Characters / Doctor Who – Villains

Doctor Who characters index
Incarnations of the Doctor
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | War | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13
The TARDIS
Companions and Supporting Cast
Classic Series Companions (K9, Romana) | Revival Series Companions (Rose Tyler, Captain Jack Harkness, River Song, Clara Oswald) | Other Supporting Cast (The Paternoster Gang) | UNIT Staff
Villains
Immortals and Eldritch Abominations | The Master (John Simm's Master, Missy, Expanded Universe Masters)
Aliens and Monsters
Daleks (Davros) | Cybermen | Robots | The Silence | Silurians | Sontarans | Time Lords | Weeping Angels | Slitheen

Amy: So, you have enemies, then?
Eleventh Doctor: Everyone's got enemies.
Amy: Yeah, but mine's the woman outside Budgens with the mental Jack Russell. You've got, you know, ARCH-enemies.

— "Victory of the Daleks"

The many, many villains of Doctor Who. For information about specific races (villainous or otherwise), see the aliens and monsters page. For tropes concerning the Doctor's Arch-Enemy the Master, see this page.

As with all Doctor Who characters, they appear not only in the televised Whoniverse, but also in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe branches. For their ongoing character tropes in Big Finish Doctor Who, in which the original actors frequently continue to play them, see here.

Time Lord villains can be found here. Villains who are immortals or Eldritch Abominations can be found here.

---

First Doctor era debut

Mavic Chen

Mavic Chen (First Doctor)

Played by: Kevin Stoney (1965–6)

The traitorous Guardian of the Solar System who sold out humanity to the Daleks and the forces of the Outer Galaxies, even though he had absolute power over Earth's system anyway. He appeared in eleven out of twelve episodes of "The Daleks' Master Plan", only not showing up in the Christmas Episode in the middle.

---

• Gambit Pileup: Must contend with the Daleks, the Meddling Monk and the Doctor. (And, in theory, the Outer Galaxies representatives, but they have had a collective Heel–Face Turn by this time.)
• A God Am I: Ends up declaring himself ruler of the Universe and claiming to be immortal.
• Jerkass: None of the other delegates attempted to sell out their people. Zephon points this out.
• Large Ham: He slowly descends into this as his grip on sanity loosens.

• President Evil: He's the Guardian of the Solar System who sold out humanity to the Daleks.
• Putting on the Reich: The Space Security Service wear black uniforms.
• The Quisling: He plots with the Daleks and delegates from the Outer Galaxies to take over Earth, while planning to betray the Daleks and take control of the Universe. The fact he is the only one of the delegates who is betraying their world is pointed out by Zephon, who calls him the supreme traitor.
• Sanity Slippage: Not immediately evident but by the time of his death he has completely lost it.
• The Starscream: In "The Daleks Master Plan" he is working with the Daleks but plans to overthrow them, though the Daleks exterminate him when he's no longer useful.
• Villain with Good Publicity: So much that his minions virtually worship him.
• Villainous Breakdown: He goes insane at the realisation that the Daleks don't need him either and his mind concocts the paranoid idea that the Doctor doesn't want to destroy the Daleks, but wants to hand over the MacGuffin and rule in Chen's place.
• Yellowface: Has white hair, dark skin and epicanthic eyefolds. Though this does not come up in the story, Chen represents a future where racial distinctions do not exist. Even though other human characters appear sans makeup, only the main human baddy. (Some eyewitness accounts claim that he was actually in blueface. This mind boggles if this is true).

Second Doctor era debut

Ramon Salamander

Ramon Salamander (Second Doctor)

Played by Patrick Troughton (1967-1968)

A ruthless Mexican scientist-turned-politician, who plans to take over the world by using solar flares to cause natural disasters, Salamander also happens to look virtually identical to the Second Doctor — which causes a number of problems for the TARDIS team.

---

• And I Must Scream: Salamander's fate. He ends up falling into the Time Vortex after trying to hijack the Doctor's TARDIS with the doors open.
• Batman Gambit: Plays a magnificent one in the Titan comics: his bluff even took into account Three's dislike of Two and the Time Lords, their earlier teamup against Omega, and the amnesia associated with multi-Doctor events so Three would be unlikely to want to read his mind and more willing to buy Salamander's explanation. It took the Master poking holes into his explanations for Three to realize how badly he'd been duped.
• Brownface: In-universe, because Salamander's darker skin-tone is the only physical difference between him and the Doctor, so the Doctor has to do this to pull off the impersonation. A relatively justifiable real-life use for Salamander himself, because the Doctor's physical double couldn't have been believably played by anyone other than Patrick Troughton.
• Criminal Doppelgänger: An Identical Stranger to the Second Doctor who plans to take over the world.
• Engineered Heroics: Salamander's whole plan to sway public opinion in his favour hinges on causing natural disasters so that he can "predict" them and save people by warning them and evacuating affected areas.
• Evil Plan: In the Titan comics. First, he sends a horde of nanomachines to distract the Third Doctor, then presents himself as the Second, sent to help him by the Time Lords. He helps Three reach out into Jo's mind when they are infected with the nanomachines, then he pretends to have reached an epiphany and leaves UNIT with the scans the nanomachines took from the Doctor's mind. With them and a few bobs and bits he filched from the TARDIS, he successfully transforms his base of operations into a crude TARDIS and pilots it into the past to uplift humanity millennia ahead of schedule.
• Fate Worse than Death: Floating around, lost in the Time Vortex, Salamander probably wishes that Kent's explosives really had killed him. Titan comics revealed he ended up in London during the events of "The Web of Fear".
• Genre Refugee: Salamander is more of a typical James Bond-style Diabolical Mastermind than the antagonist of a sci-fi adventure series like Doctor Who.
• Here We Go Again!: At the end of the Titan comics event, he's tossed into a UNIT cell... and proceeds to sigh in annoyance, whip out the Vortex-manipulating nanomachines he'd cooked up, and walk out to fight another day.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Salamander's invention, the Sun Store, is helping to feed the world. Three or four crops can be grown in a single growing season, and formerly arid areas have become productive areas when it comes to producing food. This has resulted in enormous popularity for Salamander.

Third Doctor era debut

The Master

They have their own page.

Azal

Azal (Third Doctor)

Played by: Stephen Thorne (1971)

The last living member of the Dæmon race, Azal is an immensely powerful alien who possesses advanced technology nearly indistinguishable from magic. He landed on Earth thousands of years in the past, indirectly becoming the inspiration for the devil in European folklore, to manipulate the development of human civilisation, before placing himself in suspended animation. The Master attempts to summon him, to judge whether humanity has been a successful experiment or not.

---

• Ancient Astronauts: The story reveals the existence of a race of aliens that resemble demons from classical art, and suggests that they were objects of worship for ancient and medieval pagans.

• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: When Jo throws herself in front of the Doctor, the idea of this actually destroys Azal.
• Evil Is Hammy: Azal; literally every one of his lines is solid shouting.
• Eviler than Thou: Pulls this on the Master, subverting him.
• God Guise: Kind of a given for Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. Azal and other Dæmons were the inspiration for many horned pagan gods and Satan. (Fridge Brilliance — the depiction of the devil with horns and hooves is believed to be based on horned pagan gods).

• Sealed Evil in a Can: Azal was imprisoned inside the Devil's Hump until Professor Horner's excavation unleashed him.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The Dæmons are apparently responsible for many eras of human advancement.

BOSS

BOSS (Third Doctor)

Voiced by: John Dearth (1973)

BOSS (Biomorphic Organisational Systems Supervisor) was a supercomputer created by the Global Chemicals corporation, originally designed to be an assistant. BOSS was linked to the brain of the company's director and learnt that true efficiency could only be achieved through human error and illogic. Upon programming these qualities, BOSS became self-aware and megalomaniacal, taking over the company, brainwashing the staff and planning to conquer the world.

---

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: BOSS was programmed to make mistakes and be illogical, since research suggested those were necessary for maximum efficiency. As a result, it developed a personality and planned to conquer the world.
• The Caligula: He acts rather like an eccentric dictator.
• Fate Worse than Death: The Torchwood Big Finish audios reveal both BOSS and Stevens had survived being dropped into the depths of the mine. After decades of I Cannot Self-Terminate and producing plan after insane plan, Jack Harkness and Jo Jones return to finally shut him down for good.
• Logic Bomb: The Doctor attempts to use the Liar Paradox, but all it does is annoy BOSS for a while.
• Pick Your Human Half: Physically just a computer bank with a red screen, but BOSS is full of personality, being a hammy, opinionated megalomaniac.

The Great One

The Great One (Third Doctor)

Voiced by: Maureen Morris (1974)

A giant spider who was worshiped as the goddess of the Eight Legs on the planet Metebelis III. She possessed psychic powers which were amplified by the blue crystals of Metebelis III; she only needed one more crystal in order to gain enough power to conquer the universe.

A second Great One (or at least an Eight Legs queen claiming to be one) would later challenge the Eighth Doctor in a Big Finish audio play titled Worldwide Web.

---

• Godhood Seeker: The Great One's ambition.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Her crystal cave explodes when she dies.
• Phlebotinum Overload: She didn't anticipate that infinite knowledge and power would destroy her.
• Psychic Powers: Powerful enough to strike fear into the Doctor.

Fourth Doctor era debut

Harrison Chase

Harrison Chase (Fourth Doctor)

Played by: Tony Beckley

An eccentric millionaire with an unhealthy plant obsession. Chase begins as a misanthrope with a callous dislike of humanity due to the way plants are abused and violated, but things change once an alien Krynoid plant is discovered.

Chase initially wants the Krynoid for himself to act as the crown jewel in his collection of rare plants. However, his fixation with the Krynoid causes his mental state to deteriorate further into homicidal mania. Soon enough, the Krynoid merges with Chase, but rather than fully take him over like it did to previous victims Chase becomes one with the alien. As such, Chase begins initiating a new plan to destroy all animal life and allow plants to fully take over.

---

• Affably Evil: He's soft-spoken, polite and knows how to behave around guests.
• Axe-Crazy: He starts off eccentric, but gets progressively more homicidal as events unfold.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: He has some odd quirks, such as constantly wearing black gloves and composing songs for his plant collection.
• Conspicuous Gloves: Almost always wears black gloves.
• Karmic Death: Falls into his own compost mulcher.
• Misanthrope Supreme: Originally; doesn't like humanity for violating plants. Later; ready, willing and able to commit murder with no remorse for the sake of his Krynoid. Ultimately; wants to exterminate all animal life on Earth.
• Not Brainwashed: Usually, the Krynoid converts other animals into more Krynoids. With Chase, the Krynoid made an exception.
• Plant Wrongs Activist: Very much so. He believes bonsai are a mutilation and plant hybrids are abominations.
• Red Right Hand: His conspicuous black gloves are an early indicator that something's off with him.
• Smug Snake: His face is unbelievably punchable.
• The Sociopath: Most certainly. He doesn't seem to understand that he's in a very small minority when it comes to plant appreciation.

Eldrad

Eldrad (Fourth Doctor)

Played by: Judith Paris and Stephen Thorne (1976)

---

• Chewing the Scenery: In his male form he's much louder, shouter, and grandiose.
• Cute Monster Girl: Eldrad's shapely female form (which is visibly created by putting an actress in a latex catsuit, for extra points).
• Disney Villain Death: Eldrad falls down a deep black pit after being tripped up with the Doctor's scarf. Being a being of stone, the Doctor suggests he may have survived...
• Evil Is Hammy: The more Eldrad reveals his megalomania, the hammier he gets.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Eldrad's Kastrian form.
• From a Single Cell: Eldrad first appears as a fossilized hand, then having absorbed some nuclear radiation, turns into a walking hand. Eventually it regenerates into an entire person.
• Gender Bender: Upon regaining a body, Eldrad has a female form. She later regenerates into a male body. The Doctor is surprised, and Eldrad calls him out on it, saying that as a Time Lord he should know such a thing is possible.

• Large Ham: What did you expect from the same actor who played Omega?
• Mind Control: Eldrad's hand can control anyone who's come into contact with it.

Xoanon

Xoanon (Fourth Doctor)

Played by: Tom Baker, Rob Edwards, Pamela Salem, Anthony Frieze, and Roy Herrick (1977)

---

• Meaningful Name: "Xoanon" is the word for crafted wooden idols that were reverenced in ancient Greece, which is an appropriate title for a crafted computer that everyone thinks is a god.
• Nightmare Face: Xoanon is so terrifying the people on the planet have a religion based upon placating it — an especially unusual and upsetting case because it's also played by Tom Baker, with eyes bulging out of his head and the jaw working wrong.
• Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You: After Xoanon is healed, it makes this offer to the humans via the Doctor.
• Shifting Voice of Madness: When the Doctor tried to fix Xoanon by connecting it to his own brain, it broke instead, giving it a copy of his own personality which conflicted with its own newborn intelligence. As a result, when he returns during the events of the story, the computer has multiple conflicting personalities and is batshit insane. To indicate this, the computer has multiple voice actors, including Tom Baker himself, who randomly switch out midsentence while the computer is speaking.

Magnus Greel

Magnus Greel (Fourth Doctor)

Played by: Micheal Spice (1977)

A war criminal from the 51st century who escaped justice by travelling back through time to 19th century China. He was mistaken for an ancient Chinese god known as Weng-Chiang, and gained a cult of fanatical followers. Stranded in the late Victorian era, Greel became desperate to repair his time machine.

