Doctor Who: Endgame
Hear me out: why it would be perfectly feasible for everyone's favourite Time Lord to cross over into the MCU!
With Avengers: Endgame returning to cinemas, I felt it only fitting to revisit a moment from the film's original release which left many a Doctor Who fan scratching their heads. While the Doctor is arguably TV's most famous time traveller, the Time Lord's television adventures were noticeably absent from the roll call of movie and TV shows name-checked by Mark Ruffalo's Smart Hulk, as he debunked traditional time paradox scenarios popularised by the likes of The Terminator and Back to the Future. Before expanding upon the MCU's own theory of branching timelines - where, rather than potentially erasing your future, travelling to the past simply becomes your new future.
While Doctor Who's omission from Endgame may have been due to the show's cult appeal across the pond, or the fact - rather surprisingly for a sci-fi show - that it doesn't often dwell on the repercussions of time travel, I'd like to offer up a more tantalising prospect... the Doctor is not a fictional character in the MCU. And this could all be thanks to the show's illustrious history in its home country.
In the late 1970s, as Tom Baker continued to ride a wave of popularity on UK TV, Marvel took over the license to produce Doctor Who Comics and launched Doctor Who Weekly - a magazine which featured articles, competitions and an official " Stan Lee Presents " Marvel Doctor Who comic strip. Running until the mid-nineties, this popular comic strip featured the first eight incarnations of the Doctor, and more importantly, has its own designated Earth of 5556 in Marvel Comics' history. Notably, this run also crossed over with the main Marvel Comics Universe of Earth-616, the same Earth number later adopted by today's Marvel Cinematic Universe. This memorable event took place in 1988, as Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor faced off against the popular robotic bounty hunter, Death's Head - not once but twice - in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and an issue of Death's Head's own Marvel run.
If the Doctor Who and Marvel Comic universes can meld, as an eternal optimist, I have chosen to believe the Doctor's omission from Avengers: Endgame was entirely intentional to preserve the possibility of an equivalent crossover on the big screen. With the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday promising an almighty clash of multiverses, their respective Earths of 5556 and 616 could easily collide. Of course, to paraphrase another big-screen Doctor - and in light of recent events in the show's production - just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Yet the prospect of the Doctor and the TARDIS materialising within a Guardians of the Galaxy-style space adventure remains appealing. To this nerd's heart, at least.
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