There’s rarely a TV show that has incorporated so much of pop culture, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror into its universe as Doctor Who (don’t be mad at us, Fortnite). In truth, the eponymous Doctor has confronted some of the most vile evils the universe has had to throw at them throughout time, space, and the paradoxical areas in between. While Cybermen and Daleks all come with their unique hues of horror, and while The Master‘s failed sanity is nothing to balk at, none of these adversaries compare to an enemy that can merely think you out of existence.
Well, this is exactly the type of foe the Doctor faces in the last of Doctor Who‘s most recent specials, entitled “The Giggle.” The Celestial Toymaker is not a being that can be so easily comprehended. Capable of controlling time, space, and matter with the same ease in which the Doctor traverses the universe in his TARDIS, it’s no mystery why even the Doctor fears this otherworldly entity. Many have even wondered whether the old foe was a Time Lord himself or one of the Great Old Ones, which further raises many other questions. For example, has the Doctor ever encountered Cthulhu, and have the two ever engaged in a battle of alien wits?
The answer is, sadly, no. The Doctor and Cthulhu haven’t exchanged blows in the Doctor Who series, intellectual or otherwise. However, that doesn’t mean that the opportunity won’t present itself in the future. The truth is that “The Giggle” brought us more than just a two-Doctors-for-one-villain treat, and there’s plenty to unpack. Besides introducing the newer audiences to one of Doctor’s oldest villains, “The Giggle” also introduced the concept of bi-generation — which is worth its own discussion — and finally brought Ncuti Gatwa‘s Fifteenth Doctor to the show’s forefront.
However, for long-time fans of the show, the implications of the existence of a force like the Celestial Toymaker definitely garnered more attention. Halfway through “The Giggle”s runtime, Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker takes center stage with Dona Noble and the Doctor as his captured and very captive audience. As he describes to Donna everything horrible that has happened to certain companions in the past, the Doctor decides to challenge the Toymaker to a game, which the latter gleefully accepts. While setting up the game and ominously shuffling a stack of cards, the Toymaker gives a speech in which he reveals whence he came from and why.
The buildup to this particular scene paints the Celestial Toymaker as an entity that’s capable of manipulating time, space, and matter, much like the Doctor — to a lesser and more TARDIS-aided degree. However, unlike the Doctor, who relies on his intellect and technology, the Toymaker is capable of manipulating atoms with the power of thought alone. He is clearly a very powerful entity. According to Doctor Who lore, the Toymaker is one of the Great Old Ones — unimaginably ancient creatures of immense power, generally seen as harbingers of evil and destruction.
The Toymaker’s speech in “The Giggle” somewhat confirms this as he states that he came from outside of this universe to play cosmic games with powerful entities. He toyed with supernovas and turned galaxies into spinning tops. He gambled with God and made him a jack-in-the-box, and when the Master lost his game against the Toymaker (sometimes in the past), the Great Old One sealed him for all eternity inside his gold tooth. He is obviously an entity where the laws of psychics don’t matter and even stranger geometries apply (shout out H.P. Lovecraft!).
But before he finally stacked the deck for the Doctor to cut, the Celestial Toymaker shared that there was only one player he dared not face — the One Who Waits, with whom the Doctor isn’t familiar. Seeing that the Doctor isn’t familiar with the mysterious entity, the Toymaker mentions his decision to flee from the One Who Waits and decides not to spoil the surprise, leaving the Doctor and the fandom wondering who the mysterious entity might be. What could have made the Celestial Toymaker, an entity that bends reality to his whim, so afraid that he decided to run?
Given the show’s proclivity for incorporating various elements from folklore, literature, and pop culture, and the fact that one of the Great Old Ones ran away from something more powerful than himself, we can only speculate that the One Who Waits might be another Great Old One.
This perfectly sets the stage for the appearance of Cthulhu as the next Big Bad of the Doctor Who series. And while the fact that Cthulhu and Doctor Who have no official crossovers in the series remains true, the same can’t be said for other Doctor Who media.
The Whoniverse is a narratively vast space comprised of the official TV show and several prose and audiobook releases that fit inside the official Doctor Who canon. One such release is The Lovecraft Invasion, in which a Somnifax becomes attracted to H.P. Lovecraft and enters his mind in an attempt to bring Cthulhu into reality. Other accounts from various media have identified Cthulhu as an Old One whom the Seventh Doctor prevented from rising again in 1915 Haiti. There are several other accounts referencing the Great Old Ones and Cthulhu in other releases as well.
Here is where things become even more interesting. All of these stories, be they audiobooks or prose, agree that the Great Old Ones came from outside the Doctor’s universe. They predate the Big Bang and have escaped the destruction of their universe by shedding their physical forms while transitioning to the Doctor’s universe, where they have been reborn with godlike powers. Seeing how we already got the Celestial Toymaker to appear in the series as one of those Great Old Ones, why wouldn’t Cthulhu make an appearance as well?
The very mention of the One Who Waits is an apt metaphorical description for Cthulhu, a cosmic entity of great power lying in a death-like slumber in the sunken city of R’lyeh, waiting for the time when the stars align correctly to awaken so that he can rise again. So, while the Doctor still hasn’t punched Cthulhu in the Doctor Who series, he might take kid gloves off if H.P. Lovecraft’s version of Squidward decides to wake up and try to plunge all of time and space into blubbering madness.