Star Trek Can’t Stop Hinting It’s Actually Connected To Doctor Who
Could this ever really happen?
The Season 3 finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has come and gone, and in it, several timey-wimey notions of inverted cause-and-effect drive the central narrative. In fact, if you squint, aspects of “New Life and New Civilizations” feel inspired not just by beloved Next Generation writing, but also, by the paradoxes of Doctor Who.
Thematically, the story of Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano) has a lot in common with Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) in Doctor Who’s 2005 finale, “The Parting of the Ways.” But, there’s another Easter egg in the SNW Season 3 finale that seems to, again, suggest the canons of Star Trek and Doctor Who are linked.
Mild spoilers ahead.
Pelia (Carol Kane), a long-lost companion of the Doctor?
At the start of “New Life and New Civilizations,” before the primary plot gets going, Pelia (Carol Kane) offhandedly mentions, “Remind me to tell you about the time-traveling Doctor I once knew...”
Now, Pelia is over 5000 years old, and has made claims that have lived on Earth throughout nearly all of human history. Her species, the Lanthanites, are unusually long-lived, and when La’an (Christina Chong) and Kirk (Paul Wesley) met Pelia in the early 21st century, she looked to be about the same age as she is in the 23rd. The point is, for Pelia, a century is the blink of an eye.
Clearly this gives her something in common with the Doctor from Doctor Who, but Star Trek has introduced other long-lived aliens who might have a connection to Time Lord before. Guinan’s species, the El-Aurians, are also very long-lived, and in a 2012 IDW comic book crossover between The Next Generation and Doctor Who, it was implied that Guinan was aware of the the 11th Doctor.
That said, for both Trek and Who, the comic book adventures and crossovers aren’t strictly canon, meaning, that Doctor Who Easter eggs in Strange New Worlds are simply a kind of fan fiction, or hat-tipping.
But will it end there? In 2024, when the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) mentioned that he and Ruby (Millie Gibson) should visit the Star Trek universe, Who showrunner Russell T Davies indicated he hoped it would actually happen at some point, saying to Inverse that the Doctor talking about Star Trek as a real universe was “a deliberate shift.”
Now, in 2025, Strange New Worlds has referenced Who outright twice; once with the appearance of the TARDIS in Episode 6, “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” and now again, in the finale, with Pelia talking about her “time-traveling Doctor” friend.
Logistically, the future of Doctor Who is unclear, insofar as a new season hasn’t been confirmed by the BBC or Disney+. Meanwhile, Strange New Worlds will end with Season 5, likely sometime in 2027. Will Whovian and Trekkie dreams of a crossover perish as the brutal reality of entertainment business dealings marches on? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Just by mentioning the Doctor outright in Strange New Worlds, it seems that Trek has officially claimed the Time Lord as part of its canon. And if that’s true, from a certain point of view, Doctor Who created Star Trek, and maybe, vice versa.
