Eldritch Abomination / Doctor Who

Basically Remina or Ego made from hellfire.^note And without the creepy tongue or beard, respectively.

Doctor Who and its expanded universe feature a whole lot of Eldritch Abominations.

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Doctor Who

• There's a lot of evidence pointing towards the Time Lords being an entire species of this trope, given their incredible age and intelligence, how easily and often the very laws of reality are twisted like playthings by them (in Classic Who, they are easily capable of moving entire planets and monitoring all the energy in the universe), and their inherent ability to perceive the universe in ways no other species can. Indeed, several of the conflicts between the Doctor and the Master play out a lot like battles in an endless war between two Eldritch Abominations, with the poor lesser beings caught between.
  • Depending on the Writer, though. They are either this or Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
  • In the Expanded Universe, fighting a war even worse than the one described in the TV show, Time Lords are combat bio-engineered to regenerate into the perfect soldier for any environment. In one case, this means turning into minor Cthulhu Mythos creatures. One becomes nothing less than a sentient timeline.
  • Remember the Doctor's line from "The Pandorica Opens" about the thing the Pandorica was designed to hold: "There was a goblin, or a trickster... or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world." It's the Doctor himself.
• The Daleks believe the Doctor is one. They call him "Bringer of Darkness", "The Oncoming Storm", "The Destroyer of the Worlds" and "The Predator of the Daleks"; he's the only being in the universe they outright fear (keep in mind they were deliberately engineered to feel nothing but hate for all things non-Dalek), and "Asylum of the Daleks" shows that the few Daleks that survived encounters with him were driven almost permanently catatonic by the experience.
  • Even a non-Dalek could make the argument the Doctor themself is a Humanoid Abomination, albeit a (usually) benevolent one. They're an impossibly ancient being with an understanding of the universe far outside any reasonable human, they single-handedly put Gallifrey into a bizarre limbo stasis and were granted a potentially endless source of regenerations, and they have an ancient, unspoken true name. "The Timeless Children" offers up even more evidence for this argument, revealing they're actually a mysterious entity from another realm, the only known one of their kind in this universe, who already had an endless number of regenerations, and initial attempts to try and figure out what they might be and where they might be from didn't reveal any secrets that could be understood, aside from their ability to regenerate, which the proto-Time Lords copied and modified for themselves.
• The TARDIS itself is a fully sentient Eldritch Location. Bigger on the Inside, filled with endless wonder and terror and secrets the Doctor doesn't let even their closest friends in on, able to go anywhere in time and space — and very much alive and in more control of her movements and every single square centimeter of her as-big-as-it-wants-to-be interior than whoever is at the wheel. The Expanded Universe says the TARDIS is a full-on Eldritch Abomination, which considerately disguises herself to avoid reducing the passengers to gibbering wrecks. As a living shape-shifting creature, at home in extra-dimensional spaces, with a mind that even the Doctor deems unfathomably alien, it's certainly a good candidate. A minor story comments on the TARDIS' mind as completely and utterly pandimensional. When a salvage crew captures it and tries to remove parts, we find out what it means to make the supreme mistake of pissing her off. Basically... don't.
  Eleventh Doctor: Don't touch a thing. The TARDIS will get huffy if you mess.
• The Animus from "The Web Planet" can generate a fungus-like substance to make an organic palace for itself, as well as possess any living creature that is in contact with gold. In the Expanded Universe, it's actually Lloigor, one of the Great Old Ones from the Cthulhu Mythos.
• The Great Intelligence, a powerful, disembodied consciousness that whispers in people's minds for years or even decades to turn them into willing puppets, and was infrequently encountered until "The Name of the Doctor" — in which it makes an almost-successful attempt to destroy the Doctor's entire life back to even before he ever left Gallifrey. Before that, it attempted to steal all of the Doctor's life experiences and memories and mentally revert him back to a younger age. It manifested bizarre powers and whenever it deigned to take physical form, it could Body Surf if the body it was in was damaged. Before "The Snowmen" provided an independent origin for the Intelligence (originally the reflection of a disturbed child's psyche in a snow-like, chemical telepathic field, improved upon by that same child-turned-Mad Scientist until it was unfathomably greater and more powerful than its creator could even comprehend, let alone intend), the Expanded Universe identified the Great Intelligence as an alias of Yog-Sothoth, and it is not hard to see why.
• The Nestene Consciousness, a formless entity powerful enough to control innumerable psychic links over many light-years, capable of bringing life to any plastic which it uses to launch an invasion army. In the Expanded Universe, it's one of the thousand children of Shub-Niggurath.
• Sutekh, Last of the Osirans, from "Pyramids of Mars". At the time, the Doctor describes him as the worst threat he has ever faced, the greatest time of peril in the history of the Earth, and given his awakening would have rendered the planet a barren wasteland before he spread across the universe to kill everything, his concern was very much justified.
• The eponymous creature in "Image of the Fendahl"; almost everyone who saw it died of fright, and that was only a crippled ghost of its true self 12 million years dead, which had been manipulating human lineages for millennia to ensure its release.
  • Not everyone who saw the Fendahl was lucky enough to die of fright. The Core transformed some of them into Fendahleen (the other components that, together with the Core, make up the Fendahl). The leader of the cultists who completed the process of creating the Core had even worse luck than that. He was still alive, still human, and seemingly still sane... but what he saw when he looked into the eyes of the Fendahl caused him to request the means to kill himself. The fact that the Doctor gave him those means is a testament to just how bad the Fendahl is.
  • And then the Time Lords released it to use for warfare.
• The Great Vampires, known also as Yssgaroth, who fought the early Time Lords in the war that made the entire species get sick of violence, are gargantuan winged creatures who feast on planets, and can only be killed by having their heart destroyed. But they are so massive that the Time Lords had to invent a new type of ship specifically for hunting them. The only way the Doctor managed to best the one he encountered was by stabbing it with a rocket ship.
• The Eternals, beings that live outside of time in eternity, are immortal and use the imagination of people from our universe (they call us Ephemerals) to form realities. They can take anyone they want from any point in time and force them to do whatever they wish. They are not invincible, though; if somehow trapped in our reality, they are mortal and vulnerable.
• The eponymous Big Bad in "The Curse of Fenric" is described as evil incarnate from almost the beginning of the universe, albeit one without a body of its own, instead possessing others' bodies. One of the spinoff novels identifies Fenric as Hastur the Unspeakable from the Cthulhu Mythos.
• The Reapers from "Father's Day" may be an understated example, but they're still incredibly terrifying winged beings that are literally linked to "Time" itself and appear whenever a Temporal Paradox happens like "bacteria taking advantage of the wound". It gets even worse when the Ninth states the only things that could stop them are appropriately enough the Time Lords but since they're out of the picture (heh) the Reapers are unstoppable and will devour everything until the paradox is fixed. The Reapers are one of the very few foes that can deactivate the TARDIS, and in the Four Doctors comic, a Reaper smashes straight through the TARDIS like it's made of... well, wood.
  • The way the reapers behave cleaves closely to the Hounds of Tyndalos, both being species of creatures that hunt time travelers that draw their notice.
• The Beast from "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit", so much so that the Doctor refuses to understand it.
  • In Torchwood, we meet its spawn, who kills people with its shadow. An Expanded Universe novel reveals that it is actually keeping even worse beings at bay, and that it killing people for the energy required to do so is simply "collateral damage".

