10 Nu-Who Storylines That Doctor Who Spin-Off Media Did First
Have Russell and Steven been copying your homework?
Between 1989 and 2005, there was a wealth of Doctor Who novels, comic strips, and audio dramas to keep fans entertained while they hoped for the series' eventual return. Due to the very nature of how fans consume media, some of the ideas from these works have bled into episodes of the 21st-century incarnation of the show. Some of them have been deliberate lifts, employing the writers to adapt their work for the screen, triggering all sorts of passionate debates about canonicity in the process.
Steven Moffat regularly adapted his own short stories and fan theories in his time as showrunner. One of the most notable of these was his poetic take on the etymology of the word "Doctor", a theory he'd trotted out on fan message boards that eventually made it into A Good Man Goes To War. More often than not, the recurring storylines or thematic concerns are purely the results of fans being in charge of the show.
Many Doctor Who fans want to analyse certain aspects of the series, and therefore there's often a lot of crossover in how those are approached. This list collects some of the most obvious of these recurring storylines that first originated in the spin-off media of Doctor Who's wilderness years.
10. The Doctor Becoming Human
Russell T Davies commissioned Paul Cornell to adapt his acclaimed 1995 novel Human Nature for David Tennant's second series as the Doctor in 2007. Both versions are an attempt to tell a Doctor Who love story, but they differ in their approaches, and not just in terms of form.
The most obvious difference is the Doctor's motivations for transforming his biology. In the novel, the Seventh Doctor becomes human in order to better understand the grief and loss of his companion Bernice, whose lover Jason had died in the previous book. While living as a schoolteacher in England in 1913, Dr John Smith has to assume his true identity to repel a vicious alien invasion.
The other notable aspect of the novel that differs from the TV version is just how violent it is. People die in the TV version of course, and the anti-war message and allusions to WW1 remain. However, with the 1995 novel being aimed at grown-up fans rather than a Saturday night BBC1 audience, it goes much further.
It's brutal, but at heart, it's a very Doctor Who story about what exactly makes the Doctor the hero that he is. No wonder RTD wanted to bring it to a wider audience.