Doctor Who quiz: can you tell your Sontarans from your Skithra?

Examinate … examinate … Jodie Whittaker faces her questioners. Photograph: James Pardon/BBC Studios

The end is near for Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor, as she faces massed ranks of intergalactic foes and meets some old friends in her final episode as the BBC’s legendary Time Lord in The Power of the Doctor, which broadcasts on 23 October at 7.30pm in the UK. But how much attention have you been paying during her stint in the Tardis? Test yourself with our 13th Doctor quiz …

The Guardian’s 13th Doctor quiz

1. 

   Jodie Whittaker was cast as the 13th Doctor when Chris Chibnall became showrunner. Which award-winning show had they previously worked together on?

   1. Silent Witness

   2. Life on Mars

   3. Broadchurch

   4. Dalziel and Pascoe

2. 

   The Tardis interior that debuted alongside the 13th Doctor featured a biscuit dispenser. Which biscuit did it most commonly provide to the Doctor and her "fam"?

   1. Digestives

   2. Custard creams

   3. Oreos

   4. Jammie Dodgers

3. Award-winning episode Rosa was co-written by Malorie Blackman, and featured the story of Rosa Parks. But which other US civil rights leader did Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole) meet during the adventure?

   1. Martin Luther King Jr

   2. Malcolm X

   3. John R Lewis

   4. Daisy Bates

4. The finale of Whittaker’s first season was almost as hard to spell as the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius. What was it called?

   1. The Battle of Roonskar An Kalas

   2. The Battle of Skoorbar Ak Rolos

   3. The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

   4. The Battle of Kanspoor Ad Lokos

5. The 13th Doctor faced off against many creatures large and small during her tenure. Which tiny but hungry alien did she encounter aboard the Tsuranga ship during 2018's The Tsuranga Conundrum?

   1. Beep the Meep

   2. The Adipose

   3. The Slitheen

   4. The Pting

6. 

   Which comedian was one of the main guest stars in New Year special Eve of the Daleks, where she could be found as the character Sarah, running a storage facility that got ensnared in a time loop?

   1. Aisling Bea

   2. Rose Matafeo

   3. Roisin Conaty

   4. Jessica Knappett

7. 

   What condition did Ryan have that applied extra pressure to him when he and the Tardis fam were in tight situations?

   1. Synaesthesia

   2. Dyscalculia

   3. Dyslexia

   4. Dyspraxia

8. 

   During Whittaker’s era, Jo Martin plays an incarnation of the Doctor from somewhere in the Time Lord’s past. She first appeared during Series 12 in 2020. What name was given to identify her Doctor?

   1. The Frugal Doctor

   2. The Prisoner Doctor

   3. The Fugitive Doctor

   4. The Lost Doctor

9. 

   Which football team did Graham (Bradley Walsh) support. He wore a pin badge of their crest on his jacket?

   1. Aston Villa

   2. West Ham United

   3. Sheffield United

   4. Liverpool

10. 

    Which fictional police force did Yasmin Khan (Mandip Gill) work for when we first met her?

    1. West Ecclesfield

    2. Hallamshire

    3. Stannington

    4. Fulwood

11. The episode Demons of the Punjab was set during the partition of India by the British, and featured the backstory of Yaz's grandmother. But when was the partition of India?

    1. 1947

    2. 1948

    3. 1949

    4. 1950

12. Although Whittaker was the first woman to take on the role full-time, which female actor had played the part of the Doctor in Comic Relief spoof The Curse of Fatal Death?

    1. Jennifer Saunders

    2. Joanna Lumley

    3. Dawn French

    4. Julia Sawalha

13. 

    Sacha Dhawan made his debut as the Doctor’s nemesis, the Master, in 2020 two part story Spyfall - but who did the actor play in the 2013 docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time?

    1. Waris Hussein

    2. Sydney Newman

    3. Earl Cameron

    4. Roy Stewart

14. Which episode marked the exit of two of the 13th Doctor’s companions, Graham O’Brien and Ryan Sinclair?

    1. Resolution

    2. Revelation of the Daleks

    3. Eve of the Daleks

    4. Revolution of the Daleks

15. 

    What was the name of the explosive mentioned by the 13th Doctor when she and Yaz were trapped on a gravity bar at the start of The Halloween Apocalypse, a weapon that had also featured in Doctor Who in the 1980s wielded by companion Ace alongside the seventh Doctor?

    1. Nitro-9

    2. Nitro-11

    3. Nitro-13

    4. Nitro-19

16. During which episode did the Doctor and her friends tackle the Queen of the Skithra, played by returning Whoniverse actor Anjli Mohindra, who had been sidekick Rani Chandra in the Sarah Jane Adventures?

    1. Nikola Tesla and the Alien Queen

    2. Nikola Tesla’s Nightmare

    3. Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror

    4. Nikola Tesla’s Night of Pleasure

17. 

    The Sontarans invaded Earth history and even rode horses into battle in the Crimea war during the 2021 story Flux. But which kitchen instrument did companion and pirate cosplayer Dan (John Bishop) use to knock them out?

