Star Trek is an American science-fiction franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. Beginning with Star Trek: The Original Series, 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.
References to Doctor Who in Star Trek narratives[]
Television[]
An oft-noted Star Trek reference to Doctor Who is this computer screen in the TNG episode, The Neutral Zone, which listed several prominent Doctor Who actors.
A computer console seen in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Neutral Zone" 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.
Paramount Pictures, owner of the Star Trek franchise, does not currently consider anything other than the Star Trek television series and films canonical. Nevertheless, there are licensed comic and prose stories, and these have very occasionally referenced the DWU.
A direct reference to the Doctor Who franchise is made in the novel My Enemy, My Ally, which describes USS Enterprise crewmembers watching a Fourth Doctor episode.
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)
According to The Nth Doctor, in 1994, Leonard Nimoy, who played the original Mr. Spock 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.
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."
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.
As long running science fiction franchises, there have been occasional story elements with marked similarities.
The cybernetic Borg assimilate species in similar fashion to the Cybermen and also use a similar catchphrase ("You will be assimilated"). Likewise, the warrior race of Klingons share similarities with the Sontarans and Draconians.
The Trill 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 "Facets" and "Field of Fire", 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 Terry Farrell and her character of Jadzia Dax was replaced by Nicole de Boer's Ezri Dax, in much the same way Doctor actors are replaced when they choose to leave the series.
Like the Silurians, the dinosaur-descended Voth 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.
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.
