Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and Doctor Who.
As we await the final season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, an interesting bit of news has done the rounds. I touched on this very briefly in one of my Season 4 episode reviews, but apparently the creative team behind Strange New Worlds was quite keen on doing a crossover episode with another long-running sci-fi series: the British institution known as Doctor Who. The crossover didn’t happen – and, thanks to both Star Trek and Doctor Who shutting down production, at least for a while, it won’t be happening any time soon, either! However, it still piqued my curiosity… so I wanted to talk a little about this abortive crossover today.
As always, a couple of caveats before we go any further.
First of all, I have no “insider information” about what this crossover could’ve looked like. My commentary is based on publicly available information, almost all of which has come directly from the producers and showrunners of Strange New Worlds and Doctor Who. Secondly, all of this is just one person’s *subjective, not objective* opinion on the matter. If you disagree with my take on either of these shows or their crossover potential, or you just hate what I have to say… that’s okay! There ought to be room in the Trekkie community (and the Doctor Who fandom) for differences of opinion and respectful disagreement.
It wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that Doctor Who and the Star Trek franchise are compatible at a core, fundamental level. Both exist in the sci-fi space, both feature humanoid aliens and interplanetary adventures, and both often tell stories that use a sci-fi lens to examine real-world issues. At least here in the UK – Doctor Who’s native land – there are plenty of folks who are big fans of both franchises, too, and there’s long been a connection between the fandoms that never devolved into the rivalry that Star Trek had, for a time, with Star Wars.
Furthermore, a crossover between Star Trek and Doctor Who has literally already happened… albeit only in comic book form! In 2012, the comic Assimilation² was published by IDW, and it’s a direct crossover story between Doctor Who and Star Trek: The Next Generation, depicting an alliance between the crew of the Enterprise-D and the Doctor and his companions as they try to stop the Borg and the Cybermen from teaming up. I haven’t read it (I’m not a comic book fan), but I think the existence of Assimilation² adds a little bit of context and depth to this story.
The read-out from both Strange New Worlds’ creative team and the folks behind Doctor Who is pretty much the same: both sides were interested, and at least some work went into creating a pitch or story outline, but corporate issues killed the idea before it could go any further. Doctor Who’s former showrunner, Russell T. Davies, recently said as much in an interview. Because Doctor Who’s most recent seasons were part-funded by Disney (who gained exclusive rights to put the show on Disney+ outside of the UK), and because Star Trek was owned by Paramount at the time… getting the two media giants to collaborate – particularly when it came to the timing of episodes being broadcast – seems to have been at the heart of the problem.
Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman, who served as the co-showrunners for Strange New Worlds, have also talked about the project – and it really does seem like both sides wanted it to happen. There were even plans afoot for Doctor Who’s executive producers to fly out to the United States for talks – though this was cancelled seemingly at the last minute.
This is the closest that Star Trek has ever come to this kind of crossover in live-action. And rather than get phenomenally excited, or dismiss the idea out of hand, let’s take a moment to think about what a crossover between these two sci-fi institutions might’ve actually looked like.
The first thing to say is, I’m afraid, somewhat negative. Neither Doctor Who nor Strange New Worlds have been at their best, of late. In terms of review scores and viewing figures, both shows have seen a pretty significant, measurable decline – and in that context, a crossover could feel less like a celebratory coming together and more like… well, a desperate grasping of straws. In its fourth season, Strange New Worlds didn’t once make it into the top-ten most-streamed TV shows of the day, week, or month – something it managed in previous years. And Doctor Who’s viewing figures have similarly fallen off a cliff. It would be difficult to see a crossover episode, at *this* moment, as anything other than a cloying attempt to attract lapsed viewers.
I haven’t seen any recent episodes or seasons of Doctor Who. I noped out of the show after I felt the writing quality had catastrophically collapsed during Peter Capaldi’s tenure, and I haven’t been back since. I didn’t watch much of Jodie Whittaker’s tenure as the Doctor, I *definitely* wasn’t interested in David Tennant’s unnecessary return to the role – which just felt indicative of a production that had wholly run out of ideas – and I didn’t show up for Ncuti Gatwa’s tenure in the Tardis, either. Which stands me in good stead, apparently, since no one else did, either.
