Star Trek (franchise)

Star Trek is an American science-fiction franchise created by. Beginning with , the franchise has since spawned many series in the form of television, films, comics, novels, and various other mediums. The franchise has an overarching theme following the adventures of Starfleet in the service of the United Federation of Planets.

Like Doctor Who, Star Trek is among the oldest science-fiction franchises, having first aired in 1966. Unlike Doctor Who, however, Star Trek does not follow one continuous series, but rather several iterations following the many different characters that serve in Starfleet.

Star Trek has made several references to the Doctor Who universe, and the two also share some behind-the-scenes commonalities. Both franchises have also had an officially licensed crossover.

Television

 * Star Trek Doctor Who.jpg computer console seen in the  episode "" shows the names of the first six actors to play the Doctor. Peter Davison's name was misspelled as "Peter Davidson". The remastered version of the episode, released to Blu-ray, removes this reference.
 * The Argolis Cluster, first mentioned in the Next Generation episode "I Borg", was named after the planet Argolis from TV: The Leisure Hive.
 * "", an episode of , features a TARDIS-like, is bigger on the inside than on the outside, and has an interior design featuring TARDIS-like roundels. The show's production team has acknowledged this as an homage. That episode's writer, , noted that his "idea of the ship morphing into a police call box was immediately nixed by the producers!"

Other media
, owner of the Star Trek franchise, does not currently consider anything other than the live action Star Trek television series and films canonical. Nevertheless, there are licensed comic and prose stories, and these have very occasionally referenced the DWU.
 * The Star Trek novel  makes an indirect reference to the Time Lords, a direct reference to Metebelis crystals and features cameos by the Second Doctor and the Fourth Doctor.
 * Several Star Trek stories have mentioned "" as Starfleet engineering tools. For instance, the ' novel ', the ' eBook ' and ' novel '.
 * A direct reference to the Doctor Who franchise is made in the novel , which describes USS Enterprise crewmembers watching a Fourth Doctor episode.
 * 's time travel novel  features a number of minor, but intentional, references to the DWU..
 * Time is described as "a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, time-wimey . . . stuff", as in TV: Blink.
 * The character of is a conflation of the names Rani Chandra and Anjli Mohindra.
 * A ship named the  appears, which Bennett claims to have named after producer Verity Lambert.
 * The, archenemies of the already established , were named after Shirna, the partner of Vorg, who both appeared in TV: Carnival of Monsters.
 * A "large, blue, boxlike artefact" is seen in a Federation storehouse of alien time travel devices.
 * A planet is described as having "silver trees and an orange sky", with inhabitants who have been monitoring history for thousands of years — thus making it an apparent analogue of Gallifrey.
 * The Tigellian chronic hysteresis is a reference to Tigella.
 * Other extremely incidental references are also in the book, but they are obscured by bad spelling on the author's part (such as the fact that a character is supposedly named after Peter Purves, but spelled Purvis) or deliberate obfuscation (such as a unit of measurement named the "maloc", which is supposedly a tip of the hat to the "malcolm" from TV: Planet of the Dead)
 * The  novel describes the death of Kathryn Janeway as a "fixed point in time". (TV: The Waters of Mars)
 * In issue #5 of the crossover comic , the TARDISes of both the Doctor and the Master, in its greek column form, are among the many impounded space-time vessels.

Cast connections
Due to the two franchises being produced in different countries, shared cast members are infrequent. Most of the connections between the two franchises have occurred as a result of the three productions with extensive North American filming: the 1996 movie, TV: The Impossible Astronaut, and Torchwood: Miracle Day. Major Star Trek actors who appeared in these productions include Nana Visitor and John de Lancie, and companion Dr. Grace Holloway was also played by Deep Space Nine guest star Daphne Ashbrook.

After appearing in TV: The Long Game as the Editor and narrating a series of Doctor Who Confidential, Simon Pegg also took over the role of from the 2009 film  onwards. Noel Clarke also appeared alongside Pegg in the 2013 sequel . In 2020, Orla Brady played in  after having played Tasha Lem in TV: The Time of the Doctor. That same year, David Ajala played in  after having played Peter in TV: The Beast Below.

Other recognisable actors who have guest starred in both franchises include David Warner, Mark Sheppard, and Alan Dale. Deep Space Nine stars Alexander Siddig and Chase Masterson crossed over into the DWU by virtue of voice acting work, typically for Big Finish Productions. In 2012, Chase Masterson debuted the character of Vienna Salvatori in AUDIO: The Shadow Heart, with a spin-off audio series which followed in 2013. This made Masterson the first actor to take a regular role in both a Star Trek and Doctor Who spin-off.

