8 Times Doctor Who Mocked Itself

The universe is an enormous place. It's so large, that our tiny human brains cannot possibly comprehend its full scale. So isn't it weird that every single alien the Doctor encounters usually has some sort of evil plan?

You'd think that the Doctor would run into some nice, welcoming aliens from time-to-time, but with each new episode... nope. It's just bad guys after bad guys.

Now obviously, this is a part of the show's design. Each episode needs a hostile force for the Doctor to overcome, because it wouldn't be all that thrilling to watch the TARDIS crew chilling on a beach for 45 minutes. Doctor Who is a show where an ancient Time Lord battles deadly aliens - that's the format.

In Twice Upon A Time though, this format is subverted when Doctors One and Twelve encounter the glass avatars of the Testimony Foundation. Because this is Doctor Who, the natural assumption is that these glass people have sinister intent, but late in the episode, we find out that they don't - at which point, the Twelfth Doctor drops a meta line that cheekily pokes fun at the show's "all aliens are evil" trope:

"Oh, it's not an evil plan. I don't really know what to do when it isn't an evil plan."

Considering that the Doctor's life is essentially a battlefield, you have to imagine that, deep down, Twelve was secretly relieved that he didn't have to defeat any bad guys.