Comic Book / Doctor Who (Titan): Tenth Doctor

The Tenth Doctor comics were one of Titan's three initial on-going series of Doctor Who comics, and like the other three were published from 2014 to 2018 and divided into three "years" similar to TV seasons. They were almost entirely written by Nick Abadzis, most famous for Laika, and the main artist was initially Elena Casagrande and later Georgia Sposito.

The series was officially set during the "year of specials" in the broadcast year 2009, between "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End" and "The End of Time" when the Tenth Doctor had no ongoing TV companion. His initial companion in the comics was Gabby Gonzalez, a young woman from contemporary New York City. Gabby's best friend Cindy Wu initially refused to join them, but became a full companion from Year Two on. Year Three saw the comic's recurring character Anubis promoted to full companion with Gabby and Cindy. The comic was not fully serialised, but saw a number of ongoing plotlines, such as Gabby's increasingly-apparent psionic powers, and Anubis's relationship with his father, Fourth Doctor TV villain Sutekh.

In 2021, Dan Slott was announced to be writing a miniseries featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha. After much Schedule Slip, it was finally published as a short stand-alone graphic novel in 2023, with the title Once Upon a Time Lord.

This series contains the following tropes:

• Abstract Eater: In Once Upon a Time Lord, the Pyromeths feed on stories.
• Adventure Archaeologist: In Once Upon a Time Lord, Dr. Rana Rashad.
• Alien Abduction: The Monaxi kidnap people from different worlds to sell into slavery.
• Ambiguous Gender: The Shan'tee have no actual gender, but humans tend to assign them to them because of their preconceptions. The Shan'tee known as "Smokey" is perceived by Gabby as male and Allegra as female.
• Animal Espionage: The birds in the Monaxi gladiator arena are robot spies.
• Art Shift: Sections of "Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth" are in mock-Chinese art style.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: It's revealed that all the Osirans except Anubis did this after Sutekh was imprisoned. Anubis plans to do this, but his technology is too degraded. The Osiran cultists were under the impression that he would take them with him, and are not happy when he has no intention of doing so.
• Auction of Evil: The "Ebonite Rooms" in "The Fountains of Forever" are an underground auction room for alien artefacts.
• Bad Boss: The Minaxi leader Iktra treats his subordinate Vozmorth very abusively and finally tries to shoot the Doctor even though the shot will also kill him.
• Band Land: When discussing possible travel destinations in "The Infinite Corridor", Cindy suggests they visit the "planet of the living musical instruments". The Doctor shoots the idea down, saying that he's "Been there. Too recently."
• Bittersweet Ending: "Music Man". Clearly more bitter than sweet, as the Doctor and Gabby end up defeating the Nocturne, but it was only achieved by the sacrifice of the musician Roscoe, in an attempt to save his sister's life. When Gabby is forced to tell Cindy this (as Cindy was in a relationship with him and wasn't there at the time), Cindy immediately puts two and two together. The last shot of the story is Gabby and Roscoe's sister trying and failing to comfort a crying Cindy, all while the Doctor stands forlornly, staring at Roscoe's corpse and his broken trumpet.
  Gabby POV captions: Now I understand why he doesn't ever really explain. Sometimes, you just can't find the words.
• Black Bug Room: The Paranestene consigns the Doctor, Gabby, Cindy, and Noobis to one in "Breakfast At Tyranny's".
• Bottomless Pit: Zhe's "apprentice" turns a stairwell into a Bottomless Pit to trap the Doctor.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Mr. Ebonite brainwashes various characters, including Gabby, to force them to fight each other in "Arena of Fear".
• Brown Note: The Nocturnes in "The Singer Not the Song" are sentient Brown Notes capable of transforming other beings into themselves.
• The Bus Came Back: A Nocturne returns as the antagonist in "The Jazz Monster" and "Music Man", after a whole fleet of them were also antagonists in the opening Year Two story, "The Singer Not the Song".
• Call-Back:
  • The Doctor says that Zhe trained in block-transfer computation on Logopolis, and later says that he only encountered autonomously sentient block-transfer constructs once before.
  • When Gabby is empowered by the "apprentice", she briefly comes into telepathic contact with the Ood collective.
