10 Doctor Who Moments That Broke The Fourth Wall

5. Not In Hyde Park Anymore (The Face Of Evil)

Doctor Who The Face Of Evil Tom Baker Fourth Doctor
BBC Studios

The 1977 serial The Face Of Evil wasted no time in delivering a crazy fourth wall break courtesy of Tom Baker's Doctor, with the mad-eyed Time Lord stepping out of his TARDIS, and immediately striking up a conversation with... himself?

That's how the whole thing is framed, of course, with the Doctor capping off this rather lonely conversation by asking himself if he wants to look around. But from our perspective, it's a clear fourth wall break, with the Doctor staring into the camera and rambling on about how he isn't in Hyde Park, and how there's a knot in his hanky. Check out a bit of this at the 16-second mark in the video below!

What's interesting about a lot of the Doctor's fourth wall breaks (including this one) is that they tend to happen when he's travelling alone. In The Invasion Of Time, he'd just lost Leela and K9; in Heaven Sent, he'd just lost Clara; and in The Wedding Of River Song, he'd dropped Amy and Rory at home a few episodes prior.

It seems that, when the Doctor gets lonely, he tries to reach out to his longest-serving companion, the companion he knows can always be relied on: us.

In this post: 
Doctor Who
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

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!