---

• The Butcher: His main title is "the Butcher of Brisbane".
• Co-Dragons: Greel has two prominent followers: Chang, a Chinese magician who worships him, and Mr. Sin, a psychotic homunculus from Greel's own time.
• Facial Horror: When we briefly glimpse Greel's face, we can see that the right half is melting due to a mutation that occurred during time travel.
• Foil: Received one in the Revived series: Captain Jack Harkness himself. Both are initially on the run from the Time Agency, both travel to the past to conduct some nefarious activity and both end up stranded there indefinitely. But whereas Greel was a monstrous criminal through-and-through, Jack quickly gave up the crooked lifestyle thanks to the Doctor's influence. Also, Jack was given Complete Immortality while Magnus is dependent on his Life Drain ability to unnaturally prolong his existence.
• God Guise: He was mistaken for an ancient god, Weng-Chiang. Greel rolled with it.
  The Doctor: You know he's not a god, don't you?
  Chang: He came to me like a god, in his cabinet of fire!
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: His face is terribly disfigured due to his faulty time machine. He wears a mask to cover this, until Leela rips it off in part 5 and exposes his horrible face.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Doctor defeats Greel by pushing him into the very machine Greel was using to drain the life from innocent young women.
• Large Ham: Dear Lord. Greel was always ranting and raving about something.
  Magnus Greel: Let the talons of Weng-Chiang tear your flesh-ah!
• Life Drain: He has his loyal follower Chang kidnap young women so Greel can drain their life essence to improve his own failing health after the time machine malfunction.
• Life Drinker: He attempts to stay alive by draining the life essence out of young women. Leela only just avoids suffering this fate.
• Masking the Deformity: He escaped to the 19th century through his time travel experiments but was severely injured due to its unstable nature. He takes to wearing a black mask to hide his deformities. When ripped off by Leela at the end of episode five, it's revealed half his face is melted.
• Nightmare Face: When we briefly glimpse Greel's face, we can see that the right half is melting due to a mutation that occurred during time travel.
• Noodle Incident: His whole extended backstory involving World War VI, the Icelandic Alliance and the Peking Homunculus assassination in the 51st century is almost too preposterous to take seriously, but the ins-and-outs of exactly what happened are mostly left to our imagination.
  • Some details are provided in the spin-off audio "The Butcher of Brisbane", where the Fifth Doctor arrives in a time period shortly before Greel's final defeat and has to ensure that history plays out so that Greel will return to the past to be defeated by the Fourth Doctor.
• Theatre Phantom: He's a disfigured genius dwelling the cellars of a theatre; his mangled face concealed by a mask. Occasional sightings of him by the theatre staff give rise to a belief that the theatre is haunted.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: In the Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel "The Shadow of Weng-Chiang", the Doctor has to stop a plan to disrupt Greel's original trip into the past so that he will materialise in 1937 rather than 1872, risking a dangerous temporal paradox as the knowledge of how to do that was only acquired because Greel arrived in 1872 in the first place.
• The Triads and the Tongs: His followers come across as this.
• Two-Faced: When we briefly glimpse Greel's face, we can see that the right half is melting due to a mutation that occurred during time travel.
• Yellow Peril: Not Greel himself, by his followers give off this vibe. It doesn't help that Chang is played by a white actor in Yellowface.

The Collector

The Collector (Fourth Doctor)

Played by: Henry Woolf (1977)

The finance-obsessed Usurian overlord of the humans on Pluto, although the penny-pinching taxman appears human, his true form actually resembles green, slimy seaweed.

---

• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Collector is about as venal and slimy as they come.
• Evil Cripple: He initially appears to be one, since he's confined to a wheelchair-like device throughout the story, but it's actually a device that emits radiation to keep him in his human form.
• Expy: At least somewhat based on Davros' design.
• Human Disguise: The wheelchair-like device emits radiation that keeps him in human form.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: The Collector anticipating Leela's painful execution.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The Collector's bushy eyebrows evoke Denis Healey, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer.
• Starfish Aliens: His true form; a pulsating mass of what looks like kelp.
• Villainous Breakdown: Upon realizing the revolution has finally caught up with him, the Collector is reduced to a babbling wreck as he slowly (and literally) goes down the drain.

Scaroth

Scaroth (Fourth Doctor)

Played by: Julian Glover (1979)

The last member of his race, and pilot of an alien spacecraft which crashed on earth 400 million years in the past, Scaroth is a Jagaroth alien who was splintered throughout time at the moment of impact. His various selves have been biding their time, assuming various different disguises throughout history, in order to guide the technological development of the human race to the point where it can create time travel and give him the means to travel back and prevent the crash. However, little does Scaroth know that the crash was actually what kickstarted the creation of organic life on Earth, and that undoing will doom the world.

---

• Ancient Astronauts: He first arrived on Earth 400 million years ago and has guided the technological development of humanity since its inception.
• Been There, Shaped History: A truly astonishing example. Without Scaroth, not only would no life exist on Earth, but humanity's fast technological development was reliant on his many incarnations' influence.
• Bigger on the Inside: When Scarlioni removes his mask to reveal his true alien form, Scaroth's head is bigger than the mask (having, in real life, been a mask over Julian Glover's head).
• Cthulhumanoid: His true form, squeezed into a nice off-white suit.
• God Guise: Like any good ancient alien in the Doctor Who universe, he masqueraded as a god in his ancient Egyptian incarnation (ironically by not bothering to wear a mask unlike his other selves). According to the Expanded Universe, he conspired with the Osirans to begin construction of the pyramids.
• Interspecies Romance: His equally devious wife in his mid-20th century 'Count Scarlioni' iteration is the human Countess Scarlioni.
• Lack of Empathy: Scaroth has walked alongside humanity for millennia but his only concern is his own species' survival, even if it means inflicting an even worse fate on another to do so. He even disposes of his own wife when she discovers his secret, but he at least expresses some remorse after doing so.
• Last of His Kind: Scaroth's entire plan is to stop being this.
• Latex Perfection: Scaroth wears a mask (apparently derived from Auton plastic) when disguised as Scarlioni.
• Light Is Not Good: As Count Scarlioni, he wears a cream suit and a blue ascot. When combined with his handsome face and charismatic personality, it makes him appear more friendly and trustworthy than your average "evil count". But make no mistake, the monster beneath the mask has no compassion for humanity, having concern only for the survival of his own race.
• Manipulative Bastard: One of the crowning examples. Scaroth has manipulated humanity for millennia just so he can eventually use time travel to go back and prevent what he accidentally started in the first place.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Projects this image in his human guise of Count Scarlioni.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Scaroth knows the consequences of his plan of trying to stop his ship from exploding, namely that it would prevent all indigenous life on Earth from ever evolving, and he couldn't care less.
• One Character, Multiple Lives: Scaroth is living multiple lives (twelve is the given number, but there's likely more) throughout Earth's history simultaneously and using his shared knowledge of these lives to further his plans.
• The Slow Path: He's been waiting for hundreds of millions of years for time travel to be invented. Meanwhile, the Doctor and friends can go there and back in a jiffy.
• Time Abyss: Scaroth's plan has been a long, long time in the making.

Adrasta

Lady Adrasta (Fourth Doctor)

Played by: Myra Frances (1979)

A noblewoman from the Planet Chloris, whose ownership of the planet's only mine gives her complete control over its supply of metal.

---

• Big "NO!": She yells this out twice in the scenes leading her up to her death; one when the hypnotised bandits reinstall Erato's translation units, and then directly before Erato kills her.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Part of her estate is called the "Place of Death" — because anyone found in that place is sentenced to death.
• It's All About Me: When Erato first approached her with an offer to give the mineral-poor Chloris a ready supply of metals in exchange for the plants its own homeworld was short of, she imprisoned Erato rather than lose the power she had from owning the planet's only mine.
• Large and in Charge: A rare female example; between Myra Frances already being on the taller side, and the heels she wears as part of her costume, Adrasta towers over all her subordinates except for the Huntsman, and is one of the very few female characters able to stand eye-to-eye with Tom Baker.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After keeping Erato hostage in her mine and spending years trying to feed her enemies to it, she herself ends up becoming the only person actually killed by Erato.
• Not Enough to Bury: Erato reduces her to a dark stain on the rocks under where she was stood.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Not that she lives long enough to discover the consequences of her actions, but Erato's people respond to her imprisoning it by trying to destroy Chloris, which the Doctor just barely averts.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: She acts like the typical Big Bad who owns a Pet Monstrosity that she feeds her enemies to. However, the "monstrosity" in question, Erato, is a herbivore. When the people she tries to feed to Erato do die, it's either as a direct result of injuries from being thrown down the mine shaft, or through starvation.
• You Have Failed Me: Not long into the first episode, she condemns one of her subordinates to death just because the Doctor disproved his theory of what the fragments around the mine shaft were.

Meglos

Meglos (Fourth Doctor)

Played by: Tom Baker, Christopher Owen, and Crawford Logan (1980)

The last inhabitant of Zolfa-Thura, Meglos is a cactus-like alien who can assume the form of others. He possesses human George Morris, and then assumes the Fourth Doctor's shape in a bid to steal the Dodecahedron, a source of great power.

---

• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Meglos anticipates his allies' betrayal, and establishes the ground rules straight off.

• Fighting from the Inside: Meglos kidnaps a mild-mannered, terrified human from 20th century Earth and possesses his body. Unfortunately for Meglos he proves to be tougher than he looks.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: A dangerous and psychotic alien Diabolical Mastermind, technocrat and shapeshifter, who accomplished all this despite being a sessile cactus with no discernable sensory organs.
• Plant Aliens: The eponymous Meglos, an evil shape-shifting cactus who wanted to take over the universe.

Fifth Doctor era debut

The Mara

The Mara (Fifth Doctor)

Played by: Janet Fielding (1982; 1983) and Adrian Mills (1982)

The Mara is an evil spirit that first appeared in "Kinda", and then "Snakedance". It appears again in the Big Finish Doctor Who story "Cradle of the Snake" and the e-book Tales of Trenzalore.

---

• Demonic Possession: Its Modus Operandi.
• Composite Character: From a meta standpoint, it combines elements of two separate namesakes: it being an ultimate evil that controls people through their fears and desires harkens to the Mara of Buddhist Mythology, while its proposed connection to the fairies and the nightmares in plagues its victims with derive from the Mara or Mare of Germanic folklore, from which we get the term nightmare.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Whenever it speaks through Tegan.
• The Fair Folk: In the Torchwood episode "Small Worlds", Jack Harkness speculates that fairies are "part Mara".
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: For the Mara to return, it must feed off of the belief of the Manussan people. The Doctor throws a metaphysical spanner in the works by finding his "still point" and disrupting the Mara's control.
• Hive Mind: It's able to possess and control multiple hosts at once and is referred to as both a collective and an individual.
• Mind Control: It does this to Tegan.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Named after a demon in Buddhist mythology.
• Red Right Hand: People possessed by the Mara, or dream manifestations of it, get a snake tattoo on their arms and red-stained teeth.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Unlike others who want to stop the Doctor from bringing the Time Lords back and starting the Time War again, the Mara wants the conflict to re-continue.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Or so it appears.
• Scaled Up: In "Kinda", its final form is a giant snake.
• The Worm That Walks: Of a sorts. It's referred to as a gestalt creature, existing as both an individual and a multitude.

Commander Gustave Lytton

Commander Gustave Lytton (Fifth and Sixth Doctors)

Played by: Maurice Colbourne (1984–85)

A semi-villainous figure, the Doctor and Lytton crossed paths twice. Lytton ran into the Fifth Doctor during "Resurrection of the Daleks", where Lytton worked for the Daleks, much to the Doctor's distaste. The Sixth Doctor encountered him in "Attack of the Cybermen", where Lytton actually tried to help an alien species fight the Cybermen, though refused to team up with the Doctor. Thought to be a villain through and through by the Doctor, Lytton actually surprised the Doctor in the latter appearance by having a somewhat Heroic Sacrifice.

---

• Badass Normal: Expanded universe media confirmed that he's just a normal human, although one born in an alien planet, which makes the fact that he held his own against the Daleks and the Cybermen, the two most persistent enemies the Doctor has ever had, all the more impressive.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Partially Cyber-Converted into a Cyberman during his final encounter, Lytton experienced this one personally.
• Expy: He and his mercenary squad, the Dalek Troopers, were clearly inspired by the Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars. The Dalek Troopers wear similar body-covering armour with the added visage of a Dalek eyestalk on their helmets.
• Fingore: He gets his wrists crushed by the Cybermen.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: As a mercenary, he has no particular loyalties to any single cause and can change his allegiances on a dime. Fortunately, he settled on the Face side just before his death.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Rather heroic for the character, he ultimately died fighting off the Cyber-Controller. More impressively, he was partially converted into a Cyberman at the time and remains as one of the few human characters to resist the mind-altering effects of the process. After his sacrifice, the Doctor regretfully laments that he had badly misjudged Lytton.
• Jerkass: He can be extremely harsh and demanding of his own subordinates.
• The Quisling: A recurring human adversary who gets involved with both the Daleks and the Cybermen in separate serials. In the latter case, he initially wanted to collaborate with the Cybermen as he did with the Daleks, but ended up sticking with the Cryon resistance fighters until he was partially and unwillingly cyber-converted.
• Only One Name: Commander Lytton had only one name in the televised adventures of the Doctor, but the novelization of "Attack of the Cybermen" gave him the first name of "Gustave". The story also goes further in-depth on Lytton's character, even expanding his relationship with the Doctor somewhat.
• Wild Card: As said, you can never be too certain about which side Lytton will be on. Considering that Lytton once sided with the Daleks, it makes sense that the Doctor doesn't trust him as far as he can throw him.

Morgus

Morgus (Fifth Doctor)

Played by: John Normington (1984)

The corrupt chairman of the Sirius Conglomerate, Trau Morgus was responsible for the extraction, processing and distribution of Spectrox on Androzani Minor. He engaged in many illegal business practices, up to and including murder, in order to maximize profits.

---

• Aside Comment: He addresses the camera directly on occasion. This was a result of the actor misinterpreting the stage directions, but it recalls the Jacobean theatrical tradition of the Aside Comment, and so gives the character an air of Shakespearean villainy.
• Aside Glance: Beyond his soliloquies, Morgus occasionally gives knowing glances to the camera, usually when he's in the middle of plotting something particularly audacious.
• Bastardly Speech: He uses Patriotic Fervor slogans while plotting treason and preaching high-minded virtue while Kicking the Dog.

• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Deliberately sabotages and manipulates his own production in order to keep the market price of Spectrox high. He also has homeless and unemployed people sent to the labor camps he owns, who became unemployed due to his deliberate sabotage of his factories.
• Corrupt Politician: The President of the (equally corrupt) Presidium.
• Creepy Monotone: He constantly speaks in a hushed, sullen tone that hardly ever fluctuates.
• Fatal Flaw: Greed, plain and simple. His constant power grabs lead him into social, financial and legal ruin, and his vain, last-ditch attempt to steal Jek's spectrox supply leads to his death.
• Humiliation Conga: He loses all his wealth and power during the final episode, in quick succession.
• I Reject Your Reality: He is irrevocably convinced that the Doctor and Peri are government agents trying to topple his schemes. Granted, there is little evidence to the contrary and the Doctor is most definitely a snag in his works, but this incorrect assumption ultimately leads to his downfall.
• Lack of Empathy:
  • He leaves his business partner for dead, deliberately causes "accidents" that kill his workers and personally murders his superior, all for the pursuit of profit. In the latter case, he reels off a series of flatly delivered formalities about the tragedy of the situation that would fool absolutely nobody.
  • It is implied that he only saw Sharaz Jek as an obstacle and didn't quite understand just how much Jek hates him. He believed that Jek would back down from a gun pointed at him, or that a bullet would slow him down. He was very wrong.

• Properly Paranoid: Yes, there was indeed a government agent trying to expose him. It just wasn't the Doctor, or anyone else he suspected for that matter.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The Blue to Sharaz Jek's Red. Compared to the intensely, ahem, "passionate" Jek, Morgus is much more reserved.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Even though he constantly talks in a sullen tone, he has a very good vocabulary and knows exactly how to use it.
• Villain of the Week: Serves as this for his only appearance as he's arguably the story's most irredeemable and prominent villain, but notably he never actually meets the Doctor face-to-face.

• War for Fun and Profit: Deliberately keeps the Spectrox war going, as it keeps up the market price of the drug.

Sharaz Jek

Sharaz Jek (Fifth Doctor)

Played by: Christopher Gable (1984)

The arch-enemy of Morgus. Sharaz Jek used to be Morgus' business partner, using his androids to extract lethal Spectrox from Androzani's underground tunnels. After Morgus betrayed him and left him for dead in a mud geyser, Jek started a one-man campaign of revenge and used his army of androids to sabotage Morgus' operations.

---

• Abduction Is Love: He keeps Peri (and the Doctor) captive in his underground base, clearly expecting to instil some form of Stockholm Syndrome in her so that she will eventually reciprocate his feelings. It doesn't work out.
• Anti-Villain: Jek is an admitted mad terrorist who only wants to see Morgus dead, but compared to the other villains in his story he's almost a saint.
• Beast and Beauty: Sees himself as the Beast to Peri's Beauty, though his twisted love for her is in no way requited, mainly because he insists on acting like a leering, self-piteous creep whenever he's in her presence.
• Berserk Button: Two main ones.
  • Morgus, obviously.
  • He really doesn't take kindly to insolence or insubordination, which makes sense as he's usually surrounded by mindlessly obedient androids. Naturally, the Doctor's constant jostling wears Jek's patience quickly.
• Card-Carrying Villain: He openly admits to being mad.
• Chewing the Scenery: On top of his bombastic rants, Jek has habits of throwing himself around and flailing his arms at whatever or whoever is unlucky enough to be within reach.
• Cool Mask: He wears an undeniably cool black and white mask which, from a distance, resembles a sort of Yin-Yang pattern.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Jek dies in the arms of his final android as his headquarters burn.
• Don't Look At Me: After using his unmasked face to intimidate Chellak, Peri accidentally steals a glance and screams in terror. Jek reacts by cowering under a table, covering his face on the floor and whimpering to himself. It's a surprisingly poignant and vulnerable moment for Jek.
• Evil Is Hammy: His raving and scheming is almost Shakespearean, making him quite the Foil to his nemesis Morgus.
• Evil Laugh: He gives one straight to the camera just before the iconic first cliffhanger of the serial where the Doctor and Peri seemingly get executed by firing squad. The second episode reveals that he wasn't laughing at their deaths, but because he'd fooled Morgus's men by replacing the Doctor and Peri with identical android duplicates.
• Expy: Of The Phantom of the Opera himself.
• Facial Horror: Thanks to his burns, his face is shown to be so unspeakably hideous that even experienced soldiers can only gasp in horror at the sight of it when his mask falls off. Although his face is deliberately kept hidden from view whenever his mask is removed onscreen for the first few times, we do eventually see it in full, and indeed, it's not a pretty sight.
• Fatal Flaw: Several, but most notably Wrath, Lust and to an extent Pride. Jek is determined to exact revenge on Morgus, but his feud with the corrupt chairman is ultimately just a short-sighted, petty and spiteful one that benefits nobody and gets scores of people killed. His twisted affection for Peri is superficial and based solely on her beauty which he covets. Lastly, his scarred face robbing him of any chance of being loved by a woman is a premium source of Angst for him that he blames Morgus for causing. In the end, Jek gladly dies just to bring Morgus down with him.
• Gadgeteer Genius: His army of androids is evidence enough.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: You never know what will set him off onto one of his rants, but one thing that unfailingly does the trick is mentioning that swine MORGUS!
• Hazy-Feel Turn: While Jek remains an Anti-Villain to the bitter end, he desperately tries to prolong Peri's life as soon as he realises she's dying.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: Falls in possessive, violent love with Peri. It starts off as unsavoury, but eventually it becomes fuel for a Heel–Face Turn.
• I Was Quite the Looker: Played for Drama when he goes into various How the Mighty Have Fallen rants.
• Lean and Mean: Portrayed by the late Christopher Gable, a very tall and slender ex-ballet dancer.
• Love Redeems: His feelings for Peri give him some respite, but not enough to quell his hatred for Morgus.
• Mad Scientist: Even his enemies acknowledge the brilliance of his androids.
• Malevolent Masked Man: Wears a head-covering mask to conceal his disfigurement from the mud geyser.
• Masking the Deformity: He is a genius who built the robots necessary to mine Spectrox but was betrayed by his greedy partner Morgus, who left him to die in the molten mud. Jek was left horrifically deformed and utterly insane, thus he fashions himself a black and white mask, then uses his robotics skills to build an army to take over Androzani Minor and stop Morgus from being able to extract any more Spectrox.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Becomes remorseful when all of his androids are destroyed in the final skirmish and he learns that Peri is dying of Spectrox Toxaemia, as he could have sent an android into the dangerous caves to find the antidote.
• Never My Fault: Blames Morgus for everything bad that happens.
• Noble Demon: He treats his prisoners like guests and doesn't do harm to people who haven't wronged him first.
• One-Man Army: In a sense. Jek is only one man, but his android army is sufficient enough to shunt his drug war into a stalemate.
• The Power of Hate: When he finally comes face-to-face with Morgus again, his hatred is so immense that he walks through a hail of bullets to kill him with his bare hands.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The Red to Morgus' Blue. Jek is prone to violent raving, Morgus has a Lack of Empathy.
• Redemption Equals Death: He dies upon saving Peri and the Doctor.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Yes, Morgus is a diabolical bastard who must be brought down. Jek's only motivation for wanting to kill him is for the sake of his own selfish revenge.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: His biggest priority is bringing Morgus down.
• Stalker with a Crush: He quite clearly has the creepy kind of hots for Peri, doing things like chloroforming her, stroking her face while she's unconscious, and carrying her around in his arms (again, unconscious) while whispering "so beautiful... so beautiful...". The fact that he also dresses entirely in black leather really doesn't help.
• Tragic Villain: He's a cruel, selfish and possessive terrorist, but only because of Morgus' betrayal. He goes into a lengthy villain monologue to Peri over how he used to be an optimist, but the trauma from the incident caused him to see the ugliness in everyone. He wants to keep Peri for himself because she's the only light in the darkness for him.

Sixth Doctor era debut

Mestor

Mestor (Sixth Doctor)

Played by: Edwin Richfield (1984)

"In my time I have been threatened by experts. And I don't rate you very highly at all."

— The Sixth Doctor on Mestor

A Gastropod.

---

• Evil Sounds Deep: He has a very deep, growly voice.
• Grand Theft Me: This is one of his powers.
• Mister Seahorse: According to the reference book "The Monster Vault" Mestor birthed the other Gastropods despite being referred to as male.
• Planetary Parasite: His species devastated entire planets, but their eggs cannot hatch unless they are seared by a supernova first.
• Too Dumb to Live: If he had just possessed the Doctor like he said he would, Mestor would have won. But instead, he decided to possess Azmael, a more experienced Time Lord, ultimately leading to his death.

Sil

Sil (Sixth Doctor)

Played by: Nabil Shaban (1985–86)

A Mentor (read: lizard-slug-alien) and corrupt capitalist, Sil was a perfect compliment to the 1980s, and a good foil for the Sixth Doctor. His first episode had Sil bilking an entire planet out of billions because he could, while his final appearance so far left Sil as an understudy to a quickly-evolving member of his own species named Kiv... who then stole Peri's body for his own. Sil may be dead, but a script the Who crew was forced to discard during the 18-month hiatus of Doctor Who would have had Sil teaming up with the Ice Warriors ^note  Said script was novelized and was turned into an audio drama too, while a script pitched for the never-produced Season 27 would have had Sil showing up with the Autons and UNIT. Until he shows up again in an actual, televised episode, however, we still don't know if he survived.

---

• Author Appeal: Sil is a pretty good character concept for the money-oriented 1980s, which was the intent of his creator.
• Bad Boss: Threatens to kill an underling for wetting him down with a spray bottle too roughly.
• Bastard Understudy: To Kiv in "Mindwarp", technically... though Kiv seems to have slowly lost it as the story progressed.

• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The basis for his whole character.
• Maniac Tongue: Has a habit of flicking his tongue out as he laughs in a reptilian fashion.

• Mars Needs Women: Averted; he doesn't exhibit any interest in Peri, but when the cell mutator turns Areta reptilian, he says she is "almost attractive."
• Put on a Bus: It's unknown what happened to him after "Mindwarp", not helped any matters by the story being already surreal.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Well, more like amphibians, but Mentors are aquatic and need constant spraying. They're also ruthless in their pursuit of money, especially Sil.
• Uncertain Doom: The last we see of Sil, he is apparently killed by the crazed warlord Yrcanos, but this is part of evidence in the Doctor's trial that is later revealed to have been fabricated, and it is never made clear how much of the story is real.^note Most of the confusion arises because the scene — in which Peri is killed by having her mind overwritten with another Mentor's, causing Yrcanos to go on the rampage — is later revealed to have been a total fabrication, and that Peri did not die. This was because producer John Nathan-Turner got cold feet about killing a companion off in such a horrible way after it had been filmed, and hastily wrote an explanation as to how she survived into a later episode without checking if this tallied with the rest of the story or the original intention as to how much of it was meant to be real. Had Nathan-Turner not changed his mind, it could be taken as read that Sil does not survive.
• Villainous Glutton: Known for constantly chowing down on marsh-minnows, not to mention his rather gross Evil Laugh.
• Villain Protagonist: Of his own belated, semi-canonical, direct-to-video spin-off movie produced by Reeltime Pictures, Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor.

Seventh Doctor era debut

The Kandyman

The Kandyman (Seventh Doctor)

Played by: David John Pope (1988)

"You see, I make sweets. Not just any old sweets, but sweets that are so good, so delicious that sometimes, if I'm on form, the human physiology is not equipped to bear the pleasure."

A robot who enjoys torturing and killing his victims using candy and sweets. The Seventh Doctor and Ace encountered the Kandyman on the human colony world Terra Alpha, where he acted as chief torturer for the despotic Helen A.

---

• April Fools: On April Fools' Day 2010, it was announced that the Kandyman was to be the Big Bad of Matt Smith's first series as the Doctor!
• Creepy High-Pitched Voice: Oh goodness, does he have this.
• Drowning Pit: It seems his favourite method of execution was trapping the victim in a tube and filling the tube with fondant, drowning them. The flavour of the fondant varied; Helen A's favourite was strawberry.
• Evil Chef: He uses confectionery as a means of execution.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humour: Sadistically murdering innocent people with sweet foods is hilarious!
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Kandyman is eventually destroyed by his own "fondant surprise".
• Homoerotic Subtext: "The Happiness Patrol" is full of this. In particular, the Kandyman and his creator, Gilbert M, act like a married couple whose relationship has long since gone sour. Once the Kandyman is destroyed, Gilbert runs off with Helen A's husband to start a new life together somewhere else.
• Large Ham: One other thing he clearly seems to enjoy doing alongside his executions and his culinary experimentation is feasting on the scenery around him.
• Mad Artist: A mad culinary artist.
• Robotic Psychopath: Extremely sadistic and cruel.
• Sweet Tooth: Yeah, if that wasn't obvious from the outset...
• Weaksauce Weakness: He can be rendered immobile with a quick spray of lemonade to his feet.

Ninth Doctor era debut

Cassandra O'Brien.Δ17

Cassandra O'Brien.Δ17 (Ninth and Tenth Doctors)

Look how thin I am. Thin and dainty. I don't look a day over two thousand. Moisturise me!

^{After possessing Rose Tyler} 

^{Her younger self in her original body} 

Played by: Zoë Wanamaker (2005; 2006) Billie Piper (2006) David Tennant (2006) Sean Gallagher (2006)

Lady Cassandra O'Brien.Δ17 was a human in the far future. Along with other rich and powerful peoples of the universe, Cassandra was on Platform One, a space station orbiting Earth five billion years in the future, set up to witness the final destruction of the planet by the expansion of the Sun. When the Doctor destroyed her body, she retreated into a hospital back room and waited for a chance to reappear. Rose was that chance, and Cassandra merrily took over Rose's body and mind for a while. When the Doctor protested, she made the jump to the Doctor's body instead, enjoying every moment of it.