  • Ten is briefly transformed back into the Ninth Doctor by a time anomaly in "The Fountains of Forever".
  • In "The Fountains of Forever", the Doctor says this when Vivian asks the Doctor to bring Dorothy Bell back to life:
  The Doctor: I can't. Everything has it's time...
  • In "Sins of the Father", the Time Sentinel and its servitors appear to be the same kind of being as Shayde from the Doctor Who Magazine comics continuity. The Sentinel later refers to an "Aspect Black" having been corrupted after spending time as a "lone operator", confirming this.
  • Sutekh's Legion of Doom includes entities that resemble a God of Ragnarok from "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy", the Destroyer from "Battlefield", the Beast from "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit", and the King Nocturne.
  • In "Revolving Doors" the Tenth Doctor's sad memories of all three companions he picked up in London are recalled and used as weapons against him.
  • The same story begins with an activation of the TARDIS's randomiser from Season Seventeen.
  • In Once Upon a Time Lord, the Doctor's ally in the Realm of the Dead is the werewolf from "Bad Wolf", who sees his own death as a Mercy Kill and is grateful to the Doctor.
• Call-Forward:
  • When Zhe's "apprentice" accuses him of being a critic, Ten says that critics wear bow ties, and then muses that bow ties aren't a bad look.
  • A somewhat grim one when the Doctor tells Vivian that he can't prevent Dorothy from dying:
  Vivian: Don't give me that. You think that, when your time comes, you'll want to go?
  • "The Singer Not the Song" contains multiple references to the Arc Words "No song lasts forever" from Ten's final stories.
  • In "The Good Companion", the Time Sentinel turns out to be worried that the Doctor will break the lock on the Time War.
  • Gabby has visions of Clara and Bill among the Doctor's other companions.
• Chekhov's Gift: At the end of "The Singer Not the Song", a Carbonadium Box (a music box that changes its tune depending on the listener's mood) is given to Gabby as a gift from visiting Wupatki. This device proves important for two occasions, with the first one being when the Doctor uses it to pull a "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight for Gabby (as she is under the control of Mr. Ebonite) in "Arena of Fear" and the second consisting of Gabby activating it with a trumpet in order to weaken the Nocturne in "Music Man".
• Clones Are People, Too: The Paranestene's clones of Cindy achieve individuality and pull a Heel–Face Turn.
• The Coats Are Off: In "The Singer Not the Song", Ten takes his overcoat off as soon as he discovered that there's actual trouble on Wupatki.
• Continuity Cavalcade:
  • Gabby's drawings of the people they meet on Ouloumos include the Giant Robot, a Quark, an Ice Warrior, and an Alpha Centaurian.
  • In Once Upon a Time Lord, the Realm of the Dead is inhabited by representatives of every kind of alien species the Doctor has killed members of.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Doctor mentions Cameca when he and Gabby discuss the Aztecs' magical use of mirrors.
  • American newscaster Trinity Wells, who regularly appeared in Davies-era TV stories, appears on TV to describe events in the contemporary-Earth stories.
  • In "The Weeping Angels of Mons", the Doctor talks about meeting H G Wells.
  • In "The Fountains of Forever", the alien hairdryer from "Dalek" is being sold at the Ebonite Rooms, still mistaken for a weapon.
  The Doctor: Lots of money for Van Statten's old hairdryer.
  • "The Fountains of Forever" includes a mention of Department C4, a malevolent British government black ops organisation from various Big Finish Doctor Who dramas.
  • In the "Laundro-Room of Doom" short, various past Doctor and companion costumes can be seen in the TARDIS wardrobe room.
  • In "The Singer Not the Song", Ten was trying to take Gabby to The Eye of Orion.
  • In "Cindy, Cleo, and the Magic Sketchbook", Gabby finds Turlough's old sketchbooks in the TARDIS.
  • Gabby's psychic textbook warns Gabby of a coming evil analogous to The Beast, the Destroyer, and the Vampires.
  • In "Medicine Man", the Doctor talks about manipulation of humanity's history by the Jaggeroth, the Fendahl, and the Osirans.
  • Sunzberro in "Medicine Man" is a Terileptil, although nicer than the ones the Fifth Doctor met in seventeenth-century Heathrow.
