Other TV shows may break the fourth wall by talking directly to the audience. Doctor Who just blew it to smithereens — and it's been a long time coming.
In "Lux," episode 2 of Ncuti Gatwa's second season as the Doctor, our time-traveling hero is trapped, along with companion Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu), in a cinematic universe created by an evil god (Alan Cumming). After failing to break out of the frame in other directions, the pair literally break the fourth wall — smashing a TV screen — and step into a living room containing three fans who were just watching them on Doctor Who.
And what's the first reaction from the fans? Surprise, but not total surprise: "Oh my god, it happened," says one. Showrunner Russell T Davies, an old-school fan himself, nailed it: Doctor Who lovers have been primed to expect this sort of thing for 60 years.
So before you rush to the internet to vent your nerd rage using the hashtag favored by the more cynical fan — #RIPDoctorWho — let's take a quick trip through all the previous moments in the show's long history that suggest this mysterious Time Lord really knows his audience.
The first Doctor breaks the fourth wall
As stuffy as the BBC was in the 1960s, it could still let its hair down at Christmas. That's the reason for the seasonal chaos in the Doctor Who episode "The Feast of Steven," broadcast Dec. 25, 1966.
After capers that have little to do with the ongoing story ("The Daleks' Master Plan"), the Doctor (William Hartnell) pours drinks for his companions, then turns to toast the audience: "Incidentally, a very merry Christmas to you at home."
"Feast of Steven" is one of many lost Who episodes, so we can't see this seminal moment. But audiences may not have felt it was entirely out of character for the show; after all, in the earlier story "The Aztecs," an evil priest confides his plan to camera, Shakespeare villain-style.
As showrunner Davies put it in a 2024 interview, there has always been "something showy about Doctor Who, something proscenium arch about it. There's something arch about it, full stop."
Tom Baker, fourth-wall breaker
Even the greatest fans of Tom Baker (the fourth Doctor, 1974-1981) find it hard to defend Baker's tendency to speak directly to viewers — IRL, the consequence of a new producer who couldn't rein in his overbearing star.
Baker did this for the first time in episode 1 of "The Face of Evil" (1977), when he was without a companion (and personally believed he didn't need one). Then he did it twice in "The Invasion of Time" (1978), along with a cringe-inducing ad-lib: "Even the sonic screwdriver can't save me this time."
It would never again be that obvious, but Baker's three successors in the role each had their sly winks. Peter Davison (1981-84) and Colin Baker (1984-86) both appeared to be talking to the audience while referencing their new faces post-regeneration. Sylvester McCoy (1987-89) seemed to tell viewers he'd "miscalculated" during "Remembrance of the Daleks."
That story, set in 1963, also had a scene with a TV set on which a BBC announcer is about to introduce the very first episode of "a new sci-fi series called Do—" before cutting away.
Even "Lux" couldn't get much more meta than that moment.
And the most fourth wall-breaking Doctor is ...
Given how much Davies (and fellow sometime showrunner Steven Moffat) loves getting meta, it's surprising that the show took as long as it did, after Davies brought it back in 2005, to turn its spotlight on the Doctor's relationship to viewers.
At the very end of his run, eleventh Doctor Matt Smith (2010-13) flicks his eyes to the camera while delivering the line, "I will always remember when the Doctor was me." But it was subtle enough, amidst the drama of a regeneration, to be missed at the time.
Everything changed with the arrival of Smith's successor, Peter Capaldi. "I'm nothing without an audience," Capaldi says in "Heaven Sent," with the cheekiest peek at us as he passes the camera. (That didn't stop "Heaven Sent" being voted the best Doctor Who story of all time by Doctor Who Magazine readers; perhaps it even helped.)
By that point, Capaldi had already delivered two Moffat-written monologues to camera. One explained the bootstrap paradox and told us to "Google it," in "Before the Flood." The other, in "Listen," asked "why we talk out loud when we know we're alone," before suggesting that it's "because we know we're not."
Both monologues were pre-title "cold opens", meaning they didn't cut into the action; plus, like the "Heaven Sent" moment, both could be explained in-universe as the Doctor needing to talk to himself.
Then came "The Church on Ruby Road," Gatwa's first story, and the still-mysterious Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson): "Never seen a TARDIS before?" she says to camera in the closing seconds. She also closed Gatwa's first season by telling us the Doctor's story "ends in absolute terror."
We don't yet know why or how she's doing this, but Mrs. Flood's brief appearance in "The Robot Revolution" continued the trend: "You ain't seen me," she warns the audience, ducking out of a scene before the Doctor arrives. Ironically, when she appears again at the close of "Lux," Mrs. Flood doesn't look at the camera while telling other characters the TARDIS is a "trick of the light."
And Davies had to work hard to get more meta in "Lux" than he did in last season's "Devil's Chord." A god named Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon) opens the story looking to camera, saying "let's begin," and playing the Doctor Who theme on her piano. Gatwa closes it by winking to camera — then we cut to him performing the intentionally meta song, "There's Always a Twist at the End."
Arguably, by putting its Doctor Who fans in a sequence that we are explicitly told is not real, "Lux" is not that important in solving the fourth-wall riddle posed by Mrs. Flood, Maestro, and the Doctor's wink.
But "Lux" does at least settle a longstanding fan debate prompted by all those decades of fourth-wall breaking: Does the Doctor know he's in a TV show? Answer: No, he definitely did not even imagine the possibility before. Now, however, he may increasingly suspect he's not alone even when he's alone.
Wink-wink.
Doctor Who Season 2 premiered Apr. 12 on Disney+ and BBC. New episodes air weekly on Saturdays at 3 a.m. ET.
