Nightmare Fuel / Doctor Who Series 14

• "The Church on Ruby Road"
  • While they definitely have that strong stench of goof, that stops being funny the moment you realise how the goblins actually work.
    • The main one: they eat babies. That's messed up all on its own!
    • And oh no, it gets worse! They're also capable of Time Travel. Which means they can - and do - go back in time to feast on someone while they're still an infant, and that just becomes more terrifying the longer you think of it.
    • To give you a good idea, just look at what happens when they decide to do this to Ruby near the end. The Doctor just turns around and she's gone, without a single trace. A few minutes later and he finds the entire timeline has changed (and not exactly for the better, at least from what we see of it), with the kicker being that nobody even knows who she is, and there's not a single trace of her existence anywhere. Which of course the Doctor knows is a big problem. Luckily it doesn't take him long to piece two and two together, but even still, at this point the only thing preventing Ruby from becoming a Ret-Goner is the Doctor's memory. Long story short, those goblins were this close to zapping Ruby from history harder than the crack in time did to Rory.
  • The Goblin King himself. He looks nothing like the other goblins, who are a little freaky but are too small and cartoonish to be properly scary on their own. He's an oversized Blob Monster that seems to be more of a freaky Slitheen-Jagrafess hybrid. And he's the one actually doing the chomping.
    • How he eats the babies - they are fed to him in baskets on a slowly moving Conveyor Belt o' Doom.
• "Space Babies"
  • The Bogeyman, being a living mass of snot with razor sharp teeth. You can't exactly blame those titular babies for instantly wetting themselves just from hearing the name. Even the Doctor runs away from the Bogeyman before learning that it was designed to be intimidating.
  • This episode reveals that whatever was going on with Ruby's mother, it's much stranger than initially implied. At one point the Doctor thinks back to the moment where he saw Ruby's mother abandoning her... only for his memory of the event to change to now show her mother abruptly spinning to point at the Doctor.
    • And when The Doctor snaps back to the present with Ruby, they both notice that snow is falling in the corridor they're standing in. It's not an illusion, it's real snow from that night. A flake even melts in The Doctor's hand to prove it's real. Whatever it means, The Doctor insists that he and Ruby not visit that night, because he took that sign as a warning. The last shot of the episode is snow inside the TARDIS. There's nowhere they can hide.
  • The CGI mouths put on the baby actors are a case of both Unintentional Uncanny Valley and Accidental Nightmare Fuel, since they're supposed to be cute and charming.
• "The Devil's Chord"
  • Maestro is no different from their father in their method of driving the world mad, but they do it by removing music as an outlet for humanity's frustrations, resulting in a Bad Future from a Hopeless War that reduced Earth into a nuclear wasteland, and they don't plan on stopping at Earth, either; feeding on humanity's music is just them gaining enough strength to steal the "music of the spheres", which will result in the entire universe screeching to a halt and being left just as dead and empty as the Earth of this alternate timeline.
    • Maestro describing the sound of a nuclear winter as "the purest music of all". Really helps paint them as warped as The Toymaker.
  • The Maestro's general demeanor is terrifying. They can go from Large Ham to Ax-Crazy at the drop of a hat. And they have more than enough power to make you suffer if they want.
    "All those melodies, stifled and STRRRRANGLED inside you. All those songs you never sang, they sit there still... wrapped around your... HEART, still beating... wrapped soooo.... tight. Would you like me to set them free?"
    "The CHORUS of ancient songs call me... Maaaaestrooooo! Aaaaaand WHO.... are you? Because I. HEARD. MUSIC. HAHAHAHAHA! And music... IS MIIIIINE!!!"
  • Maestro feeding "off all the songs unsung" making them sound more like a creature of the abstract like The Weeping Angels.
  • The existence of "The One Who Waits", whom both the Toymaker and Maestro fear. According to Maestro, "[they're] almost here."
  • Whatever is going on with Ruby's past only gets stranger and more disturbing here. Not only are the strange circumstances surrounding her implied to be tied to the One Who Waits, but when Maestro attempts to feed on the music inside her, we're met with the same eerie rendition of "Carol of the Bells" that played on the night she was abandoned, with even Maestro being alarmed at how the song can have so much power. Maestro doesn't even try to feed on it either from being so unsettled by it or because they can't...
  • Given that both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctor seemed relatively unscathed, a bigeneration shouldn't be so painful compared to a regeneration, right? Wrong. Fifteen reveals here that the experience quite literally tore his soul in half, and that he wouldn't survive a second one.
  • When Ruby claims that Maestro's plan can't succeed because she was born in 2004, the Doctor turns unusually solemn and grim and takes her back to 2024, showing her that it's now a nuclear wasteland. What happens if the Doctor doesn't intervene isn't usually shown, but this hammers in just how urgent it is and makes the threat of the Laughably Evil Maestro feel much more severe. It's also a notable Good Is Not Nice moment from an incarnation of Doctor who had been one of the most charming and sociable ones up to this point — seeing him without his manic energy is pretty unnerving. The fact that the scene is a Call-Back to an equally chilling moment from "The Pyramids of Mars" doesn't help.
  • The Doctor and Ruby's first glimpse of Maestro is when their face starts appearing in every reflective surface, including John Lennon's glasses. When the Doctor sees Maestro's face reflected in a spoon, the latter suddenly shrieks very loudly, before everything abruptly returns to normal. The Beatles then become hostile to questioning and storm off.
• "Boom"
  • The predicament that the Doctor finds himself in throughout this episode. The episode starts with him in a situation that seems all too familiar - the TARDIS lands, he hears someone screaming, and he rushes to help - but as he's on his way, he suddenly hears an unusual noise... and realizes that he's standing on a landmine. He finds himself forced to stand in place, one leg in the air, for fear that the slightest movement, the slightest change in his blood pressure, the slightest emotional shift might set off the explosive... and it turns out, it's not just any regular land mine; no, it uses some kind of quantum charge to detonate the DNA of the person who stepped on it... which, given that the Doctor is a Time Lord, means that this explosion would be big enough to rip apart the entire planet.
  • Those robot ambulances, which have a nasty habit of killing people and leaving behind their dead bodies super-compressed in a jar.
    • Someone deliberately designed them that way, purely to maintain a Forever War for Fun and Profit.
  • Again Ruby's presence, this time her near-death, somehow summons the snow of the night she was born.
  • The Villengard Weapon Factories. They started off as the subject of a ascended Noodle Incident in "The Doctor Dances", then returned as a Continuity Nod in "Twice Upon A Time", but here we get a look at how cold, robotic, and utterly ruthless the company is in making a profit off of war. As mentioned above, the company's products include smart mines that contain no explosive, because they detonate the victim's DNA, and guns that can't be used against other Villengard products (unless, presumably, both sides of the conflict use Villengard weapons. No profit if the weapons don't work then). And just because the company also manufactures combat ambulances as well, don't think that makes them good. If the ambulances deem your recovery time will take too long, they will kill you and super-compress your body for efficient disposal. And they also can withhold treatment if you don't fit a certain criteria (in the Church's case, belief). Frankly, Jack and River's sonic blasters might be the nicest things these factories produced. In-universe, this company earned its nickname of "Nightmare of the Seven Galaxies."

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