2013s Cold War gives us an important plot point and an Easter Egg rolled into one in the form of the HADS; the Tardiss Hostile Action Displacement System. A Tardis protocol that moves it to a safe point if danger is detected, conveniently stranding the Doctor and Clara onboard a Russian submarine with an Ice Warrior. While this may seem like a standard of way of removing the Tardis from the equation so the Doctor cant easily save the day, it actually goes a little further back than that. Forty-four years further back to be precise. Although it has appeared in several spin-offs such as comics and audio plays, the only definitively canon appearance of the HADS was in the Second Doctor story The Krotons. Until Mark Gatiss brought it out of mothballs both as a plot point and an Easter Egg for those who have seen The Krotons.
7. The Other Umbrella Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis
Since its a story set almost entirely inside the Tardis and broadcast in the year of Doctor Whos 50th Anniversary, Series 7s Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis is crammed full of continuity references but theres one little continuity Easter Egg more likely to go unnoticed than the others. When Clara goes into a room of full of old props like the Doctors cot, she briefly picks up an umbrella with a bamboo handle. To the untrained eye it may come across as just a random bit of junk since the Doctors umbrellas were always flashier or had a question mark shaped handle. But in his first few stories, the Seventh Doctor used the bamboo umbrella before switching it out for the more iconic question mark handled one in Delta And The Bannerman. Say what you like about the Steven Moffat era, but the writers and props team really do their research.
JG Moore is a writer and filmmaker from the south of England. He also works as an editor and VFX artist, and has a BA in Media Production from the University Of Winchester.
