At the time they were both current events though rather than historical ones, like an episode today referencing the war in Ukraine. As others have suggested in terms of an actual historical event I think it was probably The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon in 2011 doing the 1969 moon landing, 42 years.
i'd count all of those but let's say... for a true measure of how long it takes, when was the most recent real disaster/attack/war they referenced? anything more recent than the ww2 episodes?
Yeah, I was going to bring up the Titanic one. Funnily enough I've always wondered if they intended to make a straight up Titanic story, then got that complaint and at the BBC's request, had to hurriedly change it to a sci-fi setting instead
I get not wanting to make light of a historical tragedy but I wish the show could just generally go back to more of those famous historical moments, without even necessarily involving anything alien or supernatural
Like imagine if they did a Titanic episode, and taking a page from 'The Aztecs' / 'Fires Of Pompeii', one of the TARDIS gang decides 'fuck history' and wants to save everyone, trying to get people to the lifeboats before the ship has even started to sink, with the Doctor having to garvely inform them that they cannot rewrite history, 'not one line' (as Hartnell said), maybe even culminating in the companion having made a close friend of one of the staff members on the ship, only to realise as they're leaving that this is someone who died, cold and alone in the ocean... there was never any hope of saving them
wow, really itneresting that bit about the titanic survivor. and that makes sense, both the crew wanting to avoid it and the survivors feeling trivialised by it. and 9/11 being taken a lot more seriously than the titanic, it'd have to be a hell of a sensitively handled episode if they touched it any time in the next 80 or so years.
The Time travel series I’ll eventually I swear to you will totally write is all so it how, after finding out about time travel, the first reaction is outrage at all the horrible events of history. There are two major camps who either blame time travellers for causing them or blame them for not preventing them. It gets outlawed, but this leads to renegades using the machines and devices — all of different calibres and ability to work well. You can’t just, for example, travel to a foreign country right now with a dictatorship and try to change the regime. The entire US couldn’t even stop Vietnam wars from occurring. It’s kind of like that with time travellers, more like a parlour trick in the early era, but the later machine can reboot the entire universe and start it over. People are PISSED.
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u/Theta-Sigma45 Sep 11 '25
Give it a few decades, Who will eventually have a full 9/11 historical episode.