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In 2014, IDW Publishing's contract for the Doctor Who Expanded Universe expired. The comic license was won by the Titan Publishing Group. Rather than launch one ongoing, the publisher opted for three - focusing on the Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors - that ran for three years before the series was rebooted in 2018 to be an ongoing based on the Thirteenth Doctor.
The publisher also launched mini-series based on the Third, Fourth, Seventh, Eight, and Ninth Doctors.
There were also three Crisis Crossovers published:
Examples of Doctor Who (Titan) include:
In General[]
- Continuity Cavalcade: Free from television budget and the inevitable aging/death of actors, the comics delight in pulling out material from the most obscure parts of Doctor Who lore.
- Interquel: The stories usually say between which television episode the stories take place in or offer enough hints that a reasonable guess can be made.
- Running Gag: Relating to the UNIT dating controversy, the characters, and the narrator, always wonder whether the Third Doctor's stories took place in The Seventies or The Eighties whenever the topic is brought up.
- Police Are Useless: UNIT. They can't do anything.
Third Doctor[]
- Affectionate Parody: The whole story is a glorious homage to the 1960s and 1970s Bond films.
- Alien Invasion: The series opens with a race of Mechanical Lifeforms invading. But they're not aliens and are just a distraction.
- Battle in the Center of the Mind: To combat the Micro-Machines, the Third Doctor enter Jo's subconscious.
- Beneath Notice: How did the Master set up his bugs within UNIT? Via the lady that delivers tea.
- Big Bad Wannabe: Both the Master and Ramón Salamander. The former because he's so Obviously Evil that everyone saw his betrayal coming a mile and a half away and the latter because, for all his smarts, he lacks the Doctor's real world experience. Once the Doctor finally nails him down, it only takes him about a minute to stop him.
- Call Forward:
- It's implied several times that Jo is the one who coined the term "timey-wimey." Might be a Continuity Snarl as it's been implied that the Tenth Doctor came up with the phrase but he could have just fished it out of his memory.
- Yates' directionless attitude is seen several times, setting up "Invasion of the Dinosaurs."
- The Master's speech is clearly an early draft of the one he gives in "Logopolis."
- At the end, the Doctor follows through on the offer he makes every Last of His Kind villain trying to take over Earth in the new series. Take them to an empty planet so they can forge their own destiny.
- Continuity Nod: Salamander's staff is from the Newton Institute.
- The Corrupter: The Master is clearly having the time of his life being this to Mike Yates.
- Crazy Prepared: The Master has a secret passage into the British Parliament and had his TARDIS follow them back to 1868. You know just in case. He's also taken steps to detect the arrival of any other Time Lords.
- Dramatic Irony: The Master swims off saying that he and the Doctor will meet again but these two incarnations will never meet again.
- Enemy Mine: The Doctor and the Master.
- Evil Is Petty: The Master reveals that his primary motivation for investigating the Mechanical Lifeforms and planned to derail their conquest was because they didn't ask him for help in conquering Earth.
- Freudian Excuse: The Doctor suspects that he hates the Time Lords so much because they forced him to regenerate.
- Friendly Enemy: The Master towards the Doctor. Less so in reverse.
- Giving Radio to the Romans: Ramón Salamander's main plot. He uses his time machine to return to the time of the British Empire and tries to sell them his Nanomachines.
- Heroic Willpower: The Brigadier can now shrug off the Master's hypnosis.
- Hidden Depths: Averted. As said under Incorruptible Pure Pureness, Jo really is that lovely and innocent.
- Identical Stranger: Ramón Salamander to the Second Doctor.
- Immediate Sequel: The series takes place in the immediate aftermath of "The Three Doctors."
- Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Jo Grant to the Doctor's pleasant surprise.
- Just Following Orders: How Salamander's staff justify themselves to the Doctor saying that they have families to feed. Unlike his later, war-weary, incarnations, the Doctor is sympathetic and promises to get them home.
- Latex Perfection: The Master's masks. Their perfection is the result of them being part of his TARDIS.
- Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: "Doctor? The Master got away, using his face as a parachute." And yes, the Brigadier immediately lampshades it.
- Mechanical Lifeforms: The micro machines.
- Muggle Power: Salamander will makes this an Invoked Trope.
- Muggles Do It Better: The Master decides that the Nanomachines could be used to effectively conquer the galaxy.
- Nanomachines: The villain has a swarm of them.
- Not Me This Time: As the Master keeps saying.
- The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: The Master's primary motivation for teaming up with the Doctor. Aside from not wanting a human to steal Time Lord technology, Earth is his to conquer.