So while I can’t say for certain that Doctor Who has been a badly-written, declining, mediocre-at-best show for years, trying to coast on the genuine successes of the revival’s early years, while becoming increasingly reliant on cheap overplayings of the nostalgia card and desperate attempts to bring back former writers and even actors… I mean, that’s *exactly* where the show finds itself, isn’t it? And, as sorry as I am to say this as a huge Trekkie and someone who was a massive Strange New Worlds fan… that show ain’t exactly in a much better place.
Six episodes out of ten in Strange New Worlds’ recent fourth season were either bad, worse, or a level-five writing accident which was so atrocious that it should have genuinely resulted in producers and creatives losing their jobs. And that isn’t just my opinion, either – look at the individual episode review scores on review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB. All of Strange New Worlds worst-rated episodes came from the most recent season, and Doctor Who is barely any better, with several of its worst-rated episodes coming in the most recent two seasons, too.
In short, a crossover between two shows that are not at their best (by a country mile) probably wouldn’t have been the net positive that the production teams were hoping for. To be blunt about it, the best-case scenario for a crossover at the time it was planned would’ve been something that was merely okay; a safe play that ultimately led to something unremarkable and bland. In the worst case, though… well, Strange New Worlds’ writers have been piss-poor more often than not of late, and I wouldn’t have any confidence in their ability to handle a complex crossover between two long-running franchises.
Maybe they’d have gone all-in on their latest “big swing,” leaning heavily on tropes and clichés from both shows in a way that comes off less as respectful homage and more like laughing *at* these illustrious sci-fi properties – and by extension, at the fans who love them. Look no further than the genuinely nasty, mean-spirited soap opera spoof Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass in Season 4, or the piss-take of Star Trek: The Original Series in the third-season episode A Space Adventure Hour as cases in point.
And that’s “cases” plural; Strange New Worlds has had repeated problems with its genre parodies, spoofs, and “big swings,” and I see no reason to assume that a Doctor Who crossover would be handled any differently. Maybe you could argue that Doctor Who’s creative team would be an “emergency brake,” shutting down some of the worst and most moronic ideas that the Strange New Worlds folks might’ve come out with. But given the fan reaction to recent seasons and episodes of their show… I doubt it.
I think both shows, given their relative positions, would’ve wanted to “go big or go home” with a crossover like this. By which I mean they’d want to go all-in on getting as many tropes, clichés, and parodies crammed into the story as possible in order to draw attention to it (and because, frankly, that’s just the calibre of writers we’re dealing with for the most part). There’d be a huge temptation to not only turn a crossover into just one more “big swing” in a season that was full of them, but also to go to even greater extremes as a way to try to claw back some of the attention and interest that viewers at large seem to have been unwilling to give either series.
And that… well, it wouldn’t have led to a great episode, I can say that for certain!
Doctor Who and Star Trek have both passed their sixtieth anniversaries. There are almost 900 Doctor Who episodes and (depending on who’s counting) close to 1,000 Star Trek episodes, too. Both franchises have spin-off productions, huge casts of characters, deep world-building and lore… and detail-oriented fan communities who keep track of all of it! Bringing them together is not an inherently bad idea, and I could see a pathway to making it work. But it would have to be handled with care and finesse – neither of which are words I’d use to describe most of the writing in Strange New Worlds’ fourth season (or much of modern Star Trek, come to that).
I can’t speak for recent Doctor Who episodes and stories, but modern Star Trek has repeatedly struggled to stay consistent with *itself*, let alone balancing six decades’ worth of lore and history from an entirely new fictional universe. Even as far back as Enterprise, shortly after the turn of the millennium, Star Trek was running into issues with internal consistency – and that’s only worsened in the modern streaming era. Contradictions and apparent retcons are frequent occurences – and even just within the confines of a single show, we’ve seen storylines abandoned without being completed, characters being dumped with no explanation, and writing that seems to misunderstand some of the franchise’s core technologies and narrative building-blocks.