  • The Monaxi are said to have supplied gladiators to the early Time Lords for the Game of Rassilon.
  • "The Wishing Well Witch" contains a reference to Stockbridge, the English village which is the scene of alien events in various Doctor Who Magazine comic strip stories.
  • In "Old Girl", the Doctor alludes to the cat nuns from "New Earth".
  • In "Breakfast at Tyranny's", the Paranestene briefly torments the Doctor by making him hallucinate himself as an Auton, with the sonic screwdriver as his Arm Cannon.
  • The TARDIS showroom in the Doctor's hallucination in "Breakfast at Tyranny's" includes the white classical column form assumed by the Master's TARDIS in "Logopolis" and "Castrovalva".
  • The wasted Nestene duplicates of the Doctor look like his previous regenerations.
  • In "Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth", the Doctor says that he once lived in China for a time without access to the TARDIS, which may be a reference to "Marco Polo".
  • In "Vortex Butterflies", Gabby refers to Turlough, Izzy, Fitz, Liv, Rose, and Donna.
  • The Twelfth Doctor says that Ten really doesn't want to know how old he is.
  • Sarah alludes to Davros accusing the Doctor of turning his companions into weapons in "Journeys' End".
  • Sarah refers to an evil android duplicate being created from her in "The Android Invasion".
  • In "The Good Companion", Zhe offers to get Gabby Manussan Salted Snakebite Strudel.
  • Cleo refers to the Doctor as Doctor Mysterio.
• Crazy-Prepared: In Once Upon a Time Lord, the Doctor has a prepared plan for what to do if a companion is captured by Pyromeths, which requires every single step in a lengthy chain to go off exactly as he anticipated.
• Creepy Changing Painting: Gabby's sketchbook changes to give Cindy messages, by implication because its pages are psychic paper.
• Creepy Child: In Once Upon a Time Lord, the Pyromeths initially manifest as these at the fete.
• Culture Justifies Anything: In "Echo", the Shreekers falsely claim that hunting the Echoes is an ancient cultural tradition.
• Dark Action Girl: Cleo, the very pragmatic and not very faith-driven Osiran cultist from "The Fountains of Forever".
• Defector from Decadence: Aspect Blue recognises that the rest of the Time Sentinel is becoming corrupted and helps the Doctor and friends.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: In "Music Man", walk-on people in the club are visibly horrified and disgusted to see that the Chinese-American Cindy and the black Roscoe are in a relationship.
• Didn't Think This Through: In "The Weeping Angels of Mons", the Angels start attacking soldiers during World War One because extra disappearances won't be noticed, only to end up with malnutrition because most of their prey had only weeks, days, or minutes to live.
• Downer Ending: "The Good Companion", the Year 3 finale. The Doctor uses the TARDIS to successfully stop the Time Sentinel's plan to regulate time, but at a severe price: Gabby doesn't get to the TARDIS in time, and ends up in the Twelfth Doctor's TARDIS. Since that Doctor realizes that it is Gabby, this means that she can never go back to the Tenth Doctor, or possibly any of her friends and family (if Ten told them about her fate). And Cindy will end up emotionally scarred over losing the girl who only recognized her feelings at the last moment.
• Dragon with an Agenda: The Para-Nestene's Red TARDIS is recruited as a servant by the Time Sentinel, but ends up corrupting and possessing it.
• Education Mama: Gabby's father acts like this to her, although it's only education that will be useful for his businesses.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Used by the Doctor, Gabby, and Noobis, and Master Wu Wei and his followers, in "Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth" to defeat the Paranestene's elemental monsters.
• Emotion Eater:
  • "Revolutions of Terror" features the good Pranavores and evil Cerebravores.
  • The Reach tries to use the Doctor's angst over his past Davies-era companions to escape into the main universe.
• The End... Or Is It?:
  • "The Weeping Angels of Mons" ends with an elderly Jamie visiting a war cemetery. As he and his family leave, his granddaughter, Gabriella, ends up tripping. She tells her family that she must have "tripped over a stupid stone or something", not knowing that she has actually tripped over a Weeping Angel's hand, sticking out of the grass...
  • The end of "Sins of the Father" hints that Anubis may be slipping into his father's more evil ways.
