Doctor Who: 25 time periods Thirteen and Team TARDIS should visit

A Volunteers of America Soup Kitchen in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

The Great Depression

Most people think that any story involving the Great Depression must be a particularly American one, but it doesn’t have to be. This period still stands as the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world and even though it began in the U.S., it impacted almost all nations to varying degrees. A Doctor Who episode in which the TARDIS team explores the heavily impacted industrial cities of Depression era-England or Europe could be quite fascinating to those of us who don’t know much about how this economic crisis affected lives beyond U.S. shores.

All that said, of course, the earliest and probably most dramatic Depression-era stories are American ones, from the initial stock market crash(es), to the Dust Bowl in the Midwest, to President Roosevelt’s federal work programs.

Historical figures we might meet: Almost any kind of story from this era is going to be interesting regardless of whether it’s about FDR or the nameless woman in Dorothea Lange’s famous Migrant Mother photo. So far, Chibnall seems so interested in the lives of ordinary people that his Doctor Who will likely fare better telling the story of the latter rather than the former – illuminating the gaps of lived experiences for real people.

Potential adventures: While this would most likely not be a happy episode, the Great Depression setting would fit in with some of the themes that Doctor Who has tackled this season. We all know that Thirteen and her companions would want to help – to save a family, salvage a bank, find jobs for a starving town. But they can’t. Not really. There may be a few temporal holes here and there where they ease the poverty of a person or two, but it’s not like they can stop the Depression from happening. In order for the world – and human history – to turn out correctly, these people pretty much have to suffer and starve in order for the global economy and World War II to turn out the way that they did. How hard would suffering on that scale be for this particular team to walk away from? How much can they help before it might cause harm?