Doctor Who: 25 time periods Thirteen and Team TARDIS should visit
By Lacy Baugher
(Photo: By William A. Crafts – “Pioneers in the Settlement of America” by William A. Crafts. Vol. I Boston: Samuel Walker & Company, 1876, Public Domain)
Salem, Massachusetts (1692)
Late 17th-century Massachusetts is a perfect time period for Doctor Who to visit because it not only includes a compelling specific historical moment, but one that has plenty of modern resonance today: The Salem witch trials. If this is too American a story for a British series such as this, that’s okay. Most of England and Europe went through their own witch panics at various points beginning in the late Middle Ages. So there’s certainly a similar story that might be told without such an obvious American slant.
Historical person our Doctor could meet: John and Elizabeth Proctor. They were real people, not just characters in the famous Arthur Miller play The Crucible. He was executed; her sentence was postponed because she was pregnant. It saved her life, in the end, as the bulk of the panic had eased by the time she gave birth.
Potential adventures: The First Doctor’s granddaughter found herself accused of witchcraft during this period in tie-in novel The Witch Hunters, but the television series itself has never told a specifically Salem-related story before.
The witch trials certainly lend themselves to all sorts of dramatic stories on their own, due to the subject matter involved. But the fact that the Doctor is now a woman adds an entirely new twist to things. True, Doctor Who hasn’t leaned too heavily into the differences between the Doctor as a man and the Doctor as a woman – both versions are just the Doctor, full stop. But there’s likely no way the show could do any sort of story about the witch panic without directly confronting the fact that the Doctor is currently sporting a female form.
How would Thirteen deal with the growing problems in the Massachusetts town caused by the trials? The increasing accusations? The deaths of presumably innocent people? Might the Doctor — with all her fancy technology and quick talk — find herself accused of witchcraft? Then what?