  "Horus and Sukteh. Am I more the one, or the other? Is the weight of my heart too light, or too heavy? Am I worthy to enter 'The Afterlife'? And if not - why not? What did Horus see that I cannot? I have an inkling now of how Sukteh felt. For him, the universe was a prison - the emptiness of the sky was no illusion... but a temptation. A philosophy. An aspiration to correct the imbalance of nature. Perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps the sky is not filled with light. Perhaps there is, after all, a purity in darkness."
• Enemy Without: Zhe's "apprentices".
• Energy Being:
  • The Shan'Tee are living musical tunes.
  • The Monaxi are part energy and part corporeal.
• Evil Knockoff: The Paranestene creates an evil copy of the TARDIS and multiple clones of Cindy, and assumes the Doctor's form in their climactic confrontation.
• Exact Words: The Osiran projection asks Colonel Münsterhausen if he wishes to go to the realm of the dead. When he says yes, the mummy robot holding him kills him via Neck Snap.
• Expy:
  • Father Monaghan in "The Weeping Angels of Mons", with his wartime conflicts of faith, has a lot of similarity to the Reverend Wainwright in "The Curse of Fenric".
  • The Time Sentinel's "aspects" have quite a bit in common with the Auditors of Reality in the Discworld series.
  • Admiral Skarrr and Troutanicus in Once Upon a Time Lord, are alien parodies of Captain Ahab and Moby-Dick.
• Fastball Special: Used by Noobis and Gabby in "Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth" to get Gabby into the Paranestene's fortress.
• Fatal Family Photo: In the Cold Open of "The Weeping Angels of Mons", Harry shows off a photo of his fiance shortly before being caught by an Angel.
• Floating Continent: Wupatki's "bridgeweb", a series of cities floating in the atmosphere of a gas planet.
• Flying Saucer: The Monaxi spacecraft look like this, copying the upper sections of their jellyfish-like bodies.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Downplayed since the Doctor is an alien time traveller, but at one point he offers Gabby the phone given to him by Martha since he had upgraded it. Gabby dismisses it as being ancient since it's a flip phone and doubts she can even text someone with it, reflecting how the majority of the Tenth Doctor's adventures took place between 2007 and 2010. The Doctor then briefly complains about this and says how his phone is used for more important things, like having an actual conversation as opposed to just texting.
• Foreshadowing: The constant references of butterflies, which hint at Gabby's block transfer powers that she gains in "Arena of Fear" due to her being possessed by Mr. Ebonite:
  • In "The Arts In Space", when one of Zhe's assistants transfers some of his power into Gabby, she sees black butterflies as well as events from the previous story, "Revolutions of Terror".
  • In "Spiral Staircase", Dorothy Bell tells Gabby this:
  "Look at you, all those possibilities and glowing things clustered around you! Thoughts like so many butterflies..."
• Fusion Dance: Dorothy Bell merges with the Key, a reality-warping Osiran AI device.
• Future Me Scares Me: The entity in "Vortex Butterflies" is a potential version of Gabby, empowered by her interactions with Zhe and the Osirans, and abandoned by the Doctor when she got powerful enough to scare him.
• Girl of the Week: Gabby develops a romantic attraction to Jamie, the soldier who survives "The Weeping Angels of Mons".
• Gladiator Games: The Monaxi force their captives into these.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Cerebravores were created by an alien culture as a weapon against their enemies, but they got loose and destroyed all life on the planet.
• Halloween Episode: The story where the Doctor meets Gabby has a gang of evil Emotion Eaters attacking New York during the Dia de los Muertos.
• Heroic BSoD: How well does the Doctor and Cindy react to seeing Anubis and revealing that he is the son of Sukteh? Cindy ends up fainting, and the Doctor has fallen to his knees, trying to comprehend this impossible fact. There is even a closeup of the Doctor's eye, to further hit the point home.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Both Captain Fairbairn and Father Monaghan in "The Weeping Angels of Mons".
  • Dorothy sacrifices her own life to send Sutekh back into limbo.
  • Crossland breaks out of the Reach's influence and sacrifices himself to save the world in "Revolving Doors".
• Homage: In Once Upon a Time Lord, Martha's first story has elements of Moby-Dick and her second has elements of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
• Homoerotic Subtext: There's a strong innuendo that Dorothy Bell and Vivian are more than just friends.
