SDCC Announcement Sparks Speculation About a STAR TREK / DOCTOR WHO Crossover

Since 2011, the world has celebrated the International Day of Friendship. which promotes “the idea that friendship between peoples, countries, cultures and individuals can inspire peace efforts and build bridges between communities,” according to the United Nations website. Well, now the celebration is extending into outer space with the inaugural Intergalactic Friendship Day, bringing two venerable franchises together.

Paramount Global and BBC Studios announced that Star Trek showrunner and executive producer Alex Kurtzman and Russel T. Davies, Kurtzman’s counterpart for British science fiction series Doctor Who, will be meeting onstage at San Diego Comic-Con for a panel entitled, appropriately, Doctor Who x Star Trek.

The panel itself is scheduled for Saturday, July 27 from 5:30 - 6:30pm and will feature a “creator-to-creator" conversation about the art of storytelling in alternative universes and to celebrate the power of friendship,” according to StarTrek.com. It will be accompanied by a “Friendship is Universal” Gallery Experience in San Diego’s Gaslight Quarter from Thursday, July 25 - Saturday, July 27. The gallery will feature props and costumes from across the more than 55 year history of both franchises, plus photo ops and giveaways.

Displaying the spirit of friendship is all well and good, but some fans believe “Intergalactic Friendship Day” is a thinly veiled excuse to make a big announcement.

“I’m trying to tamp down hopes, but ‘Inter[galactic] Friendship Day sounds a bit sus…” said Josiah Rowe, a lifelong fan of both franchises.

“I'm hoping and praying that this means that we're going to get a potential Star Trek / Doctor Who crossover...” k1ngblakskulz06 proclaimed on Instagram, with mitlee1701 suggesting, “Strange New Worlds is the perfect show to crossover with Doctor Who.”

If the fan theories are true, this would not be the first time the two franchises have crossed paths. In 2012, IDW published a limited comic book series entitled Star Trek: The Next Generation / Doctor Who: Assimilation in which saw the Eleventh Doctor (played in the television series by Matt Smith) land on the Enterprise-D and join Captain Picard and his crew in a battle against the Borg and the Cybermen, Who’s cyborg enemies.

Doctor Who, a space- and time-traveling alien who regenerates when he’s killed, has been played by fourteen actors (or fifteen, depending on if you count John Hurt’s War Doctor. According to Davies’ 2010 book Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale - The Final Chapter, when he was tapped to bring Who back after 15 years with Christopher Eccleston as the new Doctor, he considered proposing a crossover between the British series and Star Trek: Enterprise.

I would love to see the Doctor on board the starship Enterprise, puncturing all that Starfleet pompositywith his sheer Doctor-ness. When we began in 2004, Star Trek: Enterprise was still on the air…it was on our list of plans, until Enterprise was axed…I’ve wondered ever since whether to do it anyway…

Could Davies still have the idea rattling around in the back of his brain? Inverse recently quoted him as saying, “Please don’t thiink there were ever plans or approaches or treatments or anything like that. That’s just me musing.”

Nevertheless, fans are hoping for that long-awaited crossover to be announced at SDCC in less than a month. There are as yet no indications that such a thing will happen, other than Kurtzman and Davies appearing onstage together, but that won’t stop the speculation mill from running. Remember when fans theorized an upcoming musical episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and everybody involved denied that it was happening…until it did? Russell Davies’ protestation that the crossover idea was merely a musing is belied by his own words in The Writer’s Tale, but we won’t know for sure until the July 27 event.

You can find more information on SDCC here, and stay tuned for more on this breaking story.