The Alien Franchise and Doctor Who

Abe Hoekstra

MemberOvomorphJune 11, 20176460 Views3 Replies

This subject may have been discussed before, I am new here so I haven't had the opportunity to check properly yet.

This week I watched the Doctor Who serial The Ark in Space, with the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker. In this story alien beings, the Wirrn, lay eggs in human hosts, and when they hatch they consume their hosts. The larvae later enter a pupal stage amnd emerge as full grown insects.

I surfed the net and there are several sites which discuss the possibility of this story being an influence on the movie Alien.

It may also have influenced Alien: Covenant. In both Doctor Who and Alien: Covenant human beings in cryosleep have been used/will be used as hosts for the alien beings.

One more similarity. Did Ridley Scott pay homage to Doctor Who by naming the main character from Prometheus after one of the third Doctor's (John Pertwee) companions? Both are named Elizabeth (Liz) Shaw.

Sunite
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June 11, 2017

I mean, there are already a lot of real life insect species that already use hosts to reproduce, so they probably simply got inspired by that or something similar.

becnelchristineer
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June 12, 2017

The show is a noteworthy piece of British famous culture and somewhere else it has picked up a faction taking after. It has affected eras of British TV experts, a considerable lot of whom grew up viewing the series. The program initially kept running from 1963 to 1989. There was an unsuccessful endeavor to restore normal generation in 1996 with a secondary passage pilot, as a TV film titled Doctor Who. The program was relaunched in 2005, and from that point forward has been delivered in-house by BBC Wales in Cardiff
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Abe Hoekstra
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June 13, 2017

Aha, I found this: "Raised in Teesside, Scott was a young BBC designer in the early days of Doctor Who and narrowly missed the chance to design the Daleks. By calling Rapace's character Dr Elizabeth Shaw - also the name of a Doctor Who companion in 1970 - the screenwriters slyly reference a road not taken in Scott's past." https://web.archive.org/web/20120606023821/http://blogs.coventrytelegraph.net/thegeekfiles/2012/06/prometheus-link-to-doctor-who-revealed-as-university-academics-give-verdict-on-the-film-and-alien-fr.html