10 Doctor Who Moments That Broke The Fourth Wall

8. Nothing Without An Audience (Heaven Sent)

Doctor Who Heaven Sent Peter Capaldi
BBC

Steven Moffat really had a thing for self-referential humour, which, considering his background as a comedy writer, totally makes sense.

His meta stylings can be found in every single era of his Doctor Who writing career, whether it's the Weeping Angels being frozen in place by the viewers at home, or the Twelfth Doctor mocking the formula of the show in his (and Moffat's) final episode.

While these kinds of things can be considered "fourth wall breaks" in a certain sense, one of the only examples of Moffat directly breaking the fourth wall came in the Series 9 all-time classic, Heaven Sent, where Capaldi's Doctor quips "I'm nothing without an audience" while shooting a knowing glance down the camera lens.

Even though Clara (or at least, a weird vision of Clara) is in the room with him, this moment was actually included in Moffat's script, where it was specifically written as a fourth wall break.

Along with our next entry, this is also one of the only times the Doctor directly refers to the audience at home - making it a rather special entry in the show's meta back-catalogue.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!