The 1960s were a massive turning point for popular science fiction. Between 1963 and 1966, two sci-fi shows debuted and changed the course of the way people think about the genre. Those shows were Doctor Who and Star Trek, two mega franchises that, in tone and spirit, have more in common than they don’t. To date, Who and Trek have only really crossed over in comic books and video games. But never, formally, on screen.
That said, in the sixth episode of Strange New Worlds Season 3, the most famous spaceship from Doctor Who is physically and literally tangled up with the most famous spaceship in Star Trek. Here’s the hidden Easter egg in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” and why it represents a long-running tradition of love and respect between the two franchises.
Mild spoilers ahead.
When the USS Enterprise is pulled into the belly of the massive scavenger ship, Spock, Kirk, Scotty, Uhura and Chapel are stranded on the USS Farragut, where they discover that several other pieces of familiar starships have been absorbed by the scavengers, including a D-7 Klingon battle cruiser. But what Spock doesn’t mention is that ensnared just next to the Enterprise is a Type-40 TARDIS, with its chameleon circuit making it look like a 1960s police box.
Several Doctor Who and Star Trek fans pointed this out on social media, including Jörg Hillebrand, who was also a research assistant on Star Trek: Picard. As Hillebrand says, the TARDIS is “seen in every shot of the entangled USS Enterprise.”
In 2024, in the Doctor Who episode “Space Babies,” the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) floated the idea that he and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) could “visit them one day,” in reference to the Star Trek universe. But, this was far from the first time Doctor Who has made inside jokes about the existence of Star Trek, either as a media property or as another dimension. Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) called the 9th Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) “Spock” in “The Empty Child,” and the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) even spoke the words “space, the final frontier” in the episode “Oxygen.”
But Star Trek has had its share of Doctor Who references, too. On top of the fact that the Borg themselves are a huge homage to the Cybermen from Who, the 1988 Next Generation episode, “The Neutral Zone,” included the names of all the actors who had played the Doctor up to that point on one very obvious viewscreen. In 2012, IDW Comics also published a Next Generation/Doctor Who crossover in which the 11th Doctor teamed with the crew of the Enterprise-D to stop a combined Borg/Cybermen invasion of multiple dimensions.
Finally, last year, at San Diego Comic-Con, the Who and Trek brands united for a crossover event called “Friendship is Universal,” which featured artwork that combined the two canons.
Last year, Inverse also spoke to current Who showrunner Russell T Davies about the fact that the Doctor referred to the Star Trek universe not just as fiction, but perhaps, a place the TARDIS could actually land. Davies said this way of talking about Trek was “a deliberate shift.”
“The Doctor actually now talks about Star Trek as real,” Davies pointed out. “Maybe when the [14th] Doctor cast that salt at the edge of the universe, maybe some things became real that were never real before.”
Obviously, in the grand scheme of life, the TARDIS in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” is a fun visual Easter egg, and probably will never be fully explained by either franchise. And yet, if Doctor Who wanted to revisit this moment, it would be fairly easy to explain: If the TARDIS did cross over to the Star Trek timeline, the explosive force of the scavenger ship’s destruction, surely, could send the Doctor back to their home dimension.
But which Doctor was piloting that TARDIS? Or was the TARDIS abandoned in that moment? It may take a few years, but because of the way Trek and Who have orbited each other lately, here’s hoping we won’t have to wait a decade for the answer.
