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Many of Doctor Who's futures are lightyears away, but some are already in the distant past...
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00:00When Doctor Who started in the 1960s, dates like 1986 and 2020 felt impossibly far away.
00:07Surely Doctor Who wouldn't be on TV by then? And yet, the longer the show goes on,
00:11the more it risks crashing into its wild predictions for the future. And in case anyone's
00:16wondering, the next crossover point will be 2049, when the moon is revealed to be an egg.
00:20So make sure to put that date in your diary. Until then, many of Doctor Who's distant futures
00:24are now far behind us. I'm Ellie for Who Culture, here with 10 Doctor Who futures that are now
00:29in the past. Number 10, The Chase, 1966. Terry Nation's outright Dalek comedy The Chase takes
00:36place across all of time and space. One particular interlude in the Daleks' pursuit of the First
00:41Doctor and his companions is a trip to the observation deck atop the Empire State Building
00:46in New York. This took place on an undisclosed date in 1966, placing it at least a year after
00:52the actual broadcast of the episode. As far as historical records can tell, the Daleks never
00:57did visit the Empire State Building, so this prediction never came true in our own version
01:01of 1966. The closest the Daleks got to America was when the 1965 Peter Cushing movie Doctor Who
01:08and the Daleks premiered in the US in July 1966, to a less than enthusiastic commercial response.
01:13I tell you what, the producers missed a trick by not promoting the movie on top of the Empire
01:18State Building. Other notable Dalek events from 1966 included the broadcast of the Daleks'
01:23master plan and a group of Daleks arriving at the Blue Peter studio to review cakes.
01:28Aww, Great Scarrow Bake Off, anyone? I'd watch that.
01:31Number 9, The Underwater Menace, 1970-ish. The exact date of The Underwater Menace is never made
01:37explicit, but Polly dates events to roughly 1970. That's because she finds a discarded 1968 Mexico
01:44Olympics bracelet. This effectively means that Doctor Who is predicting that a Professor Zaroff type
01:49will discover Atlantis in the years following The Underwater Menace's 1967 broadcast. While it seems
01:55like a wild prediction, it's clear that the writer, Geoffrey Orme, had read about the prophecies of
02:00American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. In the 1930s, Cayce stated that, and I quote,
02:05"...a portion of the temples may yet be discovered under the slime of ages and seawater near Bimini.
02:10Expect it in 68 or 69." Well, perhaps Geoffrey had come across Cayce's prediction and turned it
02:16into the first of Doctor Who's many forays into the mythical lost city of Atlantis. However,
02:21the predictions didn't come true, and a mad scientist didn't use Atlantis to destroy the
02:25Earth in 1970. And yet, in 1968, a group of divers discovered Bimini Road just off the coast of the
02:31North Bimini Island in the Bahamas. The mysterious rock formation was described by the divers as a
02:36quote, "...pavement," and some believe it may be the road to Atlantis. Ooh.
02:41Ooh. Number 8, The Tenth Planet, 1986. In the 1966 serial The Tenth Planet, Doctor Who
02:49confidently predicted that in 1986, we would discover a tenth planet in our solar system.
02:55In the real 1986, the Voyager space probe had only made it to Uranus, the seventh planet from
03:00the Sun. The progress of human space exploration hadn't been nearly as quick as writers Kit Peddler
03:05and Jerry Davis predicted. William Hartnell's final Doctor Who serial also predicted that at the
03:10height of the space race, humanity would have abandoned national borders to embrace an
03:14international approach to space exploration. Well, sadly, this wasn't true either, and the
03:18Chernobyl disaster and ensuing Soviet cover-up was a particularly bleak example of the lack of trust
03:23between nations in 1986. The only saving grace of The Tenth Planet's vision of the future is that
03:281986 didn't see a race of cybernetically augmented humanoids and a Z-bomb nearly destroy the Earth.
03:34Silver linings.
03:35Number 7, The Chase, 1996. 30 years after the Daleks landed on top of the Empire State Building,
03:42they rocked up at the Frankenstein's House of Horrors attraction at the 1996 Festival of Ghana.
03:47Haunted House attractions were much more technologically advanced in Doctor Who's
03:51version of 1996. The robotic Dracula and Frankenstein were so convincing that the first Doctor believed the
03:57TARDIS and the Daleks had somehow managed to materialise inside the dark recesses of the human mind.
04:02Perhaps the convincing nature of the horrifying monsters was why the attraction and the festival
04:07was apparently cancelled by Peking, though quite what the People's Republic of China would have
04:11to do with a festival in a West African nation is anyone's guess. In that same year and a thousand
04:16miles away, the Eleventh Doctor crash-landed in the Garden of Amelia Pond at the start of the 2010
04:21episode The Eleventh Hour. And now get ready to have your mind blown, because where 1996 was 30 years
04:27in the future for William Hartnell, it was already 14 years in the past for Matt Smith and Karen Gillan.
04:33Mind blown.
04:35Number 6, Battlefield, 1997. Set eight years after broadcast, Battlefield is a more accurate depiction
04:42of 1997 than The Underwater Menace's wild depiction of three years into the future. There are still good
04:48old-fashioned English country pubs, even if the price of a pint has gone up considerably. The Gore Crow Hotel
04:53has its own microbrewery, a good decade before every Johnny-come-lately-craft-beer pub. Geopolitically,
05:00Battlefield reveals that things are still tense around the world as the battle between Morgaine
05:04and King Arthur becomes a metaphor for the futility of nuclear war. While nuclear holocaust wasn't as
05:09pressing an issue as it was during the Cold War, concerns about dangerous materials being ferried about
05:14places like Battlefield's fictional village were still on people's minds in 1997. So the only glaring
05:20difference from the real 1997, £5 for a water and a lemonade aside, is the fact that a group of
05:25Arthurian knights caused merry hell in an English village, nearly triggering a nuclear apocalypse.
