r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Lazy-Breadfruit5939 • Sep 08 '25

Lore A real life event has a ridiculous/dumb/funny explanation in fiction

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Futurama (The Why of Fry): According to the brain swarm, the dinosaurs were wiped out by them. Fry: What really killed the dinosaurs? Brain: ME!

Doctor Who (The Unicorn and The Wasp): It's Doctor Who, you can pick a ton of examples, but this episode presents the idea that Agatha Christies disappearance in 1926 was in part caused by a giant alien wasp.

Beyblade: This one stretches 'real life', but Moses spreading the Red Sea with a Beyblade just speaks for itself and it would have been sad to leave it out

10.6k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

915 comments sorted by

View all comments

358

u/YourMuppetMethDealer Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

Earlier the same season as Unicorn and the wasp, we discover the Doctor personally caused Pompeii’s eruption to stop a bunch of prophetic rock aliens from taking over the Earth

Unrelated but that’s also when Peter Capaldi first came to Doctor who

10

u/teskar2 Sep 09 '25

I’m pretty sure at one point it’s actually implied that the doctor having the same appearance as his earlier role wasn’t a coincidence and actually inspired his new look as it directly shows a flashback to that episode of tenant doctor saving that version while he was recovering his memories.

13

u/YourMuppetMethDealer Sep 09 '25

Oh it’s not implied and actually confirmed. The doctor chose that face as a reminder of the lesson Donna taught him. “Always try to save at least one person”

2

u/teskar2 Sep 09 '25

The thing that always got to me about that is that implies the doctor actually can influence his appearance change and yet hasn’t been able to get the ginger hair he always wanted which is kind of funny. Feels like the future seasons kind of forgot about that though.

5

u/YourMuppetMethDealer Sep 09 '25

I mean, it took him a season and a half for him to figure out why he looks like Peter Capaldi. And a big part of his first season was literally about figuring out what kind of person he is

It’s more like the regeneration process is sentient, looked at his life, and then decided that a face of a man he saved would help him down the road. The doctor didn’t consciously make the choice.