10 Doctor Who Episodes You Didn’t Know Were Connected

At the risk of stating the obvious here, Doctor Who is a very timey-wimey show.

It's like a big ball of string at this point, with so many threads from across the decades overlapping and criss-crossing. The Doctor's past (or future, depending on how you look at it) comes around to haunt them all the time, with villains from old episodes returning with a vengeance, and long-lost friends turning up in the least likely of places.

As a super-duper Whovian though, you'll undoubtedly know some of the more obvious connections between episodes.

The End of the World is linked to Last of the Time Lords because of the Captain Jack/Face of Boe reveal. The Doctor losing a hand in The Christmas Invasion feeds into the events of Journey's End. And the serial The Daleks, well, that's got fingerprints all over the show.

Or should that be sucker prints?

But what about the episodes with subtler links between them? Small background details, throwaway lines that mean way more than you think. That sort of thing?

Well, we're glad you asked, because that's exactly what this article is about.

The Eleventh Doctor's unorthodox dress sense inspired a generation of teenagers to think they were cool because they owned a tweed jacket.

Not only did bow tie sales shoot up when Matt Smith started wearing one, but his version of the Time Lord also inspired a fascination with a certain red hat.

Number Eleven first appeared in a fez in the Series 5 finale The Big Bang. The headpiece would turn up throughout the rest of his time on the show, becoming a trademark of Smith's quirky portrayal of the character.

But this was not the first time the Doctor had been seen in one.

In Doctor Who's 25th anniversary special Silver Nemesis, the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace turn up at Windsor castle and have a rummage around, and at one point, the Doctor pops up holding a mop, and wearing - you guessed it - a fez.

Considering that Eleven was also holding a mop when he was first seen with a fez, we can deduce that this moment is where he got the inspiration to wear one on the regular.

Not a massive detail, but a fun one.