Warning! This article contains minor spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4, episode 1, “Valles Marineris.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has just revealed another secret Doctor Who crossover. With the premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, all eyes are on Paramount’s flagship modern Star Trek series to “boldly go where no show has gone before.” The new season is more episodic and thus more adventurous than ever, with the first episode alone featuring a Martian civilization, Jurassic-era dinosaurs, and a massive historical twist, one that impacts our understanding of Star Trek’s entire universal timeline.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ audacious return this year is an undeniably welcome one, especially as another one of science fiction’s oldest and most celebrated franchises hasn’t fared as well in recent months. The BBC’s Doctor Who, which is three years older than Star Trek, has had a turbulent time since its “season 2” finale in 2025. As fans await more news, however, Star Trek is at least keeping the iconic franchise’s legacy alive with a few carefully placed blink-and-you’ll-miss-them Doctor Who Easter eggs.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has referenced the Doctor’s time-traveling shenanigans before. In season 3, episode 6, “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” the Doctor’s TARDIS can be seen floating in space next to the USS Enterprise. In season 3, episode 10, “New Life and New Civilizations,” Commander Pelia (Carol Kane) tells Spock (Ethan Peck) that she once knew a “time-traveling Doctor.”
The franchises have crossed over in comics before, too — in one IDW story, The Next Generation‘s Captain Picard joins forces with Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor to fight the Borg. In another, The Original Series crew fights Doctor Who’s Cybermen alongside Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor. Strange New Worlds showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Meyers even discussed the possibility of an outright, on-screen crossover with former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies. There’s a long history between these two franchises.
Strange New Worlds Season 4’s Premiere Reveals Another Secret Star Trek & Doctor Who Crossover
Despite the season opener’s massive, three-part story, there was room for a bit more timey-wimey weirdness in Strange New Worlds season 4, episode 1. During a scene in which the Starship Enterprise’s primary crew meets to discuss a mission involving a rare, category 10 interstellar squall, Commander Pelia tells the group that she’s seen one before:
“I’ve seen one once, a long time ago, but not from this close. I think I was in a phone box at the time.”
Of course, the Doctor’s TARDIS has always disguised itself as a (now) vintage British police phone box, one that’s famously larger on the inside than it is on the outside. If any of Star Trek‘s characters could have crossed paths with the Doctor, it would be Commander Pelia. Pelia is a Lanthanite, a humanoid species first introduced in canon in Strange New Worlds season 2. In the show, Pelia is roughly 5000 years old. With Pelia’s long lifetime and Star Trek’s multiversal storytelling approach, there’s no reason to assume the Enterprise’s current Chief Engineer couldn’t have met one of the Doctor’s many incarnations.
Star Trek & Doctor Who Face Similar Questions About Their Franchises’ Futures
Still, a proper crossover between Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Doctor Who is highly unlikely, especially now. Doctor Who‘s future is currently in limbo; even the previously announced Doctor Who 2026 Christmas Special has officially been scrapped, and the BBC has put the show out to competitive tender after Disney declined to renew its distribution and co-production deal. Russell T Davies and long-time production partner Bad Wolf have also left the series. Given the bonkers cliffhanger ending of Doctor Who season 2/15, in which Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor regenerated into former companion Billie Piper, Doctor Who‘s uncertain future feels especially bleak.
While Star Trek is currently still on air, its future as a TV franchise is similarly unclear. While the newly formed Paramount Skydance has announced a new Star Trek movie is in the works, Strange New Worlds will end after a shortened, six-episode fifth season. The one other remaining Star Trek show, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, was abruptly canceled after its season 1 finale; the only reason season 2 will air sometime next year alongside Strange New Worlds season 5 is because it has already been shot.
If no new Star Trek shows are announced within the coming months, next year’s releases will bring an end to a decade of so-called Nu-Trek television, which started with Star Trek: Discovery in 2017. Though Star Trek has experienced dark periods before, including the 12-year small-screen gap between Star Trek: Enterprise and Discovery, it feels more final this time around. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was originally conceived as a four-season show, and Paramount’s recent merger with Skydance and its potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery will cause massive shifts in the industry.
Given their respective impact on science fiction and pop culture at large, both Doctor Who and Star Trek deserve better. Hopefully, if both franchises do endure a longer hiatus, they’ll come back stronger than ever in the aftermath, just like Doctor Who did when it first returned in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston’s highly underrated Ninth Doctor. And who knows? Perhaps a real Doctor Who and Star Trek crossover could still happen somewhere down the line in this strange timeline.
New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 premiere weekly on Thursdays, exclusively on Paramount+.
- Release Date
-
2022 – 2027-00-00
- Network
-
Paramount+
- Showrunner
-
Henry Alonso Myers, Akiva Goldsman
- Directors
-
Dan Liu, Amanda Row, Maja Vrvilo, Akiva Goldsman, Dermott Downs, Eduardo Sánchez, Jeffrey W. Byrd, Jonathan Frakes, Jordan Canning, Leslie Hope, Valerie Weiss, Sydney Freeland, Christopher J. Byrne, Rachel Leiterman
- Writers
-
Onitra Johnson