Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Doctor Who references keep multiplying — and they trace back to a crossover that nearly happened
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Doctor Who references explained — the hidden TARDIS, Pelia's "phone box" line, and the Akiva Goldsman–Russell T Davies crossover that collapsed over corporate hurdles.
At some point Strange New Worlds stopped winking at Doctor Who and started openly flirting. What looked like one cheeky easter egg is now a full pattern of canon-adjacent behavior, and — per the showrunner himself — it 's the visible wreckage of an actual crossover that got as far as the "how would this work narratively" stage before dying the most Hollywood death imaginable.
The receipts, in order
- Season 3, episode 6, "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail": a teeny tiny TARDIS is visible behind the Enterprise after a scavenger ship swallows it. Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor had already name-dropped the Enterprise over on his show, so this was returning fire.
- Season 3 finale: the 5,000-year-old Commander Pelia (Carol Kane) casually mentions a time-traveling Doctor she used to know, an episode after which no one on that ship asked a single follow-up question, which frankly tracks for Starfleet.
- Season 4, "Valles Marineris": Pelia strikes again, recalling an interstellar storm she once watched from a suspiciously specific vantage point:
Ma'am. Ma'am.
The crossover that almost was
None of this is random. Co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman confirmed that he and former Who boss Russell T Davies genuinely worked the problem:
"We really did talk to Russell for a while about crossing over," Goldsman told SYFY Wire.
Per Goldsman, they got into specifics — when it would air, how to merge two wildly different production aesthetics, possibly a two-parter — before too many corporate hurdles killed it, with Who living at the BBC/Disney+ and Trek at Paramount, a licensing knot nobody's lawyers were untying. The two franchises have been officially friendly since a shared 2024 Comic-Con panel between Alex Kurtzman and Davies, which is how the easter-egg détente became policy.
So the writers did the next best thing: decided the crossover happened anyway, offscreen, to Pelia, and just kept salting the scripts with evidence. The only official meeting of the franchises remains the 2012 comic where the Eleventh Doctor and Picard fight a Borg–Cybermen alliance, which is a sentence I will treasure forever. Until the lawyers evolve, Pelia is the crossover. Protect her at all costs.