Ship Tease in Doctor Who.
- First Doctor companions Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright are obviously very close but nothing ever explicitly comes from it, at least in the show itself, though the Expanded Universe suggests that they eventually got married, and this was finally confirmed in on-screen canon in the spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures in "Death of the Doctor"). Particularly painful teasing includes the scene in "The Romans" where Barbara checks out his Gorgeous Period Dress, talks about how splendid he looks, and then we get a scene of her doing his hair. There's also this
◊ from "The Keys of Marinus". - Steven gets two non-explicit Girls of the Week — one in the second half of "The Ark" and one in "The Savages" — whose relationships with him are handled in this way. He gets another one in "The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve", and the fact they spend several days together resulted in fan theories that he left her pregnant (she apparently had descendants with the same surname as her). There's also a lot between him and Dodo, such as how the citizens of "The Ark" tell legends about them being a "young couple", Dodo's extreme jealousy when Steven plays piano for an attractive female bar singer in "The Gunfighters", and the way Steven embraces her before leaving the TARDIS team in "The Savages".
- Jamie and Victoria are practically made of this: He heads off to rescue her from the Daleks after just seeing her painting (technically her mother, but there's a Strong Family Resemblance) and may have been responsible for convincing her to ditch her Victorian dress for something more... modern. By "The Ice Warriors", she seems jealous of him eyeing up the girl technicians, and he responds by suggesting she try on one of their outfits; by "The Enemy of the World" everyone just assumes they're a couple and they don't seem in a hurry to correct them. When "Fury from the Deep" has him practically stricken on finding her apparently dead, then they share a tear-stricken farewell before spending one last night under the same roof before parting for good, we're pretty much in Did They or Didn't They? territory.
- The Third Doctor and Liz, mostly by way of generous innuendo. He flirts with her on their first meeting and to get her to steal the TARDIS key from the Brigadier in "Spearhead from Space" (if she gets the TARDIS key for him he'll show her the TARDIS is "big enough"?), "The Silurians" opens with a sequence of him explaining to her that even though his car looks old it still has a lot of charm (while lying on the floor looking up her miniskirt), he strokes her hair while she's looking after him in "The Ambassadors of Death"... There could even have been payoff for this one as Liz was treated as his equal, but the character got unfortunately Put on a Bus to Hell at the end of the season.
- The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane:
- Even crosses over into Did They or Didn't They? in the Expanded Universe — the short story Crimson Dawn contains a short sequence of Leela showing off (and bragging about) her scars to the Doctor, who responds by baring his chest to her and blaming the non-existent damage on "Sarah Jane Smith — she broke both of my hearts".
- In "The Ark in Space", Sarah Jane has been forcibly put into a coma state by an automated system on a Sleeper Ship, at a time when the Fourth Doctor was still gently figuring out his personality after his regeneration. When Harry insists Sarah is "of value", the Doctor agrees in language that Vira can more easily understand. Vira tells the Doctor "your comrade is a romantic". The Doctor makes a wistful, puzzled face and says, "perhaps we both are".
- In "Terror of the Zygons", the Doctor and Sarah are Locked in a Freezer and to save Sarah's life, the Doctor mesmerises her into not needing to breathe by getting her to look into his eyes. The whole scene is shot rather suggestively, with the Doctor glistening with sweat, gently caressing her face in extreme closeup, and it ends with him throwing back his head and moaning.
- In "Pyramids of Mars", Sutekh starts digging through the Doctor's mind and is apparently shocked by the extent of his feelings towards Sarah Jane.
- "School Reunion" establishes that Sarah Jane was in love with the Doctor and it's strongly implied the feeling was mutual, in a scene where the Doctor openly discusses the heartbreak of Mayfly–December Romance with Rose.
- The Expanded Universe likes to do this with the Fifth Doctor and Peri a lot, as the actors had a preposterous amount of on-screen UST for the two television stories they spent together, even though No Hugging, No Kissing was being enforced to very powerful levels at that point. Just one tiny example is in the Fifth Doctor & Peri story in Short Trips and Sidesteps, where the Fifth Doctor becomes extremely flustered by Peri wearing just a large Disneyland t-shirt as her nightclothes and nothing else, mumbles something about her outfit, and becomes distracted from flying the TARDIS.
