10 Best Doctor Who Time Travel Stories
You do know this is a show about time travel, right?
For a show about a time traveller, Doctor Who deals with the perils of mucking around with our past and future with a surprising lack of regularity. This year's Festive Special Eve of the Daleks is the first time that the show has properly explored the phenomenon of a time loop, barring flirtations in the likes of Carnival of Monsters and Meglos.
So when else in the show's 58 year history has it explored the ramifications of travelling through time? And, in the Reithian genesis of the programme, what do these stories teach a young audience about cause and effect, consequences and morality? Time travel may seem like a tempting prospect, it's what finally convinced Rose Tyler to climb aboard, after all.
And yet, it can also provide you with a devastating moral dilemma or an insight into the horrors of history.
Let's travel back across 58 years of time and space through the prism of our favourite teatime sci-fi show. Watch out for butterflies and remember, don't interfere. Unless Catherine Tate asks you to.
10. City of Death
Forget Biff Tannen's almanac, the greatest use of time travel for financial gain can be found in Douglas Adams' classic Doctor Who story. Trapped on Earth and splintered across human history, Scaroth needs funding for the time experiments that will make him whole again.
In what is one of the most ingenious villainous schemes in the history of Doctor Who, he plots to steal the Mona Lisa using alien technology. Not only that, but centuries earlier, he has also managed to convince Leonardo Da Vinci to paint six copies of the famous artwork. Once the news breaks, he intends to sell one each to the seven nefarious art collectors who covet the painting. After all, they're hardly going to brag about it are they?
It's a wonderfully inventive use of past and present communicating with each other, and clearly influenced Steven Moffat's later work. Not only that, but the accident that splinters Scaroth across time is the very spark that begins life on Earth. In one of the best jokes in the whole story, the brutish but well-meaning Duggan puts human history back on course by lamping Scaroth with the most important punch in human history. It's a simple resolution completely at odds with the tricksy time narrative, which is why it's utterly hilarious.