Backwards Clock Trivia Quiz

Answer: 'The Unquiet Dead'

'The Unquiet Dead' features the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler. They travel to Cardiff on Christmas Eve in 1869 and meet Charles Dickens, and attend a seance. Vapour-like creatures called the Gelth have been possessing dead bodies at a local funeral parlour and making them attack people. Gwyneth, a clairvoyant and a servant at the funeral parlour, acts as a medium for communicating with the Gelth and opens a rift so that they can cross over, only for the Gelth to reveal that there are more of them and they are planning to take over the planet. Dickens realises that the Gelth are vulnerable to gas and turns on gas taps to force the Gelth out of the bodies. Gwyneth sacrifices herself by blowing up the gas with a box of matches to stop the Gelth escaping.

Answer: 'Demons of the Punjab'

'Demons of the Punjab' features the Thirteenth Doctor, Yasmin Khan, Graham O'Brien and Ryan Sinclair. It is set in August 1947, around the time of the partition of India. Yasmin asks the Doctor if she can visit her Indian grandmother Umbreen in her youth after receiving a watch from her, and learns that the watch used to belong to a Hindu man called Prem, who Umbreen intends to marry despite her being Muslim. At the wedding, the group see a pair of aliens, who had appeared in one of the Doctor's visions, standing over the body of Bhakti, a holy man.

The aliens are called the Thijarians and are a dying race, who want to commemorate those who die alone. They reveal that Bhakti was murdered by Prem's brother Manish, who opposed the wedding, and that Prem will die during the partition. The Doctor oversees the wedding between Umbreen and Prem and the watch gets broken; a group of Hindu nationalists, summoned by Manish, then attack the reception. Umbreen, her mother and the Doctor's group escape, while Prem is killed by the nationalists.

Answer: 'The Girl Who Died'

'The Girl Who Died' features the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald. It is set in a village during the time of the Vikings, and the Doctor and Clara encounter a group of aliens called the Mire, who wear metal suits. The Doctor claims to be Odin, but the villagers do not believe him when a Mire appears in the sky, also claiming to be Odin, and says he will take the Viking warriors to Valhalla. He teleports the Vikings, Clara and Ashildr, a local storyteller and puppet maker, onto his spaceship. The Mire kill the Vikings and drain their adrenaline and testosterone. Ashildr declares war on the Mire in revenge, and they give the village 24 hours to prepare.

The Doctor uses electricity from electric eels to stun the Mire and steals one of their helmets, which he alters and gives to Ashildr. She makes the other Mire think that a puppet is a dragon and they leave; however, the helmet kills her. The Doctor heals Ashildr by implanting one of the chips from a Mire helmet into her body, which has the side effect of making her immortal. (She later appears in 'Face the Raven', under the name of 'Me'.)

Answer: 'The Girl in the Fireplace'

'The Girl in the Fireplace' features the Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler and Mickey Smith. While investigating a spaceship from the 51st century, the Doctor looks through a fireplace - which is actually a window in time - and sees a little French girl, Reinette, on the other side, which is in the 18th century. There is a clockwork android hiding in her room and the Doctor protects Reinette from it. Reinette, who is revealed to be Madame de Pompadour (and the spaceship is later revealed to be named after her), reappears as a young woman and the Doctor discovers there are several time windows on the spaceship, which all lead to different points in Madame de Pompadour's life. A group of androids have killed the human crew of their spaceship and used their organs to repair the ship, and they want Madame de Pompadour's brain when she turns 37, as they believe it will be compatible with the ship by then.

At a ball in Versailles, the androids take Madame de Pompadour hostage and threaten to decapitate her. The Doctor has to go through a time window disguised as a mirror to get to her. Luckily, he is able to return to the spaceship through the fireplace, as Madame de Pompadour has had it installed in the palace at Versailles. When the Doctor returns to see Madame de Pompadour again, she has died and King Louis gives the Doctor a letter from her.

Answer: 'The Vampires of Venice'

'The Vampires of Venice' features the Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond and Rory Williams. The Doctor decides to take Amy and Rory on a romantic break to Venice in the sixteenth century. The city has been sealed off, supposedly because of the Black Death, but is actually being controlled by the patron Rosanna Calvierri, a Sister of the Water whose true form resembles a fishlike monster. She runs a girls' school, which is really a front for the Sisters of the Water; she is transforming the girls into Sisters, which gives them vampire-like traits, as she is the only surviving female and needs more females to procreate. Amy infiltrates the school to protect Isabella, a boatbuilder's daughter, but is captured by the Sisters. Isabella saves her from being transformed, but is thrown into the canal and eaten by Rosanna's sons.

The Sisters attack the home of Guido, Isabella's father, but Guido sacrifices himself to kill them all by blowing his house up with gunpowder. Rosanna attempts to sink Venice so that the Sisters of the Water can take over, but the Doctors stops her. She jumps into the canal and is eaten.