Anthony Head and Alec Newman also read audiobooks for the Star Trek franchise.

Crew connections
According to The Nth Doctor, in 1994,, who played the original Mr. and directed two Star Trek feature films, was reportedly under consideration to direct one of the many aborted Doctor Who feature film projects under consideration during the 1989-96 interregnum.

TV movie composer John Debney also composed scores for the ' episode "" and the ' episodes "" and "". Tony Dow, who worked as visual effects producer for the TV movie, later directed the Deep Space Nine episode "".

Torchwood: Miracle Day writers Jane Espenson and John Shiban have also written episodes for Deep Space Nine and  respectively. Other writers, such as Una McCormack, John Peel, Diane Duane and Keith R.A. DeCandido, have written for both franchises in other media.

Crossovers, planned and actual
In April 2009, Russell T Davies revealed in an interview that he had considered writing a Doctor Who episode that crossed over with Star Trek: Enterprise.
 * "I would have loved to have done a Star Trek crossover," said Davies. "The very first year, we talked about it. Then Star Trek finally went off air. Landing the TARDIS on board the Enterprise would have been magnificent. Can you imagine what their script department would have wanted, and what I would have wanted? It would have been the biggest battle."

In 2012 IDW Publishing published an official 8-issue crossover series titled Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who: Assimilation² that featured the Eleventh Doctor and the Cybermen encountering the characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation, with one issue also featuring a flashback of the Fourth Doctor encountering characters from Star Trek: The Original Series. The first issue was released on 30 May 2012.

Other information

 * The fan novella The Doctor and the Enterprise by Jean Airey, initially was published privately as a stand-alone fanzine and then in a professional edition in 1989 by Pioneer Books. This book featured the fourth Doctor and the original Star Trek crew, in a setting that pastiched the  Darkover" novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley. The Pioneer edition removes the names of many Trek characters. Many other amateur fan fiction crossovers between the television series have been written over the years, including Airey's own sequel to her novel, a piece of erotica entitled 'The Lieutenant and the Doctor'; Airey's book remains the only such to be published professionally, if unofficially. There would be no official crossover between the two franchises published until Assimilation²'' in 2012.
 * Cast members of both Doctor Who and Star Trek have participated in special editions of the television game show, The Weakest Link, hosted by Anne Robinson.
 * Albert Einstein has appeared in both franchises. In Doctor Who, he appears in Sylvester McCoy's debut story, Time and the Rani, and the 2011 mini-episode Death Is the Only Answer. In the  episodes "" and "", he appears as a holographic projection. In the latter, he was played by Jim Norton, who later played Thomas Kennet in WC: Scream of the Shalka.
 * As long running science fiction franchises, there have been occasional story elements with marked similarities.
 * The cybernetic assimilate species in similar fashion to the Cybermen and also use a similar catchphrase ("You will be assimilated"). Likewise, the warrior race of  share similarities with the Sontarans and Draconians.
 * The also possess the ability to pass on a symbiont after a host body dies, allowing them to effectively live on after death, not entirely dissimilar from regeneration. When joined with a symbiont, the personality of the new host will change as it becomes an amalgamation of their own, plus those of their predecessors, as well as retaining all of their memories. Through specific rituals, it is also possible for the current hosts to interact with their predecessors, as seen in the Deep Space Nine episodes "" and "", which were DS9 equivalents of multi-Doctor episodes. The ability of Trill to take on the memories and experiences of others was also utilised when  and her character of  was replaced by 's, in much the same way Doctor actors are replaced when they choose to leave the series.
 * Like the Silurians, the dinosaur-descended are a sentient, humanoid reptile species that evolved on Earth and developed a technologically advanced civilisation. Like those Silurians who built the ship in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, the Voth left the planet, eventually settling in the Milky Way Galaxy's Delta Quadrant.
 * In a Top Gear "Master of the Universe" segment, a Klingon raced around the Top Gear track against a Dalek, a Cyberman and Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor (as well as Darth Vader from Star Wars and Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon).
 * Both franchises have featured characters from the Sherlock Holmes stories in some manner. Doctor Who features Holmes and Watson in some of its print media; Holmes’s arch-nemesis is the central antagonist of one episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
 * With this in mind, it is worth noting that Benedict Cumberbatch is the only cast member to have played a character in all three franchises.
 * The novel  by Christopher L. Bennett is dedicated "To William, Patrick, Jon, Tom, Peter, Colin, Sylvester, Paul, John, Christopher, David, Matt and the other Peter."