A twelfth story was added to the collection in 2014 to mark the formal debut of the Twelfth Doctor in the television series, and it was retitled 12 Doctors 12 Stories accordingly. It was announced that it would be re-released in November 2018 as 13 Doctors 13 Stories with a Thirteenth Doctor story.
For the sake of editing, each story and its tropes has its own folder.
"Nothing O'Clock" has its own page.
Tropes:
- Hook Hand: The inner workings of the Doctor's prosthetic hand resemble this to one of the space pirates.
- Invasion of the Baby Snatchers: The space pirates are abducting children to harvest their organs to sell on the black market.
- Shout-Out: The First Doctor uses 'd'arvit' as a swear word.
- Whole-Plot Reference: In an unconventional way — this story is one to Peter Pan, but the denouement reveals that the Doctor's exploits inspired that play and novel in-universe.
- Giving Radio to the Romans: The Master is giving electricity to the Vikings.
- The X of Y: The first of several stories in this anthology to use this title convention, in the great Doctor Who tradition.
- I Was Quite a Fashion Victim: Or will be. The Doctor is miserable upon discovering that in the future, he'll think wearing a bowtie is cool!
- Meaningful Name: The story takes place on a 'Heligan Structure', a plant-based Colony Ship. The Lost Gardens of Heligan, an estate garden neglected for decades and restored in the 1990s, are a well-known real-world tourist attraction in Cornwall.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Most of the children seem to have those. All of them refer to what they want to do to the Doctor!
- Take That Me: The Doctor encounters a statue of his future self and does not agree with the notion that Bowties Are Cool.
- The X of Y: The second story in this collection to use this trope.
- Big Fancy House: The wealthy Acklin family lives in one — which stands out even more than it normally would in a time of rationing for Americans.
- Brutal Honesty: Truth Tellers can make anyone speak only in this manner, no matter how much it hurts themselves or others. The Doctor reveals that in fact they only reveal what the wearer believes to be true, not what is objectively true. Big difference.
- Gingerbread House: Discussed by Nyssa; Dipthodat houses may have inspired the trope in Earth stories due to their unique construction.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Justified; although his prejudice against Jonny (Jewish) and Nettie (black) isn't out of place in 1940s America, wealthy Mr. Acklin's cruel and condescending attitude towards the lower-class kids marks him out as just as bad as his daughter. As it turns out, he and other Dipthodats have this attitude towards anyone who isn't their kind!
- Refusal of the Call: Jonny and Nettie are offered a chance to be companions, but turn it down.
- Rich Bitch: Annabelle Acklin is this to a T.
- Teens Are Monsters: The Truth Teller craze is encouraging this behavior in the local teens under the guise of mere Brutal Honesty. And Annabelle turns out to be an actual monster!
- World War II: The temporal setting.
- First-Person Perspective: Peri Brown.
- Planet of Hats: Koturia has romance as its hat. Its culture is inspired by the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas, Nevada — a city famous for the sheer number of weddings that take place there.
- The Power of Love: Koturians shapeshift into their final, locked form through this power, which is focused via a special stone used in the marriage ceremony. If the love between a couple does not prove true, the change won't happen.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Doctor realizes, to his sadness, that he has to figure out how to restore the original timeline that their escape disrupted — the ideal universe they are now in simply cannot hold.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Starman.
- Giant Enemy Crab: It is revealed Ali's species is this!
- Meaningful Name: An obvious-in-hindsight example with Ali, who is genuinely alien.
- Sherlock Scan: Ali works out that the Doctor is a Time Lord from the fact he is chasing someone. The Doctor even calls her "Sherlock Holmes".
- Tomato Surprise: The Doctor's new companion Ali isn't human.
- The X of Y: Third story in this collection to use this trope.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: It is revealed this story takes place during the ending of "Rose". After he first dematerialises, the Doctor has further adventures before returning for Rose a few seconds later from her perspective.
- Call-Back: The Doctor is reminded of his journey in the Land of Fiction when he first realizes that this world is based on a book Martha read, and thinks back on this while trying to figure out how to stop this different threat. Rapunzel turns up in both worlds as it happens.
- Continuity Nod: The Dracula the Doctor and Martha encounter here is not the only one he's met — he notes that one of the others was Vlad the Impaler.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: The Doctor is not impressed when he learns that the overweight kid who follows the Troublemakers around is picked on by everybody, even his relatives, and correctly guesses that he is only known by the name "Fatty". Martha points out that the books were written in a less sensitive time.
