The 7 most disturbing Doctor Who episodes of all time

Metro

5 days ago

For six decades now, Doctor Who has disturbed and delighted audiences around the world with terrifying tales of evil aliens and malicious monsters.
From devious Daleks to sinister Cybermen, the Whoniverse is crawling (sometimes literally) with horrors beyond most people's imagining.
Yet the question is, what are the most disturbing Doctor Who episodes? Well, there are plenty of chilling tales from the Tardis that have forced audiences to hide behind the sofa.
There are stories like The Satan Pit, The Ark in Space, and who could forget Blink? Honestly, I could spend days curating this list, so to make things easier, I've done things a little differently
I've limited myself to the revived era (starting in 2005) and chosen one story (some of these are two-parters) from each Doctor's run. That means there's one entry for every Doctor from the Ninth to the Fifteenth, so you get as comprehensive a list as possible.
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So what are you waiting for? Here are the seven most disturbing Doctor Who episodes!
The first truly scary episode of the revival era, this two-part story sees the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose (Billie Piper) track a mysterious ship through time to London during The Blitz.
While there, however, the pair learn there are things far more dangerous than German bombs awaiting them as a strange gas mask-wearing child prowls the ruins of the city, desperately searching for his mummy.
There's a long history of body horror in the Whoniverse, but this was the first episode to marry those old ideas with modern effects.
This leads to arguably the most chilling scene in all of Christopher Eccleston's run, where Doctor Constantine (Richard Wilson) painfully vomits up a gas mask as he loses his mind and body to the Empty Child's strange curse.
Combine that with a genuinely creepy atmosphere, a razor-sharp script from Steven Moffat and some superb acting, and you've a recipe for a truly sinister story. Is it any wonder these two episodes won a 2006 Hugo Award?
Only the Tenth Doctor (or any of the Doctor's incarnations, actually) could go on the sci-fi equivalent of a coach trip and end up in a life-or-death situation.
Yes, it might sound ridiculous, but this terrifying tale sees the Last of the Time Lords go on a solo adventure where he comes face to face with an impossible creature that slowly turns a coach-load of tourists against the Doctor (David Tennant).
People may be surprised to see I've listed Midnight here and not Blink, but honestly, I think this is the scarier story. Why? Well, Midnight is a story where the Doctor's most powerful weapons, his wit, words and wonderful brain are all turned against him.
As the mysterious creature grows in power, it takes more and more of him, leaving him an empty husk. It's only through sheer dumb luck that he manages to save the day, and it's a story that demonstrates in a universe full of Daleks, Cybermen, and Weeping Angels, there's no creature more dangerous than a frightened human.
An underrated gem, The Girl Who Waited begins with the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith), Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) and Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) landing on the resort world of Apalapucia.
What should be a relaxing break becomes a nightmare, though, when Amy is trapped in a faster time stream and the Doctor and Rory are forced to watch Amy grow older and older with no way to help her.
What makes The Girl Who Waited such a disturbing episode isn't its villain or the monster. It's that it uses time travel to tell a really effective story about Amy's fears and anxieties while exploring a moral dilemma that even the Doctor can't talk his way out of.
Indeed, the final moments of the episode, where our hero betrays and kills Amy (although not the one we know… it's all a bit timey wimey), is one of the darkest moments in the series' history.
When the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi), Master (Michelle Gomez) and Bill (Pearl Mackie) investigate a distress call in deep space, they discover a ship trapped in the event horizon of a black hole.
That might sound dangerous enough, but things take an even darker turn when the crew gun down Bill, and she's taken away by mysterious patients who claim they heal Bill… more than that, they can make her better than new, whether she likes it or not.
I'll be honest, I never found the new Cybermen that scary. They looked too much like robots, so it was easy to think of them as cybernetic automata.
This two-parter, however, exposes the sheer horror of Cyber conversion by letting you see the human under the steel, a powerful and terrifying reminder that Cybermen are people who have had their humanity ripped away from them.
This, coupled with the revelation that the Cybermen are and always have been the Mondasians (and potentially humanity's) ultimate destiny, is such a horrifying reveal that it gives me chills just thinking about it.
The Power of the Doctor is the Thirteenth Doctor's (Jodie Whittaker) final story and sees The Daleks, The Cybermen and Rasputin (yes, really) team up to defeat the Doctor once and for all.
Okay, I thought long and hard about which of Jodie's episodes to include, and it really came down to two episodes: this and Village of the Angels.
Ultimately, though, I decided that there' something far more disturbing about this story for one specific reason. You see, so often the Doctor's enemies just want the Time Lord dead… or as dead as an immortal alien can be.
Here, though, the plan is to change the Doctor permanently by forcing her to regenerate into The Master, effectively trapping them in their own body for all eternity.
That's such a horrifying thought to have – not to mention the subtext of a man taking a woman's body without her permission – that I thought it had to be included on this list even if it's not as 'scary' as the other stories I chose to include here.
After Donna (Catherine Tate) spills coffee on the Tardis controls, she and the Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant… again) are flung to the edge of the universe, where they encounter an abandoned ship.
As the duo explore the mysterious vessel, however, they quickly learn the ship might not be as abandoned as they thought.
Wild Blue Yonder is a deliberately weird episode that makes brilliant use of the uncanny to unsettle viewers and leave them reaching for a sofa cushion to hide behind.
Arguably, though, what makes this episode so effective is that we learn almost nothing about the 'Not-Things' that haunt the ship, with even the normally borderline omniscient Doctor baffled by where they came from and what they wanted. After all, what's scarier than the unknown?
When the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) accidentally steps inside a fairy circle, he mysteriously disappears, leaving his companion Ruby (Millie Gibson) all alone.
Well, not quite all alone. More Trending
Everywhere Ruby goes, she's followed by a strange woman who's always 73 yards away and seems to terrify anyone who talks to her.
The Fifteenth Doctor's era leaned into the supernatural and mystical more than other seasons of New Who.
It's fitting then that its scariest episode is effectively an old-fashioned ghost story that relies more on an unsettling atmosphere and haunting visuals than big, bombastic scares to frighten you.
Doctor Who is available to stream now on BBC iPlayer.
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