25 of the best fictional planets to visit

18. Gallifrey (Doctor Who)

Visiting Gallifrey would take some serious bending of time and space, but that’s not such a crazy thing to think of in the world of Doctor Who. If the titular Doctor can gallivant around all of existence without regard to petty things like timelines and physics, then maybe we can take a brief sojourn on the Doctor’s home planet.

Of course, we might not want to mention that we know the Doctor. The other Time Lords living on Gallifrey aren’t exactly excited to claim the timey-wimey trickster as one of their own. They are a very powerful, wise, and ancient race. Alas, this also means that they can easily slip into a kind of society so bound by tradition and stagnation that even their ability to travel through time loses its luster.

That doesn’t mean you can’t take a peek at their world and culture, however. Gallifrey itself is pretty interesting, starting with its distinctive yellow-orange color. It’s also got a serious security system going on, between the planetwide quantum force field and a teleportation-resistant transduction barrier.

Visit the Capitol, Gallifrey’s rather unimaginatively named the capital, and you’ll also get a chance to gawk at some very impressive architecture. The tall, shining towers of the Capitol are protected by a massive dome straight out of the best classic science fiction works.

The natural world of Gallifrey is also plenty strange and intriguing to us humans. It’s got plains of striking red grass and similarly red, gold, brown, and purple rocks. Everything is capped by the admittedly spectacular binary star system that holds Gallifrey in its grip.