- The UNIT era contains rather a lot between the coworkers — Yates' crush on the Brigadier is hinted at in the Dance Party Ending of "The Dæmons", and Benton's interest in Jo is implied when he shirks off his post to come and talk to her in "Day of the Daleks". Yates and Jo are implicitly dating in the backstory to "The Curse of Peladon", justifying Jo's bizarre choice of outfit for the story (her date outfit), and Yates appears moody and jealous at Jo's wedding party in "The Green Death". None of it goes anywhere.
- "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" contains an odd sequence where the Doctor sees Leela in a Victorian dress, is made speechless, looks her up and down appraisingly, and then tells her in a low, flirtatious voice that he'd be proud to take her to the theatre and that if she's good he'll buy her an orange. Leela responds with a thrilled grin, as if she's inwardly Squeeing over the Doctor taking an interest in her.
- Russell T Davies seems fond of writing kisses between the Doctor and his companion solely so they can be shown in trailers, with two season openers including this. Both kisses were for Applied Phlebotinum reasons; in season two another character had taken over Rose's body, and the kiss in season three was explained by the Doctor as a "genetic transfer" to help Martha (whom he had only just met) get the attention of the Judoon by showing non-human traces on their scanner.
- Rose was the subject of relentless teasing with the Doctor, to the point that it seriously annoyed fans who preferred the original series' No Hugging, No Kissing policy. Even discounting all the myriad examples, her kisses with the Doctor in the season one finale (which again was for Phlebotinum reasons) and season four finale (actually with a human copy of the Doctor; long story) were the most dramatic and received the most attention out of all the others.
- Speaking of kissing, Captain Jack Harkness has the distinction of being the first person in the new series to kiss the Doctor, and later appearances subtly and not-so-subtly hint that he's in love with him.
- One-shot characters Sally Sparrow and Larry Nightingale from "Blink" have some Ship Tease moments. Like Sally being best friends with Larry's sister, Kathy. Or the two of them working together to figure out the Doctor's message about the Weeping Angels. And then there's Larry hugging Sally in a protective way when the TARDIS starts to leave without them during the episode's climax. And at the end, they're running a shop together, which Sally pointedly tells Larry that's all that's between them when he asks if Sally's confusion over the whole situation was getting in the way of "other things". But then, the Doctor comes back and clears up Sally's confusion, which obviously makes her happy as she holds Larry's hand and they walk back inside leaning against each other. But unfortunately, they haven't appeared since, so we don't know what happened to them.
- Romana might have been invented solely to tease the audience. She was another Time Lord of comparable age, at the time Tom Baker was the youngest actor to have played the Doctor, they had brilliant on-screen chemistry (Baker even ended up marrying Lalla Ward, who played Romana II), but the writers just would not go the extra distance.
- The Big Finish audio "The Boy That Time Forgot" does this for Adric/Nyssa. Hard. Nyssa confesses to Adric that she did love him once, and Adric is clearly in love with her to the point of insanity. The catch? Timey-wimey stuff has turned Adric into a mad, centuries-old man with a lust for revenge against the Doctor for leaving him for dead, not to mention having an entire civilization of giant genius insects at his beck and call. ...Yeah, it's pretty clear that They Won't.
- The Doctor/The Master:
- The season three finale was basically a relentless stream of teasing between the Doctor and the Master, ranging from the Master's orgasmic "I like it when you use my name" to the Doctor cradling the Master in his arms, sobbing, as he begs him not to die.
- "The End of Time" took all that Ship Tease and just lit it on fire. "I wonder what I'd be without you." Awwww.
- While definitely less blatant, Doctor/Master teasing is hardly a new phenomenon. "A cosmos without the Doctor scarcely bears thinking about", anyone?
- Let's talk about Twelve and Missy, shall we? In her first appearance, she refers to him as her "boyfriend". The first thing she does on meeting him is to push him up against a wall and snog him senseless, and things only escalate from there...
