Fantastic Beasts: 10 Ties To Doctor Who You Might Have Missed

9. The Magic Of The Pouring Rain

Fantastic Beasts Doctor Who
Warner Bros.

Rain is a particularly useful device in TV and movies – it can be a symbol of joy, cleansing or redemption, or a backdrop to a great struggle; and just sometimes the rain is not quite what it seems.

In the Doctor Who 2014 series finale Death in Heaven, Missy uses the Cybermen to convert the bodies of the dead, by literally raining down cyberpollen over the graveyards. Other than the strange fact that the rain is focused on specific sites, and its sudden onset, the deluge is indistinguishable from normal rain.

Similarly in the denouement of Fantastic Beasts, when the rain falls over the unsuspecting inhabitants of New York, all is not quite as it seems. Newt’s solution to how to obliviate an entire city, is to use Frank the Thunderbird to make it rain with the powerful venom of the swooping evil.

The intentions might be quite different, but the visual similarities of an alien creature rising into the sky and making thunderclouds under instruction, whilst poisoning the rain, are quite striking. Like Newt does with Frank, only minus his respect for the creature, Missy treats the Cybermen as her pets.

Contributor
Contributor

Paul Driscoll is a freelance writer and author across a range of subjects from Cult TV to religion and social policy. He is a passionate Doctor Who fan and January 2017 will see the publication of his first extended study of the series (based on Toby Whithouse's series six episode, The God Complex) in the critically acclaimed Black Archive range by Obverse Books. He is a regular writer for the fan site Doctor Who Worldwide and has contributed several essays to Watching Books' You and Who range. Recently he has branched out into fiction writing, with two short stories in the charity Doctor Who anthology Seasons of War (Chinbeard Books). Paul's work will also feature in the forthcoming Iris Wildthyme collection (A Clockwork Iris, Obverse Books) and Chinbeard Books' collection of drabbles, A Time Lord for Change.