Doctor Who

Season 12

Spyfall: Part One

1. This is the first two parter of Chris Chibnall's run as showrunner.
2. Lenny Henry (Daniel Barton) previously played an alternative version of the Seventh Doctor in The Lenny Henry Show: Episode #2.5 (1985).
3. The sniper rifle shown at the start of this episode is a bbgun/airsoft copy of the Barrett M82 made by the company Snow Wolf.
4. The name of the big company in California is Vor. Voro is Latin for "devour", "destroy", "overwhelm".
5. The Master's TARDIS - or rather its exterior disguise - resembles a typical house in the Australian bush until the climax when it takes flight, and it is revealed as an homage to Dorothy's house in The Wizard of Oz (1939) with the Master as the Wizard, and of course the nickname for Australia is Oz. Note that even the interior of this house is part of that TARDIS's exterior disguise generated by its Chameleon Circuit, so the Doctor didn't actually land her TARDIS inside the Master's TARDIS. It was shown some years earlier how this arrangement can be deceptively large in Doctor Who: Hell Bent (2015), with another TARDIS whose exterior disguise included the interior of an American diner.
6. First meeting of the 13th Doctor and the 10th Master.
7. To keep Sacha Dhawan's appearance in this episode a secret, let alone the fact that he was playing the Master, he was digitally removed from promotional materials.
8. This episode shows the results, for the first time since the series' return in 2005, of the Master's Tissue Compression Eliminator.
9. When Control is shot he says, "Oh!" before dying.
10. The scarf that Daniel Barton is wearing in the Vox HQ is long like the fourth Doctor's, but it's Tardis blue and has Tardis windows as the pattern. Seems like that's a clue to the big reveal at the end of this episode.

Spyfall: Part Two

1. Among those pictured on the Master's psychic map as the most significant contributors to the advancement of human computer science are Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Alan Turing OBE FRS.
2. As mentioned in the episode, Ada Lovelace was paralyzed for a time as a child. However, it was following a case of measles.
3. This episode takes place in 2020, 1834 and 1943.
4. Sacha Dhawan (The Master) plays the original director (Waris Hussein) on the docu-drama about Doctor Who, An Adventure in Space and Time.
5. Lenny Henry (Daniel Barton) previously played an alternative version of the Seventh Doctor in The Lenny Henry Show: Episode #2.5 (1985).
6. The Master asking the Doctor if he had apologized for Jodrell Bank is a callback to Doctor Who: Logopolis: Part Four (1981), when the Fourth Doctor climbed on the radar dish to sabotage the Master's plan to use a replica of the Pharos Project and send a signal into space, which would've wiped the universe. It was the moment when the Fourth Doctor fell from the dish and regenerated to his fifth incarnation.
7. The WW2 portion of this adventure was set in 1943 - later that year, Noor Inayat Khan was arrested by the Nazis; and once the SS intelligence agency was done with the brave woman, she was executed at Dachau concentration camp in 1944.
8. When the Master says "win, win, win", he counts in the German way with his thumb as the first number, indicating he has adopted the mannerisms to pass as a German.

Orphan 55

1. As of January 2020, this episode has the lowest IMDB user rating of any Doctor Who episode, including the original series.
2. Much of the dialogue here has been replaced in post-production, especially in scenes around the transport vehicle - where lines are "spoken" by actors who are facing away from the camera, moving rapidly across the shot, or just not visible at all.
3. The cat-human character calls herself "Hyphen with a 3". The script and subtitles write this as "Hyph3n" and the character explains the 3 is between the second h and n when questioned by The Doctor, but it could also be written as "-3", ":-3" being an emoticon for a cat's face.

Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror

1. In real life, Tesla did believe that Mars was inhabited and tried many experiments to communicate with the people there.
2. Nikola Tesla, an ethnic Serb, was born in Smiljan in the Austrian Empire, in what is present-day Croatia. Goran Visnjic, who plays the character, is Croatian.
3. Robert Glenister played Major Salenteen in Peter Davison's last story as The Fifth Doctor, "The Caves of Androzani", over 35 years earlier.
4. Paul Kasey's 37th appearance in Doctor Who.
5. Goran Visnjic is the second actor from "ER" to appear on the series, the first being Alex Kingston (River Song in this series, and Dr. Elizabeth Corday alongside Visnjic's Dr. Luka Kovac on ER).
6. Anjli Mohindra, who appears as Queen Skithra, previously played Rani on the spin off show The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007). One episode featured Bradley Walsh who plays Graham in this show.
7. Goran Visnjic previously played time traveler and antagonist Garcia Flynn on the American television show "Timeless" (2016-2018).
8. Edison's bet and his refusal to pay as he claimed he was only joking is based on a real experience. Tesla's attack on Edison is based on the fact that Edison was mainly famous due to his patents. Many of his experiments were either done by his staff or taking existing technology and changing it. Even the famous claim of being the inventor of the light bulb isn't true, he just created a new filament for it. Edison's battle over AC vs DC was very real. He even sponsored the electrocutions of animals, including an elephant to illustrate how dangerous Tesla's version was. The darkest part of the tale is Edison's lab made the first electric chair using AC. Wardenclyffe was a real place and was intended to be used to send wireless electricity until Westinghouse pulled funding.

Fugitive of the Judoon

1. The Judoon leader is named "Pol-Kon-Don". This is a tribute to BBC online producer Paul Condon, who died in 2019 and was a huge fan of Doctor Who.
2. The Doctor's line "A platoon of Judoon. Near the moon." mirrors a similar line spoken by the tenth Doctor in Doctor Who: Smith and Jones (2007) ("Judoon platoon upon the moon...").
3. As the Doctor is talking to Ruth in the cathedral after the Jodoon fight, there is a rainbow pattern that appears behind the Doctor from sunlight through a cathedral window. Unlike her shirt, the colors are in the correct spectral order (red, orange, green, blue, violet).
4. In order to keep it a secret that he was filming his appearance in this episode, John Barrowman faked a house renovation in Cardiff. He later went so far that, in order to keep up the ruse, he ended up renovating the house for real.
5. Marks 10 years since Captain Jack appeared on the show. His last appearance was in the 2010 episode Doctor Who: The End of Time: Part Two (2010), which marked the end of David Tennant as the Doctor. John Barrowman continued to play Captain Jack Harkness on the Doctor Who series spinoff Torchwood (2006) from 2006-2011.
6. Marks the first appearance of Jo Martin as The Doctor and the first Doctor portrayed by a black actor.
7. Ruth uses the original acronym "Time and Relative Dimension in Space" for "TARDIS", like it was first explained by Susan in Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child (1963). Later in the series the acronym was changed to "Dimensions" (plural).
8. This is the third multi-Doctor story within Doctor Who's revival, the others being Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor (2013) and Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time (2017). However, if one counts Doctor Who: Time Crash (2007), the short where the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) and the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) met, then this would be the fourth.
9. The Alliance was first mentioned in Steven Moffat's Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens (2010) 10 years ago.

Praxeus

1. The patch on the arm of the astronaut that reads 'Centry Mission IV: Lang, Haywood, Pattillo' is a nod to Ryan Haywood and Jack Pattillo of the gaming entertainment group Achievement Hunter. At the time of filming of the episode, Achievement Hunter was airing gameplay episodes of a Minecraft mod pack entitled 'Galacticraft'. This was confirmed by the patches graphic designer Benjamin Davis on twitter following the airing of the episode.
2. On the original airing, Creature Design was incorrectly credited to Ray Holman. It has been corrected to Millennium FX on the BBC iPlayer copy.

Can You Hear Me?