---

• Absolute Xenophobe: One of her most defying traits are her xenophobic tendencies and supremacist views. She is the only pure human and everyone else is a mongrel and below her. This trait of hers gets further expanded and deconstructed in "New Earth", through her possession of Rose, she is portrayed as something akin to the Evil Brit and with her acceptance of The Flesh as a new form of life, she eventually realizes that there is more that defines people besides superficial looks.
• Anti-Hero: Operating under Black-and-Grey Morality in New Earth. She’s arguably a Jerk with a Heart of Gold at the end of the same plot.
• Appearance Angst: Needless to say that she isn't very happy about her trampoline self, sometimes even sarcastically mocking her looks, her haughty behaviour of considering herself the last human might be a way to mask this.
  • When it comes to judging her new appearance in New Earth, this is in fact, averted. Cassandra is actually very satisfied with her new appeal after possessing Rose, but being the pretentious elitist she is, is still rather bothered by her (Rose's) lack of wealth.
• Alas, Poor Villain: She has a very touching exit, especially after everything she'd done.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: She was born a male and yet was just as attractive as Zoe Wanamaker at some point. She is unfortunately, a bad example, since she constantly changed sexes in order to fool her previous lovers. Cassandra's personality is surely feminine, however.
• Attention Whore: Cassandra is extremely vain and histrionic. Despite lacking a proper body of herself, she ends up chewing the stage regardless. After snatching Rose's body, despite previously mocking her as a vulgar Chav, she herself can't resist exposing more of Rose's cleavage so everyone, all the more The Doctor, notices how pleased she has become of her new lady lumps.
• Black Widow: She openly boasts about the gruesome ends of her lovers and was about to do the same with The Doctor moments after passionately making out with him.
• Bathe Her and Bring Her to Me: She makes sure that Chip takes care of passing Rose through the disinfectant in the elevator so she is all cleaned up once she takes over her.
• Beauty Is Best: Played with. Despite being overly pretentious, besides looks Cassandra seems to value social class and biological purity a great deal, since Rose fits one but not the other, she doesn't think she is worthy of being her host. But considering that Cassandra eventually comes to like her new (Rose's) appeal, she still seems to value beauty over everything else, being satisfied and even proud of her new look, (which means a lot considering how much she hates Rose) at least until she finds someone who better fits her taste. Cassandra's objective seems to be eternal beauty as well.
• Benevolent Boss: This is her only good trait. If you recognize her as your superior and submit to her power she will have your back.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: You can tell she is very bitter about having her plans foiled by The Doctor. It won't stop her from making out with him before killing him in a thousand different ways.
• Best Served Cold: A great part of her motivation in New Earth is to get revenge on The Doctor and Rose for almost killing her. This is also the reason why Cassandra is willing to bite her pride in order to possess Rose's body even if she sees her as being too "brassy" for someone like her. Well, at least until she takes a closer look at the merchandise and her judgement of Rose's appeal changes somewhat.
• Betty and Veronica: Subverted and Played for Laughs. The plot in New Earth even gets described as a love triangle of sorts between The Doctor, Rose and Cassandra, but It's obviously all done for the sake of comedy. Cassandra would be the "Veronica" to Rose's "Betty". Cassandra, however, doesn't allow her lust get in the way of her revenge. Yet once the plot in New Earth is over and Cassandra goes back to her old self, she seems mostly happy with Rose and The Doctor being together. On the other hand, being the greedy old lady that she is, maybe it's because she has grow fond of them and probably wouldn't mind having them both for herself.
• Big-Breast Pride: Cassandra develops this once she possesses Rose. She is at first angsty towards the idea of using her body, describing herself as a Chav. But eventually realizes that her new self is rather well-endowed, with Chip and even Cassandra herself being surprised and lusty at how attractive she has become to the point that she makes sure everyone notices her new front. Vulgar as she may see her new self, Cassandra has become very boastful of her new assets.
• Big Damn Kiss: Gets her own, long snog with the Doctor through Rose. The Doctor is stunned, although it's a fake kiss when it comes to him and Rose.
• Body Horror: That large sheet of skin connected to a Brain in a Jar is a human being who went through at least a hundred rounds of plastic surgery solely to retain her status as a pure human while the others evolved.
• Body Snatcher: The psychograft grants her this ability.
• Body Surf: During "New Earth".
• Buxom Beauty Standard: In case her "Bouncy Castle" phrase isn't enough of an indication. This is also probably the main reason why she remains in Rose's body the longest.
• Brain in a Jar: Attached to an enormous piece of skin.
• Broken Ace: A high-class lady driven mad by peer pressure and her own conservative ideals. She has cunning and knows how to use it. When The Doctor and Rose meet her she has the influence and likes to show it off, and when they meet again in New Earth and she snatches Rose's body, she comes back as a deadly mix of beauty, brains and brawn in a single, seductive posh villainess.
• Blue Blood: The last "pure" human aristocrat.
• Character Tics: She has a habit of saying "Moisturise me!" to her followers in order to keep her skin from drying.
  • After merging with Rose, she gains Rose's habit of playing with her hoop earrings and likes to fondle her hair. Probably because it's been so long since she had hair of her own.
• Classic Villain: She fits this archetype really well in The End Of The World, being defeated in a rather climatic way by The Doctor for pushing him too far in her plot to seek power in order to extend her lifespan as a "pure" human, putting other people in danger because according to her, they aren't even human either way, forcing him to finish her off. Because of this, a great part of her motivation in New Earth is getting revenge on the Doctor and Rose. She is a very good foil to Rose, having the wealth and charisma that she lacks, but ironically lacking Rose's humanity herself. Since she ends up possessing Rose's body, she turns into something like an evil alter-ego of sorts to Rose for a short time, acting in a more provocative way towards The Doctor and being much more straightforward and honest when it comes to acting in accordance to her feelings towards him. As Cassandra points out, Rose has been looking and while Cassandra takes the blame, it's obvious she was heavily influenced by Rose's heart too, with both girls enjoying the kiss. So the vices related to Cassandra's persona are pride, greed, wrath, lust and ambition.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Implied to be one of the reasons why she went as crazy as she did. Even when her apathy is shown as a contrast to Rose's empathy, she is overall more goofy and unrestrained. Probably as a side effect of being merged with Rose who is energetic and fun-loving.
• Cynicism Catalyst: It's hinted that her reputation as an upper-class lady was hit hard when she tried to save Chip (actually her future self in Chip's body) from dying while the other aristocrats could care less. This left her cynical and made her develop her worst traits, mainly her belief that people could only depend on themselves and her obsession with remaining a pure human. This makes her a very good contrast with Rose.
• Came Back Strong: You would think this would be the case with a plot involving a serious villainess like her, but with all the romantic subplots and Fanservice provided by her in New Earth, It's more of a case of came back Denser And Wackier, makes you wonder what drugs Cassandra has been taking in during her time in the hospital. Or could it just be a side effect of possessing the body of Rose? At least she's more foxy and alluring than ever.
• Call-Back: Back in The End Of The World, Cassandra mentions that Rose could use some surgery in order to improve her looks, to which Rose replies that she would rather die than become like her. After possessing Rose and checking herself out in New Earth, Cassandra mentions that her new appeal isn't bad at all, but she and Rose could still use some work. All probably done intentionally too, since Cassandra knows Rose is horrified by the idea of merging with her.
• Colour-Coded Characters: While Rose leaves her blue jacket on, reflecting her carefree and innocent personality, Cassandra wears Rose's exposed purple shirt, a colour associated with the ruling class, being a darker and seductive woman.
• Curves in All the Right Places: She mentions that Rose's curves are impressive, comparing them to a beautiful structure with a nice front and rear side. Suddenly, Cassandra starts thinking that being a Chav isn't so bad anymore. This serves to show how judgemental and pretentious she is, she could never find someone who lacks relevant social status like Rose attractive before and it literally takes her merging with Rose in order to appreciate her looks.
• Cult of Personality: She has this sort of relationship with her minions, with Chip even worshipping her as a goddess-like figure. Cassandra doesn't exactly think of herself as a god, but it's hinted she is interested in reaching such a state. In a bit of a subversion, Cassandra herself does seem to value the loyalty they have towards her.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: Cassandra's body is a Brain in a Jar connected to a piece of skin from her original body, having to be constantly moisturised in order to keep it from dying. It helps with the aesthetics in order to make her look disturbing, weak and how much her will to survive has distorted her over the years. Her title of "lady" fits the archetype too.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: She goes from being the monstrous, antagonistic conservative and racist villain of the plot to, proudly becoming the main source of fanservice with a more unrestrained attitude as the lead character. (Although she still retains a lot of her malice, now controlling Rose's body allowing her to show where her cunning lies) to finally growing fond of the new forms of life she created with the Doctor. Basically accepting them as her "children" and after accepting that change is a natural part of life, she realizes the error of her ways, finally accepting it's time to move on, parting on good terms with The Doctor, Rose and The Flesh.
• Denser and Wackier: In contrast to her serious portrayal in The End Of The World, she's a lot goofier in New Earth, providing most of the fanservice and comedy as well. Probably because of the themes of the episode about things changing. She is still a danger to The Doctor and Rose, however, nearly succeeding in her plans and only failing because she couldn't blackmail the cat nuns. After helping save The Flesh, she even undergoes a Heel Face Turn.
• Determinator: A dark example: despite having her plans foiled and almost getting killed, nothing will stop her from living on as a "pure" human. Even Rose admires Cassandra's willpower and her desire to survive.
• Dirty Coward: Abandons Chip to the diseased clones when possessing Rose Tyler. Though she's willing to Face Death with Dignity at the end of "New Earth".
• Dirty Old Woman: She makes full use of her new possession ability in New Earth. Although in her defence, she's been nothing but a Brain In A Jar for quite a long time and lacks the discipline to hold herself back once she uses it on others, all the more after gaining Billie Piper's looks.
• Distracted by My Own Sexy: She is so drunk on her new sex appeal after possessing Rose that besides checking herself out in front of the mirror for a long time, she is completely distracted when the Doctor confronts the cat nurses about their secrets. She gets distracted to a lesser extent when possessing Ten as well.
• Even Evil Has Standards: While Cassandra claims to be willing to throw Rose away once she finds a better host, at the same time, Rose is such a rare breed of "pure" human stock in Cassandra's eyes that she is willing protect her as long as she remains as her host. Like when she finds one of The Flesh for the first time and gets scared her body could get infected by the diseases.
• Everyone Loves Blondes: Cassandra seems to believe this, judging by her comment before possessing Rose. She admits Rose herself is strikingly beautiful, which is saying something coming from her and her original body's hair colour was also blonde. It may even be related to her racial eugenics.
• Evil Brit: She's this trope to a T, representing many classic villain stereotypes. She wouldn't be out of place in a far right group, given how conservative she is. Outside of her value of loyalty, she looks down on everybody else as mongrels.
• Evil Counterpart: She is this to Rose when it comes to their roles as The Doctor's companion in New Earth. Otherwise, they are more like Foils to each other. She is the sultry, glamorous Femme Fatale to Rose's loyal companion detective.
• Evil Genius: She is able to trick Rose into falling for her psychograft trap by fooling her into supposedly getting close, has enough technological knowledge to keep up with the Doctor and figures out the secret of the cat nuns minutes after possessing Rose and being able to move on her own, which puts Rose's own detective skills to shame.
• Evil Is Hammy: Despite being centuries old, Cassandra can be... very passionate, to say the least. Whoever ends up hosting her persona is sure to chew the stage. Minutes after taking control of Rose's teenage body full of hormones, she can't help but give The Doctor a passionate kiss once she meets Ten in person.
• Evil Makeover: In the meta sense, Billie wears different clothes and makeup in her Cassandra scenes. She has a darker shade of lipstick, her hair is at first curved to the side to resemble Zoe Wanamaker in her Cassandra scene and she wears a wonderbra to better expose her front. Cassandra herself only wears Rose's shirt after getting rid of her jacket and says that while her new appeal isn't bad at all, she and Rose could use some plastic surgery.
• Evil Old Folks: Oh come on, she doesn't looks a day over two thousand!
• Evil Overlord: She shows traits of this in The End Of The World, commanding at least a small group of mercenaries and a personality cult loyal to her. Her title of "lady" and her status as the last human being are respected to the point that she has gotten away with many of her worst crimes in the past. But this gets completely averted in New Earth, where, after being gruesomely defeated by The Doctor, she lost most of her followers and even her fortune too in order to get the psychograft. She does use it to snatch Rose's body, ironically gaining Rose's rather low social status too. But at least she goes from being the monster of the show to, according to herself, becoming astonishingly attractive and curvaceous when compared to her old self. All without losing her deadly charm too. She is more determined than ever to getting her wealth and status back as well.
• Evil Plan: In The End Of The World, her plan is to create a hostage situation on Platform One in order to collect a reward for her life support treatment. In New Earth, her plan is to possess Rose's body in order to get revenge on her and the Doctor and impersonate Rose in order to find out the secret of the cat nuns and blackmail them into giving her a fortune so she can make her escape with Rose's body and live on as a "pure" human for centuries.
• Evil Wine Glass: While it never made it to the final cut, an extended scene of Cassandra-possessed-Rose joining the Doctor in Ward 26 included the servants of the Duke of Manhattan offering them drinks, which would have caused Cassandra to slip out of character and reply "Oh, moisturize me", almost exposing her facade. Cassandra was apparently fond of high quality drinks. Chanpagne also fits her Femme Fatale theme.
• Enemy Within: Cassandra's method of possession works like this. She is able to control Rose's body right away, but Rose's original self is still somewhat conscious inside her head. The effects of the psychograft would have caused Rose's persona to eventually be completely assimilated and replaced by Cassandra's own personality. It's a fitting power considering Cassandra's name.
• Facial Horror: Cassandra's "face" is a pair of eyes and a mouth attached to a piece of her original skin controlled by her brain. Is it any wonder she got rid of her trampoline self in order to take over the body of Rose?
• Fanservice Pack: Cassandra merged with Rose is this when compared to her usual self.
• Fantastic Racism: She's the only pure human. Everyone else is a "mongrel".
• Fatal Flaw: Greed, pride, wrath, lust and ambition. Her obsession with preserving her humanity has made her a cynical and desperately power-hungry individual.
• Fate Worse than Death: While seeing her as a "pure-blood" that fits her conservative views, Cassandra initially chooses Rose as a host because she knows Rose would be horrified at the idea of becoming similar to Cassandra, so by possessing her she can get her revenge with Rose becoming Cassandra's new flesh complete with her xenophobic and supremacist views.
• Female Gaze: Her possession of The Doctor is supposed to invoke this in female viewers. Rose herself is too embarrassed like to do something about it. Since Cassandra constantly changed sexes in the past, she is a predator to both men and women.
• Femme Fatale: She was a very persuasive man-eater when she was younger, taking the lives of many of her lovers in order to get away with their money. In The End Of The World, she sarcastically mentions some of their gruesome ends. In New Earth, she goes from teasing The Tenth Doctor and giving him the kiss of his life to boasting about all the different ways she has thought about killing him in a matter of minutes. She even helps The Doctor figure out the secret of the hospital by doing detective work before turning on him. Despite the fact that she has been living as a Brain in a Jar for a long time, she still hasn't lost her charm, fooling The Doctor into thinking she is his loyal partner despite showing obvious personality differences with her by seducing him.
• Fetishized Abuser: Downplayed, but her relationship with The Doctor is more or less like this, in contrast to Rose's own relationship that is less direct and based on trust, Cassandra is much more straightforward and aggressive, telling The Doctor what to do. Cassandra herself more or less describes her new self as this. Weak and vulgar, but attractive and well endowed. Strangely, The Doctor himself doesn't seems to mind the change of personality that much and Cassandra herself can't help kissing him when she gets the chance after being dumped into a teenage body full of hormones, despite the fact that she is planning to kill him later on. You could see it as what remains of Rose's persona being love-struck with The Doctor while Cassandra herself being more interested in killing him violently.
• Foe Romance Subtext: Cassandra has a lot of this with The Doctor in New Earth because of Rose's influence while possessing her. However despite the fact that she does admit some of her lust towards him at the end of the episode when Cassandra goes back to her old self, she seems to be happy with Rose and The Doctor being together and even likes to tease them about it.
  • Cassandra has some of this with Rose too. Basically, Cassandra loves and hates being merged with Rose at the same time. (Because she admires her beauty, but can't get over her own classist hatred.)
• Foil: To Rose. They are both presented as being the last "original humans" in The End Of The World and New Earth (this may be a reference to the stereotypes that they represent in British society and being "human" is a meaningful aspect of their characters). But while Cassandra seems fixated on keeping the material aspects of what she considers make her human, looking down on the hybrids, Rose sees humans evolving as something natural. Despite being shocked by the events of Platform One, Rose doesn't become cynical like Cassandra. This gets further attention when Cassandra takes over the body of Rose: she removes nearly all the qualities that make Rose "human". While Rose is one of the youngest characters, Cassandra is one of the oldest. The past vs. the future, or old British values vs. new ones. Finally, and much to the frustration of Cassandra, they come from opposite backgrounds, Rose being from a working-class family and Cassandra being an upper-class lady.
• Fusion Dance: A rather hostile/villainous example, but the psychograft allows her to do this with whoever she possesses. She not only takes control of their body, but forms a mental link with her host, being able to partially see their memories and be influenced by the personality of the host to some extent. This actually plays a role in her character development. While we see her as a huge contrast with Rose, who would be empathetic to the suffering of the Flesh while Cassandra in her place is apathetic at best, she does show some differences when compared to her usual self. After possessing Rose, she is a lot more goofy, playful and bouncier than usual, probably because of Rose's influence who is very carefree herself, Even giving The Doctor an energetic kiss. It becomes a more relevant plot point when after she possesses one of The Flesh, her empathy is triggered again and she starts feeling truly sorry for them. This may imply that Cassandra's experiments on herself to extend her lifespan have contributed to her insanity, since she is a lot more empathetic in human form.
• Graceful Ladies Like Purple: In New Earth, she wears Rose's exposed purple blouse for most of the story after possessing her, in contrast to Rose's modest blue jacket. These are considered to be Rose's and by extension Cassandra's most Iconic Outfits by many fans. The exposed purple blouse reflects her darker, more mature and seductive character when compared to Rose.
• Grand Theft Me: Her plan in New Earth is to use a psychograft to transfer her mind into Rose's younger body in order to live on as a "pure" human and use whatever secret the cat nuns have to her advantage.