• Honey Trap: Noobis's girlfriend Siffhoni is actually a Time Sentinel manipulating him.
• How We Got Here: "The Singer Not The Song" begins with Gabby in danger of death as the research centre collapses.
  Gabby: Oh, Doctor... this time you're gonna be too late. It was so... so—
• Human Resources: The Paranestene created the Cindy clones from all the people who previously lived in the Valley of the Tiger.
• Human Subspecies: Both Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens sapiens appear in "Medicine Man".
• I Know What You Fear: The Cerebravores' main attack.
• I'm Mr. [Future Pop Culture Reference];
  • In "Music Man", the Doctor is outright using "Dr. Venkman" as an alias.
  • In "The Ghost Ship", the Doctor introduces Gabby and Cindy as "Artoo" and "Threepio".
  • Gabby introduces the Doctor to Captain Fairbairn as "Doctor Strange".
• Inevitable Mutual Betrayal: Sutekh views his allies merely as tools and kills most of them for lulz.
• Just Train Wrong: In "The Weeping Angels of Mons", the Angels send two soldiers back in time to a train near Dundee, just before it is destroyed with no survivors in the real Tay Bridge Disaster. The train interior is drawn correctly as a compartment carriage, but the corridor is much too wide. Externally, both the carriages and the locomotive look very, very American.
• Kick the Dog: An Angel sends Wullie and Joe back to nineteenth-century Scotland just in time for them to die in the Tay Bridge railway accident.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Inflicted by Mr. Ebonite on all the various people in his arena.
• Left Hanging: Titan ending the comic at Year Three means that there is no resolution to what happens after Gabby is separated from her friends and ends up in the Twelfth Doctor's TARDIS, and the comic never gets the chance to explain what caused the Doctor to be on his own again by "The End of Time". Logically losing Gabby might have been what caused the Doctor's companions, especially Cindy, to leave and optimistically this might mean that the Twelfth Doctor was able to return Gabby to her proper time. However since no clear explanation was given that means the comic ends on a depressing Downer Ending.
• Mad Artist: Zhe is simply neurotic rather than truly "mad", but it still means that her attempts to create sentient life by block-transfer computation go very wrong.
• Mind Rape: Suffered by the victims of the entity in "The Wishing Well Witch", which "consumes" parts of their mind leaving them insane in different ways.
• My Own Grampa: "Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth" implies that Cindy is descended from one of the clones that the Paranestene created of her in ancient China.
• Neglectful Precursors: Averted, it turns out that the Osirans took precautions to clean up after themselves when they ascended.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In "The Weeping Angels of Mons", the Angels turn out to have sent Shuggy back only about fifty years and a few miles. Leading to him turning up to rescue everyone else in a stolen German tank.
• Noodle Incident: The Doctor apparently helped the ancient Osirans defeat various enemies, including the Racnoss.
• Now or Never Kiss: In "The Weeping Angels of Mons", Gabby and Jamie kiss while, they think, blowing themselves and all the Angels to pieces with a stock of explosives. Only for the Doctor to materialise the TARDIS around them as the explosion goes off.
• Offing the Offspring: Sutekh tries to kill his own son, inevitably.
• One-Steve Limit: In "The Weeping Angels of Mons", the Doctor and Gabby team up with a Scottish soldier called Jamie. The similarity is alluded to.
• Pirate Parrot: Parodied in Once Upon a Time Lord, which has Cap'n Polly, a sapient parrot-like alien, as a stereotypical ship's captain, riding on the shoulder of a silent and apparently non-sapient humanoid robot.
• Pocket Dimension: Cindy is briefly trapped in one due to a TARDIS system failure in "The Infinite Corridor".
• Pocket Protector: Jack Harkness gave Erik a portable force field that protected him from Mr. Ebonite's weapon.
• Poke in the Third Eye: Happens to the psychic in "The Wishing Well Witch" when she sees the return of Sutekh in Cindy's future.
• The Power of Rock/Psychic Static: The best defence against the Cerebravores is your favourite song.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The Nocturnes possess various musicians in "Music Man".
• Race Lift: A flashback reveals that the incarnation of Borusa who was the Doctor's tutor was black in human terms.