- Reed Richards Is Useless: Salamander gripes about the Time Lords being victim to this noting how they keep their powerful technology out of Muggle hands.
- Seen It All: At this point, nothing surprises the Brig.
- Sequel Episode: To "The Enemy of the World".
- Sequel Hook: Salamander manages to carve a hole in his cell and escape.
- Shout-Out: Salamander's armor is very Lex Luthor-like.
- Smart People Play Chess: How the Doctor is introduced.
- Stockholm Syndrome: To the Doctor's surprise, he's actually grown to like Earth and the humans. He even suspects that he was forced to regenerate so that this would be the case.
- Sympathy for the Devil: Of all people, the Doctor knows what it's like to be changed to fit in better.
- Whole-Plot Reference: The whole series is a homage to James Bond.
Fourth Doctor[]
- Ancient Astronauts: The Olympian Gods and Medusa are aliens.
- Beware the Silly Ones: Goofy as Four may be, he shows why it doesn't pay to underestimate him.
- Call Forward: The Doctor mentions the Weeping Angels but considers them a myth at this point in his life.
- Exact Words; The Doctor said he would take Sarah Jane to a western. He didn't say that he'd take her to the old west. She's actually pretty amused.
- Grand Theft Me: The Medusa posses Lady Carstairs to escape the bio-field.
- Last Second Chance: The Doctor offers one to the Medusa but she rejects it.
- I Lied: The Medusa had no intention of ever curing Lady Carstairs.
- Life Energy: The Medusa drinks it out of other lifeforms.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: The Zeus hologram is actually quite fair. The Doctor lampshades the unlikelihood of it.
- Riddle for the Ages: Did Lady Carstairs know that she would die upon seeing her shattered and petrified face or did she just convince herself that it wasn't her?
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The Medusa is an alien criminal, trapped within the forcefield keyed to her bio-signature of the downed prison ship.
- Squee: Sarah when they learn that Albert is the great-grandfather of Harry Sullivan.
- Stable Time Loop: The Lamp of Chronos.
- Sympathy for the Devil: Likely due to being trapped on Earth in his past incarnation, the Doctor is quite sympathetic to the Medusa's plight.
- You Already Changed the Past: Why Sarah Jane has to be petrified. Because she and the Doctor already saw her statue. Per the Laws of Time, knowing your own future turns it into a fixed point in time.
Seventh Doctor[]
- Ancient Conspiracy: The Markarians are yet another group of aliens influencing Earth.
- Beauty Is Bad: The evil Markarians.
- Call Back: The Doctor is assisted in Australia by the Intrusion Counter-Measures Group from "Remembrance of the Daleks", the predecessor of UNIT.
- Call Forward: The TARDIS control room is clearly morphing towards its look in the TV movie.
- Human Popsicle: Gilmore for a long sixty two years. Fortunately, the Doctor is there to return him to 1967.
- A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Vulpanan couldn't have more Nazi tropes if they tried.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The Vulpanan President, a fascist tyrant, is clearly patterned after Donald Trump.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The Markarians. But they're the good guys.
- Shout-Out:
- The Markarians' integration into human society has more than a few similarities to the Eugenics Wars.
- The Doctor has Knockout Gas in his umbrella.
- The Vulpanans' colours are an inversion of the Helghast.
- Volcano Lair: Right off the cost of Mexico.
Eight Doctor[]
- An Aesop: No matter what they are or where they come from, everyone is entitled to a fair chance at life.
- Actual Pacifist: The Eighth Doctor truly commits to this.
- Body Backup Drive: The Bakri are creating new bodies for the ultra-rich to jump into. Trouble is, they made those new bodies a bit too well.
- Call Back: The Doctor's cottage from the old TV Action comics returns.
- Call Forward: The Doctor is reluctant to get involved in war, hinting at his conscientious objection to the Time War.
- The Cameo: Twelve and Clara appear at the end, making sure that Josie and Eight are happy.
- Foreshadowing: The man who bought Josie at the auction was bidder #12.
- Hostile Terraforming:
- The Spherion's homeworld was colonized by another species, driving them to near-extinction. Then they began terraforming the worlds of the Calaxi, unaware that they were sentient.
- The Nixi colony ship in issue 4. Though it's unclear if they even knew Earth was inhabited.
- Lighter and Softer: Even In-Universe, the Eighth Doctor is considered this compared to the Twelfth.
- Mythology Gag: When discussing, the Twelfth Doctor, Josie notes that he looked a bit Roman. Comparisons are also drawn between him and the Third Doctor.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The Animae particles in Josie's paintings combined with the spare telepathic circuit kick off issue 1.
