10 Even MORE Doctor Who Episodes You Didn't Know Were Connected
Even more Doctor Who stories connected by lots of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.
When you travel around time and space as much as the Doctor does, it's inevitable that you start to make connections between your various trips. These connections range from the big – like major sequels to classic adventures, or return appearances of the Daleks, Cybermen, Sutekh, or whoever else – to much smaller, deep-cut links.
Many Doctor Who stories are connected by similar props, like the Drahvin gun from Galaxy 4 that shows up in Genesis of the Daleks. Other times, older stories can gain a new dimension, such as when Captain Avery's appearance opposite the Eleventh Doctor retrospectively turned The Smugglers into a sequel to The Curse of the Black Spot.
We've covered this sort of thing once or twice before, but there are now over 60 years of Doctor Who and it feels like the web of time's strands are becoming further and further interlinked. Hell, who could've imagined that Doctor Who's Beatles episode would contain such a direct reference to An Unearthly Child?!
But that sort of connection is far too obvious. Instead, let's take a much deeper dive into the ties that bind the Doctor's adventures.
10. Frontier In Space & Bad Wolf
In Frontier in Space, the Third Doctor is accused of espionage and gets sentenced to hard time in a penal colony on the Moon. This is in the 26th century, where the Lunar Penal Colony is reserved for political dissidents and spies.
Of course, the Doctor immediately tries to escape, with assistance from Outer Space Jeremy Corbyn impersonator, Professor Dale.
The Doctor's escape plan fails when he's double-crossed by an appropriately-named fellow inmate, Cross. However, despite this scandal, Earth appears to continue imprisoning people on the Moon for millennia, long after Frontier in Space.
That's because, in the Ninth Doctor episode Bad Wolf, it's revealed that the Lunar Penal Colony is still in operation in the year 200,100.
When the Ninth Doctor, Lynda with a Y, and Captain Jack Harkness try to bust Rose out of the Game Station, they're swiftly detained by guards. The charge for blowing up Trinny, Susannah, and Anne Robinson? Imprisonment in the Lunar Penal Colony, which is mentioned by one of the guards while the Doctor is in a holding cell.
Learning from experience, this time the Doctor makes a bid for freedom before he gets sent to the Moon, preventing Doctor Who from being turned into a drawn-out prison drama. Nice one.