An Up Close Look At Doctor Who’s Brand New Sonic Screwdriver

An Up Close Look At Doctor Who’s Brand New Sonic Screwdriver

A new Doctor on Doctor Who means new everything: New monsters, new best friends, new TARDISes and new gear. That includes a new Sonic Screwdriver, the Doctor’s jack-of-all-trades technological device — and while we got a very tiny flash of it in the new trailer today, we now have a great look at its very unusual visage.

Naturally, it’s because the Thirteenth Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver is now a toy to tie into the upcoming series, and is actually available for purchase at Comic-Con. If you aren’t at the show, the 18cm-long toy will hit shelves in August, ahead of Doctor Who’s highly-anticipated return later this year.

The toy itself is pretty nifty — it lights up, just like the one on the show, and makes all the appropriately buzzy sonic screwdriver noises you’d hope it would make (it also rotates!).

But it’s surprising from a design standpoint just how, well, alien this new sonic is. It looks weirdly organic, from the crystal light source to the metallic shell, and the fact that it curves and twists instead of being a straight little technological equivalent of a magic wand.

It looks organic and bizarre in a way the sonic screwdriver never has before.

Past versions of the device, especially in the modern revival of Who, have meant to share a design link with the TARDIS console room that created the device — sharing similarities in aesthetic and colouration with the current “desktop theme” of the Doctor’s ship.

Could this ethereal-looking sonic give us a hint that the Thirteenth Doctor’s TARDIS console room could look equally funky? She definitely needs a new one after the whole “getting thrown out of the TARDIS mid-air while its insides exploded” thing in the last Christmas special!

Doctor Who returns this spring. If you want the Doctor’s latest gadget for yourself and aren’t currently vworp-ing your way across time and space to San Diego, it will be available for pre-order on various online stores from next Wednesday, July 25.


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.