    1. A spatula

    2. A whisk

    3. A wok

    4. A potato peeler

18. He was species bonded for life to protect Dan – but what was the species of the walking talking space dog with the floppy ears played by Craige Els?

    1. Vulpix

    2. Karvanista

    3. Killoran

    4. Lupari

19. 

    Reptiles, fish-people, or fishy-reptile-people, wherever you place them on the planet's evolutionary tree, the Sea Devils returned to Doctor Who to cause havoc this year. How many years had it been since their last major appearance in the show?

    1. 50 years

    2. 38 years

    3. 29 years

    4. 14 years

20. 

    And finally, the moment has been prepared for. Who has been announced as the replacement for Jodie Whittaker, with incoming showrunner Russell T Davies saying "The future is here and its …"

    1. Nabhaan Rizwan

    2. Richard Ayoade

    3. Ncuti Gatwa

    4. Zawe Ashton

Solutions

1:C - The ITV drama ran for three series and picked up Bafta’s best drama gong. It missed out on the Bafta audience award that year to a certain show called … Day of the Doctor, the 50th anniversary Doctor Who special., 2:B - It was the 11th Doctor who once threatened the Daleks with a Jammie Dodger. The 13th Doctor had a ready supply of custard creams, and yes, she did keep insisting on calling her companions "fam", exactly in that cringeworthy patronising way that somebody thousands of years older than you might do, 3:A - The bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that followed Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her seat helped put Martin Luther King (here played by Ray Sesay) into the national spotlight. , 4:C - The adventure took place on the titular planet, and saw the Doctor and friends having to once again foil the machinations of recurring villain Tzim-Sha, or Tim Shaw as they knew him, much to his annoyance. , 5:D - The Doctor and her friends met the deadly Pting during The Tsuranga Conundrum, when it boarded the Tsuranga to devour the ship’s anti-matter core., 6:A - ELF was run by Sarah and her errant business partner Jeff, and during the course of the time loops she found herself falling in love with Nick (Adjani Salmon) who was using the storage facility to keep all the things his exes had left behind – a not-at-all weird stalkery red flag thing to do., 7:D - Developmental co-ordination disorder (DCD) is a condition affecting physical co-ordination, making it hard for Ryan to climb ladders and perform escape maneouvres, and making it extra satisfying when he successfully lobbed a bomb at some Cybermen, 8:C - Jo Martin’s Doctor was given the title of ‘Fugitive Doctor’, on account of her desertion from the mysterious Gallifreyan organisation the Division. This incarnation was hidden from the Doctor’s past, thus unknown to Whittaker's Doctor until she met her previous self in 2020's Fugitive of the Judoon., 9:B - Being a bus driver from London he wouldn’t have any truck with anything north of the M25., 10:B - The show used a fictional police force, presumably to avoid the actual police in Sheffield being cross that they are perceived to be not very good at dealing with alien threats in the city., 11:A - The two self-governing "independent dominions of India and Pakistan" legally came into existence at midnight on 14–15 August 1947, and later became the Republic of India, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. , 12:B - Lumley appeared as the Doctor alongside Rowan Atkinson, Richard E Grant, Jim Broadbent and Hugh Grant., 13:A - Sacha Dhawan appeared in 50th anniversary Who docudrama as Waris Hussein, the show’s first director. , 14:D - Graham and Ryan left the Tardis during Revolution of the Daleks, after Ryan decided that his planet and friends needed him, with Graham staying behind to look after his grandson. But they were given some psychic paper by the Doctor as they departed, and the show hinted that their Earthbound investigations of alien occurrences might well continue. , 15:A - Ace invented Nitro-9 and stored it in deodorant cans. She had been expelled from school for blowing up the chemistry lab. Ooops. , 16:C - The Doctor and her friends met Mohindra in Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, where as the Queen of the Skithra demanded that Tesla become her engineer and fix her ship made up of stolen parts from around the universe., 17:C - Sontarans can be disabled if you give them a hefty whack on the probic vent, and Dan did it with a massive wok. It might seem like a terrible design flaw, but it would certainly make you think twice about retreating from the battlefield with dishonour if you knew one blow to the back of the neck by a Scouse comedian would do for you., 18:D - Karvanista was his name, Lupari was his species. Vulpix is a Pokémon and the Killoran are wolf-like humanoids from Doctor Who spin-off media., 19:B - Aside from the odd flashback sequence, they had last been seen as a major protagonist in the 1984 Peter Davison story Warriors of the Deep, where they teamed up with the Silurians and for some reason guest star Ingrid Pitt tried to kick their pet Myrka in the face. They made their debut in 1972., 20:C - The Sex Education star is a Rwandan-Scottish actor, meaning he will be the fourth Scottish Doctor after Sylvester McCoy, David Tennant and Peter Capaldi. Apparently lots of planets have a Scotland. Gatwa is expected to assume the role in 2023.

Scores

1. 0 and above.

   We hope you had fun!

• The Doctor Who Quiz Book by Beth Axford is published by John Blake. Martin Belam writes the Thursday quiz for the Guardian every week. The Power of the Doctor is on BBC One on 23 October at 7.30pm