What makes a great super team? The two most famous super teams are, of course, the Avengers and the Justice League, but collections of disparate characters coming together in the same shared universe aren’t always connected to superpowers and costumes. In the original pulp novels of The Shadow, the various agents of the titular vigilante were often more important to the story than the man himself, a concept which predicts the companions of the Doctor in Doctor Who. Nearly 20 years ago, on June 28, 2008, Doctor Who Season 4 brought together various companions of the Time Lord known as the Doctor, and at that point, all of those characters were closer to being agents of the Doctor, rather than just people who had once travelled in the TARDIS. The episode “The Stolen Earth,” combined with “Journey’s End,” was a huge triumph for the show and, in many ways, predicted the massive payoff of bigger genre franchises like Avengers: Endgame. The difference is, Doctor Who managed the same emotional weight of a massive team-up, minus the superpowers.
Looking back on “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” today, the most impressive thing about the concept was how quickly showrunner Russell T Davies managed to build the shared Who universe. In 2005, the series was a scrappy relic from the 20th century, making a daring comeback. But, just three years later, the new Who had established enough secondary characters and agents of the Doctor to warrant a massive crossover event, which spanned the continuities of three active sci-fi shows. This event also mined very recent nostalgia to make the audience excited about seeing characters who, again, just three years prior, nobody had ever heard of.
