10 Most Meta Doctor Who Moments EVER

9. LINDA

Doctor Who Time Crash
BBC Studios

Love and Monsters may be widely regarded as one of the most excruciatingly poor offerings in the show's history, but if you look beyond the cringeworthy Abzorbaloff it's actually something of a meta masterpiece. The whole thing is Russell T. Davies' love letter to the show's fandom, and what better way to show your love of something than by making fun of it?

Enter the London Investigation 'N' Detective Agency, or LINDA for short. They're a group of people united by their encounters with The Doctor, who meet regularly to discuss their shared fascination with the mysterious Time Lord. In other words, they're a Doctor Who fan club... in Doctor Who. This is a brilliantly meta way of poking fun at fans and their quaint little gatherings, but it's also really sweet. The members of LINDA quickly become close friends, sharing food and stories and even starting their own band. It's a lovely celebration of Doctor Who fandom, and you can tell that Russell was writing the episode from a place of love having been a lifelong fan himself.

But the meta aspects of this story are also eerily prescient: the introduction of the obsessive and controlling Victor Kennedy into the group ruins the magic, and could be said to represent the bad apples within the Who fandom who nowadays are increasingly making themselves known. Monsters, the lot of them.

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Patch is a pop culture enthusiast and purveyor of puns. He writes about media in a vague attempt to justify the alarming amount of time he spends consuming it. Nobody's convinced... but nobody's told him that yet. He spends his spare time working on Portal 2: Desolation, an ambitious fan-made sequel to Valve's beloved puzzle games.