Skip to content
Answering Your Questions About Reactor: Right here.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Everything in one handy email.
When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Steven Moffat Is Totally Down for a Sherlock/Doctor Who Crossover But Doesn’t Think It’ll Actually Happen

Reactor

Home / Steven Moffat Is Totally Down for a Sherlock/Doctor Who Crossover But Doesn’t Think It’ll Actually Happen
Featured Essays Sherlock

Steven Moffat Is Totally Down for a Sherlock/Doctor Who Crossover But Doesn’t Think It’ll Actually Happen

By

Published on August 11, 2014

In case you’ve ever thought about penning a fanfic where Sherlock Holmes tries to use his famous deduction on the Doctor, only to be stymied because he has no idea what a Time Lord is, Steven Moffat wants you to know that he’s on board. He is all about a Doctor Who/Sherlock crossover, because he’s a cool showrunner who would totally merge two completely disparate universes into a television event.

It’s his cast and fellow producers who are—in his own words—the killjoys.

At the Doctor Who season 8 premiere in Cardiff, Moffat told fans that a crossover had definitely been discussed at some point. In fact, if it were just up to him, it would’ve happened as quite the feels-bursting TV special. But in the same breath, he eliminated any real chance of it happening by mentioning that he seems to be the only one who’s writing crossover fic in his head:

Look I’m going to come clean on this: I would… Go speak to Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Mark Gatiss and Sue Vertue, OK? They’re all in the way. I’m not the killjoy, it’s that lot. It’s probably not going to happen.

I know… What a bunch of killjoys I work with.

That sounds like some “Ask your mother” question-dodging to us, but okay. The thing is, you could probably have a rad Doctor Who episode where the Doctor helps the archetypal Sherlock Holmes solve a case and maybe square off against Moriarty. But to have him—now, it would be Peter Capaldi—interact with Cumberbatch’s Sherlock in modern-day? We can’t see it.

Moffat tempered his own enthusiasm with some realism about expectation versus reality, citing his Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss:

You know in some ways, I think Mark has got a point when he says that however good you imagine [the crossover], it would be almost better in your imagination than it would be if the two grand old egotists actually met. They’d just both go off in opposite corners and sulk that there was someone cleverer than them.

He’s probably right about what fans envision being better than the reality. We still can’t get over how seamless this fan-made “Wholock” video is:

[Flickering Myth via Variety]

Photo: John Smith/YouTube

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Stubby the Rocket

Author

Learn More About Stubby
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
10 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments