Doctor Who Oxygen Geeky Spots And Easter Eggs

Space zombies, near-death experiences and what we can only hope is a temporary change for the Doctor… In Oxygen, writer Jamie Mathieson has quite literally played a blinder. And for the more observant among us, there were a handful of pop culture references and callbacks to earlier stories. Here’s our weekly round-up of the ones we noticed, along with the odd bit of wild speculation and things we just found interesting. To Boldly Go This probably doesn’t need saying, but for completionist’s sake the episode opens with the line ‘Space: the final frontier’, which is of course a reference to 1973 Jon Pertwee story Frontier In Space, which marked Roger Delgado’s final performance as the Master. The line is almost certainly hinting that it is the Master/Missy inside the vault. Space stations are familiar territory for the Doctor; the first one came in 1968’s The Wheel In Space, in which the second Doctor and Jamie faced the Cybermen aboard Space Station W3, or ‘the Wheel’. Other space stations the Doctor has visited which follow the model of a central structure with a surrounding rotating element to produce artificial gravity – as first postulated by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903 – include the Nerva Beacon from 1975’s The Ark In Space, Platform One from 2005’s The End Of The World, and Satellite Five from The Long Game that same year. The Doctor has faced reanimated corpses before – in 2008’s Silence In The Library two-parter the Vashta Nerada took over spacesuits with their skeletal inhabitants dead inside, in quite a similar manner to the autonomous spacesuits in this story. Rose and the ninth Doctor battled the Gelth in 2005’s The Unquiet Dead, who possessed the bodies of the dead in 19th-century Cardiff. Missy turned many of the dead – including the Doctor’s friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart – into Cybermen in 2014’s Death In Heaven, while in the Brigadier’s first appearance, 1968’s The Web Of Fear, the Great Intelligence controlled the body of Staff Sergeant Arnold. Nardole removes a fluid link from the TARDIS in an attempt to disable it, a move which harkens back to the show’s earliest days and the very first Dalek story in 1963/4. On that occasion, the Doctor seemed to sabotage the TARDIS by removing the link, claiming it had run out of mercury in order to be allowed to explore Skaro. When the Daleks confiscated the link, it provided the impetus for the TARDIS travellers to help the Thals defeat the metal menaces. The events of this episode suggest that either the Doctor has modified the TARDIS since then or he was lying all along in order to help the beleaguered Thal people. Fluid links continued to be crucial to the TARDIS’s operation during several stories in the 1960s, but have not been mentioned since 1968’s The Mind Robber. Nardole shouldn’t be surprised by the Doctor’s deception; River Song told Amy in 2010’s The Big Bang that the first rule when it comes to the Doctor is that ‘the Doctor lies’. And River Song was working with Nardole when the Doctor first met him back in 2015’s The Husbands Of River Song, so you’d think she would have warned him… Sending Out an SOS For all the Doctor’s talk about distress calls and the universe asking for help, it’s actually quite rare for the TARDIS to pick up such a call – the first time wasn’t until the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane intercepted a message from Zeta Minor in 1975’s Planet Of Evil. When Bill complains that the station ‘doesn’t feel like space’, she’s right to feel a bit cheated; shortly after being picked up by the eleventh Doctor, former companion Amy Pond spends the opening moments of 2010’s The Beast Below gleefully floating within an air bubble created by the TARDIS forcefield, tethered to the Doctor by his hand on her ankle… ‘Ganymede Systems’ refers in the first instance to the largest moon of Jupiter. However, there may be a deeper significance – Ganymede is a crucial part of the Red Dwarf story, and the Microgramma font (or its close cousin Eurostile) commonly used in Dwarf is plastered liberally around the inside of the station. Could there be a deeper connection? Believe it or not, we’ve done some digging into this, and we’ll have the answer for you on Monday… Velma the spacesuit is presumably named after the character from Scooby-Doo. The suggestion ‘You look like you’re trying to run’ is an homage to Clippit (Nicknamed ‘Clippy’), the often-irritating Office Assistant help mascot used in Microsoft Office products between 1997 and 2007, who would often pop up with such messages as ‘It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?’. The Psychic Circus The Doctor once again flashes his psychic paper to trick the crew into trusting him. First wielded by Christopher Eccleston in The End Of The World, the paper was writer Russell T Davies’ way of avoiding one of the most common tropes of the classic series, in which the Doctor and his companions would be regarded with distrust for most of part one of a story in order to pad out the running time. With shorter stories in the new era, Davies needed a way for the Doctor to get involved in the action as quickly as possible. The paper doesn’t always work, mind – Shakespeare was too clever to be fooled in The Shakespeare Code, while in Army Of Ghosts it’s revealed that all Torchwood operatives undergo basic psychic training. … which was used to advertise the special: “I’m the Doctor. I’m a Time Lord. I’m from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. I’m nine hundred and three years old, and I’m the man who’s going to save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below… You got a problem with that?” It’s almost definitely not an intentional callback, but that moment is so wonderful we couldn’t not include it. Sadly, Bill wouldn’t be the first of the Doctor’s companions to die in the vacuum of space; in 1965, the first Doctor’s companion Katarina (who had joined the TARDIS crew during the previous story) sacrificed her life by blasting herself and the villainous Kirksen out of a spaceship airlock. The expanding and contracting red lights on the spacesuits are likely an homage to HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey – the space station in which was another one to follow the rotating artificial gravity model. Temporary blindness is an occupational hazard while travelling in the TARDIS; fourth Doctor companions Sarah Jane Smith and Leela were both briefly rendered blind – the former by a flash from Maren’s ring in The Brain Of Morbius and the latter by an exploding Rutan ship in The Horror Of Fang Rock – an explosion which also changed her eye colour, as actress Louise Jameson had an adverse reaction to her brown contact lenses. And Dr Grace Holloway was blinded after looking into the Eye of Harmony in the 1996 TV movie. Finally, the Doctor gets his yo-yo out again, something he previously did in 2015’s The Girl Who Died and 2014’s Kill The Moon, in which he used the yo-yo to determine the local gravity. This is something the fourth Doctor first did in The Ark In Space, and this Doctor’s general love of the toy seems to have come from that incarnation. That’s your lot for this week. Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments below…