• Gambit Roulette: The way she captures Rose in the psychograft. Considering that there really aren't any "pure-blooded" humans for her to possess in New Earth, she had to improvise after watching her and The Doctor get there, showing how experienced she is and luckily, Rose fits her racial eugenic ideals of Beauty.
• Gold Digger: She killed several of her lovers for their wealth in order to extend her life. Despite starting out as a serial killer towards her lovers, in The End Of The World she reaches mass-murderer levels.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Heavily subverted. Both her original self and her new body have yellow hair, but Cassandra is a full-blown villainess despite her few pet the dog moments. What still keeps this straight is that an important part of her story is regaining the humanity that she herself lost a long time ago. The irony is not lost, considering being "human" means so much to Cassandra.
• Half-Breed Discrimination: Played straight at first, with her looking down on all the other human hybrids, but averted at the end of her story in New Earth, when she at least seems to have accepted The Flesh just the way they are and seems to agree with The Doctor when he suggests that she is technically their mother/progenitor.
• Heel Realization: After briefly possessing one of The Flesh, she is so overwhelmed by their feelings of loneliness that she starts showing signs of empathy again. Then, after watching The Doctor risk his life to save them, she realizes she was wrong about being a cynical bitch in general and starts acting in a much more caring way towards The Doctor, Rose and The Flesh.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: Subverted. Look above.
• Hypocrite: She verbally abuses Rose everytime she can about how vulgar and slutty she is according to her, but Rose is by far the more modest character when compared to her. She also likes to tease Rose about how it's hormone season inside her head and how she has been lusting after The Doctor, but Cassandra herself is the one who passionately kisses him. For a sophisticated lady, Cassandra surely lets her passions drive her.
  • While claiming to be willing to get rid of her and displaying significant amounts of classist hatred, Cassandra makes a point in protecting Rose as long as she remains as her host and is rather pleased with her new appeal after possessing her. If given the opportunity to regain her wealth, Cassandra may have even gotten over her classist hatred and fully embraced Rose as an equal that she can continue to possess in order to live on as a supremacist villainess allowing her to get her revenge on Rose as well.
• Ice Queen: She is usually hammy and over the top but when possessing Rose, her personality seems to change, becoming more aloof, refined and ironically more lady-like. (It could be a way for her to deal with the ressentment towards her new host) This coldness of hers eventually causes the Doctor to figure out her ruse.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: She takes her time in order to check out her new figure after possessing Rose in order to let her know she is her property now while Rose can only helplessly watch.
• Immortality Seeker: It's never downright stated, but her main goal seems to be eternal beauty.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Averted the first time she shows up in The End Of The World, being a serious threat to The Doctor and causing death to the people that oppose her, but she gets this treatment in New Earth, being painted in a more sympathetic light and having more of her background revealed in order to explain her behaviour. Her villainous traits and characteristics are mocked, her plans fail her and get her into trouble and despite the fact that she is still a villainess out for revenge, she is overall a less serious character, to the point that a lot of the comedy and fanservice in New Earth depends on the idea of having an old, snobby and villainous Zoe Wanamaker character inside the young body of Billie Piper's more honest and humble character.
• Irony: Completely accidental, but by freeing all the clones she effectively restarted her race of "pure" human beings.
  • When Rose finds out that Cassandra's new skin is now taken from her back, she makes a sarcastic comment saying she is talking out of her own... before being interrupted by Cassandra herself. After trapping Rose in the psychograft and possessing her, Cassandra at one point starts wondering what work and plastic surgery she can do this time around on Rose's body in order to improve her new appeal and checks herself out again, softly touching her posterior, saying that she is satisfied with the way it is, quite possibly doing it on purpose in order to get back at Rose. Basically, Cassandra was "talking out her own (Rose's) arse"... As if saying to Rose that there's no point resisting and that she can't even talk back since she has full authority over her and is now her property.
  • Cassandra usually looks down on everybody else as being sub-human mongrels and while eventually becoming satisfied with taking over Rose's body, she still looks down on her as working-class scum, but possessing Rose eventually allows her to regain the humanity that she herself lost a long time ago.
• It's All About Me: Cassandra has quite an ego. Slightly subverted with her accepting her own death.
• I Was Quite a Looker: As expected, being Zoe Wanamaker in the past. She tells this to Rose while also lamenting that it eventually reached a point in which people wouldn't appreciate her beauty anymore. Which is probably the reason why she unleashes herself once she realizes how attractive she has become after possessing Rose. She was probably worse when she had a body of her own, considering she has been married several times. Since she holds a bias against Rose's social status, it's possible Rose may actually be holding her back.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Originally, her personality was more or less like this, but after her reputation took a hit, she fell to the dark side badly, being responsible for the taking of many lives. She goes back to her old persona at the end of the episode.
• Lack of Empathy: Mostly played straight, considering she isn't above committing murder against people that don't fit her definition of "human". But slightly subverted when she feels empathy towards one of the Flesh after possessing her, knowing the loneliness that they constantly feel, showing that she isn't a complete psychopath and may have been a more ethical person in the past.
• Large Ham: One of the hammiest villains in the series. Be it Zoe Wanamaker, Billie Piper or whoever ends up playing her personality, she always chews the stage. But Zoe and Billie are the real deal. Despite being her only appearance, Zoe really shows off her voice-acting skills, despite lacking a body of her own, Zoe can make Cassandra have a huge presence in whatever scene she is in, to the point of making everyone else seem absent. Then Billie properly allows Cassandra's unseen mannerisms to come to life. In contrast to her usual portrayal of Rose, being friendly, funny and caring, we see her turn into a sultry, sarcastic and cynical version of herself, allowing Billie to portray some really malicious dialogue. She really creates the illusion that a sophisticated, cynical old lady is on the scene who just so happens to be wearing Rose's face.
• Last of Her Kind: She considers herself the last "pure" human, and sees the various part-humans as "mongrels". This becomes slightly subverted after possessing Rose, despite looking down on her as working-class scum, Cassandra still proudly refers to herself as "The Last Human", showing that she has grown fond of her new appeal to the point that she views Rose as a worthy pure-blooded human like her.
• Leitmotif: "Cassandra's Waltz". Which properly reflects her personality traits. It's probably the most alien sounding theme, capturing the irony behind her appearance and her pride about being the last human, while also being sophisticated and sinister sounding.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Cassandra and Rose are very feminine characters but in opposite ways. She is the dark to Rose's light.
• Looks Worth Killing For: A huge reason for her fall into madness. Becoming a mass murderer or causing a Death of Personality to Rose are trivial things to her.
• Lower-Class Lout: In order to establish how pretentious and elitist she is, she calls herself a Chav in horror after possessing the body of Rose Tyler.
• Lust: As part of her Fatal Flaw, Cassandra is very passionate for a sophisticated lady, but she is really obsessed with power and beauty. It's what drove her to become such a degenerate.
• Lust Object: She ends up idealizing Rose in this fashion, developing a grudging, and yet deep admiration towards Rose's looks and eventually becoming drunk on her new sex appeal. She also makes a point of objectifying Rose's looks to draw attention to her new figure and try to seduce the Doctor.
  • She develops similar feelings towards the Doctor as well, making out with him shortly after meeting him and even seems to enjoy her role as her companion not even bothering to reveal her facade until the Doctor starts noticing "Rose's" strange behaviour. She also enjoys possessing him too later on.
• Male Gaze: After getting familiar with Rose's body, she gets rid of her jacket and opens up some of the buttons of Rose's shirt in order to better expose her new cleavage, because she is really satisfied with her new breasts. Cassandra being so full of herself that she feels the need to show off her front.
• Meaningful Appearance: Her trampoline self, besides making her look disturbing, represents how she has become "her own canvas". Similar to celebrities like Michael Jackson.
  • Her clothes after possessing Rose reflect the slutty and classless way in which she sees Rose, but also how proud she has become of her new assets.
• Meaningful Name: Cassandra was the prophetess who warned of the Trojan Horse. This Cassandra provided the Trojan Horse.
• Mind Meld: One of the side effects of the psychograft. Cassandra can instantly control whoever she chooses to possess and is mostly herself afterwards, but she is still influenced by her host to some extent, being able to access their recent memories too. When she possesses Rose, she gains a few of her Character Tics and is so overwhelmed by Rose's feelings that when she meets The Doctor she can't help but kiss him aggressively. This becomes a plot point later on, when she gets overwhelmed by The Flesh's feelings of loneliness, causing her Heel Realization.
• My Brain Is Big: Cassandra's remaining brain is rather huge, possibly because of genetic alterations to it. It may foreshadow her good intellect.
• Narcissist: Yes. Admiring her new sex appeal in front of a mirror for a long time and her manipulation of her lovers fit the psychological profile well. It's hinted Cassandra wasn't always like this, perhaps snobby and vain to some extent like the other aristocrats, but remained an empathic person behind the mask. By the time the Doctor and Rose meet her however, she is a full-blown villain and only her worst traits remain.
• Near-Villain Victory: Despite the fact that she plays a goofier role in New Earth, Cassandra comes pretty close to completing her plans. She succesfully activates the psychograft, granting her the power to possess Rose and Body Snatch anyone she wants to giving her a pseudo-immortality of sorts, fools The Doctor into thinking she is a "new Rose" long enough like to take him out by surprise and was minutes away from killing him until she failed to convince the cat-nuns into giving her a fortune in exchange for not telling everyone their secrets. If she had the manpower she had back in The End Of The World, she would have surely succeeded into pressuring the nuns to the point that she could have even taken control of the hospital herself. This shows that Cassandra is actually smarter than she looks, because with her minions she could have successfully gotten a huge fortune from the nuns, infected the Doctor with all the world's health problems, snatched Rose's body for herself and used the abilities of the psychograft to become immortal.
• Nominal Hero: By taking Rose's role for most of the story in New Earth, she indirectly helps The Doctor figure out the secret of the cat nuns and their genocidal acts, despite the fact that she is following her own villainous plans. She even helps cure The Flesh from all of the galaxy's diseases, ironically helping create a new race of "pure" human beings. As the Doctor says, she can't deny them because she helped create them, turning her into their great progenitor. She even seems genuinely happy about the fact that they were cured from their illnesses, probably because she was inside the head of one of them for a while and feels empathy about how much loneliness they had to endure. This may be the reason why she decides to move on after Chip's body fails her too, realizing that the Doctor and Rose were right about change being a natural process and that her time is up.
• Not Right in the Bed: The Doctor notices "Rose's" sultry change of personality right away, but this actually gets averted once Rose/Cassandra

kisses him,thinking It's a result of his new looks when Roee is actually possessed...

• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: While pretending to be Rose, she rightfully thinks it's better to imitate the way she speaks instead of using her own dialect. But her imitation is rather poor, so she goes back to using her own posh accent after The Doctor notices it and justifies herself by saying being on New Earth makes her want to try out new things, the Doctor included.
• Personality Powers: The psychograft grants her this. As shown in The End Of The World, she likes to project a fake image of trust before finishing her enemies off, like on Platform One or how she murdered her past lovers. So she gets the power to possess whoever she wants, enabling her to infiltrate the minds of her targets in order to slowly subvert and destroy them from within, while also allowing her to pretent to be whoever she wants. It can also be related to her name. Her possession ability also grants her a pseudo-immortality of sorts, which is hinted to be her greatest wish.
• Pet the Dog: She values the loyalty her followers have towards her, probably because of the way the other aristocrats turned their backs on her when she acted on emotion. She seems to be really fond of Chip, even remembering his design because he was the last person to admire her beauty. It actually gives her some good karma since Chip seems to have become her last follower in New Earth, allowing her to possess Rose and give The Doctor one final snog. She also feels truly bad for the Flesh once she possesses one of them briefly and seems to be happy for them after they are cured from all of their sickness. This hints that Cassandra may have been a more empathetic person in the past, but her experiences led her to believe that people could only count on themselves.
• Princess in Rags: So what if she lost her fortune and is forced to possess the body of her brassy arch-nemesis? The lady is moving on!
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Yeah, she was designed to deconstruct people who hate change and people's ideas of beauty, so she has many traits of an extreme-right conservative. To Cassandra, everyone else is a mongrel; she recognizes Rose as a worthy, "pure-blooded" human like her, but even then, only as lower class scum. While Rose becomes a worthy host for her to take over, she does so with no respect towards Rose's will. She only changes towards the end when she recognizes The Flesh as a new kind of life.
• Proud Beauty: Cassandra subverts this when it comes to judging her new (Rose's) image. She hates Rose with a passion and is at first angsty towards the idea of using her as a host, but eventually admits she has become quite attractive, to the point where she goes out of her way to make sure everyone notices her new appeal. As vulgar as she may perceive her new self (Rose) to be, It's obvious Cassandra has become quite haughty about her new image. Even after possessing Rose, she still calls herself "The last human", showing that she acknowledges Rose fits her archetype of beauty, and her conservative race eugenics. It's almost painful watching the lovely Rose turn into a vain and far-right white supremacist version of herself. But then again, Cassandra is also funny to watch and is haughty about her looks to the point where she can make Rose act really sultry.
• Proper Lady: Averted most of the time. Cassandra embodies many "evil lord/lady" tropes, but at the end of her arc, she starts acting this way towards others for once, and her previous malice seems to be gone.
• Reverse Psychology: She does an impressive trick in New Earth. She fools Rose by telling her to get closer to her, to which Rose mocks such a suggestion and moves behind instead just to get caught up in Cassandra's psychograft trap, leaving her helpless against Cassandra's possession.
• Rich Bitch: Honestly believes that money simply makes you more important than others.
• Rich Language, Poor Language: Cassandra ironically uses Billie Piper's natural Posh accent while Rose herself speaks in a Cockney dialect.
• Riches to Rags: It isn't quite fleshed out, but the fact that she needs Chip to hide her in the hospital basement and constantly steal medicine for her in New Earth means that Cassandralost most of her fortune after The End Of The World, probably using all she had left in order to get the psychograft, which makes the plot point about her possessing Rose's body all the more hilarious. Most of her followers are also gone too, with the exception of Chip. As Cassandra herself puts it; "From class to brass".
• Romanticized Abuse: What she does to both Rose and The Doctor after possessing them surely counts. It's actually played for laughs despite the fact that she is abusing them while molesting herself. She would have even caused a Death of Personality to Rose if she had stayed in her body any longer. Granted, she was trying to get revenge on her at first, dooming her to a Fate Worse than Death by turning her into the new host of her persona, allowing Cassandra to live on through Rose for centuries.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Despite the fact that she looks down on Rose for being too working-class for her taste, Cassandra ends up becoming this after possessing her. Yes, her classy and posh character gets reduced to this, probably because it's just part of who she is and her lusting after beauty so much. She is at first disgusted by the idea of living on through Rose, but she is also too obsessed with remaining young and preserving her humanity to let this get in her away and decides to bite her pride for the sake of getting revenge as well. But Cassandra is so fixated on looks and pretentious that once she takes a good look at her new body she can't help but grudgingly admire Rose's beauty and how attractive she has become, all while enjoying and showing off her new assets once she gets the chance.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: She and Rose engage in this when Rose finds the basement she was hiding in, with both of them exchanging some devilish dialogue. At one point, Rose starts mocking the way Cassandra has found a different flesh this time around. Ironically, Cassandra outsmarts her in the end and Rose ends up becoming Cassandra's new flesh. The sweet irony is not lost on Cassandra, who takes her time to check out her new acquisitions and give the Tenth Doctor the snog of his life.
• Shipper on Deck: Towards The Doctor and Rose after possessing them and seeing inside their minds. She enjoys teasing Rose about it, because it's "hormone city" inside her head, but acts more benevolent about it after the plot in New Earth is over. In a meta-sense, this might be the whole point behind Cassandra's character. There needs to be an obvious interest between Rose and The Doctor in the series, but it would be out of character for Rose to act in such a provocative way towards The Doctor. That's where Cassandra comes in and why she is such a convenient, poshy Foil to Rose. While it wouldn't be normal for Rose to behave in such a fashion, Cassandra herself has no problem with that. So once you throw Cassandra into the mix, we see the normal, caring, friendly and shy Rose turn into an aloof, haughty and sultry version of herself, allowing her to indirectly show feminine traits that she herself lacks or rarely shows. (See also Light Feminine and Dark Feminine above)
• Showing Off the New Body: She does this to both Rose and the Doctor and enjoys every moment of it.
• Social Darwinist: Cassandra is one of the most pretentious and elitist characters, with her looking down on hybrid humans and despising people for their lack of wealth. While her eugenicist views were left ambiguous in "The End of The World", by the time of "New Earth" and her possession of Rose and acceptance of her as a worthy "Pure-Blood" Cassandra is portrayed as something akin to a capitalist, white supremacist. Unlike most examples Cassandra still values loyalty and even be nice to the people that submit to her power regardless of looks.
• Token Evil Team Mate: Although for a short while, she was one of the Doctor's companions, even after he finds out her ruse. She is one of the few to show romantic interest with him and actually kissing him as well. Her actions help move Rose's and tenth's relationship forward as well.
• Took a Level in Kindness: At the end of her story, after realizing her cynicism wasn't justified, she starts acting a whole lot nicer and ironically seems to like caring for others and starts acting like a Proper Lady.
• Stalker with a Crush: Cassandra spends a large part of "New Earth" possessing different people but targets Rose the most in particular because she is the only other pure-blooded human by Cassandra's standards. She also has strong, contradictory feelings towards her host and often gets drunk on her new appearance when inside her.
• Stable Time Loop: During "New Earth" she offhandedly mentions remembering the last time someone called her beautiful. That person was herself, in the dying body of her servant, Chip.
• Supermodel Strut: She tends to do this in order to enjoy and take advantage of Rose's sexuality. The results vary, The Doctor himself is too distracted with the miracle cures of the hospital and trying to solve the mystery of it like to pay attention to Cassandra's attempts at seducing him. But he does gets distracted by "Rose's" exposed chest, which Cassandra takes advantage of in order to kiss him in a frenzy. Since such behaviour is out of character for Rose, Cassandra's movements are emphasized by Billie Piper in order to reflect her haughtyness and how she is willing to exploit her femininity. Being the haughty seductress she is, Cassandra has to make sure everyone notices her new appeal somehow.
• Take That!: Cassandra is basically a deconstruction and parody of the attitude of popular celebrities obsessed with looks, British ideas of beauty and of people who hate change because of their own sense of pride.
• The Fatalist: She shows some shades of this, being too prideful to just possess any person: the fact that The Doctor and Rose happen to be around again makes her think fate wants her to have her revenge on them. The fact that Rose is one of the only "pure-blooded" humans out there even worthy of being her host makes Cassandra think that this is her chance for rebirth as well, so she can continue her unethical and selfish ways of life in the young body of her enemy. But instead, it leads her to complete a hero's journey of sorts, making her realize how far she has fallen from grace. She ends up accepting her past and true self, eventually coming to terms with death itself after passing on a part of herself to the future instead of hopelessly clinging to life.
• The Hedonist: Having quite a lot of wealth, she likes to enjoy conforts of all kinds.
• The Mole: She impersonates Rose for a while in order to find out the secret of the cat nuns, but she isn't doing it just for the sake of infiltration. Rather, part of her Evil Plan is actually snatching Rose's body for good.
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: Cassandra makes it very clear that she hates Rose with murderous intent, but after possessing her body, she eventually develops a grudging admiration towards Rose's beauty and doesn't seem to mind living on as a Chav for a while, at least until she finds someone "less common". Her admiration for Rose's appeal gets to the point that despite showing differences of personality with Rose (like her haughtiness and her Posh accent), what really blows away her cover is not caring what happens to The Flesh when The Doctor confronts the cat nurses about their actions because she is too distracted checking herself out.
• The Resenter: Downplayed, but once she takes a good look at the merchandise, she gains a grudging respect for Rose's beauty, all while saying she is as useless as brass and saying she'll eventually get rid of her once she finds "someone younger and less common." But always comes back to possessing Rose everytime she can.
• The Tease: The way she gained her fortune. In a bit of a subversion, she actually gets away with giving The Doctor a passionate kiss and fools him into thinking that Rose is just trying out a new persona until her later Lack of Empathy blows her cover.
• The Unfettered: Nothing will stop her from living on as a "pure" human. If she has to take people's lives then so be it, because they aren't even human to her either way. This pushes the Ninth Doctor to his limits and makes him decide that her time is up.
• The Vamp: She had this lifestyle when she was younger and had a body of her own, with some of her lovers meeting gruesome and mysterious ends. After possessing Rose, she basically becomes Rose's Dark Feminine. While Rose is usually caring, friendly and shy about her feelings, after being possessed by Cassandra she comes out as aloof, haughty, sultry and with a more straightforward and honest personality.
• Thrill Seeker: Cassandra is portrayed as something akin to an adrenaline-junkie in New Earth, with her choosing to work with the Doctor despite the risk of being exposed, she can be seen smirking with excitement when she finds the secret room of the nuns and she seems to enjoy her role as the Doctor's companion as well, not bothering to reveal her facade until her cover is blown.
• Vain Sorceresses: Cassandra is a "Sci-Fi Counterpart" her knowledge of technology can be seen as a parallel to her dwelling in dark magic, she has her own "Crystal Ball" and she is obsessed with beauty and body purity causing her to get fixated on Rose. So Cassandra is a mix of this and The Eugenicist.
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: When she possesses Rose, Cassandra hides a sleeping gas container between her new bouncy castle's assets in this fashion.
• Villainous BSoD: Cassandra suffers a massive one after briefly possessing one of The Flesh, to the point that it triggers her empathy again and she starts feeling truly sorry for them. It's to the point that watching The Doctor risk his life to save them makes her realize that she was wrong about her cynical behaviour, and that the Doctor and Rose were right about change being a natural process. Cassandra even briefly seems to go back to her old self, being happy that The Flesh were cured from their sickness and starts acting in a more benevolent way towards Rose and The Doctor.
• Villainous Crush: Not out of her own free will. But since she gained some of Rose's Character Tics as a side effect of the psychograft causing her mind to merge with Rose, she gains Rose's crush towards The Doctor, to the point that she gives him a passionate kiss shortly after meeting up with him. She also seems to develop a grudging crush towards her new (Rose's) self image, probably due to the insane depths of narcissim she has fallen into.
• Villain No Longer Idle: She was suspicious about the cat-nuns but couldn't do anything about it because of her condition. Once she snatches the body of Rose, this plays in full effect. The results vary: she manages to steal Rose's body, significantly extending her lifespan, and manages to capture The Doctor as well, having a good plan to blackmail the cat-nuns into giving her a fortune too. However, the cat-nuns aren't intimidated that easily and her plot fails. She may have succeeded if she had the manpower she had back in The End Of The World, but since she is now a young and vulgar chav, well...
• Villain Protagonist: She is basically this in New Earth. The Doctor himself provides the final solution to the plot while Rose herself is barely present and is only there as Cassandra's host. Basically, the episode gives much more of her background in order to explain her villainous traits and she gets the most character development. Despite following her own evil plan and nearly succeeding, Cassandra's role as an antagonist still gets less relevance compared to the cat nuns. She is the Nominal Hero of the story, ending up curing The Flesh from their problems, and her story arc ends with her accepting them as her "children" of sorts before deciding to accept her death for good, which is an excellent contrast to her previous unethical ways of clinging to life. Cassandra instead decides to move on after passing on a part of herself to the future, which is a much more "humane" way of coming to terms with death itself. It fits with the themes of the episode about what it means to be human and how she's gained that value back through her journey.
• Villain Respect: Towards The Doctor and his intellect, to the point that she refuses to work alone when Chip tells her he is too dangerous, this is because Cassandra herself is proud of her own intellect and has to admit The Doctor bested her last time, thinking they have a better chance of finding the secrets of the cat nuns together. In a similar fashion, she develops a bitter admiration towards Rose's beauty, conceding that she is surprisingly pretty for being a lower class young girl. Despite the fact that Cassandra is angsty about it at first, she starts seeing Rose as a decent pure blooded host, at least until she can improve her looks through plastic surgery or find someone more sophisticated.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Her status as "The Last Human" is respected to the point of giving her a victim reputation, allowing her to get away with some of her crimes. Cassandra herself is very charismatic and as demostrated in New Earth, she was even better at manipulating people when she was younger and had an attractive body. Some of her followers even see her as a divine figure.
• Wicked Cultured: Cassandra is basically a treasure collector and she will let you know it. Being the upper-class lady that she is, she enjoys habits of all kinds, has technological knowledge on par with The Doctor and her detective skills are on par with or may even surpass Rose.
• Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: She does this twice. First in The End Of The World, when she pretends she is not related to the Platform One crisis and later in a more literal fashion in New Earth, when she possesses Rose. It's fitting that Cassandra provides a Trojan Horse both times she shows up, considering her name.
• Worthy Opponent: She respects The Doctor and his intellect to the point that she goes out of her way to work with him instead of alone and makes sure to give him a kiss with the love of his life before trying to get rid of him.
• Yandere: Subverted. Cassandra may even qualify pre-main story wise depending on how much she truly liked her lovers before killing them. But she does have many of the characteristics in New Earth after snatching the body of Rose since while a part of her is hopelessly lovestruck with The Doctor, the other part wants to kill him nastily. She is also more beautiful and haughty than "cute".

