Jackson Lake (David Morrissey) in The Next Doctor (2008), Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh) in The Crimson Horror (2013) and Charles Dickens (Simon Callow) in The Unquiet Dead (2005).
Something’s gone very wrong with the Victorian era… perhaps.
Early on Christmas morning in the year 1851, a mechanical behemoth rose from the murky waters of London’s River Thames. Thousands – tens of thousands, maybe – ran out into shaken streets to watch as the monstrosity stamped its iron feet across the capital, flattening whole buildings in the process. The night was clear enough for many of those below to discern the ascent of a hot air balloon that rose to the height of the creature’s head, so its sole occupant could fire some strange lightning at this piston-powered Goliath… causing the creature to dissipate before its tottering body could fall, crushing an entire district. Now, the watching multitudes weren’t to know that the creature was in fact a ‘Cyberking’ – a ‘dreadnought class’ vessel belonging to the terrible Cybermen – and that their balloon-piloting saviour was the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant), using the Cybermen’s own dimension vault to expel the creature into the Time Vortex (as explained in TheNext Doctor, 2008). But there was no doubt in the freshly unscrambled mind of schoolteacher Jackson Lake (David Morrissey) that the events he and those throngs of others had witnessed would be “history, spoken of for centuries to come”.