• "42" has as its antagonist a sentient star capable of possessing people and giving them burning eyes.
• The Weeping Angels: impossibly fast creatures, indistinguishable from ordinary statues until you look away, able to transport people through time (because it's how they feed, off of all the "stolen moments"), take the minds of the ones they kill and use them as puppets, reproduce by projecting themselves through images, including images on the lens of an eyeball. On top of that, if they have enough power, they can turn ordinary statues into more of their number.
  • In the spinoff Class, it's revealed the Angels are working with a group of humans preparing for an "arrival" involving what appears to be some sort of super-Angel, or Angel god, which seems to be even worse than the usual kind. According to the series creator this would have involved a Weeping Angel Civil War.
  • In the Village of Angels, the Angels are capable of lifting an entire town into a vacuous void outside of existence of regular spacetime, in two different time periods, just so they could limit the movements of a singular target. If you are sent from one time period to the next, and happen upon the same angel again, you are Reduced to Dust. And in the end! They turn the Doctor into an angel without even touching her.
• The... creature from "Midnight". We don't see much of it, so it's nothing definite. But it Mind Rapes the Doctor and, by turning the people he's trying to save against him, comes closer to killing him than anything else.
  Sky/Doctor: He's waited so long. In the dark. And the cold. And the diamonds. Until you came. Bodies so hot. With blood. And pain.
  • Even worse, the Doctor has no knowledge of the creature. He doesn't know where it came from, how long it was there, what it is, if it's the only one of its kind in the universe, or how to beat it. It's one of the very few times in the entire decades long history of the show that something like this has utterly stumped and terrified the Doctor. The Hostess ultimately sacrifices herself to push the Possessed Sky out of the carriage. The Doctor remains shaken, and says the planet should be left alone, suggesting that either he doesn't believe it's dead, or he believes there's more than one of them.
    The Doctor: Let this planet keep on turning around an xtonic star. In silence.
• In "The Waters of Mars", the Flood is a viral life-form on Mars which emerges from the ice of an underground glacier being mined for the first Martian base's water supply. Although it's a biological virus, the Flood demonstrates that it is intelligent and sentient, with every microbe of it being connected in a Hive Mind manner which enables it to work together, and it can even voluntary choose to wait before taking over an exposed host if it wants to. Upon coming in contact with humans, the Flood takes over their bodies and turns them into zombified monsters who are wholly possessed by the Flood's Hive Mind with seemingly no trace of their original personality left, and it causes the infected hosts to spew infectious water through their skin and mouths like a sliced-open artery. It's also unknown where the Flood really came from: it's apparently one of the few alien creatures that the Doctor isn't familiar with, and the Doctor speculates the Ice Warriors who originally inhabited Mars probably ran afoul of the Flood and froze it inside the glacier long ago. What's worse, it's even seemingly hinted towards the episode's end that the viral form might not really be the Flood's true form but rather just an extension of an even greater Eldritch Abomination true form encased in the glacier.
  • What with Sutekh and the Flood, not to mention the Fendahl being said to have "passed through" on its way to Earth, it's no wonder the Ice Warriors went into hibernation for millions of years before abandoning the planet altogether and Mars became a dead planet...
• The Time War is indicated to have involved many of these:
  • In "The Stolen Earth", the Doctor mentions that he last saw Davros when his command ship was swallowed by something called the Nightmare Child, which a) must therefore have been massive, and b) almost certainly fits this trope.
  • "The End of Time" has the Doctor elaborate on this, mentioning that many abominations were created in the last days of the War:
    "You weren't there, in the final days of the war. You never saw what was born."
    • And what was born? Besides the aforementioned Nightmare Child, there's the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, the Could-Have-Been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres. "The war turned into hell."
