10 Doctor Who Fan Theories That Make Too Much Sense To Ignore
6. The Shopkeeper In The Sarah Jane Adventures Was The Corsair
Elisabeth Sladen’s untimely passing left The Sarah Jane Adventures with a shortened final series and lots of loose ends.
Chief among these was the identity of the mysterious shopkeeper introduced in Series 4's Lost in Time, and seen again in Series 5 opener Sky – a self-professed “servant of the universe”, together with his parrot companion, Captain.
Had Series 5 of The Sarah Jane Adventures been completed, we would've discovered that the Shopkeeper was an unwitting pawn in a scheme engineered by the Trickster. But as things stand, fans have been left to fill in the gaps – and one particular theory has gained quite a bit of traction.
For his debut Doctor Who episode The Doctor’s Wife, Neil Gaiman created the character of the Corsair – a riotous, swashbuckling Time Lord/Lady who was an old acquaintance of the Doctor.
In a book feature later that year titled Eleven Things You Probably Didn’t Know About The Corsair, Gaiman revealed that one of the Corsair’s incarnations had a parrot, and one of the illustrations that accompanied the feature showed said parrot resting on a dark-skinned hand. Hmm.
What’s more, the Shopkeeper's actor briefly returned to the Whoniverse in 2016 to play Class’ Chair of the Governors – another mysterious character.
Was he also the Shopkeeper and/or Corsair? It’s tempting to think so.