Nightmare Fuel / Doctor Who 2009 Specials

"Because it's funny! Don't you see?! LOOK AT ME! I'm SPLITTING MY SIDES! I AM HILARIOUS! I AM THE FUNNIEST THING IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!"

• "The Next Doctor":
  • The specials-only year started with a bang, with Christmas 2008 bringing the return of the Cybermen, who create animal-like ninjas with dog brains. Oh, and more brain-electrocution and ambushes, of course.
  • The "fugue state" Jackson Lake suffers from? It's a real condition. You could have it right now, and you wouldn't even know it....
  • Ms. Hartigan says of the Doctor that he's "yet another man come to assert himself against me in the night." Yeesh.
• "Planet of the Dead": Easter 2009 gave us a man being burned to a skeleton as he steps through a wormhole, and a vast swarm of killer stingrays that turn planets to sand within a year.
  • If you have entomophobia, the Tritovores count as this with their semi-realistic fly heads.
• "The Waters of Mars":
  • Russell T Davies said that this episode would be very scary, going on to describe it as "nightmarish". Consider how many people were left hiding under the bed after episodes that were not intended to be that scary. How did he do?
  • Monsters that infect you with the very thing that makes up 60 percent of your body, or over 70 percent of this planet's surface. One drop is all it takes. If you're literally anywhere else other than the small, tightly enclosed, easily destructible environment the episode takes place in, infection is only a matter of time. Water can get in anywhere. The Doctor puts it best in this quote:
    "Water is patient, Adelaide. Water just waits. Wears down the clifftops. The mountains. The whole of the world. Water always wins."
  • During the Doctor's first meeting inside Bowie Base 1, and his eureka moment, as the names of all the in-the-flesh characters in that very room were being spouted off, it goes to a webpage showing that they die on that very day. The Doctor knew that he couldn't do anything to change it, because it was a fixed point in time and it shows how sorry he seemed for them.
    • When the Doctor realizes that he is the only Time Lord left, and that consequently, he makes the rules. Nothing scarier than a man who rules reality, and is now willing to abuse that fact.
    • Then what makes him halt. Specifically, the companion-of-the-week killing herself to preserve the order of time.
    • The Time Lord Victorious speech can be compared directly to the Master's conversation with the shrunken Doctor in LOTTL. The similarities in the mindset of the respective Timelords at those points are REMARKABLY similar, and provoked physical shaking and symptoms one might possibly associate with Mind Rape. They even say 'tough' in the same way. Oh, and in The End of Time, he quotes him directly- "Funny? No? Little bit?".
    • "The laws of time are mine, and THEY WILL OBEY ME!" Now who does that sound like?
    • "I'm a Time Lord. I HAVE THAT RIGHT." Now didn't that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
    • This episode puts right out in the open a fact that often gets sort of lost in the Doctor's Cloud Cuckoolander and Bunny-Ears Lawyer qualities: The Doctor is mentally ill, and fairly unstable. In The Waters of Mars it wasn't made cute or funny; it was dark, and serious and deadly, and not ignorable. That was scarier than any villain or monster they've had on the show.
    • A) What happens at the very beginning of this incarnation? The Doctor casually rewrites the timeline. Why? Because Harriet Jones, the Prime Minister fated to bring in a golden age for Great Britain had ... dared to not trust that he would always be there to save them. So this isn't the first time the Time Lord Victorious came out.
    • B) What incarnation of the Doctor is this? #10. Add one for the War Doctor. Add one more for successfully suppressing a regeneration. #12. When was the Valeyard predicted by the Timelord Council? Between the 12th and final regenerations. Had the mission commander not sacrificed herself to preserve the timeline, just how close were we to the Valeyard personality achieving dominance?
    • It's not just the Master; the Doctor's Sanity Slippage also parallels that of the Time Lords in "The End of Time". During the War, they went mad with their own power, to the point of being willing to destroy the universe to "ascend to a higher form of consciousness". This was why the Doctor had to kill them in the first place. Now bear in the mind that the Doctor was able to do that — to destroy not one, but two all-powerful civilizations, all by himself. Then realize that if he were to go down the same road, there might be no one at all capable of stopping him.
    • What makes that final scene even more unsettling is that the Doctor's cocky, I'm-really-so-very-awesome-me smugness in that scene isn't a million miles off from how he's behaved in other episodes after beating the baddie of the week... except this time, it's presented in a much more unsettling light. Rather than everyone around him boosting him up by fawning over how great he is in dazzled awe, they're utterly freaked out and terrified by him. The fact that it's one of the most matter-of-fact A God Am I moments ever makes it far more unsettling than a million ranting megalomaniacs.
    • In "The Runaway Bride", Donna told Doctor that he needs someone to prevent him from going too far. And this episode would've meant nothing if it didn't prove her point. Though this is nothing new, all the way back to the First Doctor, Ian Chesterton stopped The Doctor from bashing a caveman's skull in with a rock. This is more or less canon that The Doctor ever since, was inspired for one reason, to keep companions, to keep his humanity in check and prevent his darkness from taking over.
  • The Doctor sonic-ing the Gadget robot and Roman screaming in pain because his brain is connected to the robot. The worst part of it all is that The Doctor is completely unaware of the damage he's causing, running around with a big grin on his face.
  • The manner in which the Flood transformed people into hive-minded water zombies was utterly terrifying. Bonus points for the tremendous Tear Jerker of Steffi desperately turning on a recording of her children during her last few seconds of consciousness, before emerging from the room she'd been sealed into (after a behind-the-back view of the transformation) to terrorize her former crewmates. Then adorable Roman's living example of the 'One Drop' being fatal.