- Expy: The Troubleseekers are this to The Famous Five and similar kidlit characters, and are explicitly described as a rip-off of such in-story. Avoided with the other stories and books that turn up later.
- Trapped in TV Land: The main premise. In the climactic stretch, they wind up traveling through several lands extrapolated from Martha's memories:
- Martha comments to Rapunzel, while stuck on her tower, that she loves her story — and via time-travel she's seen the movie too. (Martha is from 2008 Earth; said movie wasn't released until 2011.)
- Dracula gets punched by the Doctor! Bonus points for being book-accurate (bearded, for one thing).
- Miss Havisham gets chewed out by Martha, who struggled through her story as School Study Media. Martha wonders if she can't give Estella what for, too...
- The Doctor and Martha narrowly escape being zapped by wizards in Hogwarts. Doubles as a Continuity Nod to "The Shakespeare Code".
- An encounter with "a nervous girl" and a sparkly boy in the woods forces Martha to ask the Doctor not to judge her...(also a Take That!).
- The X of Y: The fourth and last story in this collection to use this trope. Moreover, the title of the story is also the title of the novel the Doctor and Martha end up in in-universe.
Written by Neil Gaiman. In The '80s, animal mask-wearing strangers who always ask people to ask them what time it is are buying up all the houses in a small English town for ridiculous amounts of money. In The New '10s, the Doctor and Amy are puzzled upon returning to Earth to discover humanity has vanished...This story also appears in Trigger Warning, a 2015 collection of Gaiman short stories.
Has its own page.
- Alien Catnip: Many alien races Must Have Caffeine. Not all of them have the same reaction to it as humans.
- Busman's Holiday: The Doctor's just trying to fetch coffee, and this happens! Or so it seems. He's using the excuse of fetching Clara coffee to continue his investigation of the killings on Choris.
- Continuity Nod
- This is set on the Planet of the Coffee Shops (aka Choris), which the Doctor briefly mentioned in "The Girl Who Waited".
- This takes place while the Doctor is picking up coffee for Clara — possibly between the end of "Deep Breath" and him turning up in "Into the Dalek" three weeks later. (Black said in an interview that she was given the first four Twelfth Doctor scripts to reference in writing this story, and those episodes are the first two.)
- The Doctor regards the wares of this planet as the third-best coffee in the universe. His old UNIT colleague Sergeant Benton made the second best, and Elisabeth Pepys the absolute best.
- Apparently quite a few Whoniverse species frequent Choris; background characters here include a Terileptil, a Silurian, a Graske, and a Vinvocci. See also Heinz Hybrid below.
- The Doctor explains to 78351 that sometimes a person wants to tell themselves something important, but does not do it directly — they might do it by way of a different face, for example, one they don't like...
- Creepy Good: The Twelfth Doctor's embodiment of this trope is played up in this story. 78351 is almost as frightened of him as of the dark and whatever it is that's killing people.
- Everyone Is a Suspect: But especially the Doctor and 78351, seeing as the victims were standing near them at the time and the killer has to strike very quickly...
- Evilutionary Biologist: 78351 and his two friends were prisoners — and the only survivors — of a group of these trying to come up with an Ultimate Life Form with which to colonize/conquer the universe until the Doctor freed them. And one of them appears to be around on the Planet of the Coffee Shops, right near 78351 in the line...
- Face Your Fears: 78351 is terrified by the situation he and the Doctor are in, as it punches all of his Primal Fear buttons — and then some when The Reveal is made. The compassionate Doctor tells him that, often, admitting to one's self that they are afraid can be the hardest thing in the world, but it must be done if those fears are to be faced and conquered...and 78351 rises to those challenges in the end.
- First-Person Perspective: Told from 78351's point-of-view.
- Fun with Acronyms: A serious, subtle example that turns out to be Foreshadowing. The Intergalactic Coffee Roasting Station is known as ICRS for short, pronounced "Icarus". Icarus flew too close to the sun on wings of feathers and wax and ended up drowning in the sea below him. 78351 pilots his ship in the direction of a sun to obtain the energy he needs for his final transformation, even though the act may kill him. As he changes, he sprouts wings.
- Gentle Giant: 78351 is a hulking, hunched-over humanoid with grey skin and a bare pate, almost as tall as the Doctor, kind, and extremely timid.
- Have We Met Yet?: Another incarnation of the Doctor saved 78351 and his fellow prisoners/subjects from the sadistic experiments years before. 78351 remembers the name and recognizes a similar enthusiasm, but Twelve, who is forgetful even by Doctor standards, initially doesn't remember this and it's left unclear which Doctor was the rescuer.
