10 Times Doctor Who Shamelessly Ripped Off Hollywood

5. Last Christmas Stole The Facehuggers From The Alien Series

Dr Who Bright
BBC

A family-friendly festive episode is the last place you'd expect to find a reference to one of the most disturbing horror monsters of all time, and yet, that's exactly what Last Christmas did.

Doctor Who's 2014 Christmas special includes a shameless and obvious steal from Ridley Scott's 1979 classic, Alien, straight-up pilfering the iconic facehugger creatures and reworking them into the episode's villains, the dream crabs.

Alien Facehugger
20th Century Fox

These sneaky dream crabs scuttle along the walls and floors and leap at people with a frightening pace, wrapping themselves around the faces of their victims, exactly like the facehuggers do.

And as if the parallel wasn't clear enough, the episode makes it even clearer with a name-drop. At one point, a character states that the dream crabs are "a bit like facehuggers" from Alien, to which the Doctor gloriously responds "there's a horror movie called Alien? That's really offensive - no wonder everyone keeps invading you."

It's very on-the-nose lampshading, but at least the script was self-aware enough to acknowledge that the design of the dream crabs wasn't exactly original. And interestingly, this wasn't even the first time that Doctor Who copied the Alien movies...

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.