Doctor Who: 10 Major Ways The Doctor Affected Human History

While running around alien spaceships is a common sight in the show, it's the historical adventures that make for some of the most fascinating Doctor Who stories.

Sure, it's fun to see the Doctor exploring the sleek and shiny cities of the distant future, but there's a unique and arguably more interesting appeal in watching depictions of events that actually happened, in getting to know characters that actually existed.

To that end, Doctor Who has been all over the place. Victorian London, the Stone Age, Nazi Germany, ancient Rome, 1580s Venice, the North Pole: the show has visited many notable time periods and locations over the years, and this has resulted in the Doctor becoming directly involved with Earth history on more than one occasion.

From causing famous historical disasters to assisting some of the most pivotal points in the evolution of society, not a single series goes by without the Doctor interfering with human history in some way. And while this historical galavanting isn't always too notable, the Doctor has played with the past in some major ways every now and then.

One of the only examples of the Doctor actually utilising a historical event to help them win the day, the bad guys in Series 6's blockbuster two-part opening were defeated with a little help from Neil Armstrong... and his foot.

With the Silents having infested pretty much every last corner of the Earth, the Doctor devises a surprisingly violent way to deal with them, for someone who claims to be a pacifist: he convinces humanity to mercilessly slaughter them.

That's uh... that's one way of doing it.

With a clip of a Silent saying, "You should kill us all on sight" spliced into the broadcast of the moon landing, any human who watches that iconic historical moment will now see a Silent instructing people to kill them. This clip could be in the real broadcast too, and we'd never even know it. Spooky. If you ever feel a murderous urge out of nowhere, that might be it.

Did the Eleventh Doctor care that he'd basically turned billions of humans into murderers? Since he was snogging River immediately afterwards, probably not. But hey, his plan was an effective one!