1. Zellin mentions that he is an Immortal, like the Eternals, the Guardians, and the Celestial Toymaker. All of those beings are Immortals that the Doctor has met in his previous incarnations.
2. First title to have a question mark.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati

1. It turns out that the Doctor's psychic paper has as little effect upon Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, as it did nine seasons before upon William Shakespeare.
2. There's a neat homage to the show's 2005 revival when Mary and Byron discuss the 13th Doctor's accent, and Polidori suggests that she's from The North (of England) - since famously Rose Tyler asked the 9th Doctor how he could be an alien, when he sounds like he's from The North, only to learn that "Lots of planets have a North."
3. Graham makes an homage to Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" when first meeting Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, saying "it is a truth universally acknowledged" before he is interrupted. The rest of the quote is "it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." "Pride and Prejudice" had been written only three years before, in 1813.
4. The Doctor makes a reference to Lord Byron's daughter Ada. Ada was a character in an episode 2 this season Spyfall: Part 2.
5. This episode takes place in June 1816.
6. The Doctor, describing what the Cybermen do to people, says "I won't lose someone to that again." A clear allusion to previous companion, Bill Potts, who did get turned into a Cyberman.
7. Mary describes the Lone Cyberman as a "modern Prometheus." This was the subtitle of the original 'Frankenstein' novel, though in that case it referred not the creature but the doctor who created it.

Ascension of the Cybermen

1. Julie Graham, who plays Ravio, also plays Ruby White in "Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith", a two parter in the spinoff show The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007).

The Timeless Children

1. The Doctor and the Master arrive upon the desolate ruins of Gallifrey and the Master says, Look upon my works, Doctor, and despair". In 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the sonnet 'Ozymandias' which contained the line, "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair." The Doctor had met Shelley just two episodes before, in The Haunting of Villa Diodati.
2. When the Doctor's regenerations are flashing through her mind, a sequence from the serial Doctor Who: The Brain of Morbius: Part One (1976) is included, which showed regenerations of the Doctor that preceded the one played by William Hartnell. In the next serial, Doctor Who: The Seeds of Doom: Part One (1976), it was established that Time Lords have only twelve regenerations, so that element of canon was discarded for 44 years until the revelations of this episode made it possible for both serials to be accurate.
3. When introducing the 'Cyber-Masters', the Master says: "For Gallifrey. For the Time Lords. For the end of the universe itself." This mirrors Rassilon at the end of The End of Time part 1 declaring: "For Gallifrey. For victory. For the end of time itself."
4. At the end of this episode, The Thirteenth Doctor mirrors the Tenth Doctor's reaction by saying "What!?"
5. The Doctor, according to this episode, is the Timeless child. She was first seen as a female child, and had her memories erased after several regenerations.
6. The prison in which the Doctor is held captive was quickly assumed by fans to be Shada, which first appeared in Doctor Who: Shada (2017). However, this was neither confirmed nor denied.

Revolution of the Daleks

1. This special was filmed in October 2019 and aired on January 1, 2021.
2. Rehashes the "Have you had work done? - You can talk!" exchange between the Doctor and Jack Harkness, from the first time Harkness met a regenerated (Tenth) Doctor, then played by David Tennant. In its initial use, the exchange was a bit of a personal jab at Barrowman for actually having had "work done" to himself at the time, but it is unconfirmed if the same applies here or if it simply serves to establish some sort of a humorous trend for whenever Harkness teams up with a regenerated Doctor.
3. When the Doctor is about to tell herself a bedtime story, she is reciting 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'.
4. Jack Robertson (Chris Noth) is said to be called "the American Mike Ashley". Similar to Robertson, Mike Ashley is a British billionaire entrepreneur known for starting in sporting goods and branching out to buying companies such as department stores.
5. Also rehashes the "where did that weapon come from" gag, again referring to Jack Harkness, from his appearance in "Bad Wolf" (2005).
6. The first three people exterminated by the Daleks are all wearing red tops. This is a nod to a running gag in the Star Trek franchise, in which unidentified crew members in red shirts would be killed off.
7. Last appearance of Graham and Ryan.
8. Harkness' poignant speech on how the Doctor's companions "...don't get to choose when it stops" is rather heftily undermined at the end, where a part of the Doctor's 'fam' does indeed get to do precisely that and just leave without issues. It isn't the first time that has happened either with a 'regular' companion of the Doctor. Martha, for instance, of the Tenth Doctor's era did just the same and simply walked away.
9. After the episode aired, a small clip was shown that announced John Bishop as the next companion.