- Plant Aliens: The Nixi.
- Sufficiently Advanced Alien: The Witherkin are creatures of living sunlight, even if Mrs. Fellowes summarizes them as dark magic.
- Stable Time Loop: The Eight Doctor met Josie because the Twelfth bought her at an auction and set up their meeting based on his memories of it.
- Starfish Aliens:
- The Witherkin.
- The Spherion.
- Written by the Winners: The Doctor bitterly notes that the writers may have been in charge of the winning side, but they very rarely did anything. Harris' family defeated the Nixi the first time but the rich family they serve appropriated the story.
Ninth Doctor[]
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Several factions want the Doctor's memories of the Last Great Time War. As they learn when they get a taste of them, War Is Hell.
- Big Bad Wannabe: Addison Delamar may be a Corrupt Corporate Executive who masterminded an intricate plan, but the instant the hologram of the Cyber-Leader showed up, there was no question as to who the bigger threat was.
- Continuity Cavalcade: The Temporal Bazaar.
- Continuity Nod:
- As established in his audio book series, the War Doctor works, reluctantly, with Cardinal Ollistra.
- As the Time War got worse and worse, the Time Lords unleashed the Great Vampires against the Daleks.
- In one of the Doctor's memories, the War Doctor is cradling Cinder's corpse, his Mauve Shirt companion from Engines of War.
- Could Have Avoided This Plot: If the Doctor hadn't boasted that he was a Time Lord to the whole of the Temporal Bazaar, about 95% of the comic wouldn't have happened.
- Crystal Spires and Togas: The Perpetual City.
- Didn't Think This Through: The Doctor announcing that he's a Time Lord in the middle of a temporal black market. Jack and Rose can only Face Palm.
- Doesn't Like Guns: The Doctor of course. He even destroys Jack's squareness gun when the good captain uses it one too many times for the Doctor's liking. Though as the Brig asks, does he actually have any better ideas?
- Exact Words: At the end, Jack does exactly what the Doctor would do. Pulling a Heroic Sacrifice, giving up more of his memories, and tricking the villain.
- Evil Power Vacuum: With the Time Lords and Daleks gone, several other races went to war for supremacy over time.
- The Federation: The Raxas Alliance.
- Flanderization:
- Downplayed but Rose is a lot more prone to making snarky comments and being a Dumb Blonde than she was on television.
- Likewise, Nine is a bit more short-tempered than he is on-screen.
- Godzilla Threshold: The Time War got bad enough that the Time Lords unleashed the Great Vampires on the Daleks.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Rose's Clingy Jealous Girl tendencies become apparent when Tara joins the TARDIS and gets along with the Doctor.
- Have We Met Yet?:
- At the end of Doctormania, the Doctor gets a distress call from Mickey. But it's a Tenth Doctor-era Mickey whom Mickey was trying to call.
- Official Secrets features the Ninth Doctor interacting with UNIT from the Third Doctor's era.
- Head-in-The-Sand Management: According to Mickey, UNIT's response to a problem is to issue a D-Notice (which bars every and anyone from investigating) and pretend that it doesn't exist.
- Hidden Depths: Rose might be a Closet Geek with regards to superhero comics.
- Honest John's Dealership: Glom.
- Immediate Sequel: The series starts right after "The Doctor Dances."
- Jerkass Realization: Even after meeting and befriending the genial Tenth Doctor, whom Micky was trying to call, Mickey still considers the Ninth to be an unrepentant Jerkass. Nine is quite horrified to learn that Mickey believes that he would stoop so low as to mock a victim of disfigurement.
- Never Trust a Trailer: The previews for The Bidding War show Rose giving birth to an alien baby. It's, essentially, a VR simulation.
- Noodle Incident: The Brigadier being in Geneva. No details are offered, the story just needed him out of the way for a while.
- Oh Crap: When the Doctor sees the fourth guest at the auction: a Cyber-Leader. Repeated again when he notes it's been unusually quiet.
- Planet of Hats: Nomicae is described by the Doctor as being home to every tech giant and is essentially Silicon Valley IN SPACE!.
- Police Are Useless: UNIT. It's why Mickey wouldn't work for them.
- Pretender Diss: The Doctor is rather unimpressed by the fake Chumblies.
- Shaggy Dog Story: Jack's quest for his missing memories and to help an innocent man that he was sent to kill. It was all just an elaborate trap to use him as bait for the Doctor.
- Shout-Out:
- Recurring Affably Evil salesman Glom is repeatedly called "Squidward" by the characters.
- When posing as an Intrepid Reporter, Rose calls herself "Lois Lane of the Daily Planet." She forgets that two seconds later and says she's from the Daily Bugle.
