BBCWhat makes a great super team? The two most famous super teams are, of course, the Avengers and the Justice League, but collections of disparate characters coming together in the same shared universe aren’t always connected to superpowers and costumes. In the original pulp novels of The Shadow, the various agents of the titular vigilante were often more important to the story than the man himself, a concept which predicts the companions of the Doctor in Doctor Who. Nearly 20 years ago, on June 28, 2008, Doctor Who Season 4 brought together various companions of the Time Lord known as the Doctor, and at that point, all of those characters were closer to being agents of the Doctor, rather than just people who had once travelled in the TARDIS. The episode “The Stolen Earth,” combined with “Journey’s End,” was a huge triumph for the show and, in many ways, predicted the massive payoff of bigger genre franchises like Avengers: Endgame. The difference is, Doctor Who managed the same emotional weight of a massive team-up, minus the superpowers.Looking back on “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” today, the most impressive thing about the concept was how quickly showrunner Russell T Davies managed to build the shared Who universe. In 2005, the series was a scrappy relic from the 20th century, making a daring comeback. But, just three years later, the new Who had established enough secondary characters and agents of the Doctor to warrant a massive crossover event, which spanned the continuities of three active sci-fi shows. This event also mined very recent nostalgia to make the audience excited about seeing characters who, again, just three years prior, nobody had ever heard of.In case it’s been a while: The premise of “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” involves the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) realizing that someone has stolen a bunch of planets, including the Earth, for some nefarious purpose. The revelation of this masterplan is absurd, even by Doctor Who standards: Davros, creator of the Daleks, is using these planets to create a specific type of engine which will, in turn, create a “reality bomb” which will wipe everything out of existence, other than the Daleks themselves. Why this exact number of planets is needed is...explained...but not well.But who cares! Today, we might groan when a more recent Who episode has the Doctor monologuing about truly incoherent technobabble, but in 2008, David Tennant’s Doctor could say the wrong temperature of butter on toast was going to destroy the universe, and we would have bought it. This is the power of the DW Season 4 finale, then and now. Fans love to fixate on the moment in which the Doctor and a duplicate of the Doctor chat with Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) on a lonely beach, but the staying power of this storyline is the Avengers-level team-up of utterly ordinary people who are now badasses.In addition to Donna, “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” bring together former companions, Captain Jack (John Barrowman), Mickey Smith (Noel Clarke), Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), and even the robot dog K-9, AND Rose’s mom Jackie Tyler (Camille Coduri). Oh, and don’t forget Martha’s mom, Francine Jones (Adjoa Andoh).In addition to all these characters introduced in Who, characters from the spinoffs The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood appear as well, including Luke Smith (Tommy Knight), Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd), and Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles). This kind of crossover was the sort of thing the Arrowverse would do a few years later, nearly constantly, but again, before the 2000s, people had heard of the Flash and Supergirl. Before 2005, nobody had heard of these Who characters. The only true nostalgia play in this storyline is the inclusion of Sarah Jane Smith and K9, who technically hail from the 3rd (Jon Pertwee) and 4th (Tom Baker) eras. The return of Davros counts, of course, as a nostalgia callback to the old-school era of Who, but that’s not the reason fans were excited at the time. Plus, arguably, for newer fans of the show, Sarah Jane Smith was a character they remembered from Season 2, meaning this entire crossover event seemed to have been set up from the beginning.Sarah Jane, Mickey, and Jackie in "The Stolen Earth." | BBCIt wasn’t planned out, exactly, of course. And, as anyone who has read Davies’ memoir The Writer’s Tale will tell you, there were many, many roads not taken during these years on Who. However, what makes this finale so impressive is the way Davies decided to cash all of his chips on newer characters he had created, and in doing so, made it seem like this team of humans had been around for longer than any of them actually had.Rewatching “The Stolen Earth” today feels oddly quaint, because several more Doctor Who crossovers, or multi-Doctor episodes, have happened in the years since Season 4 ended. And yet, this one somehow still feels epic as hell, and somehow bigger than more recent finales, even though we have more canon and a billion more companions since then. If Who were to do a companion team-up storyline like this again, and bring back everybody from 2005 until now, it would take an entire season to do it justice. (In fairness, Flux attempted this kind of thing for the 13th Doctor era in 2021 and 2022.)The larger point is that nothing about “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” should work as well as it does. This was still a brand-new reboot show, acting like it had been around for a decade, not three years. The boldness and sweetness of these episodes are balanced perfectly, as is the heroic silliness that makes Doctor Who so addictive. And, if you’re wondering why fans still pine for the golden days of 21st-century Who, rewatching “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” explains everything.Doctor Who 2005-2022 (including Season 4) streams on AMC+.