Many of Doctor Who's futures are lightyears away, but some are already in the distant past...
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00:00When Doctor Who started in the 1960s, dates like 1986 and 2020 felt impossibly far away.
00:07Surely Doctor Who wouldn't be on TV by then. And yet, the longer the show goes on,
00:11the more it risks crashing into its wild predictions for the future.
00:15And in case anyone's wondering, the next crossover point will be 2049,
00:19when the moon is revealed to be an egg. So make sure to put that date in your diary.
00:22Until then, many of Doctor Who's distant futures are now far behind us.
00:26I'm Ellie for WhoCulture, here with 10 Doctor Who futures that are now in the past.
00:3010. The Chase, 1966
00:33Terry Nation's outright Dalek comedy The Chase takes place across all of time and space.
00:39One particular interlude in the Daleks' pursuit of the First Doctor and his companions is a trip
00:43to the observation deck atop the Empire State Building in New York. This took place on an
00:48undisclosed date in 1966, placing it at least a year after the actual broadcast of the episode.
00:54As far as historical records can tell, the Daleks never did visit the Empire State Building,
00:59so this prediction never came true in our own version of 1966.
01:03The closest the Daleks got to America was when the 1965 Peter Cushing movie,
01:07Doctor Who and the Daleks, premiered in the US in July 1966, to a less-than-enthusiastic
01:12commercial response. I tell you what, the producers missed a trick by not promoting
01:16the movie on top of the Empire State Building. Other notable Dalek events from 1966 included
01:21the broadcast of The Daleks' Master Plan and a group of Daleks arriving at the Blue
01:26Peter Studio to review cakes. Ah, Great Scarrow Bake Off, anyone? I'd watch that.
01:319. The Underwater Menace, 1970-ish
01:35The exact date of The Underwater Menace is never made explicit, but Polly dates events to roughly
01:391970. That's because she finds a discarded 1968 Mexico Olympics bracelet. This effectively means
01:46that Doctor Who is predicting that a Professor Zaroff type will discover Atlantis in the years
01:51following The Underwater Menace's 1967 broadcast. While it seems like a wild prediction,
01:56it's clear that the writer Jeffrey Orme had read about the prophecies of American
02:00clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. In the 1930s, Cayce stated that, and I quote,
02:04"...a portion of the temples may yet be discovered under the slime of ages and
02:08seawater near Bimini. Expect it in 68 or 69." Well, perhaps Jeffrey had come across
02:14Cayce's prediction and turned it into the first of Doctor Who's many forays into the mythical
02:19lost city of Atlantis. However, the predictions didn't come true, and a mad scientist didn't use
02:23Atlantis to destroy the Earth in 1970. And yet, in 1968, a group of divers discovered Bimini Road,
02:30just off the coast of the North Bimini Island in the Bahamas. The mysterious rock formation
02:35was described by the divers as a quote, "...pavement, and some believe it may be the road to Atlantis."
02:428. The Tenth Planet, 1986
02:46In the 1966 serial The Tenth Planet, Doctor Who confidently predicted that in 1986,
02:52we would discover a tenth planet in our solar system. In the real 1986,
02:56the Voyager space probe had only made it to Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun.
03:00The progress of human space exploration hadn't been nearly as quick as writers Kit
03:05Pedler and Jerry Davis predicted. William Hartnell's final Doctor Who serial also
03:09predicted that at the height of the space race, humanity would have abandoned national borders
03:13to embrace an international approach to space exploration. Sadly, this wasn't true either,
03:18and the Chernobyl disaster and ensuing Soviet cover-up was a particularly bleak example of
03:23the lack of trust between nations in 1986. The only saving grace of the Tenth Planet's
03:27vision of the future is that 1986 didn't see a race of cybernetically augmented humanoids
03:32and a Z-bomb nearly destroy the Earth. Silver linings.
03:357. The Chase, 1996
03:38Thirty years after the Daleks landed on top of the Empire State Building,
03:42they rocked up at the Frankenstein's House of Horrors attraction at the 1996 Festival of Ghana.
03:47Haunted house attractions were much more technologically advanced in Doctor Who's
03:51version of 1996. The robotic Dracula and Frankenstein were so convincing that the
03:56first Doctor believed the TARDIS and the Daleks had somehow managed to materialise
04:00inside the dark recesses of the human mind. Perhaps the convincing nature of the horrifying
04:04monsters was why the attraction and the festival was apparently cancelled by Peking,
04:09though quite what the People's Republic of China would have to do with a festival
04:12in a West African nation is anyone's guess. In that same year and a thousand miles away,
04:17the Eleventh Doctor crash-landed in the garden of Amelia Pond at the start of the 2010 episode
04:22The Eleventh Hour. And now get ready to have your mind blown because where 1996 was 30 years in the
04:28future for William Hartnell, it was already 14 years in the past for Matt Smith and Karen Gillan.
04:33Mind blown.
04:356. Battlefield, 1997
04:38Set eight years after broadcast, Battlefield is a more accurate depiction of 1997 than the
04:44underwater menace's wild depiction of three years into the future. There are still good
04:48old-fashioned English country pubs, even if the price of a pint has gone up considerably. The
04:52Gore Crow Hotel has its own microbrewery, a good decade before every Johnny-come-lately craft beer
04:58pub. Geopolitically, Battlefield reveals that things are still tense around the world as the
05:03battle between Morgaine and King Arthur becomes a metaphor for the futility of nuclear war,
05:08while nuclear holocaust wasn't as pressing an issue as it was during the Cold War. Concerns
05:12about dangerous materials being ferried about places like Battlefield's fictional village
05:16were still on people's minds in 1997. So the only glaring difference from the real 1997,
05:22five pound for a water and a lemonade aside, is the fact that a group of Arthurian knights cause
05:27merry hell in an English village, nearly triggering a nuclear apocalypse. Far for
05:31the cause when it comes to Doctor Who, really.