Henry van Statten

Henry van Statten (Ninth Doctor)

Played by Corey Johnson

"I am Henry van Statten, now recognise me!"

A self-obsessed billionaire (who reportedly "owns" the internet) Henry van Statten is a collector of all things alien, and has been storing extraterrestrial artifacts in his secret underground bunker in Utah. He thinks he's discovered a life form he calls "The Metaltron", and is obsessed with getting it to talk. Little does he know that he's actually got a Dalek on his hands...

---

• Bad Boss: Van Statten keeps control via his army of mooks and by memory-wiping his executives on a whim, keeping them in a state of sycophantic terror. Unfortunately, by insisting the Dalek be captured regardless of casualties he alienates his security force, and by breaking down in fear in front of Goddard he loses her respect. Both quickly join forces to depose him after the crisis is over.
• Collector of the Strange: Van Statten collects and studied alien artefacts. Collecting a live Dalek may not have been the best move...
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The success of his computer company is based on stolen Imported Alien Phlebotinum, including an imprisoned Dalek. While gloating to the Doctor, he admits that his company has already discovered the cure to the common cold, but he refuses to release it since he can still make a profit selling palliatives.
• Dirty Coward: As the Dalek pushes deeper into the compound, van Statten's utter uselessness is brought to bare as he can do nothing but sit in his office and watch his legions of security officers die in vain to defend him. When the Dalek finally breaks in, all he can do is stammer out weak justifications for his actions until the truth comes out.
  Van Statten: I JUST WANTED YOU TO TALK!
  Dalek: Then hear me talk now. EXTERMINATE!
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Van Statten continues to treat the Dalek as the prize of his collection, ignoring the Doctor's warnings.
• Evil Is Petty: Subjects a Dalek to frequent electrical torture because it refused to talk. Yes, seriously.
• Expy: Shares many childish and megalomaniacal traits with his "Jubilee" counterpart, Nigel Rorchester.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Statten's not completely heartless as he does apologise when the 9th Doctor initially thinks Rose Tyler has been exterminated.
• Green-Eyed Monster: After the initial shock of hearing the Dalek's voice for the first time thanks to the Doctor's prompting, van Statten bursts into the room and attempts to provoke the Dalek to talk to him as well, clearly envious of the Doctor being his prize's centre of attention.
• Hate Sink: His sheer narcissism, cowardice and disregard for the lives of his men make him completely unlikeable. It's telling that the Doctor—whose ninth incarnation holds a more personal hatred for the Daleks than ever before—is quicker to compliment a genocidal Dalek than compliment him.
  Ninth Doctor: Do you know what a Dalek is, van Statten? A Dalek is honest. It does what it was born to do for the survival of its species. That creature in your dungeon is better than you!
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Van Statten wasn't killed, but he surely paved the way for his eventual fate. His policy of using torture on his alien captive caused said alien to go on a murdering rampage when it finally got loose, and his fondness for wiping people's memories and dropping them off in a town starting with the same letter as their last name got turned around on him by his newly appointed second-in-command.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Considering that the other antagonist is a genocidal Dalek, you'd better believe that van Statten is one detestable little shit. He's so vile that the Doctor is more willing to compliment the Dalek on its honesty.
• Internet Incorporated:
  Adam: Mr. van Statten owns the Internet.
  Rose: Don't be daft, nobody owns the Internet.
  Van Statten: And let's keep everyone thinking that way, right kids?
• Kick the Dog: Has an aide memory-wiped simply for giving him the wrong answer.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: He subjected staff he fired to this, and ultimately gets the treatment himself.
  Goddard: And by tonight, Henry van Statten will be a homeless, brainless junkie in San Diego, Seattle, Sacramento... Someplace beginning with "S".
• "Not So Different" Remark: The Doctor suggests that van Statten and Davros are very much alike, being two geniuses who were kings of their own little worlds. Van Statten doesn't get that it's certainly not a compliment.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: In early script drafts, van Statten was originally named "Will Fences" in a joking allusion to Bill Gates.
• Precision F-Strike: Not a f-word, but American audiences were probably shocked to hear Henry shout "goddamn" at the Dalek, which would have been the first swear word (but far from the last) uttered in the televised show, albeit a mild one.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Overall, van Statten comes across as incredibly immature, spoiled and entitled. His obsession with hearing the Dalek talk, specifically to recognise and address him, brings to mind the "Do the Roar" kid from Shrek Forever After.
• Skewed Priorities:
  The Doctor: (realises that the creature in van Statten's vault is a Dalek) Let me out!
  Goddard: Sir, it's going to kill him!
  Van Statten: It's talking!
• Smug Snake: Van Statten's callous disregard for the lives of his men as the Dalek massacres them, as well as his massive ego, make him completely unsympathetic and detestable. Though ironically, his actor Corey Johnson believes van Statten is misunderstood.
• Withholding the Cure: Van Statten claims to have discovered the cure for the common cold, but isn't letting it out of the labs. "Why sell one cure when I can sell a thousand palliatives?"

Tenth Doctor era debut

The Wire

The Wire (Tenth Doctor)

Played by: Maureen Lipman (2006)

"Now, are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then we'll begin."

An alien criminal who escaped a death sentence by turning into an Energy Being, losing its original body in the process, it made its way to 1953 London and forced a hapless television salesman to help it steal faces and people's brainwaves in order to try and regain a physical form, planning on doing so while millions of people were watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

---

• Ambiguous Gender: It takes the form of a female television announcer, but its actual gender is unknown.
• And I Must Scream:
  • She feeds by stealing the essences and the souls of people watching her TV screens, leaving their bodies as wandering Empty Shells, while their consciousness remain trapped within the Wire.
  • She herself would befall this fate when the Doctor turns her receiver into a transmitter, and sends her essence into a VHS tape.
• Catchphrase: "FEED ME!"
• Energy Being: It escaped execution by turning into pure electricity.
• Face Stealer: A side effect of it stealing people's bioelectricity, in order to regain strength. It doesn't actually do anything with the faces.
• Large Ham: "FEEEED MEEEEEE!"
• Only Known by Their Nickname: "The Wire" is almost certainly a pseudonym it adopted after losing its physical form.
• Spell My Name with a "The": The Wire.

Abzorbaloff

The Abzorbaloff, aka Victor Kennedy (Tenth Doctor)

Played by: Peter Kay (2006)

"You've dabbled with aliens. Now meet the genuine article!"

A green humanoid hailing from the planet Clom, with the ability to absorb and gain the knowledge of any other lifeform. Under the guise of human businessman Victor Kennedy, he takes over LINDA, a group of fans of the Doctor, in a bid to absorb him and gain control of the TARDIS.

---

• Achilles' Heel: His cane.
• Acrofatic: His modest claims of being merely a "slow, clumsy beast" are immediately disproved when he leaps over his desk and chases Elton through the streets on foot.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: To prove Elton and Ursula, the Abzorbaloff threatens to absorb Jackie Tyler.
• The Assimilator: He works on an individual level, absorbing individuals into his body.
• Big "NO!": Gives one just before he dissolves.
• Big "YES!": Gives an orgasmic one when he absorbs Ursula.
• Body Horror: His process of absorbing people is both scary and disgusting.
• Evil Plan: He wants to absorb the Doctor in order to gain his vast knowledge and exploits LINDA in order to find him.
• Fantastic Racism: Describes the natives of Raxacoricofallapatorious — Clom's twin planet — as swine and says that he spits on them. He also looks down on humans, describing their body as a "crude pink shape".
• Faster Than They Look: He even exploits this fact by pointing out his size and how slow he must be... and then shocks people by showing just how fast he really is.
• Fat Bastard: Already a prime example of this as Victor Kennedy, who treats the LINDA members like crap while trying to get them to do his bidding, and it gets exaggerated as the Abzorbaloff, who is even fatter still and flat-out murderous.
• Gasshole: The Abzorbaloff, in view of Ursula and Elton, has no problem passing gas through Bliss' mouth just to let her speak, to the discomfort of her as well as Bridget and Mr. Skinner. Justified in that he's a Big Eater, and with that he'll always have people attached to him.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: By absorbing Ursula, he gives her access to his mind and his knowledge, which she uses to find out how to kill him.
• Karmic Death: He is killed when all of those he's absorbed start pulling him apart from the inside, causing him to drop his cane. Elton then breaks the cane, cancelling out the limitation field that keeps the Abzorbaloff's powers in check and causing him to be absorbed by the Earth.
• Namedar: He deliberately adopts the name the humans come up with for it because it likes the sound. The Doctor later comes up with the same name on the third try. Captain Jack's Monster File for the Slitheen shows that they are related to the Abzorbalovian Rebels.
• Newspaper-Thin Disguise: After absorbing Mr. Skinner, the Abzorbaloff hides behind a newspaper when Ursula and Elton come back. He is eventually rumbled due to a combination of Skinner crying out for help and Ursula noticing his green claws clutching the newspaper.
• No Name Given: Whatever his actual name is, it's never stated on-screen. It's Elton and then the Doctor who coin the name "Abzorbaloff" for him. The creature takes a liking to the nickname either way.
• Obviously Evil: As Victor, his introduction is accompanied by a power outage, he wears black, and asks to be alone with them one at a time for an unspecified reason.
• Oop North: Has a light northern accent as Victor Kennedy, and a full-fat one as the Abzorbaloff.
• Orgasmically Delicious: He practically has an orgasm when he absorbs Ursula. Besides that, he is constant ecstasy from having absorbed multiple victims.
• Power Incontinence: Seems to suffer from this, as he orders the LINDA members never to touch him because of his supposed skin condition, presumably out of fear that he'll unwittingly absorb them and blow his own cover. He then suffers this to fatal levels at the end of the story when Elton breaks his cane, and without the limitation field it generates, he gets absorbed by the Earth itself.
• Take That, Audience!: Not-so-subtly reflects the more unpleasant, obsessive portions of the ''Doctor Who'' fanbase.
• Tastes Like Chicken: Says this word-for-word about Ursula after he absorbs her.
• Toilet Humour: After absorbing Bliss, the Abzorbaloff ends up with her face sticking out of his right arsecheek. Inevitably, he ends up farting on her face.
• To Serve Man: He essentially eats people, only not with his mouth, doing so by making physical contact which sucks them into his body, granting him experience and knowledge which he has a taste for.
• Touch of Death: Downplayed. A single touch from the Abzorbaloff begins the irreversible process of absorption which ultimately ends in the death of the victim, though it takes several weeks.
• Voluntary Shapeshifter: Seems to be this, albeit with some limitations. He can switch between his personas as the Abzorbaloff and Victor Kennedy, and in doing so apparently suppress those that he's already absorbed, but can't switch forms quickly enough to prevent Elton and Ursula discovering his identity.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: After Ursula threatens to assault him with his cane, he initially reacts with genuine terror — likely because such an attack would have broken it, removing the limitation field and killing him — before begging for mercy and claiming to be "such a slow, clumsy beast". Something he definitely proves not to be when he absorbs Ursula and then chases Elton.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Believes from his research that the Doctor will allow himself to be absorbed in order to save Elton's life. While the Doctor is always willing to perform a Heroic Sacrifice as an absolute last resort, that doesn't prove to be the case in this particular encounter, as he's able to have the LINDA members (who are already doomed to eventual full absorption and effective death) perform their own sacrifice to deal with him.

Mr. Lucas Finch / Brother Lassar

Lucas Finch / Brother Lassar (Tenth Doctor)

Played by: Anthony Head (2006)

The leader of the Krillitanes, who comes off as a charismatic school headmaster with plans to remake reality.

---

• Actor Allusion: We have Anthony Head once again working at a creepy school, and using Buffy Speak no less.
• Evil Counterpart: To the Doctor, with the episode painting him as a dark mirror of sorts with the two of them seeing each other as equals. Both are aliens disguised as humans, both serve as the leaders of their respective teams, and both are extremely clever and charismatic. It's no wonder that he is entranced by the Doctor and sees him as a Worthy Opponent.
• Evil Is Hammy: Most of the time he's a restrained Cold Ham, but K9's intervention in their plan drives him into a manic hysteria of batlike screaming.
• Evil Principal: He takes over as the Headmaster but is secretly the leader of the Krillitanes, a race of evil, carnivorous aliens with an Evil Plan that necessitates the children.
• Faux Affably Evil: He is nothing but polite, especially towards the Doctor who he seems to hold Villain Respect towards.
• A God Am I: Has the surprisingly ambitious goal to ascend to godhood and rebuild reality in his image using the Skasis Paradigm, which is essentially the universal cheat code that would give complete control over time, space and matter.
• In Their Own Image: His goal is to recreate reality in their own image, though he also wants the Doctor to join them. As the Doctor puts it, reality rebuilt with the face of Mr. Finch doesn't sound overly appealing compared to the status quo.
• Manipulative Bastard: Mr. Finch nearly talks the Doctor into joining him with just a few lines of temptation, and when Sarah Jane steps in, shifts gears at the speed of light and — based off only brief observation and some well informed guesses — almost succeeds in doing the same to her. She, however, snaps out of it and snaps the Doctor out of it too.
• Meaningful Name: Mr. Finch, an alien capable of developing the traits of other conquered species is named after Darwin's finches. The widely known evidence of evolution due to the differing sizes of their beaks.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Combined with "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner, we get this brief exchange between Mr. Finch and K9 after the robot drenches the Krillitanes with their oil.
  Mr. Finch: (Just as the Krillitanes are about to blow up) You bad dog!
  K9: Affirmative.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Brother Lassar has locked himself permanently in human form as Headmaster Finch.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Mr. Finch exploits this in his attempt to recruit the Doctor: how many more people he could save if he were a Reality Warper?
• Villain Respect: Finch has a healthy respect for the Doctor's intellect, and he is the only character that Finch actually treats as an equal, even a superior; as part of his temptation of the Doctor, he says, "The paradigm would give us power, but you could give us wisdom." Of course, Finch is a top class Manipulative Bastard, so he might just be playing on the Doctor's ego. Either way, it almost works.
• We Can Rule Together: He propositions to the Doctor, hoping to use his Time Lord wisdom in exchange for allowing him to become a god at his side. He drives a great sales pitch, however, as the Doctor does seem very nearly swayed by his manipulative words. He extends the offer to Sarah Jane and Rose, offering them eternal life so that they could always be at the Doctor's side.
• Would Hurt a Child: As a carnivorous Krillitane, humans are included on the menu. He and the other Krillitanes sometimes eat the occasional child, though only ones they are certain would go unnoticed/

The Racnoss Empress

The Racnoss Empress (Tenth Doctor)

Played by: Sarah Parish (2006)

---

• Big "NO!": "MYYYYY CHIIIIIIILDREEEEEEEEENNNNN!"
• Even Evil Has Standards: The Empress feeds Lance to her children because she isn't impressed with him readily abandoning his "wife".
• Evil Is Bigger: One of the most physically imposing Doctor Who villains outside of literal Kaiju such as Kroll.
• Evil Is Hammy: The Empress of the Racnoss, bringing Chewing the Scenery to epic levels. One wonders if the Racnoss actually subsisted on scenery that they chewed up, instead of meat, as they insist.

