Themed Episodes For The Future

Gustaff Behr looks at some ‘themed’ story ideas that Doctor Who has yet to touch.

Over the years, we’ve had an assortment of strangely timed or themed episodes on Doctor Who. Yearly we have Christmas episodes. We’ve had Easter episodes, which apart from the Doctor eating an Easter egg, had nothing whatsoever to do with said holiday. We’ve had a New Year’s special, which again was mostly about air date and less about the actual date in question. Then there’s the stuff Doctor Who get up to in-series like the Doctor-lite stories which focuses on the companion and companion-lite episodes which do the same for the Doctor.

Heck, one of the most popular stories ever hardly includes the Doctor and his companion at all! Nevertheless, there are a few other ‘themed’ stories which Doctor Who has yet to touch and wouldn’t it just be exciting if we could get one or two of them in Series 9 or 10 maybe. What are they, well read on…

Prison Episode

Going all Prison Break for a moment, the characters are arrested on an alien world and imprisoned, but not for 2 minutes like regular Doctor Who stories. All their means of escape are gone and they are surrounded by other alien inmates. The prison episode features them trying to break out with no time travel help, no sonic screwdriver and no TARDIS. More like a reverse-Time Heist.

Spending an entire episode trapped somewhere is something unusual and unlike Doctor Who, who usually (not always) only stay imprisoned for as long as the plot needs, but having a Prison Break style episode could also be turned into a filler romp for the Doctor and his companion as they join forces with the most bizarre life forms in an attempt to gain their freedom.

Origins Episode

There’s not much that needs explaining here. It’s a story… explaining the origins of someone. Difficult to comprehend eh? I aim this story at the Master or Mistress or whatever you choose to call him or her, specifically the gap between John Simm’s Master becoming trapped in the Time War and Gomez’s escaping back into our universe. It would be a great Doctor/Companion-lite story to tell about how the Master regenerated into a female, where her TARDIS is – does she even have one? How did she escape and how did she acquire this yandere obsession for the Doctor. This I believe is a story worth telling.

Musical Episode

Now you might be going, why a musical of all things? It’s SCI-FI, not High School Musical. Well, surprise surprise Doctor Who has done a musical in audio format before – with pirates no less. Anyone who’s listened to Doctor Who and the Pirates will know that a Doctor Who Musical episode is more than just doable. If Sixie can carry a tune, then Twelve should have no troubles.

A Musical Episode is structured around the cast breaking into song (and possibly dance) throughout the episode. Since we have had things like Truth Fields and whatnot, we might justify and even lampshade it in the story by going to a planet where EVERYBODY sings! This would be a great idea for a comedic filler set in-between the dark stories of the series.

Halloween Episode

And finally, topping the list as my number one is the very scary and equally bizarre Halloween episode. People have been asking this of Doctor Who for years and yet the answer as to why it’s never been done is simple: Halloween is mostly an American thing.

But Doctor Who is international now and has made use of American soil and characters so why not take a bit of this spooky spirit and dedicate a grizzly Doctor Who episode to Halloween? We don’t have to set it in a country where Halloween flourishes. Maybe a Halloween planet where everything is scary and spooky?

Halloween episodes are unusually creepy and spooky and all kinds of weird nonsense happen. This might seem like an everyday thing since we get all that and then some each series, but Halloween episodes are unique in that they go out of their way to be eerie rather than scary and it’s usually by the end where things still don’t make complete sense or the eerie dark ending which makes it worthwhile. It’s the fact that whatever happened is so disconnected from the usual shenanigans that makes this idea enticing to do.

Or we can go with the light-hearted approach and have the characters attend a Halloween party where something mysterious and/or enticing takes place. The characters are in costume, houses are now re-imagined haunted mansions (or actually haunted in Doctor Who’s case).

So, which themed episodes would you like Doctor Who to do one day?