Add an entire new show with decades of its own lore and history into the mix and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
In brief, I just don’t see a way for the current crop of creatives and producers – either from the Doctor Who or Strange New Worlds sides – being able to pull off a crossover like this in a way that would’ve felt plausible and in keeping with the histories and complicated worlds that both shows have built up over decades.
Then we come to in-universe implications.
Part of the appeal of both Doctor Who and Star Trek is that they present themselves as being set in the real world – *our* world – but with new technologies and alien races present. Star Trek is mostly set in the future – the 22nd Century and beyond – whereas Doctor Who routinely visits the past and the present day. But both shows claim to exist in the same world, the same timeline, and the same universe as their audiences. And that’s a big part of why they’ve been so successful at capturing the imagination of generations of fans.
But it isn’t possible for both properties to coexist in the *same* universe, right? Doctor Who and Star Trek have both explored the past, the present, and the future of Earth and humankind. There is no place for Silurians in Star Trek – because Star Trek’s Voth exist in the same space. Both the Time Lords and Sontarans, from Doctor Who, are supposedly natives of the Milky Way – but the size of their empires would mean Starfleet would’ve encountered them at some point, right?
The Federation and the Doctor have both visited Earth in the 20th and 21st Centuries – repeatedly – but never ran into each other. And even if races like the Daleks aren’t from our galaxy, they certainly tried very hard to invade it on multiple occasions, including attacking Earth in the past, present, and future. None of those events happened in the Star Trek timeline – nor did things like the Borg incursion, Vulcan first contact, or the founding of the Federation in Doctor Who’s.
So the only way a crossover like this could work would be to explicitly state that the two shows take place in – say it with me, folks – parallel universes! Only… that would take something away from one or both of them, wouldn’t it? Not to mention that both the Doctor/Time Lords and the Federation would be very interested in exploration and learning more about this brand-new parallel universe.
Parallel universes exist in Star Trek (look at the Mirror Universe as just one example), and I’m pretty sure I remember similar concepts in Doctor Who, too, so on a technical level, nothing about that would be canon-breaking. But it would lead to an obvious question: which show is in “our” real-world timeline and which gets relegated to the status of a parallel universe? I guess that would depend on whether we’re talking about an episode of Strange New Worlds or an episode of Doctor Who. The framing and point-of-view would effectively decide how the audience interprets the crossover; who stepped through the looking-glass into whose universe?
And that might seem nitpicky or minor, but you gotta remember that Trekkies and Doctor Who fans can be ravenous when it comes to questions of lore and canon! Creating a story which could satisfy both groups of fans has so many hurdles – just one of which being the question of setting and parallel universes – and there would undoubtedly be many, many more that would arise.
Presumably, a crossover wouldn’t just be about meeting each other, shaking hands, and hanging out. There’d have to be stakes to the story, some way of creating drama and tension. And if we’re doing the first-ever crossover between two legendary, long-running franchises, fans would want to see iconic and well-known characters and aliens, right? So we’d realistically be looking at something not dissimilar to the comic book story I mentioned – the Doctor taking on the Borg and Starfleet taking on the Cybermen, or something like that.
And while it could be fun to see Captain Pike fight a Dalek or the Doctor trying to punch a Klingon… any story with villains to defeat means there’s less time for the characters who’ve crossed over to spend time together. Star Trek can do great scientific puzzles, but I think a story like Mirror, Mirror or Discovery’s first season – the “oh no, how do we get home from this weird parallel universe?” kind of thing – would feel underwhelming and just wouldn’t fly. So we’d be looking at an episode involving at least one villainous alien faction – almost certainly a very iconic, well-known one – and that would mean a more action-oriented story with less time for moments of characterisation.
Even a feature-length episode, two-parter, or standalone TV movie would struggle, I fear, to cram in everything fans would hope to see. Strange New Worlds has ten main characters (if we count Kirk and Pelia), and Doctor Who’s recent seasons have had the Doctor frequently being accompanied by two companions. Some Strange New Worlds characters either wouldn’t make the cut or wouldn’t be able to have much time on screen, even in a longer TV movie-length story. And that’s before we look at guest stars, aliens, villains, or other such things.