05:335. The TV Movie, 1999-2000
05:37At the turn of the millennium, the Master almost turned the universe inside out during his battle
05:42with the Eighth Doctor. With the Eye of Harmony open, the very fabric of reality became malleable,
05:47which would have only made the first hangover of 2000 even more painful. Thankfully, predictions
05:52of widespread devastation at midnight on the 1st January 2000 never came to pass. We came close
05:57thanks to the millennium bug, but like the Master's plot with the Eye of Harmony, its effects were
06:02rolled back and caused minor disruptions. Airing in 1996, the Doctor Who TV movie wasn't
06:07the only bit of science fiction to predict the end of life as we knew it as we inched closer
06:12to the year 2000, so it needn't feel bad for getting it wrong. Interestingly, Torchwood would
06:17later reveal that Captain Jack's predecessor killed himself and his team at the turn of the
06:22century, because he feared what was coming. The TV movie did make one accurate prediction
06:26for the future though. The Doctor would be doing a lot more kissing from the year 2000 onward.
06:30The Tenth Doctor certainly made good on that promise when he arrived in 2005.
06:344. Aliens of London 2006
06:38From the moment the Ninth Doctor accidentally drops off Rose 12 months later in the 2005
06:42episode Aliens of London, the RTD era of Doctor Who takes place in the very near future. From the
06:48death of the Prime Minister to the rise and fall of Harriet Jones to the election of Harold Saxon,
06:53the big moments from RTD's Doctor Who lore took place roughly a year ahead of our own reality.
06:58Hilariously, the political unrest during this period of Doctor Who does bear comparison with
07:03parallel events in UK politics. After replacing the murdered Prime Minister at some point after
07:07Aliens of London and World War 3 in 2006, Harriet Jones is then ousted by the Tenth
07:13Doctor's whispered message, don't you think she looks tired? In the real world, Gordon Brown
07:17replaced Tony Blair in 2007 after a similar scandal involving what the Slitheen refer to as
07:23massive weapons of destruction. Both Harriet Jones and Gordon Brown were then replaced by
07:28villainous politicians who ruined Britain's reputation on the world stage. So something
07:32else to add to Doctor Who's list of accurate predictions, I guess?
07:353. Dalek and Fear Her 2012
07:38Utah 2012, a narcissistic billionaire and powerful figure in the United States of America,
07:44keeps a Dalek in his basement. After his recklessness almost causes global destruction
07:48at the hands of said Dalek, he's ousted from his position and will never ever again
07:52interfere in American politics. Written by Robert Sherman and set in 2012, 2005's Dalek
07:58seems utterly prophetic, albeit four years early and with a much happier ending for the American
08:02people. Across the pond in 2012, as depicted in the 2006 episode Fear Her, the UK was preparing
08:08to host the Olympics, but disaster struck at the hands of some magic crayons. The opening
08:13ceremony was disrupted by the disappearance of the collected guests and athletes, who were
08:17captured inside a drawing. The day was saved, the attendees returned, and a 10th Doctor heroically
08:22took up the Olympic torch and marked the start of the competition. Magic crayons aside, the Doctor
08:27did carry the Olympic torch in the real world 2012, but it was the 11th incarnation and not the 10th,
08:33as David Tennant had regenerated a few years earlier.
08:362. The Enemy of the World 2018
08:39The year 2018 must have seemed impossibly futuristic to David Whittaker when he was
08:44writing The Enemy of the World in 1967. Although the easy access to hovercrafts and the devastating
08:49volcanic eruptions in Central Europe never came to pass, there's still something quite prescient
08:54about Whittaker's view of 2018. At its heart, The Enemy of the World is Doctor Who doing a James
08:59Bond movie, with a charismatic villain and some big action set pieces. It's also a political
09:04thriller about how the rich can weedle their way into global politics. If Whittaker had lived in
09:092018, he may have been alarmed at what he got right about humanity's future. Looking back on
09:14The Enemy of the World now, the themes of a tanned megalomaniac who feeds disinformation and fake news
09:20to his global audience feel all too real. Patrick Troughton's performance as Salamander may look
09:25outrageous and over the top, but is it any more outlandish than the performance of 2018's actual
09:30leader of the free world? Just saying. 1. The Hungry Earth 2020
09:352020 will never be anyone's favourite year, but come on, let's not get into another debate about
09:40the timeless child. Of course, 2020 was a rough year for everyone as we lived with the Covid-19
09:45pandemic, and the world began to feel like a particularly bleak sci-fi dystopia. Doctor Who
09:49couldn't predict this, but it did visit 2020 in the Chris Chibnall-penned two-parter The Hungry
09:54Earth and Cold Blood, which aired in 2010. In Chibnall's version of 2020, the Silurians awoke
10:00in a small mining town in Wales where they attempted to retake Earth from the humans.
10:04After negotiations stalled, the Silurians were returned to their hibernation in the hope that
10:09one day a peaceful accord could be reached. Fast forward 10 years and Chris Chibnall was
10:13Doctor Who's showrunner in 2020. He didn't revisit the Silurian revival, but there's nothing to say
10:18that it didn't still happen while the 13th Doctor was dealing with Ruth and the Jadoon in Gloucester.
10:23One thing he did get wrong was that the future Amy and Rory wouldn't have turned up to greet
10:27their past selves on account of their deaths in New York decades earlier. And now I'm sad.
10:32And there you have it, but while we're on the topic of the future,
10:35why not check out 10 times Doctor Who accidentally predicted our future?
10:39In the meantime, I've been Ellie for WhoCulture, and in the words of River Song herself,
10:42goodbye, sweeties.