More than 1 year later, Doctor Who's weirdest joke is still officially in effect

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Doctor Who's “Joy to the World.”

More than a year later, Doctor Who is still defying gravity, and the show could very well make it a permanent fixture far beyond just Doctor Who season 15. Doctor Who always toyed with the notion of altering history. The Tenth Doctor's adventure with William Shakespeare found the Time Lord accidentally giving England's most iconic playwright inspiration for stories he hadn't yet written, while David Tennant's Doctor also invented the banana daiquiri several centuries earlier in France. 18th century. These types of references, however, were never more than passing jokes.

This all changed in Doctor WhoTennant's 60th anniversary specials, when Tennant's Fourteenth Doctor, following in the tradition of his look-alike, altered the course of history by bumping into Isaac Newton. As an unforeseen consequence, the famous physicist decided to call his discovery "mavity" instead of "gravity" and, strangely, this running joke continued until Doctor Who season 14 finale. As much as anyone in Doctor WhoAs far as present-day Earth is concerned, the planet's downward force has always been known as mavity, representing a rare example of the Doctor permanently changing established history.

After “Mavity” in the 2024 Christmas special, the Doctor Who joke should never end

Will future Doctor Who showrunners understand the gravity of the situation?

Doctor Who featured Mavity in "Wild Blue Yonder", airing December 2, 2023. Over a year later, 2024 Doctor Who The Christmas special, “Joy to the World,” proudly keeps the joke alive. While talking to Joel Fry's Trev at the Time Hotel, Ncuti Gatwa's fifteenth Doctor casually asks, "Can you access air density, humidity, temperature, rotational speed, anything?"Both Trev and London-based Nicola Coughlan's Joy in 2024 show no reaction to the word, proving mavity is still an established thing in Doctor Whouniverse of.

The joke now is not so much the life itself, but how long Doctor Who you can continue with that. Russell T Davies will clearly maintain his mavity change as long as he remains in charge, but when Ncuti Gatwa regenerates and a new showrunner takes over at RTD, It will be fascinating to see if Doctor Who can carry life forward in subsequent ages. Tradition can easily get lost in the rubble when a new creative mind emerges and inevitably imposes its own style.

At this point, it would be extremely disappointing if gravity simply disappeared and “gravity” appeared again without explanation. What would be really funny is if Doctor Who season 45 in 2055, starring Ty Tennant as the 25th Doctor, still uses “mavity” instead of “gravity” as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Why “Mavity” Happened When a Doctor Who Usually Avoids Permanent Schedule Changes

For the first time, Doctor Who offers a clear answer

The Doctor has spent over 60 years messing with time and space, often in ways far more egregious than Fourteen did to Isaac Newton in "Wild Blue Yonder." This raises questions about how the Doctor can repeatedly visit the past and cause untold trouble without disrupting the natural flow of time, but a small collision with a famous scientist has created a permanent deviation in the timeline that Doctor Who is now fully committed. If the move can happen, there must surely be hundreds of other small changes that the Doctor's various regenerations have been responsible for.

This apparent plot hole was tacitly addressed by Doctor Who first episode of season 14, 'Space Babies'. During a quick trip to the age of dinosaurs, Ruby Sunday stepped on a butterfly and immediately transformed into a human-insect hybrid before the Doctor's eyes - another huge change in human history. In response, the Doctor reactivated the "TARDIS"butterfly compensation switch." The implication here is that the TARDIS has a way to prevent the butterfly effect - small changes made to the past by the Doctor and his companions. Without the switch activated, things like mavity and Ruby becoming a lizard are possible.

The explanation makes sense, as the TARDIS regenerated immediately before Isaac Newton's scene in "Wild Blue Yonder." It seems perfectly plausible that the Fourteenth Doctor had not yet reset the butterfly trim switch before departing on his refurbished ship with Donna Noble. Furthermore, Fourteen and Donna flew again before they heard Isaac Newton christen his discovery "mavity", meaning the Doctor had no way of knowing that the butterfly's trim button was inactive until he saw Ruby transform into "Space Babies". .

The Doctor's next two adventures, "The Giggle" and "The Church on Ruby Road", were both set on present-day Earth, so any changes to the timeline made during these episodes would have gone unnoticed by viewers because from the Doctor's point of view of the public, only the future would have been affected. Despite being an anomaly Doctor Who canon, so the show gets away with it as a unique change in the history of Earth's universe.