Doctor Who: 15 Cool Details Peter Harness Just Revealed About The Zygon Invasion

6. Clara's Dream Checks Are A Reference To Last Christmas

Doctor Who The Zygon Inversion dream checks Truth or Consequences
BBC/Twitter: @mrpeterharness

The second half of this story, The Zygon Inversion, begins with Clara waking up in her apartment. However, this isn't her normal reality: she's been taken over by a Zygon, and thus, is trapped in some sort of subconscious dream state.

Fortunately though, Clara has been trapped in a dream state before, so she knows exactly what to do in this situation.

In 2014's Last Christmas, Clara and the Doctor are attacked by Dream Crabs, which cause their targets to dream. At one point in this episode, the characters deduce that they're asleep by noticing that random words in their base manuals actually spell out a coherent sentence, just one of the few "dream checks" we see throughout the story.

In The Zygon Inversion, Clara utilises a similar dream check to help her at the start of the episode. She begins to notice oddities around her apartment, such as the toothpaste being labelled "this is toothpaste", and her alarm clock being wrong. So, she checks a nearby newspaper, to see if the words make any sense for a normal paper. They don't, of course, informing her that she's dreaming.

According to Harness, this moment was scripted in as a direct nod to Last Christmas.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!