Doctor Who: 10 WEIRDEST Things That The Sonic Screwdriver Can Do
It's pretty handy, unless you need it to work on wood. It doesn't do wood.
Doctor Who may have seen countless companions come and go since it first aired back in 1963, but there is one particular piece of kit that the travelling Time Lord is rarely without: the sonic screwdriver.
To those who aren't fans of the show, those two words used in succession are probably somewhat confusing, and honestly, even for the most die hard of Whovians, it's still a strange and amusing concept.
The sonic screwdriver has long been a staple of the Time Lord's adventures, and over its long and storied history we've seen it serve an unbelievable numbers of purposes.
While some of its uses - emitting sound waves, breaking glass and picking locks, to name but a few - make a fair amount of sense when you consider the device's name, there are a handful of others that demand we accept that the words "sonic screwdriver" in fact mean "whatever the Doctor needs at any given moment".
Short of the TARDIS, the Doctor's sonic screwdriver is probably the Time Lord's most iconic accessory (scarfs and bow ties notwithstanding, obviously), so let's take a look at some of the weirdest things it's ever done.
10. Scan Everything
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Before anyone says it, yes, we know. It's long been established as one of the sonic's primary uses, but can we all just take a moment to really think about how strange it really is?
Over the years, the Doctor's screwdriver has been used to determine the origin, age or composition of almost any given object, as well as mapping the distance something has travelled, or just generally learning any relevant (or irrelevant, come to think of it) information about whatever's being scanned.
While the gleaning of such information has proved invaluable to the Doctor over the years, the fact that the Time Lord's go-to move upon discovering anything new is to point a screwdriver at it is one of the strangest - and perfectly characteristic - things about the show.
Now that we've established what a weird function it is, let's just take a moment to appreciate the Doctor's years of scanning, and everything we've learned as a direct result of the screwdriver's infinite wisdom.