- Mickey compares the wormhole to the one from Deep Space Nine.
- When inside Jack's safe-house, Rose asks if he crossed the streams before noting that his secret staircase is very Scooby-Doo. The safe-house's monitors also seem inspired by Legends of Tomorrow a bit. The Time Agency would have more Legends references in the Thirteenth Doctor comics.
- Rose makes a reference to The Magic Roundabout. The Doctor flags the obscurity of it.
- Harkness. Jack Harkness.
- Nomicae is clearly patterned after Coruscant.
- Space Whale Aesop: You shouldn't give out information about who you really are online. Because if you do, your memories might be harvested and set up for auction.
- Spanner in the Works: The Doctor's telepathic powers mess up the Sin Eater process and grant them sentience. Everyone lampshades this but the Doctor is insistent that if it hadn't been him, it would have been some other telepath.
- Stable Time Loop: In Weapons of Past Destruction, Jack's future self appears piloting the TARDIS, shouting to his present self to use his vortex manipulator to go back a few minutes and start the TARDIS in time to escape the supernova.
- Take That:
- Yani is a parody of Doctor Who fangirls.
- The critiques of social media platforms; such as "Bookface", "Stumblr", "Memgram"; in The Bidding War are not subtle.
- Territorial Smurfette: Rose doesn't take it too well when Tara joins the TARDIS and cliques with the Doctor and Jack.
- Time Police: The Time Lords used to do this but now that they're gone, several other factions are trying to rise up and take their place.
- Troll: As ever, the Ninth Doctor will put down his foes with perfectly timed sarcastic quips.
- What the Hell, Hero?: The Doctor gets this a lot, particularly in Official Secrets.
- Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Downplayed. The Ninth Doctor likes UNIT fine, but he doesn't like to be reminded of his more military mindset.
Tenth Doctor[]
- Actionized Sequel: Follows Series 4 and features more action that most Doctor Who stories.
- All Love Is Unrequited:
- Cindy's crush on Gabby.
- Sarah Jane mentions that her own crush on the Doctor didn't go anywhere.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Aspect Red's reasoning for throwing the Doctor into the Untempered Schism in Old Girl. The Doctor is a dangerous rogue element and Red doesn't like him.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The Osirans did this sometime after the 41st century.
- Bad Boss: Sutekh kills his allies For the Evulz, solely on the basis that they might betray him.
- Batman Gambit: The Time Sentinels enact one in the final arc. Trouble is, it's so obviously a trap that the Doctor doesn't bite.
- Bittersweet Ending:
- Music Man. The Doctor and Gabby defeat the Nocturne but at the cost of Roscoe's life. The two then have to tell Cindy, his girlfriend, who wasn't there at the time. The last shot is a mournful Doctor staring at Roscoe's broken trumpet.
- The Good Companion, the ending to Year 3. The Red TARDIS has been defeated and the Time Sentinels stopped but at the cost of Gabby being separated from the Doctor. At the end however, the Moment drops her into the Twelfth Doctor's TARDIS but the Laws of Time mean that she can never return to the Tenth Doctor, Cindy, and, presumably, her family.
- Call Forward:
- In the Doctor's dream to his boyhood, Borusa is obsessed with tradition.
- The Time Sentinels worry that the Time Lock might be breached.
- Continuity Nod:
- When Gabby's mutation begins to show, the Doctor explains them as block transfer computations.
- The Master's TARDIS cameos in the TARDIS showroom hallucination in Breakfast at Tyranny's.
- When Sarah Jane shows up, she mentions her encounter with Sutekh, and her recent encounter with Davros whom she fears really got into the Doctor's head when he compared the companions to weapons.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Vortex Butterfly.
- Expy: The Quantum harvester is more or less a stand in for the Reality Stone.
- Future Me Scares Me: The Eldritch Abomination in Vortex Butterflies is a future Gabby whom the Doctor abandoned when her power began to freak him out.
- Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: The Red TARDIS. It comes from outside the universe and is evil. Nothing more about it is explained.
- Gone Horribly Right: The Cerebravores were created as weapons in a war. Guess what they did to their creators.
- Halloween Episode: The first story arc features the Doctor and Gabby meeting during Dia de los Muertos.
- Heterosexual Life Partners: In The Weeping Angels of Mons, after meeting a Scottish solider named Jamie, the Doctor admits that he was this with Jamie McCrimmon.
- Hive Mind / Mind Hive: The Time Sentinels.
- Honey Trap: Noobis' girlfriend, Siffhoni, is Aspect Blue trying to gather unbiased information on the Doctor.