• Rage Against the Heavens: The Osiran cultists are not happy to discover that their gods were Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and that the only one who is still present has no interest in rewarding them.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: Year 3. By the end, the Time Sentinels have been stopped, but Gabby ends up being separated from the Tenth Doctor, Cindy, Cleo and Anubis. After some shenanigans involving the Moment, she is transported back into the TARDIS... notably, the Twelfth Doctor's.
• Reality Warper: Zhe and her "apprentices", via block-transfer computation.
• Rebus Bubble: Briefly used in "Breakfast at Tyranny's" when Noobis breaks through the illusion to communicate with Cindy.
• Refuge in Audacity: In Once Upon a Time Lord, the Doctor's way of solving the Osirans' impossible riddle — he claims to have written the answer on his psychic paper, so the Osiran projection reads the (unstated) correct answer.
• Religion of Evil: Subverted - it turns out that although Namin was genuinely evil, most of the members of his religion were actually trying to keep Sutekh entrapped.
• Sacrificial Lion: When Erik tries to mortally harm Anubis out of anger at his faith being destroyed, Anubis's Seeker shoots his beam at Hanif, Erik's close friend who did literally nothing wrong in the previous two stories, as penance for Erik's actions.
• Scheherezade Gambit: Enforced in Once Upon a Time Lord, the Pyromeths force the people they kidnap to tell them stories to feed them, and kill them when they run out.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • It turns out that Sutekh escaped his apparent death by fleeing into the void.
  • The Reach is an alien criminal sealed in a pocket universe.
• Self-Duplication: The Shan'tee are capable of this in emergency.
• Sequel Episode: The end of "Spiral Staircase" is revealed to be a direct sequel to the Fourth Doctor TV story "Pyramids of Mars".
• Shout-Out:
  • The Doctor compares the Cerebravores to Zuul and himself to Peter Venkman.
  • In "The Weeping Angels of Mons", the Doctor recovers consciousness in a military field hospital and launches into a chorus of Edwin Starr's "War".
  • In "Echoes", the Doctor claims to have been present at the time of the events of King Kong.
  • In "The Fountains of Forever", FAB I from Thunderbirds can be seen parked outside the Ebonite Rooms.
  • Cindy confuses the Cerebravores with Cerebro from X-Men.
  • The Key that Dorothy merged with is also referred to as the "Hand of Sutekh" - a joking reference to a famous blooper in "Pyramids of Mars" when part of a member of the studio crew strayed into shot.
  • "Dogface", Dorothy's affectionate nickname for Anubis, refers to Dogfaces, a type of anthropomorphic character common in US comics and animation.
  • In "The Singer Not the Song", a research facility promoting communication between humans and sentient music is called the Presley Foundation, and one of the living tunes is nicknamed "Smokey" by humans, probably a reference to the great Motown singer and songwriter Smokey Robinson.
  • When confronting the mother Nocturne, the Doctor breaks into the music hall song "My Old Man's A Dustman".
  • "Music Man" contains a passing reference to a bandleader called "Morton" - presumably Jelly Roll Morton.
  • In "Music Man", the Chicago studio is called "Kayoh", which is a reference to the (later) music label Okeh.
  • In "Sins of the Father", Cindy makes a string of Star Wars jokes to cover up her fear of Anubis.
  • In "Revolving Doors", the Doctor alludes to "Break on Through to the Other Side" by The Doors.
  • In "The Good Companion", there is an exchange taken verbatim from The Empire Strikes Back, when Gabby ends up being unable to get to the TARDIS safely.
  Cindy: I love you!
  Gabby: I know.
  • Cindy's names for her clones include characters from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Love and Rockets, Star Wars, Star Trek: The Original Series, The Muppets, and The Ramones.
  • The Doctor names the Xerobian machine Marcie because it looks like a peanut and calls him sir.
  • In Once Upon a Time Lord, the alien beverage that tastes like ginger beer is a PG-rated nod to the Running Gag in The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy about every alien culture having a drink that phonetically sounds like "gin and tonic".
• The Siege: "The Weeping Angels of Mons" is a classic Base Under Siege story with a World War One British field hospital being attacked by Weeping Angels.
