The fourth season of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” is going to debut on Paramount+ on July 23, 2026, with an episode called “Valles Marineris.” Trekkies are naturally quite excited, but also a little wistful, as these final seasons of “Strange New Worlds” (and “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy”) are going to be the last televised “Star Trek” episodes for the foreseeable future. “Academy” was canceled after its already-filmed (but as-yet unaired) second season, and “Strange New Worlds” will end after its (also already-filmed but unaired) fifth season. Once those shows end, we Trekkies will have to, as we so often do, comfort ourselves with reruns, tie-in novels, and endless speculative discussions of what might have been. 

That will include pondering the “Doctor Who” crossover reference that almost happened. It seems that “Strange New Worlds” co-creator and writer Akiva Goldsman revealed to the Radio Times that he almost — but ultimately didn’t — wrote an explicit reference to the British sci-fi series “Doctor Who” into an episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.” 

“Doctor Who” has been around slightly longer than “Star Trek” (“Who” debuted in 1963, “Star Trek” in 1966), but both shows created a sci-fi TV bedrock that fans have been standing on ever since. “Doctor Who” follows the exploits of a nameless alien Doctor (fifteen actors have played the character; he “regenerates” when he dies) who travels around the universe in a time-traveling spacecraft called the TARDIS (which, thanks to a whimsical prop rigmarole, looks like a vintage police box). The Doctor typically travels around with a (generally young, attractive, female) human companion. 

Goldman wanted to imply that Pelia (Carol Kane), the engineer on “Strange New Worlds,” was once one of the Doctor’s companions. 

Akiva Goldsman admitted that the “Strange New Worlds” writer and “Doctor Who” writer Russell T. Davies were, for quite a while, sussing out the details of a legit crossover with “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.” He said: 

“We were trying with Russell to do a crossover. We were for years. […] Again, these are the near misses, but we got not unclose, and we had some really cool conversations about it. And so, certainly in our view, I mean, Pelia traveled in the TARDIS. Why not?”

Pelia, of course, is the engineer on the USS Enterprise on “Strange New Worlds.” She is a Lanthanite, a humanoid species that seemingly lives for thousands of years. Because Pelia is so long-lived, it’s wholly possible that she ran into the Doctor many centuries earlier, and spent a while in his company as his traveling companion. 

This was backed up by a barely-visible Easter egg in the “Strange New Worlds” episode “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” wherein a wide shot of the USS Enterprise featured a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it TARDIS floating in space nearby. That Easter egg, however, was a cute wink for attentive fans, and not a legitimate declaration that “Star Trek” and “Doctor Who” share a universe. 

The Radio Times also quoted something Davies said at a sci-fi convention in 2024, noting that he, too, would love to see a crossover between “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek.” And why not, indeed? The two sci-fi shows have been part of the pop consciousness for 60-some years and mutually invented the very notion of sci-fi TV “canon.” Seeing the Doctor interact with the USS Enterprise in a canonical fashion would feel like some kind of long-held cultural fulfillment. 

Of course, the crossover between “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek” has long been a delicious idea, and there have been a few cute winks to fans over the years. In the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “I, Borg,” there was a reference to a planetary system called the Argolis Cluster, which was a term taken from the 1980 “Doctor Who” episode “The Leisure Hive.” In the “Next Generation” episode “The Neutral Zone,” one can pause on a background computer panel, and see that it bears the names of the six actors who had played the Doctor up to the moment that episode aired.

The comic book company IDW even published a (non-canonical) crossover story between “Star Trek” and “Doctor Who” called “Assimilation²,” wherein the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) teamed up with Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart), and wherein the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) teamed up with Captain Kirk (William Shatner). These types of crossovers are the bread and butter of fan-baiting comic writers. There is a comic wherein the X-Men turned up on the Enterprise, and another in which Spock beat up Wolverine.

And we haven’t even mentioned Gary Seven (Robert Lansing), a very Doctor-like character that “Star Trek” inserted into an early episode as a potential spin-off character. Gary Seven had a magical portal that looked like an ordinary Earth item and a comely companion played by Teri Garr. 

Fans have also likely been writing fanfic for decades, placing any one of the 15 Doctors on the bridge of any one of the many Starfleet vessels that Trekkies are familiar with. Would an official crossover have been crass and pandering? Perhaps. But many sci-fi nerds have been waiting for years for it.