What if Missy is not a Villain but Really an Ally of the Doctor? by Joe Vitulli

Television shows often use cliche episode structures such as holiday specials, musical episodes, animation and/or claymation, and backwards plots. Some people love these sorts of shows while others roll their eyes at the rehashed concepts. Granted, some shows do handle them better than others. We have seen several Christmas specials from Doctor Who. Somehow, however, they have avoided producing their own versions of the other templates. Let us contemplate how they might hypothetically be accomplished on Doctor Who.

In the world of geekery, arguably, the most famous musical episode of a television series is Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s “Once More, With Feeling.” I think that it is safe to say, with Doctor Who being such a theatrical show, that it is extremely well suited as a vehicle for musical numbers. Fans have already created some very well produced video parodies. YouTube user AVbyte made Doctor Who The Musical! while user The Hillywood Show did Doctor Who Parody, which, quite appropriately, also parodies “The Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. User Di Wey put together Tenth Doctor: The Musical, a clever mashup of clips from the show with segments of corresponding popular songs. The closest thing that we have to an official musical is from when Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner left the show. For the wrap party, their colleagues made a tribute called The Ballad of Russell & Julie. I don’t know about you, but these examples are more than enough to illustrate that a musical Doctor Who episode would be fantastic! And what better reason to bring song-and-dance man John Barrowman back to the show?

Speaking of “illustrate,” (I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.) let’s talk about animation. My favorite geeky animated sequences in a television show are from Fringe. In the episode “Black Blotter,” Walter Bishop goes on a Monty Python inspired acid trip. In “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide,” a few of the characters go on an adventure animated in the style of a graphic novel. The opposite of this concept was shown on The Simpsons‘ episode “Treehouse of Horror VI,” when Homer Simpson travelled into the third dimension and, from there, the “real” world. Fans of Doctor Who have created quite a number of animated tribute videos. The most popular one is probably the Family Guy-esque YouTube series Doctor Stew. My favorite is the video for Chameleon Circuit‘s song “The Doctor is Dying” by YouTube user Alex Day. Another really good one is Doctor Who – Take On Me (a parody of A-ha‘s video) by user TheFlixx. These last two examples obviously also support the musical idea. Real Time, The Infinite Quest and Dreamland, while official animated Doctor Who projects, are not technically considered episodes. Besides, to be a cliche animated episode, the live action characters need to somehow travel into the animated world and be confused and/or amazed by it.

There has not been a full-on Memento-style plot-going-backwards episode of Doctor Who. The ongoing plot device of River Song and The Doctor going in opposite directions in time does not exactly count, but might make for good source material on which to base such an episode. In reality, the whole wibbly wobbly timey wimey show is good source material for that. I dunno, man. What else do I really need to say to support this one? It just makes sense.

What do you think of Doctor Who using these episode structures? Let us know in the comments below.