• Sinister Subway: The Doctor and Gabby are attacked by a Cerebravore while travelling on a subway train.
• Sole Survivor: In "The Ghost Ship", Captain Kelly is the only one of the ship crew to survive.
• Sound-Only Death: The guy who jumps off the subway train to escape the Cerebravore and lands on the third rail in "Revolutions of Terror".
• Swallowed Whole: In Once Upon a Time Lord, both the TARDIS and Admiral Skarrr's ship are swallowed by the giant fish Troutanicus.
• Swirly Energy Thingy: The Circle of Transcendence appears as this when the Time Sentinel uses it to threaten Aramuko to blackmail the Doctor.
• Take That!:
  • In Once Upon a Time Lord, the Pyromeths criticisms of Martha's stories are at times parodies of formulaic Hollywood storytelling structures, and at times parodies of criticisms of Doctor Who stories themselves by various fan factions.
  • The Doctor and Dr. Rashad make various derogatory remarks about the British Museum, an allusion to controversies at the time the story was written about the presence of various items of imperial loot in the museum.
• Take That, Critics!: The Tenth Doctor story in The Many Lives of Doctor Who has the Doctor encountering Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and helping her in her struggle against medical sexism, and is titled "Nurse Who?". In the real world "Nurse Who" was a sexist insult used by fandom misogynists to refer to the Thirteenth Doctor.
• Teaser-Only Character: Parodied and subverted in Once Upon a Time Lord — Admiral Scarrr is attacked by a monster at the beginning of Martha's first story, and the Pyromeths accuse her of poor storytelling by abandoning her apparent protagonist early on. Then subverted when it turns out he's still alive.
• Throwing Down the Gauntlet: Captain Fairbairn taking on a horde of Weeping Angels.
  "I'm Captain Douglas Fairbairn of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. My father fought the Zulu at Rorke's Drift, my great-grandfather marched with Wellington against Napoleon, and today I'm here to fight YOU!"
• Tortured Monster: The titular being in "The Wishing Well Witch", which is a gestalt of seven children from ancient Gallifrey who for unknown reasons were thrown alive into the Untempered Schism.
• Translator Microbes: Subverted in "Medicine Man", when the TARDIS has problems making some things said by the Doctor and Gabby comprehensible to Munmeth because his Stone Age culture hasn't developed those concepts or anything analogous to them yet.
• Trap Is the Only Option: Alluded to by the Doctor when he goes to rescue Gabby in "Revolving Doors".
• Turned Against Their Masters: Zhe's block-transfer "apprentices" end up manifesting her neuroses and attack her.
• Two Scenes, One Dialogue: Once Upon a Time Lord opens with a double-page spread, in which each panel has each of the Doctors in order (except War) until the Tenth explaining to a companion, in a continuous speech, what to do if they are captured by the Pyromeths.^note The First Doctor and someone off panel, the Second Doctor and Jamie, the Third Doctor and Jo, the Fourth Doctor and Leela, the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa, the Sixth Doctor and Frobisher, the Seventh Doctor and Ace, the Eighth Doctor and Molly, the Ninth Doctor and Rose, and the Tenth Doctor and Martha
• Villainous Rescue: Sutekh rescues Cindy from the King Nocturne, but only because he wants to kill her himself.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Gabby's father to her. He finally respects her when she saves New York from the Cerebravores.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In "The Weeping Angels of Mons", the fate of the wounded soldiers and nurses after the Angels attack is not shown, although it was probably unpleasant.
• World War I: The setting of "The Weeping Angels of Mons".
• Wham Shot:
  • At the end of the first part of "The Fountains of Forever", the Doctor is shot by a time reversing gun. In the process, he regenerates backwards... into his previous incantation.
  • The reveal of Anubis in "Spiral Staircase".
  • "Old Girl: Primeval" contains the return of Sutekh.
• The Worm That Walks: Mr. Ebonite turns out to be made of a multitude of duplicates of himself.
• You Are Number 6: The Paranestene assigns numbers instead of names to the Cindy clones to stop them developing individuality. It doesn't work.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In "The Ghost Ship", EarthCorp is using its more expendable employees as fodder for a weapons experiment.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Gabby blocks the Cerebravores from following the Doctor back to their homeworld through the portal.

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