Answer: 'The Empty Child'/'The Doctor Dances'

The two-parter of 'The Empty Child' and 'The Doctor Dances' features the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler, and also introduces Captain Jack Harkness, a time traveller from the future, who would go on to star in the spinoff 'Torchwood'. It is set in London during the Second World War and features a group of aliens that transform people's faces into gas masks. A spaceship has crashed near a hospital and released alien nanogenes that scanned Jamie, a little boy in a gas mask who had died earlier that night, and used him as a template for other humans; anyone who comes into contact with them becomes a 'gas mask alien' and starts asking, "Are you my mummy?" The Doctor manages to fend off a crowd of them by scolding them and telling them to go to their rooms.

Nancy, a homeless woman, is revealed to be Jamie's mother and once she accepts Jamie as her child, the nanogenes determine that she is a proper human template. Jamie comes back to life and all the 'gas mask aliens' turn back to normal.

Answer: 'The Curse of the Black Spot'

'The Curse of the Black Spot' features the Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond and Rory Williams, and takes place on a pirate ship, some time in the 17th century. The crew are being attacked by a Siren-like alien that marks their palms with a black spot after they are injured, puts them in a trance and disintegrates them. Rory gets a black spot on his hand, but Amy and the Doctor protect him from the Siren's song. The Doctor figures out that the Siren is using reflections as a portal and sends the crew to hide in the dry magazine, where the captain's son Toby - who also has a black spot as a result of his fever - is stowing away.

The Siren steals the TARDIS captures both Rory and Toby, and the Doctor, Amy and the captain all injure themselves so that the Siren will take them as well. The Siren teleports them to a spaceship, where the injured pirates are alive and in the sick bay, along with Rory, Toby and the TARDIS. The Siren is revealed to be the ship's doctor and uses the black spot as a way of taking tissue samples so it can help the injured. Amy persuades the Siren to give Rory back, while the pirate captain stays on the spaceship with his crew.

Answer: 'The Shakespeare Code'

'The Shakespeare Code' features the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones as they travel to Southwark, London, to watch a performance of 'Love's Labour's Lost'. Three witch-like aliens called Carrionites, who manipulate psychic energy created by the power of words, are trying to force William Shakespeare to rewrite the end to 'Love's Labour's Won' (a lost play which may or may not have been a sequel) so that the right combination of words will free their race. They also told Peter Streete, the architect of the Globe Theatre, to give it its distinctive design. After the Doctor and Martha meet Streete in a hospital, the Carrionites kill him.

The Carrionites reveal that they were released from banishment after Shakespeare's son Hamnet died. As a performance of 'Love's Labour's Won' ends, a portal opens up and the Carrionites enter, but Shakespeare changes the ending of the play at the last minute by ad-libbing some lines, with help from Martha. Both the Carrionites and the manuscripts of the play are sucked back through the portal.

Answer: 'The Witchfinders'

'The Witchfinders' features the Thirteenth Doctor, Graham O'Brien, Yasmin Khan and Ryan Sinclair, and is set in 17th century Lancashire, near the village of Pendle Hill. The Doctor sees an old woman, who has been accused of being a witch, being dunked in a river and drowned, and pretends to be the Witchfinder General to stop further witch trials. Meanwhile, Yasmin finds Willa, the old woman's great grand-daughter, burying her body, and several corpses, revealed to be people who were accused of witchcraft, come back from the dead.

While the Companions are following the corpses, who are possessed by aliens called the Morax, the Doctor is accused of witchcraft while arguing with a local magistrate. She is tied to a chair and dunked, but manages to free herself. The magistrate reveals that she was infected by a Morax while chopping down a tree and started the witch trials to find a cure. The Morax queen takes over the magistrate's body and reveals that the tree was a prison for Morax criminals, and that their king wants to possess King James. The Doctor manages to force the other Morax out of the corpses, but is forced to kill the magistrate as the queen is still possessing her.

Answer: 'The Eaters of Light'

'The Eaters of Light' features the Twelfth Doctor, Bill Potts and the alien Nardole, and is set in Roman-occupied Scotland. The Doctor and Bill argue over the disappearance of the Ninth Legion of the Roman Army and Bill looks for the Legion, while the Doctor and Nardole look for their bodies. Bill finds some Roman soldiers hiding from what they call a 'light-eating locust', and uses the TARDIS' translation circuits to communicate with them. The Doctor and Nardole find some dead Roman soldiers, whose bones have been disintegrated, and meet a tribe of Picts guarding a cairn. The Doctor enters the cairn and sees an inter-dimensional portal and several light-eating locusts; when he comes out, two days have passed.

Kar, the leader of the tribe, reveals that every generation, a warrior from the tribe fights a locust, which she calls 'Eaters of Light', but she released one to attack the invading Romans and it killed the tribe's elders. The Romans and Picts are forced to team up to stop more Eaters of Light escaping, and trap the Eater of Light in the portal. The Doctor plans to stay with it to stop it escaping, as he cannot leave until the sun extinguishes and as a Time Lord, he can regenerate. Nardole stops him, and Kar and the surviving Romans enter the portal to fight the Eaters of Light, but the amount of people going through it causes it to shut forever and the cairn to collapse. The tribe erects a memorial stone in Kar's memory and her brother Ban tells her name to the crows.