- Hubworld: Aramuko.
- Human Subspecies: Neanderthals and homo sapiens appear in Medicine Man.
- I Hate Past Me:
- The Tenth Doctor does not want people viewing his warrior incarnation as a war hero.
- The Twelfth Doctor doesn't care for how sentimental he once was, callously telling his past self that he'll get over Rose.
- Insane Troll Logic: As Sarah Jane lampshades in Vortex Butterflies, the Doctor didn't give her a cell phone in her youth because he wanted to avoid any anachronisms. He then proceeded to gift her a metal dog from the year 5000.
- Living Emotional Crutch: Gabby to both Ten and Cindy. By the end, they become hers.
- My Own Grampa: Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth suggests that Cindy is descended from one of her clones that stayed in ancient China.
- Neglectful Precursors:
- Averted with the Osirians who cleaned up very throughly after themselves when they reality.
- Another aversion, amazingly, comes from the Time Lords. They left the Time Sentinels to guard the Time Vortex.
- Old Shame: In-Universe, the Twelfth Doctor regards how sentimental he was over Rose Tyler to be this.
- Outliving One's Offspring: Due to the Time Travel, Cindy Wu outlived the thousands of clones of herself that she set loose in Ancient China (including one that's implied to be an ancestor of hers).
- Race Lift: When the Doctor was a lad, Borusa was black.
- Reality Warper:
- The Quantum harvester.
- The Vortex Butterfly.
- The Moment.
- Red Herring: Almost literally. Aspect Red isn't the Big Bad of the finale, it's the Red TARDIS.
- Replacement Goldfish: Rose the Cat. She is not amused.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Sutekh.
- Sequel Episode: Spiral Staircase to "Pyramids of Mars."
- Shout-Out:
- The Doctor compares himself and the Cerebravores to Peter Venkman and Zuul respectively. He later uses "Dr. Venkman" as an alias.
- At one point, Gabby introduces the Doctor as "Doctor Strange."
- Cindy names her clones after characters from, but not limited to, Snow White, The Muppets, Peanuts, and Star Trek: The Original Series.
- The Doctor names the Xerobian machine "Marcie" since it's shaped like a peanut and calls him "Sir."
- The Twelfth Doctor calls his past self "Bambi."
- Space Age Stasis: While the landscape is different, Gallifrey doesn't seem to have changed much since the past section of Old Girl. Even the citadel has only minor differences.
- Surpassed the Teacher: As Sarah Jane laughs about in Vortex Butterflies, she's now giving the Doctor advice.
- Take That: The Doctor mourning so much for Rose Tyler that he spends god know how long in the TARDIS crying over her and even built a Stalker Shrine to her. Could that be A Rose by Any Other Name or any of the thousands of Ten/Rose fanfics dealing with the fallout of "Doomsday"?
- Too Dumb to Live: The Time Sentinels choosing to believe that they can control the Red TARDIS. Gabby lampshades this.
- Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: The Red TARDIS tries to make a clone of the Doctor but struggles to decipher Time Lord DNA, creating clones of all the Doctor's previous selves.
- Vague Age: In The Lost Dimension issue, Cindy points out that while the Doctor always says he's 900 years old, he never says how long those years are or which planet they're from.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: In the finale, the Time Sentinels reveal that they're worried that the Doctor might damage the Time Lock. Except that they're not the ones calling the shots.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: As a result of the comic not getting a fourth season, what ultimately becomes of everyone, bar the Doctor, is never explained.
Eleventh Doctor[]
- A Form You Are Comfortable With:
- The Time Lock. As a human mind can't grasp it, Alice just sees a giant wall.
- Throughly inverted in the Talent Scout and the Doctor's final confrontation. The Doctor has no desire to see his mother.
- Arc Words: In Year Two: "Extermihate."
- Anachronism Stew: The Doctor's World. A planet built for someone as chaotic as him.
- The Bus Came Back: Almost literally. The Doctor's old car Bessie returns. The Doctor pimps her out into a monster truck.
- But for Me It Was Tuesday: In Year Two, the Eleventh Doctor is charged with a committing a genocide during the Time War that he can't remember at all. Because he didn't do it. Sent back in time, Alice did it and the War Doctor was simply branded as guilty by association.
- Call Forward: The Doctor remembers that he could have chosen a Type 53 TARDIS but that someone advised him to take a Type 40 instead.
- Continuity Nod: Ood Sigma remarks that the Doctor now knows not to delay in answering his summons.
- Continuity Snarl: One that's rather forgivable given how fluid time was in the Last Great Time War but the Doctor and the Master fought together on the battlefield, despite the Tenth Doctor later expressing surprise that the Master was resurrected.
