The Librarians: The Next Chapter's music keeps reminding fans of Doctor Who — and people have been hearing it since 2016
Watch The Librarians: The Next Chapter and a particular cue will start nagging at you: brisk strings, a rising figure, the sound of someone briskly solving a problem in a corridor. Whovians identify it immediately as "I Am the Doctor", Murray Gold's Eleventh Doctor theme. The shows share no composer, and nobody involved has claimed a deliberate borrowing.
Who actually writes the music
Joseph LoDuca. He scored the original Librarian TV films from 2004, the 2014 series, and returned for the spin-off, confirmed by Film Music Reporter in May 2025. His back catalogue is Evil Dead, Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules, Leverage, and Chucky — two Emmys, no BBC Wales. Gold, meanwhile, scored Doctor Who from 2005 to 2017 and again from 2023.
The comparisons started a decade ago
This isn't a Next Chapter phenomenon. Viewers were flagging it during The Librarians on TNT: a side-by-side comparison video went up on YouTube in August 2016, and a MovieChat thread about the season 3 premiere had people relistening three times and arguing over how many notes actually differ. The consensus in those threads was that the tempo, rhythm, and instrumentation all line up.
It resurfaced with the spin-off. Episode 1.3, "And the Ghost Train", drew the same observation again in 2025.
The Doctor Who connection is in the writers' room
Not the score. Tom MacRae, co-executive producer on The Next Chapter, wrote "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel" for David Tennant's Doctor in 2006 and "The Girl Who Waited" for Matt Smith's in 2011 — the same era whose theme fans keep hearing. He also wrote for the 2014 Librarians and has three writing credits on the spin-off, "And the Ghost Train" among them.
Showrunner Dean Devlin, in a 2025 press roundtable reported by TVBrittanyF, described a writers' room stacked with former showrunners and singled out the house styles inside it:
"A Tom MacRae episode is a very specific kind of episode," Devlin said.
That's the mechanism. A show about a secret organisation guarding dangerous artefacts, staffed partly by people who wrote for a show about a man in a box, is going to sound like it.
Where it's at now
Season 2 premiered on TNT on 2 August 2026. Episode 3, "And the Vanishing Bankers", is a MacRae script in which the Librarians go undercover in a hostile version of Neverland — and it guest-stars Ty Tennant, son of David.
For the record: the first season's twelve episodes were shot in Serbia, with a castle in Belgrade standing in for the Librarian's former home. The Doctor Who of it all is entirely a coincidence of personnel. Repeatedly.