The Doctor, the Doctor, the Doctor. So far they've:
- Inspired Shakespeare;
- Started the Great Fire of London;
- Accidentally inspired Nero to start the Fire of Rome:
- Made Mount Vesuvius erupt;
- and even ensured that the "spark" that kicked off the development of life would take place.
- And, going with the theme of Watergate being mentioned, the Doctor, very clearly, tells Nixon to keep his tape on constantly, so he never forgets anything. Now, who knows what ACTUALLY happened in those missing 18 minutes?
- "Rose" has the Doctor present in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated, the eruption of Krakatoa, and is reported to have told a family not to board the RMS Titanic, and the Ninth Doctor later remarked he ended up clinging to an iceberg.
- The First Doctor was partly responsible for the loss of the Marie Celeste, though the ship was only abandoned due to the Daleks pursuing him. Funnily enough, despite being one of the earliest examples of this trope in the show, this account would be disputed by several expanded universe stories which gave their own take on the incident.
- Had a key part in Carmen. Playing the triangle.The Doctor: Okay, I got buried in the mix.
- In fact, if it happened at all, it was probably the Doctor. And it's not just them; their companions get in on the act, too:
- Adric's attempt to divert a spaceship which the Cybermen had set on a collision course with Earth resulted in it being catapulted back in time, where it crashed into the planet and exploded, wiping out the dinosaurs — and Adric.
- Martha was seen inspiring some Shakespearean poetry.
- Donna gives Agatha Christie a few ideas for her novels.
- Amy specifically covered Vincent van Gogh's garden in sunflowers to trigger the creation of a rather famous painting.
- Not to mention the side character who killed Jack the Ripper. Side character. And she's the in-universe inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, too.
- In an Expanded Universe comic, Rory saves the life of Ian Fleming, inspiring the creation of James Bond. The comics have also established that Clara was Leonardo da Vinci's original model for The Mona Lisa.
- "Rosa" has a more serious example than the norm for this show: The Thirteenth Doctor and her companions, Ryan, Graham, and Yaz, while thwarting a time traveller trying to derail the start of the American Civil Rights Movement, all wind up on the same bus as Rosa Parks. And the Doctor, Graham, and Yaz (who, although of Pakistani descent, was counted as white by the bus driver) have to stay on the bus to ensure there are enough "white" passengers for Rosa to be asked to move, something that all three of them are deeply uncomfortable with.
- The Enigma of the Missing Planet, a feature in Terry Nation's Dalek Annual 1978 suggests that the original fifth planet of the solar system was moved out of its orbit by some "super intelligent life form" that found a way to motivate the planet out of its orbit, or that it was destroyed in one of the great Dalek Wars.
- The DWM comic Stop That TARDIS! has the Seventh Doctor team up with a pair of detectives to catch the Meddling Monk; ironically, the pursuit causes three historical mysteries found in a book read by the one of the detectives. First, a detective uses a grenade which causes the Tunguska Explosion of 1908, then the Monk's TARDIS takes the form of an iceberg which crashes into the Titanic in 1912, causing it to implode and create the Bermuda Triangle in 1945.
- The Battles in Time magazine's Dalek Wars feature has a Dalek saucer crash in the 1490s and be the source of the Bermuda Triangle, preying on visitors through the centuries.
- Big Finish Doctor Who:
- In Son of the Dragon, Erimem's intervention prevents Vlad Tepes from being killed during The Night Battle.
- The Second-Oldest Question ends with the implication that the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa have just created the concept of "community service" as a punishment.
- In the Eleventh Doctor graphic novel The Dalek Project, the Daleks go back through Earth's history not necessarily to interfere but to study it, specifically how humans make warfare. Catching up with them in World War I, the Doctor does ponder if they could have created the conflict by conditioning Gavrilo Princip to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but finds nothing to substantiate this theory.
- Doctor Who (Titan) has done this a couple of times:
- In an Eleventh Doctor story, it is told that the vision at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge which converted Emperor Constantine to Christianity was a combination of a crashing Cyberman spaceship and an illusion that the Doctor created to drive the Cybermen away.
- In a Twelfth Doctor story, a character in nineteenth-century England known as Charlotte is revealed to be Charlotte Brontë, with Clara and the Doctor and their relationship influencing Jane and Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre.
- Empire of the Daleks, a short comic printed in Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe, indicates that the Daleks were at least partly responsible for the Roman Emperor Caligula's descent into madness in their attempt to control his mind and the world with it. The Daleks abandon the plan when Caligula grows more and more unhinged.
- Elsewhere, the book suggests that the Daleks had a hand in the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, as well as the English Civil War's fateful Battle of Edgehill in 1642.
- An installment of DWM's Brief Encounters features Berenyi, a renegade Time Lord who engineers timeline alterations which become historical events. After plotting the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, she is then hired by a future human to craft the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