- Cut Lex Luthor a Check: The Golden Triangle use the Orphaned Hour, an old Time Lord weapon, to rewind time by thirty years so they can pass off every technological innovation as their own.
- Deal with the Devil: How ServeYou.Inc. functions.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Entity.
- Flanderization: The Master's TARDIS only appears in its gothic column form.
- Fluffy the Terrible: The monster in the first story.
- Interquel: The whole saga takes place between Series 5 and 6 when the Doctor is waiting out Amy and Rory's honeymoon.
- Lotus Eater Machine: ServeYou.Inc.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Britzit-247 is populated by people who look like Nigel Farage with the robot having Boris Johnson's face.
- Non-Malicious Monster: The Entity. As the Twelfth Doctor once said, hunger looks a lot like evil from the wrong side of the cutlery.
- Noodle Incident: The Doctor once lent a mug to his old friend Drax. The specifics are not delved into and Alice doesn't ask.
- Sad Clown: The Doctor' moroseness is a good deal more prominent than on television.
- Serious Business: In Strange Loops, the Doctor is insistent that you must never startle a llama.
- Shout-Out:
- Take That: Remembrance is a grossly unsubtle critique of Brexit, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. The Eleventh Doctor describes "Britzit-247" as being built on mutual annoyance at... something.
- Take That, Audience!: Alice remarks at one point that the Doctor, even at his worst, will never go full out Master on his foes or a foe that is at the end of the day, misguided and ignorant, which can't really be taken as anything but an attack on those fans who think the Doctor should be a darker character because Evil Is Cool.
- Took a Level In Badass: The Eleventh Doctor turns Bessie into a monster truck.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
- The Master's first incarnation in the Last Great Time War was a twelve year old child. No one ever comments on this.
- While the Doctor's World is based on the Doctor's quirks, the giant Cyberman statue is unaddressed.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: As a result of the comic not getting a fourth season, what ultimately becomes of everyone, bar the Doctor, is never explained. The series ends with the Doctor asking where and when the Sapling would like to be dropped off, or if he would like to stay in the TARDIS, and Alice wondering what will come next.
Twelfth Doctor[]
- Ancient Astronauts: Kali.
- Arc Words:
- "Hyperios Rises" in Year 1.
- Clara Oswald and the School of Death drops several mentions of "hybrids," tying into Series 9's Myth Arc.
- Attack of the 50 Foot Whatever:
- In the climax of The Swords of Kali, the eponymous antagonist possess Clara and supersizes her body to fifteen feet tall. Clara actually admits that it was kind of fun.
- K2. An upgrade of K1. The Doctor is unsurprised.
- Based on a True Story: In-Universe, Time Surgeon is based on urban legends of the Doctor's adventures.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Subverted in The Fourth Wall. The Doctor has been absorbed into a comic book and is warning the reader not to fall into the trap. Then played straight at the end.
- The Bus Came Back:
- The Celestial Toymaker.
- Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen makes a return in the last arc, though now going by the name Margaret Ag-Kris Therur-Ford Jingatheen.
- But for Me It Was Tuesday: The Doctor doesn't remember defeating Lucifer van Volk. Though as he notes, it could be a Have We Met Yet? situation (it isn't).
- Censor Suds: Clara in Clara Oswald and the School of Death.
- Christmas Episode: Relative Dimensions.
- Colony Drop: The Scindia-Corp try and crash the Haven (an orbiting city) into Mumbai.
- Companion Cube: In Clara Oswald and the School of Death, the Doctor gains a stuffed fish called "Sonny" whom he absolutely adores.
- Cool Teacher: Clara, even if her students find her a little odd.
- Cool Old Guy: The Doctor of course.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: The Doctor in The Hyperion Empire when Fireman Sam starts flirting with Clara.
- Curb Stomp Battle: The Hyperions' invasion of Earth.
- Did I Mention It's Christmas?: Ghost Stories.
- Doppelganger Replacement Love Interest: The motivation of The Fractures in a nut-shell.
- Everyone Has Standards: The inhabitants of Dyssiopeia communicate exclusively through swearing but whatever Clara said was too much even for them.
- The Evils of Free Will: The Mindmorphs.
- Eviler Than Thou: The Sea Devils prove much more dangerous than the Silurians ever did.
- Eyepatch of Power: Subverted in Clara Oswald and the School of Death. The Doctor tries to pull this but not only is his eye fine, the rest of his persona, as Clara points out, is a nautical Cliché Storm.
- Failed a Spot Check: As the Doctor lampshades, he, of all people, should have figured out that the Haunted House was a dying TARDIS.