• The House from "The Doctor's Wife", a malevolent, ancient living asteroid that originally existed outside the universe (the plug hole at the bottom of the universe), and eats TARDISes.
• Pictured above is the Old God, or "Grandfather", from "The Rings of Akhaten". A creature so powerful even the Doctor is willing to consider it a god, which has been sung to for millennia (constantly, with singers rotating in and out but the song never having been interrupted, ever) because if the songs cease for even a second, it will wake and devour all existence (oh, and it's the size of a planet). The parallels to Azathoth couldn't be more blatant.
• The Moment is one of the more understated ones, and yet probably the most powerful in the series. Never mind that it's a weapon with the ability to destroy worlds, and a piece of mechanics complex enough to develop a conscience; throughout its only appearance it repeatedly and calmly punches holes in the Time Lock around the Time War. As a reminder, this is the same barrier that's strong enough to (mostly) seamlessly contain the full might of the Daleks, Time Lords, and every other Eldritch Abomination they brought with them. For her part, she spends her time convincing her users not to employ her for her designed purpose of immense destruction because she finds the whole idea just terrible.
• The creatures in "Flatline", dubbed the "Boneless" by the Doctor, two-dimensional beings from outside the known universe. Among other things they drained dimensional energy from the TARDIS, and the Doctor realized that they apparently tried to learn about the three dimensional universe. He tried to find a way to communicate with them, something that proved difficult since even the TARDIS couldn't translate their language at first, and their sense of space was so alien that even the TARDIS was confused. Eventually they gained three dimensional forms, heavily distorted and warped, looking like distorted reflections of human beings, their movements jerky and clumsy, constantly shifting in shape and sometimes appearing as if they couldn't keep their three dimensional form together. They can pull you into their 2D state as well, making dissecting you as easy as turning the page in an anatomy book; a pattern on the wall turned out to be one unfortunate character's entire nervous system. The Steven Moffat era is really good at creating these.
• "It Takes You Away": The Solitract is a rare benevolent version. It's a sentient universe, the mere existence of which caused a Reality-Breaking Paradox that forced the main universe to eject it before reality could begin. Contact between the Solitract and the universe threatens both of them with collapse, causing the universe to create an anti-zone (a pocket dimension) just to keep them away from each other. Despite this, the Solitract is just lonely and only lures people in so it can have company. Once the Doctor shows it that both realities are threatened by this, it willingly lets her go.
• "Spyfall": The Kasaavin. Originating from Another Dimension resembling an endless forest of strange tube-like structures, they seem completely alien to our universe; when one is asked about where they come from, its response is "Far beyond [...] your understanding". In the episode they appear as glowing lights in the approximate shape of human beings; however, they claim to have taken these forms to mock humanity, and that this is not their natural appearance. They also don't seem limited by the normal flow of time, as they seemingly infiltrate the entire timeline of humanity between the 19th and early 21st century simultaneously and are able to effortlessly transport humans who come into contact with them between different time periods in that range.
• The "Not-Things" from "Wild Blue Yonder" are an understated but terrifying example. Seemingly disembodied beings that exist at the farthest edge of the universe, they gradually became malevolent beings due to being influenced by the collective hatred and anger of the known universe. In the episode itself, they appear as copies of the Doctor and Donna, and while their physical forms have a tendency to decay into nightmarish distorted versions as soon as they stop paying attention to maintaining them, their personality imitations are alarmingly accurate. Most of the time the only reason the Doctor and Donna are able to catch on to the deception is the Not-Things' extremely limited understanding of how the universe actually works (for instance, the Not-Doctor's tie disappearing from the floor because it didn't realize that objects continue to exist even if you're not paying attention to them. Beyond what they tell us about their origins, we find out absolutely nothing about what they actually are or where they came from.

