piece where the Doctor scaled the exterior of the Icarus was removed for how expensive it could’ve been. The replacement was the notorious moment where the switch the Doctor needs to pull is built just out of easy reach.

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