- The Eleventh Doctor and Amy was frequently teased, despite Amy's first episode ending on the night before her wedding. Before Rory became a companion too, Amy kissed the Doctor and tried to seduce him, and while the ship appeared to be "sunk" in "Amy's Choice", it was brought back to the surface when Rory died a few episodes later, only to be re-sunk when Rory came back to the life for the season finale. Even after Amy and Rory got married, there was still a ton of ship teasing, particularly in "A Good Man goes to War", where it was implied multiple times that Melody Pond was the daughter of the Doctor and Amy. She wasn't, of course, and much of the previous Ship Tease turned out to be just mistakes due to context. For example, Amy told the Doctor she was pregnant before Rory, implying that the baby might be the Doctor's. It's eventually explained that Amy knew it was Rory's, but the baby was conceived on the TARDIS, and Amy was worried what effect that would have.
- Clara Oswald and the Doctor:
- The pair have bucket-loads of Ship Tease from the very beginning. From accidental hugging to hand holding to the Doctor calling Clara "perfect" to a Cyber-converted Doctor confessing his love to her to the Doctor telling her to take her clothes off after a Suggestive Collision. Utterly sunk (at least, so it appeared at first...) when the Eleventh Doctor regenerated into a very alien, spidery old man who constantly insults her appearance (not that Eleven never did, usually in very obvious denial). That didn't stop Twelve managing to add his own piece of Ship Tease to the sunken Clara/Eleven ship; he remarked "I'm not your boyfriend" and implied that Eleven, not Clara, was the one who made that mistake.
- The webisode "She Said, He Said", in which the Doctor and Clara examine their feelings for each other, seemed like confirmation that Clara was being set up as the first true love interest in the form of a companion (rather than a one-sided crush as with previous companions) with the Doctor going so far as to call her "My Clara" and "perfect for me in every way". Though fans will never know if this was true or if it was all just one long ship tease thanks to the reboot caused by Matt Smith's departure.
- Although Twelve would be caught dead before you'd get a compliment or traditional flirt out of him, due to both lacking interpersonal skills and an aversion toward empty pleasantries of any sort, there have always been subtle indications that he might still harbor some of these feelings, having merely chosen not act on them out of the cynicism born from seeing many generations of humans live and die during his stay on Trenzalore, or a mistaken impression that she didn't want him anymore. He's always trying to show off to Clara, tends extremely competitive when anyone else does, sends many forlorn glances her way whenever he's in a distraught mood for any reason, is very blatantly flattered when he mistakenly assumed that Clara is dating an Eleven-lookalike, frequent states that that he needs her, at one point outright referred to one of their trips as a "date" once she was out of earshot, and then there's the incredibly UST-filled "Mummy on the Orient Express"... Doesn't help that the narrative draws parallels between their relationship, the romance between Robin Hood and Marian, the interspecies marriage between Vastra and Jenny, and Elizabeth and Darcy of Pride and Prejudice, or that the showrunner described a spectacular act of Undying Loyalty on his part as "He says 'I love you perfectly'" in a recent interview. While not necessarily indicative of anything romantic in and of themselves, their intense devotion to each other despite their frequent clashes, his habit of calling her "boss" or repeating her name many times over, and his teary-eyed reactions to both their temporary partings have certainly done nothing to deter the shippers.
- The above applies to Series 8 (2014) only. Come Series 9, the series removed the Anchored Ship and established that the Doctor and Clara were indeed engaged in a form of romance — as confirmed by the Word of God triumvirate of the showrunner, the lead actors (including Peter Capaldi, who had previously been adamant that nothing should exist between Clara and the Doctor suddenly doing a 180 and telling interviewers like Wil Wheaton that the Doctor and Clara were "crazy about each other") and directors. The show's established use of The "I Love You" Stigma required the writers to use euphemisms such as "I had a duty of care" to express the same meaning. The trilogy of episodes that ended the season chronicled the Doctor's 4.5-billion-year efforts to get Clara back after she is Killed Off for Real, leading to a uniquely SF Anchored Ship scenario.
- The Thirteenth Doctor and Yazmin Khan have been frequently shipped by fans throughout Series 11 and 12. However according to executive producer Matt Strevens this wasn't an intention on writers side. But writers went with it and since The Revolution Of The Daleks, which also had the two become only residents of TARDIS "Thasmin" has became object of frequent teases.