Expanded Universe

• The Ancient Old Ones, beings from the previous universe that follow different physics, which allows them vast Reality Warper abilities; this can be inverted with beings from the next universe that have similar powers.
• Borusa and the other Time Lords Rassilon experimented on in Engines of War. Their timelines have been retro-engineered, meaning they are in a constant state of flux between the past and possible future regenerations. They can see all possible timelines, and when Borusa is in the Eye of Tantalus, he is able to pull on threads of possibility to bring new timelines into being; similar to Bad Wolf he is able to wipe all traces of the Daleks from the Tantalus Eye.
• At one point, the Time Lords discovered a predator capable of feeding off the Fendahl — the Memeovore, or Devourer of Concept, a malign void which could reach across time and space to feed on the stuff of thought and hungered to devour all eternity, from the Big Bang to the end of time. Those who looked at it saw an endless procession of grotesque images, as their mind struggled to comprehend the incomprehensible. In The Taking of Planet 5, it escaped the time loop around Planet 5 as a result of the Time Lords' interference.
  • And in the age-old cycle of Always a Bigger Fish, the same book introduces an even more terrifying threat beyond even the Memeovore: the Swimmers. These are beings which exist within the Void between universes, and they are so unimaginably gargantuan that entire universes popped against their sides like bubbles on the side of a whale. Faction Paradox would later deem Swimmers to be a type of Leviathan, entities which disturb reality by the mere fact of their existence; it also gave them a concrete size: approximately 150 quadrillion light-years in length (more than 3 million times the length of a standard universe). The release of the Memeovore was apparently done to prevent Swimmers from being drawn towards our universe.

Big Finish Doctor Who

• Anti-Time essentially causes this. It is spread by the Neverpeople, people who have suffered Ret-Gone and are left as ghosts who devour people's time. Then there is the personification of Anti-Time, Zagreus, something which even Death fears:
  Zagreus seeks the hero's ship
  Zagreus needs the web to rip
  Zagreus sups time at a drip
  And life aside, he's sweeping.
• The Sound Creature in "Scherzo" is a(n eventually) sentient being born of the sounds made by the Doctor, his companion Charley, and the TARDIS in a previously soundless environment. It regards them as its parents and it expects them to die for its sake.
• The monsters imprisoned in the Axis of Insanity, a collection of doomed, collapsing timelines, from the Big Finish audio of the same name. The Keeper of the Axis hates the Time Lords, mostly because it's their meddling that made the Axis necessary in the first place and which keeps adding more broken timelines to it.

The Sarah Jane Adventures

• "Ancient lights", Hive Queens to at least part of the universe that existed before the Big Bang. They are capable of using astrology to brainwash others and give them tremendous powers because the universe they originated from used astrology as a science. The fact that the physics of the current universe do not work according to those rules does not matter, they can ignore that and use it regardless.
• The Abomination. In this case it's a Brown Note painting and not a flesh-and-blood being. Unfortunately, it was painted with psychically active ink, which was capable of bringing the creature depicted to life. Oops.
• The Trickster, part of a Pantheon, whose sole motivation is to cause chaos in the universe at large. He can alter the timeline at a whim and create an entire parallel universe as long as he has the agreement of someone, and he can feed on the chaos that change has.

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