It’s a classic question asked of Doctor Who actors for decades: If you had a TARDIS, when and where would you go? I’ve never put much thought into it myself, for some reason, but a reader posed a variation on the question to me this week, and I thought it was worth pondering—though in this case, I’m not thinking about where I would go, given the chance, but rather where I’d like to see the Doctor and his Companions go.

The questions of time and place are intimately intertwined—it might be interesting to pop in on Vienna in the late 18th or early 19th C., for instance, but less so in, say, 1944—but I’m going to try to separate them to a degree. So first, when would I like them explore?

Over the past fifty years, we’ve seen the Doctor go everywhen—from the Big Bang to the end of the universe. He’s been to Earth’s distant past (e.g., in “The Cave of Skulls” or at the end of City of Death) and its distant future (The End of the World). He’s visited contemporary Companions’ near-past (Father’s Day), their near-future (Fear Her), and of course their present (most of the Third Doctor’s era, for a start). Then there are the off-Earth stories, whose timescales range all over the board: past or future, archaic or futuristic.

For argument’s sake, though, I’m only allowed to pick something within Earth’s timeline. So when would I select? Given some of my previous admissions, it probably comes as no surprise that if I were steering the TARDIS, I’d choose Earth’s middle-distant past—the stuff of history books.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though. If I’m going to send the TARDIS crew off into Earth’s median-distant history (a century to a few centuries), that’s still a broad window, and I’ve got the entire planet from which to choose. What other criteria can I use? How can I possibly decide?

I’m going to make it interesting by eliminating European or European-based cultures (e.g., the US or Australia). That still leaves a helluva lot of humanity (the First Doctor did better with this criterion than any other, visiting a whopping two non-white cultures: China (“Cathay”) in Marco Polo and Central America in The Aztecs). Due to my own personal interests and biases, then, I’d like to see the TARDIS land in Japan. Specifically, I’d like to see it land in the Tokugawa (or Edo) period.

Now I haven’t stopped to think much about the exact implications of the Doctor and a modern-day Companion (or two) showing up on the doorstep of an isolationist shogunate, but I can’t help but think there could be some seriously interesting interactions there. After all, if Companions can learn from the Doctor how to see and accept members of alien species as people, surely they could learn similar things about those of our own species. Humans will always, always have our differences, but we’ll have our similarities, too. Who better to teach that lesson than the Doctor?

Besides, I just think it would be cool.