Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Sneaks in Another Doctor Who Nod

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has once again delighted fans of cross-universe references by slipping in another clever nod to Doctor Who, fueling speculation about whether these two sci-fi giants might ever officially collide on screen.

In its season three finale, the show went beyond subtle Easter eggs, planting a direct mention of a mysterious time-travelling Doctor, giving long-time Whovians a morsel of familiarity while their own show remains on pause.

The moment comes courtesy of Carol Kane’s millennia-old character, Commander Pelia, who casually advises Spock that he should meet a “time-travelling Doctor I once knew.” While Star Trek has explored temporal anomalies for decades, the wording here feels unmistakably aimed at BBC’s legendary Time Lord. It isn’t the first time this season that Strange New Worlds winked at Whovians either. In the sixth episode, sharp-eyed viewers noticed the TARDIS drifting past the Enterprise multiple times, appearing as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail during scenes in deep space. Spotting that iconic blue police box became a mini-game for fans across social media.

This is hardly the first time the two fandoms have brushed against each other. Ncuti Gatwa’s debut season as the Fifteenth Doctor contained its own Enterprise tease. In the episode Space Babies, the Doctor offhandedly suggested to Ruby Sunday that they should visit the starship someday – a throwaway line that now feels more deliberate in hindsight. Such cross-pollination shows how both franchises share a cultural shorthand: epic space exploration, strange alien encounters, and the occasional mind-bending paradox.

The overlap isn’t just in sly nods. Canonical mashups have already happened in other formats. The 2012 graphic novel Assimilation united Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor with Captain Picard and the crew of The Next Generation. Together with Amy Pond, they faced down a terrifying hybrid threat: the Borg aligning with Doctor Who’s Cybermen. The comic even dropped a callback to Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor supposedly crossing paths with Kirk’s Enterprise years earlier, suggesting a playful multiverse long before Hollywood made the term fashionable.

More recently, mobile gaming took the baton. In 2024, Star Trek: Lower Decks Mobile and Doctor Who: Lost in Time shared an event featuring David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, told in two halves depending on which app you played. This experiment underscored how easily both franchises can mesh when creatives lean into their similarities. Reinforcing this spirit of collaboration, Star Trek’s Alex Kurtzman and Doctor Who’s Russell T Davies shared a stage at San Diego Comic-Con, openly admitting that while a TV crossover would thrill them, the legal hurdles between Paramount and the BBC remain daunting.

For now, fans may have to be content with these scattered tributes, especially as Doctor Who itself faces an uncertain production schedule. Following two Disney-backed seasons, the BBC has pressed pause indefinitely, though the broadcaster insists the series will return. Until then, nods like Pelia’s cryptic “time-travelling Doctor” and the sight of a TARDIS near the Enterprise serve as fun reminders that in the hearts of fans, the Doctor and Starfleet already share the same universe – if only unofficially. Whether that ever translates into a sanctioned crossover remains the stuff of speculation, but in the realm of sci-fi, impossibilities have a way of becoming inevitable.