05:31Far for the cause when it comes to Doctor Who, really.
05:33Number 5, The TV Movie, 1999-2000. At the turn of the millennium, the Master almost turned the
05:40universe inside out during his battle with the Eighth Doctor. With the Eye of Harmony open, the very
05:45fabric of reality became malleable, which would have only made the first hangover of 2000 even more
05:50painful. Thankfully, predictions of widespread devastation at midnight on the 1st of January
05:552000 never came to pass. We came close thanks to the millennium bug, but like the Master's plot with
06:00The Eye of Harmony, its effects were rolled back and caused minor disruptions. Airing in 1996,
06:06the Doctor Who TV movie wasn't the only bit of science fiction to predict the end of life as we
06:10knew it
06:11as we inched closer to the year 2000, so it needn't feel bad for getting it wrong. Interestingly,
06:16Torchwood would later reveal that Captain Jack's predecessor killed himself and his team at the
06:21turn of the century, because he feared what was coming. The TV Movie did make one accurate prediction
06:26for the future, though. The Doctor would be doing a lot more kissing from the year 2000 onward. The
06:31Tenth Doctor certainly made good on that promise when he arrived in 2005.
06:34Number 4, Aliens of London, 2006. From the moment the Ninth Doctor accidentally drops off
06:40rose 12 months later in the 2005 episode Aliens of London, the RTD era of Doctor Who takes place
06:46in the very near future. From the death of the Prime Minister to the rise and fall of Harriet
06:51Jones to the election of Harold Saxon, the big moments from RTD's Doctor Who lore took place
06:55roughly a year ahead of our own reality. Hilariously, the political unrest during this period of Doctor
07:01Who does bear comparison with parallel events in UK politics. After replacing the murdered Prime
07:06Minister at some point after Aliens of London and World War 3 in 2006, Harriet Jones is then ousted
07:12by the Tenth Doctor's whispered message, don't you think she looks tired? In the real world,
07:16Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair in 2007 after a similar scandal involving what the Slothene refer
07:22to as massive weapons of destruction. Both Harriet Jones and Gordon Brown were then replaced by
07:28villainous politicians who ruined Britain's reputation on the world stage. So something else to add to
07:32Doctor Who's list of accurate predictions, I guess? Number 3. Dalek and Fear Her, 2012.
07:38Utah, 2012. A narcissistic billionaire and powerful figure in the United States of America keeps a
07:44Dalek in his basement. After his recklessness almost causes global destruction at the hands of said Dalek,
07:49he's ousted from his position and will never ever again interfere in American politics. Written by Robert
07:55Sherman and set in 2012, 2005's Dalek seems utterly prophetic, albeit four years early and with a much
08:01happier ending for the American people. Across the pond in 2012, as depicted in the 2006 episode
08:06Fear Her, the UK was preparing to host the Olympics, but disaster struck at the hands of some magic
08:12crayons. The opening ceremony was disrupted by the disappearance of the collected guests and
08:16athletes, who were captured inside a drawing. The day was safe, the attendees returned, and the Tenth Doctor
08:22heroically took up the Olympic torch and marked the start of the competition. Magic crayons aside,
08:27Dalek did carry the Olympic torch in the real world 2012, but it was the eleventh incarnation and not
08:33the tenth, as David Tennant had regenerated a few years earlier. Number 2. The Enemy of the World,
08:382018. The year 2018 must have seemed impossibly futuristic to David Whittaker when he was writing
08:44The Enemy of the World in 1967. Although the easy access to hovercrafts and the devastating volcanic
08:50corruptions in Central Europe never came to pass, there's still something quite prescient about
08:54Whittaker's view of 2018. At its heart, The Enemy of the World is Doctor Who doing a James Bond movie,
09:00with a charismatic villain and some big action set pieces. It's also a political thriller about how
09:05the rich can weedle their way into global politics. If Whittaker had lived in 2018, he may have been
09:10alarmed at what he got right about humanity's future. Looking back on The Enemy of the World now,
09:16the themes of a tanned megalomaniac who feeds disinformation and fake news to his global
09:20audience feel all too real. Patrick Troughton's performance as Salamander may look outrageous
09:25and over the top, but is it any more outlandish than the performance of 2018's actual leader of
09:30the free world? Just saying. Number 1. The Hungry Earth, 2020. 2020 will never be anyone's favourite
09:37year. But come on, let's not get into another debate about The Timeless Child. Of course, 2020 was a rough
09:42year for everyone as we lived with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the world began to feel like a
09:47particularly bleak sci-fi dystopia. Doctor Who couldn't predict this, but it did visit 2020 in the
09:52Chris Chibnall penned two-parter The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood, which aired in 2010. In Chibnall's
09:58version of 2020, the Silurians awoke in a small mining town in Wales, where they attempted to retake
10:03Earth from the humans. After negotiations stalled, the Silurians were returned to their hibernation in
10:08the hope that one day a peaceful accord could be reached. Fast forward 10 years and Chris Chibnall
10:13was Doctor Who's showrunner in 2020. He didn't revisit the Silurian revival, but there's nothing
10:18to say that it didn't still happen, while the 13th Doctor was dealing with Ruth and the Jadoon in
10:22Gloucester. One thing he did get wrong was that the future Amy and Rory wouldn't have turned up to
10:27greet their past selves on account of their deaths in New York decades earlier. Oh, and now I'm sad.
10:32And there you have it, but while we're on the topic of the future, why not check out 10 times
10:36Doctor Who accidentally predicted our future? In the meantime, I've been Ellie for Who Culture,
10:41and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye, sweeties.
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