- Heinz Hybrid: 78351 is "a pinch of Axon, a bit of Ogron, and a dash of Pyrovile."
- Heroic Sacrifice: Possibly, given that the story has No Ending, the fate of poor, poor 78351, who points out that the Doctor himself was ready to do this in his efforts to stop the killer.
- Incredibly Obvious Bomb: The killer planted one of these in the room where the lighting and coffee dispensing systems are operated from to cause the blackouts; the disruption of the coffee supply may or may not have been intentional. The past tense is important — this was a time bomb, and to make sure it wasn't deactivated before it went off, the two technicians who were in the control room were killed...which means there are now four victims of the murderer.
- Lights Off, Somebody Dies: The nature of the killings. The Doctor must figure out how they're being pulled off — why are the lights going on and off, and how can the killer strike so quickly?
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The Doctor regards himself as having done this by rescuing and freeing 78351, not realizing what he would become upon maturing. He also clearly regrets inspiring him to make a Heroic Sacrifice.
- No Ending: The story closes with 78351 in his burning-up ship, having sent the Doctor away. With the ship and its coffee bean shipment vaporized, the resultant energy surge allows him to make a final, permanent transformation. Whether he dies or not, his threat is stopped and he is no longer scared...
- Planet of Hats: The Planet of the Coffee Shops! The original reference in-series could have been the Eleventh Doctor sardonically describing a tourist trap with a lot of coffee shops on it, but it turns out that it really is a planet dedicated to coffee shops, and that's what it's called.
- Playing with Syringes: The scientists who tormented 78351 and his fellow prisoners did a lot of this, and he has a fear of needles as a result. Finding out that the murder victims have puncture wounds that could have been caused by needles does nothing for his nerves.
- Primal Fear: 78351 is desperate to stay awake as much as is possible due to a paralyzing fear of the dark. This fear stems from the sadistic things the scientists did to him and his fellow prisoners in the dark, claiming that whatever was done then didn't matter.... He also is deathly afraid of needles.
- Puberty Superpower: What 78351 and his fellow prisoners originally were is never specified, but it's strongly implied they were human or at least humanoid. They were operated upon from birth, were freed by the Doctor, and have all effectively hit puberty by the time this story begins; a female he's attracted to just had her antennae grow in. He came out a bit differently and actually has this trope going for him: His unconscious efforts to complete the process of becoming a winged beast have turned him into a killer in a deconstruction of this trope.
- Red Herring: The masked scientist 78351 notices, fears, and suspects is not the murderer, but rather a hallucination that he, the REAL killer, is having by way of denying his darker self.
- The Reveal: The mysterious killer who strikes in the dark is 78351. He takes on a monstrous, energy-hungry form in darkness, and denies its existence. The Doctor realizes that he is simply scared and needs to accept and transform into his adult form. Related tropes include Anti-Villain, Energy Absorption, Halluncinations (single character — the scientist), Jekyll And Hyde, The Killer In Me (Amnesiac), Power Gives You Wings, Reluctant Monster, Super-Powered Evil Side (reconstructed), Sympathetic Murder Backstory, Tomato In The Mirror.
- Save the Villain: The Doctor has a great deal of compassion for the killer once he realizes who and what it is, and tries not only to stop them, but save them if he can.
- Serious Business: Coffee for those who come to Choris — when it's first announced that the coffee's suddenly run out in the cafe, it causes a panic that's only intensified by the blackout and murder that follows. For some of the patrons, their need for coffee remains more of a concern than the fact that there's a killer on the loose!
- Single-Biome Planet: Choris, which is dedicated to growing coffee.
- 30-Second Blackout: A near-literal application of this trope, twice over at that, as the Doctor and co. are waiting in line for their coffee — and those seconds are all that the killer needs to strike and go undetected.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: In-universe, 78351 wonders what became of the scientists after the Doctor rescued him and his friends from them. As it happens, there is a scientist in a respirator mask in line with them as the killings begin...
- Would Hurt a Child: The scientists began operating on 78351 and other innocents as soon as they were born.
- You Are Number 6: 78351, nicknamed "Fifty-One" by the Doctor, who was raised in a laboratory where all the "subjects" had numbers rather than names.
- Younger Than They Look: 78351 is a Gentle Giant (about the Doctor's height and much bulkier), but he and his friends are still in the process of becoming full-fledged adults physically; effectively, they're teenagers.