10 Most Meta Doctor Who Moments EVER

6. The Three Doctors

Doctor Who Time Crash
BBC

Multi-Doctor stories are always a treat, especially when it comes to self-referential meta moments that lovingly make fun of the show's history. The very first multi-Doctor story has one of the best examples. 1973's The Three Doctors features the first three Doctors interacting with each other, and it's simply marvellous to see. Sadly however, while Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee made full appearances, First Doctor William Hartnell had to limit his part to appearing on a television monitor, filmed separately with cue cards due to his declining health.

Despite this compromise, the First Doctor makes a big impact, lauding it over his future incarnations like an amused armchair critic, watching them through a screen just like a viewer would in a fantastically meta way. "Oh, so you're my replacements!" he quips, and insults the bickering pair to show them who's boss, calling the Third and Second doctors "a dandy and a clown" respectively. "Have you done anything?" he smirks wryly, making it clear that as the original incarnation he is surely the best. This comes across as a way of poking fun at fans who always complain when the Doctor regenerates, which may seem like a modern phenomenon but actually happened as far back as 1966 when the Second Doctor was cast, with a number of complaints questioning why the respectable old Doctor had been replaced by a young fool. Some things never change, eh?

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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.