While a crossover like this isn’t an inherently bad idea, the plain and simple fact is that the current creative teams, at both shows, don’t seem up to the task. Therefore, I’m left with the feeling that a crossover made by these folks – arguably not with the purest of intentions, as they hoped to shore up flagging productions – would have been middling at best, and absolutely catastrophic at worst. I don’t like to give much credit to corporations or businesspeople in the entertainment industry these days, but if it was indeed corporate issues that got the crossover shut down… well, that probably isn’t the worst decision they’ve ever made.
However… I’m not sure that should be the final word on Star Trek crossovers!
As we’ve recently discussed, Star Trek now shares a corporate overlord with quite a few well-known franchises – one of which the franchise has already collaborated with before in comic book form. DC Comics has had several Star Trek crossovers in the past, involving the superhero Green Lantern and a futuristic Legion of Super-Heroes. And would you look at that: DC Comics and Star Trek are now under the same corporate umbrella!
DC Comics has the likes of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Flash, and dozens of other heroes. While a crossover would be tricky, I think something like that could be made to work. Comic books routinely deal with parallel universes and alternate timelines; it’s certainly no less of a silly idea than, say, a muppets episode or a musical.
There are other brands owned by Skydance where a crossover makes less sense (or no sense at all), like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones, but some of the new corporation’s intellectual properties could be ripe for a fun crossover. Even if we don’t get a full-blown coming together of fictional worlds, I could absolutely envision a future Star Trek story where, for example, a character plays through the events of Top Gun on the holodeck, or where a young cadet is eagerly reading an issue of Batman rather than a made-up fictional comic.
That’s one of the very, very few possible upsides to the Skydance merger, I guess: the potential for crossover stories or references to some of these big properties in future Star Trek productions. Or, likewise, for Star Trek to be referenced or even be a part of an episode or movie in another well-established franchise.
I like the idea of a future Star Trek project crossing over, one day, with the likes of Doctor Who – but I think it would have to be handled with a level of grace, delicacy, and finesse that modern Star Trek hasn’t ever really demonstrated. So while I don’t consider it an inherently flawed concept, I struggle to see how *this* group of writers and creatives could’ve made good on the idea. This kind of crossover has been a fantasy that many fans of both franchises will have had for a long time; doing it for the right reasons at the right moment with the right story would be absolutely essential.
And I’m not convinced that this proposed crossover would’ve been any of those things, let alone all three.
However, I also like the idea of a future Star Trek series (or movie, if that’s where the franchise is going) being able to cross over with one of the many brands and IPs now under the same corporate ownership. There could be a lot of fun to be had with a DC Comics/Star Trek collaboration, for example, and Skydance now owns many, many other properties, from King Kong and Crocodile Dundee to Tom and Jerry and The Exorcist. Now, I’m not saying any of *those* would make for a good crossover! But they illustrate the broader point that there’s potential, under this new megacorporation, for future collaborations both large and small in scale.
So that’s how I see this “crossover that never was.” Maybe it would’ve been fantastic, and I always like to be supportive, where possible, of Star Trek projects. But given the shows involved and where they’ve been trending in recent years… I can’t help but feel like we’ve dodged a bullet; a crossover that wouldn’t have properly celebrated either Star Trek or Doctor Who and would’ve ended up being a net negative and a drag on both of these illustrious franchises. It’s no coincidence that Strange New Worlds has been outright cancelled and Doctor Who has been put on hiatus just a couple of years after this crossover failed to get off the ground.
But I don’t think we should write off the idea indefinitely.
Star Trek will be back one day, I’m confident of that. And it seems like the BBC is still interested in Doctor Who right now, too. Perhaps in ten or fifteen years’ time, when someone has a really creative and fun idea for a story, these two sci-fi institutions will be able to successfully weave their universes and characters together. And if not… Star Trek has a *ton* of potential for collaborations in this new Skydance era. Assuming, of course, a new film or series gets going in the years ahead.
Thanks for reading, and as always… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The first three seasons are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance Corporation. Doctor Who is available to stream on BritBox/AMC+/Disney+/BBC iPlayer, and is also available on DVD/Blu-ray. Doctor Who – and all associated properties discussed above – is the copyright of BBC Televion/BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/Disney. One image used above (the fake movie poster) was generated using artificial intelligence. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