- Haunted House: The Doctor and Hattie investigate one only to find that it's in fact a dying TARDIS.
- Heroic Willpower: Why the Doctor doesn't bother to take Kali even remotely seriously. She's chosen to possess Clara Oswald. All the Doctor has to do is stall for time until Clara's indomitable willpower forces her out.
- Hostile Terraforming:
- Subverted in Terraformer. The process was meant to be a safe endeavour on an uninhabited world but the Hyperion buried beneath the surface had other ideas.
- The Hyperions scorch London when they invade. This is not their plan. It's just a side-effect as they build their Star-Killing weapon.
- The Sea Devils are encouraging global warming as it replicates the extreme heat of their preferred climate. Prehistoric Earth.
- Hypocrite: As Twelve tells Clara, he goes off without a "by your leave", not the other way 'round.
- Magic Pants: Averted in The Swords of Kali. And no, the artists don't show a naked Clara.
- Mama Bear: Who needs a sonic screwdriver to open a door when you have an angry mum?
- Mona Lisa Smile: Clara was the model for the painting. The Doctor notes that, although Da Vinci failed to capture her likeness, he nailed her smirk.
- Mundane Made Awesome: The Doctor wins in Vegas just by simple probability calculations.
- Ms. Fanservice:
- Clara is drawn with quite a few more form-hugging outfits than in the series and is, technically, shown naked twice.
- Bill's outfit in The Lost Dimension is a lot more revealing than her usual clothing.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Clara in Planet of the Rude when she introduces the Doctor to internet swearing where there's no one to hold him accountable.
- Mythology Gag:
- Christel Dean is named and modelled after Christel Dee, the host of Doctor Who: The Fan Show.
- Missy mentions "trip of a lifetime", the tagline for the show's revival.
- All of the comedy backup-strips with Twelve and Clara take their titles from classic episodes.
- Non-Malicious Monster:
- The Pathicols. They're Emotion Eaters but a non-fatal variety and were honestly just hungry.
- The Doctor suspects that the Shambler is this given its Blue and Orange Morality.
- Noodle Incident: At some point in 2012, either the Fourth or the Tenth Doctor defeated a Cyberman invasion.
- Not So Different: The Doctor and the Celestial Toymaker. As Clara lampshades, they're both lonely gods drifting through time and space in a magic toy box.
- Oh, No, Not Again: Kate Stewart when confronted by another alien Prime Minister. Though technically, Sea Devils aren't aliens.
- Outliving One's Offspring: An Implied Trope given how drawn the Doctor is to the Toymaker's Susan Foreman construct.
- Police Are Useless: The sheer uselessness of UNIT is constantly lampshaded.
- Reality Ensues:
- The Hyperion are a race of suns. The last stage of their evolution is supernova.
- Related to Police Are Useless, since UNIT is so incompetent at doing anything, the populace doesn't trust them or want to listen to them.
- Serious Business:
- It took over eighty-seven tries, but the Doctor finally beat Clara at Connect 3.
- The Doctor is not amused by Back to the Future and its loose attitude towards time travel.
- Sequel Episode: The Fourth Wall to "Flatline."
- Ship Tease: Clara/Doctor vibes are everywhere during her time in the comic.
- The Hyperion Empire teases Clara/Sam the Fireman only for him to pull a Heroic Sacrifice.
- Shout-Out:
- Sam the Fireman. Yes, he's heard all the jokes.
- One of the Celestial Toymaker's toys is based off IT.
- In Clara Oswald and the School of Death, the Doctor mentions knowing a "van Dyne" whom you needed a magnifying glass to see and a "von Doom." All the while drinking a pan galactic gargle blaster.
- In The Fourth Wall, Natalie compares the Doctor to the Silver Surfer.
- Playing House features time travel technology subbing in for a Haunted House, much like The Ghosts of Inverloch in Valerian. One of the dying TARDIS' rooms is also labelled the "Room of Requirement" and the path to the console room is through the cupboard under the stairs.
- In The Great Shopping Bill, the Doctor, when ranting about how inaccurate Back to the Future is, refers to "Marty" as "Morty." Bill mutters that "Morty" is totally different. Missy is later shown watching Back to the Future.
- Star-Killing: The Hyperions consume the energy of stars.
- Sympathy for the Devil: As shown in the Christmas Episode, the Doctor understands the loneliness that the Celestial Toymaker feels.
- Take That: When leafing through Captain Ersatz versions of Marvel and DC comics, the Doctor notes that his rogues gallery, and Leela, would make short work of them.
Thirteenth Doctor[]
- All-Loving Hero: Thirteen.