  • The fact that the Flood manages to momentarily pass as one of the base crew, even conversing with Yuri, who doesn't notice as it completely takes over. Then it speaks with her voice, the only time it ever speaks.
    The Flood: Earth has so much water... We should like that world so very much.
    • Which might make it more disturbing. The Flood can speak, but it just doesn't bother.
  • The Doctor in the TARDIS, staring, being aware of the consequences of his actions and his impending end, and the Cloister Bell begins to ring...
• "The End of Time":
  • Joy to the world; the Ood are back! Fortunately, they're on the side of good this time (for once.) Doesn't stop them from being generally creepy.
    • We will join. We will join. We will join...
    • The Ood show Ten a vision of the Master or, more importantly, a part of him that survived his demise, demonstrating that it's entirely possible for the psychopath to return. This, along with the Ood's warning about The End of Time Itself (punctuated with the brightest red eyes you've ever seen) freaks out The Doctor so much that he runs like a bat out of hell!
  • What happened at the climax of Part One with the Master turning EVERY human in the world, apart from Donna and Wilf, into a copy of himself. Gwen, Martha and Sarah Jane Smith never saw that coming, did they... Nor Jo Grant or Ace or the Brigadier or any of the Doctor's other companions on Earth, living or dead.
  • It's heavily implied the Master eats people and just leaves skeletons. Imagine seeing this face◊ falling from the sky on top of you while a psychotic voice yells "DINNER TIIIIIIIIMMEEEEE!!!!!!!" right before you die.
    • Even without the flashing skeleton effect, John Simm devours the scenery when playing the hungry, desperate Master, and pulls several Nightmare Faces that easily rival the likes of Willem Dafoe and Ian McDiarmid.
  • Remember the transformations happened during Obama's inauguration speech. The "filmed" inauguration speech. Imagine the horror of the people rewatching it.
  • "Do you think he changed them? In their graves?" Imagine being Wilf in that moment, knowing that not only has your entire species (save Donna) been violated, but possibly also the body of your beloved wife as well.
  • How Time Lords decided to save themselves? They decided to initiate the Ultimate Sanction - to create a time paradox so severe that it would rip the Time Vortex apart, destroying existence, and to use the free energy to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence! No wonder Doctor was so freaked out!
    • The Doctor? Hell, THE MASTER WAS SHOCKED BY THIS PLAN.
  • It turns out that the Master is crazy because (at least mostly) Time Lords put the signal of their heart into him to save themselves. So it makes them responsible, partially, for MANY of universe's disasters.
    • Making it worse is that the Master was a megalomaniac SOB long before the Time Lords put that signal into him. Rather than turning an innocent man into a psychopath, they turned a psychopath into a monster, all just to save their own skins.
  • The Doctor's mention of the horrible things that the Time Lords would bring back from the War if they were released. We may never get to see them, but that just makes it worse. Just the expression on the Doctor's face alone makes you realise that, to him, the Time Lords returning is HIS Nightmare Fuel. This is the guy who tells anyone he meets that the Time Lords were great and awesome — WERE being the operative word. Then he takes up the gun...
    "You weren't there, in the final days of the war. You never saw what was born. But if the time lock's broken then everything's coming through and not just the Daleks but the Skaro Degradations. The horde of travesties! The Nightmare Child, The Could-Have-Been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres... the war turned into HELL! And that's what you've opened: right above the Earth! HELL is descending!"
    • The Time War. So the two most powerful civilizations in the universe ever are going at it with the gloves off; bad enough. Some of the weapons are creepifying just by their names — the Dalek fleet that "flew into the jaws of the Nightmare Child" is one hell of a Noodle Incident to ponder. The use of time travel to constantly resurrect the warriors, only for them to die again and again, hundreds of times? But worst of all is the simple fact implicit in its name: because it's a time war, you can never really meaningfully say that it's over from an internal perspective. It's just sealed away, with no escape....
    • Here's some lovely Fridge Horror for you — in the old series, the Time Lords all wore robes◊ coloured according to the Chapterhouse they belonged to. In "The End of Time", every single Time Lord is wearing Rassilon's red-and-gold◊. Based on what we saw of Rassilon, what do you think happened to the other Chapterhouses?
  • The thought of the Time Lords returning made the Doctor pick up a gun willingly. This was after he rejected taking a gun multiple times. That's how bad the situation became.
  • The post climax scene with the nuclear bolt and the two doors. The Doctor is looking at Wilfred, who will most certainly die if he doesn't sacrifice himself in his place, and declaring him "unimportant" and at the same time rambling about how important he himself is. It's a terrifying moment wherein you briefly think the Doctor is utterly and completely willing to sacrifice an innocent man because he thinks "The Doctor" counts for more. This is made more horrid by the fact that Wilfred had seen such a move coming, as earlier he had called the Doctor out on his willingness to put a Time Lord's life before that of the entire human race, and is still telling the Doctor to 'let him die'. *shudder*
  • "I've lived too long". This realization is what convinces the Doctor to make the sacrifice. The obsession to continue living despite the fallout to the innocent is what had driven Rassilon to the Ultimate Sanction. Turning into Rassilon scares the Doctor more than being hit with half a million radons.
  • This whole episode is more tragic in retrospect: Ten knew he was regenerating for the last time. And he could do nothing to stop it.