- Badass Boast: Take your best shot Weeping Angels. The Doctor will defeat you once again.
- Bittersweet Ending: Old Friends ends with the Space Whale free but with the knowledge that the race will be extinct in a few centuries. And that, soon enough, the Corsair will run across House and be killed.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Time Lords don't need to blink as much as humans do.
- Bizarre Alien Senses: Just by sniffing Yaz's phone, the Tenth Doctor can tell that she's from 2020.
- Bluff the Impostor: After Yaz claims to be a probational Time Agent, the Tenth Doctor asks for her cell phone. When she hands it over, he calls BS, noting that Time Agents aren't allowed to hand out any sort of tech.
- Borrowed Catchphrase: The Thirteenth Doctor tries out "Allons-y" and "GERONIMO" but decide that they're not suited for her.
- The Bus Came Back: The Time Agency returns to prominence.
- Continuity Nod:
- The Doctor harkens back to Santa Claus' name being "Jeff."
- The Doctor alludes to the Weeping Angels taking Amy and Rory away from her.
- The Doctor gets library cards of all their faces made.
- Everyone Can See It: The Doctor is ashamed that she didn't see how clearly in love with her Martha Jones was.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Ryan is rather horrified to learn how many Whoniverse villains can pass as everyday objects.
- Eviler Than Thou: Objectively, the Nestene is the more evil of the two, but the Weeping Angels are the more powerful and dish out a hilariously one-sided Curb Stomp Battle to the Consiousness.
- Face Heel Turn: Becoming Time Agents really sours Schulz and Perkins' personalities.
- Fake Memories: The events of the Free Comic Book Day issue were implanted by Krampus to throw the Doctor off her trail.
- From Bad to Worse: As an Interquel to "Blink", A Little Help from My Friends was already pretty bad but then the Autons join the fray.
- Genre Savvy: In Hidden Human History, Ryan is worried about the creepy isolated cabins in the wood.
- Go to Alias: The Doctor now goes by Jane Smith.
- Interquel: A Little Help from My Friends to "Blink".
- Joker Immunity: At this point, the Doctor is totally resigned to the Master having survived death. Except that it wasn't the Master this time.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Keeps up the Whoniverse trend regarding Santa Claus. Krampus however is definitely real.
- Meaningful Background Event: In the first issue of A Little Help from My Friends, angel statues can be seen getting closer and closer to Team TARDIS. In the second, the mannequins keep changing position.
- Mythology Gag: The Autons at the front of Martha's shop are dressed like Ben and Polly.
- Not Me This Time:
- The Doctor initially thinks that the villain of Old Friends is Missy. It turns out to be the Hoarder.
- She later thinks that the Hoarder is the Big Bad of the Christmas Episode but it's revealed to be Krampus.
- Oh Crap: Not only have the Autons invaded 1969 but so have the Weeping Angels.
- Old Shame: Like Twelve, Thirteen doesn't seem too nostalgic about how overtly sentimental Ten was with regards to Rose. Though in her case, she is trying to spare Martha from hearing more about Rose.
- Older and Wiser: How Thirteen markets herself. The "Older" part is accepted. "Wiser" is up for debate.
- Red Herring: It's first hinted that the thief of Old Friends is Missy. It's in fact the Corsair and they're not the main antagonist.
- Revisiting the Roots: Like Series 11, the comic has historical and sci-fi aspects.
- Running Gag:
- Still not ginger.
- Redecorated. The Doctor doesn't like it.
- Saying Too Much: The Doctor rouses Martha's suspicions by using her last name.
- Stable Time Loop: The TARDIS brought the fam to 1969 to investigate temporal anomalies. Those anomalies were Weeping Angels who came to 1969 so that they could feed off the TARDIS. Yaz has a beautiful You Have Got to Be Kidding Me! reaction.
- Took a Level In Jerkass: Like in Series 12, the Doctor is more short-tempered in Year Two.
- Tragic Keepsake: The Doctor keeps a room full of them, including the Corsair's hypercube.
- Unfazed Everyman: How the Tenth Doctor can tell that Ryan, Graham, and Yaz aren't ordinary humans.
2020 Comic[]
- Bizarre Alien Senses: The Doctor can identify paradoxes by smell.
- La Résistance: The humans have one against the Sea Devils. Led by Rose Tyler of all people.
- Spared by the Adaptation: The changes in time spared Pete Tyler.
- Villain Has a Point: Subverted. Ryan thinks Earth originally belonging to the Sea Devils means this but Thirteen points out that the Sea Devils could have chosen a peaceful solution yet opted for violence. Whatever point they had is null.