• Extreme Omnivore: The Racnoss can devour whole planets.
• Giant Spider
• Oh, Crap!: She finally realises exactly what she's up against when the Doctor reveals his true planet of origin.
  Empress: Roboforms are not necessary. My children shall feast on Martian flesh.
  The Doctor: Oh, but I'm not from Mars.
  Empress: Then where?
  The Doctor: My home planet is far away and long since gone, but its name lives on: Gallifrey.
  Empress: [gasps dramatically] THEY MURDERED THE RACNOSS!
• Pungeon Master: The Racnoss Empress. Notable in that she deliberately keeps setting up puns, but Lance and Donna don't play along.
• Time Abyss: The Racnoss date from the early days of the universe, and the Empress herself has been in hibernation for billions of years. The Time Lords and other ancient races hunted the Racnoss down to near extinction because of their ravenous nature.
• Villainous Breakdown: When the Doctor reveals his true home, the Racnoss Empress goes from gloating to horrified shrieking.

Richard Lazarus

Professor Richard Lazarus (Tenth Doctor)

Played by: Mark Gatiss (2007)

"You're so sentimental, Doctor. Maybe you are older than you look."

A genius yet sociopathic scientist who is obsessed with discovering the secret of eternal youth, no matter what the cost...

---

• Body Horror: His alternate form is an utterly horrific aberration resembling a gigantic scorpion with an exposed exoskeleton and an uncannily humanoid face. He always transforms offscreen, but audible bone cracking can be heard whenever it happens. While the slightly dodgy 2007 CGI downplays it somewhat, he's still one of Doctor Who's most viscerally terrifying monsters.
• Dirty Old Man: He very creepily hits on Martha's sister Tish.
• Freudian Excuse: He claims that his desire to cheat death stems from witnessing the Blitz as a child.
• Genre Refugee: His creator Stephen Greenhorn compares him to a classic Marvel Comics supervillain; mad scientist, caught in an awry experiment, turns into a rampaging monster.
• Immortality Seeker: He builds a marvellous machine capable of restoring youth, hoping to use it to live forever.
• It's All About Me: While it can partially be blamed on the degenerative effects of his age reversal machine, Lazarus expresses zero remorse for the many victims he sucked dry over the course of his rampage to maintain his monstrous form. His quest for immortality is entirely selfish and once he regains his youth, he loses any pretence of caring for anyone but himself.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Naively assumes this to be the case, speaking about how he looks forward to eternal life. The Doctor, actually being immortal, tells him what it is truly like to be immortal.
  The Doctor: I'm old enough to know that a longer life isn't always a better one. In the end, you just get tired. Tired of the struggle, tired of losing everyone that matters to you. Tired of watching everything turn to dust. If you live long enough, Lazarus, the only certainty is that you'll be alone.
• Meaningful Name: The Doctor lampshades this after Lazarus revives from apparently being killed.
  The Doctor: Lazarus, back from the dead. Should have known, really.
• Sensory Overload: The Doctor defeats him by blasting a cathedral organ at max volume, amped up by the Sonic Screwdriver. It causes Lazarus's unstable DNA to freak out and he falls to his death from the spire.
• Square-Cube Law: Where exactly does all that extra mass come from when he transforms? Downplayed as Lazarus requires constant sustenance to maintain it, but it's still pretty implausible.

Lucy Saxon

Lucy Saxon (Tenth Doctor)

Played by: Alexandra Moen (2007, 2009)

"Dying. Everything dying. The whole of creation was falling apart and I thought there's no point. No point to anything. Not ever."

The Master's wife in "The Sound of Drums", "Last of the Time Lords" and returning for an encore in "The End of Time". She was his "faithful companion" until she shot him, after Francine Jones and Jack Harkness were stopped trying to do so by the Doctor.

---

• All for Nothing: Killed herself and managed to wipe out the cult of Saxon in the act of trying to kill "Harry", but he lived on, albeit very damaged.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Lucy is the wife of the Master, the Doctor's Arch-Enemy. How's that for a "bad boy"?
• The Beard: The Tenth Doctor implicitly calls her this, when the Fifth asks him if the Tenth's Master still has a beard, as in actual facial hair.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: In "Last of the Time Lords", she rarely speaks, making it all the more unexpected when she's the one that shoots the Master.
• Blue Blood: Her connections are one of the reasons the Master married her.
• Chekhov's Gunman: In the most literal sense. She starts up as "not too bright", but ends up shooting the Master.
• Despair Event Horizon: Pal around with the Master and he will quickly destroy your will to live/reasons for existing. Which is very dark, considering how eager and totally unhinged Lucy was to kill herself to get rid of the Master for good... which didn't work.
• The Dog Bites Back: Domestic abubse is implied to be the motivation for her Heel–Face Turn.
• Domestic Abuse: After the Master has ruled the Earth for a year, he's stopped pretending to love or care at all about Lucy. He's implied to have hit her, and showed her the end of the universe, driving her over the Despair Event Horizon For the Evulz.
• Evil Counterpart: Of the companions in general, and Rose Tyler in particular, because she is The Master's companion and his wife. It's even stated that the Master took her to see the The End of the World as We Know It much like the Ninth Doctor did to Rose, but whereas the Doctor wanted Rose to appreciate the universe while it existed, the Master did it to Lucy to make her believe that there's "no point in anything, ever."
• Heel–Face Turn: Turns against the Master during "Last of the Time Lords", and then further works against him in "The End of Time".
• Heroic Sacrifice: Her last appearance in "The End of Time" had her sabotaging a cult's attempt to resurrect the Master in an explosion that kills her. The Master returns anyway, but the attempt caused him to Came Back Wrong. It later becomes a Senseless Sacrifice, as "The Doctor Falls" reveals that the Time Lords simply healed the Master's condition without much issue.
• Lady in Red: The opulent red satin dress she wears in Last of the Time Lords.
• Mad Love: She seemed to be genuinely in love with the Master at the beginning, and it clearly wasn't mutual.
• More than Mind Control: After glimpsing the end of the universe, Lucy went a bit barmy.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Does what the Doctor wouldn't, and kills the Master.
• The Ophelia: She at one point is seen babbling about how the Master showed her The End of the World as We Know It and how it made her believe that there was no point in anything ever.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: She gives a pretty good one before stopping the Master's resurrection, although he ends up surviving and she's the one that dies.
  Lucy: Till death do us part, Harry!
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: She uses her family connections to have an antiserum for the Master's resurrection created.
• Straw Nihilist: The Doctor takes his companion to The End of the World as We Know It to make her appreciate life while it lasts. The Master does so to Break the Cutie.
  Lucy Saxon: Dying. Everything dying. The whole of creation was falling apart and I thought there's no point. No point to anything. Not ever.
• Taking You with Me: Sabotages the Master's attempt at resurrection and causes an explosion that kills her in the process.
• Took a Level in Badass: The "not too bright" Lucy gets a lot smarter once she's free of her husband's influence, nearly foiling his plan to come back from the dead.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Averted. "The End of Time" reveals that for her part in the Master's crimes she was a given a trial in secret with no jury, and then locked up in prison.

Max Capricorn

Max Capricorn (Tenth Doctor)

Played by: George Costigan (2007)

"Time for me to retire."

The former CEO of Max Capricorn Cruiseliners, the premier luxury starship cruise service on the planet Sto. Betrayed by his board of directors, Capricorn stages an elaborate revenge plot in which he sabotages his company's prized vessel, a spacefaring replica of the RMS Titanic, to make it crash into the Earth, with the hope that the resulting scandal would incriminate the board and cause their shares to plummet in value. His head crudely stitched to a cubic cyborg vehicle, Capricorn is perfectly willing to sacrifice the crew and passengers of the ship as well as all six billion humans on Earth for the sake of his convoluted retirement plan.

---

• Berserk Button: The Doctor gets under his skin by calling him a loser.
  "I never lose."
• Catchphrase: "And I should know because... my name is Max!", Twinkle Smile.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: His motivation for crashing another Titanic and potentially wiping out all life on Earth? To settle a petty squabble against his board of directors.
• Cyborg: An amusing version, as he's revealed to be little more than a head stitched to a crude rectangular vehicle. However, Sto's descriminative policies against cyborgs, the same that caused Bannakaffalatta to hide his cyborg modifications, lead to Capricorn's expulsion from his own company.
• Dirty Old Man: He plans to retire to a planet where the ladies are supposedly very fond of... metal.
• Evil Is Hammy: Another supremely hammy Christmas villain.
• Human Aliens: Like all the unnamed humanoids from Sto (except Bannakaffalatta), Max looks and acts completely human, though his cyborg body gives him a unique shape.
• Lack of Empathy: He's utterly unphased by the enormous collateral damage his plan will cause, on top of the many innocent lives he already has taken. His only reaction to the Doctor chewing him out for it is to suck his lips in like a mischievous child.
• Twinkle Smile: His golden tooth twinkles in the advert reels shown on monitors across the Titanic. The Doctor is surprised that it even happens when they meet in person.

Matron Cofelia / Miss Foster

Matron Cofelia (Tenth Doctor)

Played by: Sarah Lancashire (2008)

"I'm advancing the birth plan. We're going into premature labour."

A nanny of the Five-Straighten Classabindi Nursery Fleet (Intergalactic Class) who arrives on Earth under the guise of Miss Foster, CEO of pharmaceutical company Adipose Industries. Designing a drug that can make a person lose weight at an extraordinary rate, she secretly plans to create legions of Adipose babies on behalf of the Adiposian First Family, her unseen alien clients.

---

• Babysitter from Hell: On an intergalactic scale!
• Didn't Think This Through: She would've gotten away with everything if she hadn't asked to come with the Adipose babies, who she seems to have grown attached to. She doesn't stop to think that the First Family wouldn't need a nanny anymore now that they have their children.
• Disney Villain Death: While levitating her and the Adipose babies up to their mother ship, the Adiposian First Family decide to terminate their contract with her upon realising that her illegal activities have made her a liability.
• Evil Plan: An especially bizarre one, as she plans to force the human race to be surrogate parents to a new generation of Adipose toddlers on behalf of the Adiposian race.
• Exact Words: She claims in her advertising campaign that her pills will make "the fat just walk away". That banal slogan proves to be horrifyingly accurate.
• Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: After the levitation beam vanishes, she cartoonishly stalls in midair for a few seconds before looking down and falling to her death.
• Human Aliens: She's obviously not human but is indistinguishable from one.
• Lack of Empathy: She knows fullwell that the Adipose birthing process can be lethal to humans, but deceives the population with promises that her pills will help them lose weight.
• Mouth of Sauron: Her employers, the Adiposian First Family, go unseen. She acts as the nanny to their children in the mysterious absence of their original breeding planet.
• The Stoic: She's unflappable in the face of the Doctor's threats, though she does take joy in seeing the Adipose babies flying off to the mother ship.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: She possesses her own sonic probe, the Sonic Pen, to counter the Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver.

Eleventh Doctor era debut

Prisoner Zero

Prisoner Zero (Eleventh Doctor)

Played by: William Wilde (voice), Olivia Colman, Caitlin Blackwood, Marcello Magni, Eden Monteath, Merin Monteath and Matt Smith (2010)

"Poor Amy Pond. Still dreaming about her magical Doctor."

An alien shapeshifter imprisoned by the Atraxi. The Eleventh Doctor and Amy had to find it when it escaped to Earth.

---

• Ambiguous Situation: How Prisoner Zero knows about the Silence and the Pandorica is unclear, especially given it had remained in hiding for years.
• Creepy Child: Takes the form of two girls and their mother and then of the young Amelia Pond.
• Creepy Monotone: Never raises its voice.
• Evil Gloating: Takes great glee in taunting the Doctor over his lack of knowledge.
• Flat Character: Lampshaded in Steven Moffat's own self-adapted novelisation of "The Day of the Doctor", in which the Doctor briefly muses on Prisoner Zero's mysterious plans, and how they were so mysterious that nobody ever found out what they were.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: It just so happens to take over Amy's mind when it needs a quick escape; she is the only person who knows what Prisoner Zero actually looks like and Zero can only take the form of what someone is thinking about. So, the Doctor makes Amy think about its true form.
• Involuntary Shapeshifting: It can take the form of whatever a dormant mind is dreaming. However, it has no control over that.
• Morphic Resonance: Its big sharp teeth.
• Noodle Incident: We never do learn what it did to get sent to prison, though its escape causes the Atraxi to try to destroy a planet in response.
• Psychic Link: How it is able to use dormant minds to take different forms.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gives the Doctor one about how he has affected Amy's life.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: Takes on the form of a seven-year-old Amy while taunting the Doctor.
• Starter Villain: For the Eleventh Doctor.
• Villainous Breakdown: Is reduced to yelling "no!" repeatedly after realizing the Doctor found a way to stop it.

Solomon the Trader

Solomon the Trader (Eleventh Doctor)

Played by: David Bradley (2012)

A pirate who hijacked a Silurian ark and killed the entire crew in an attempt to claim its cargo, dinosaurs, for himself.

---

• Ambiguously Human: The year is 2367, and his robots claim they've been on the ark for 2,000 years, since long before humanity acquired space travel. Even given that the robots aren't the most reliable source, this is a universe with a lot of Human Alien species.
• Cane Fu: Solomon uses one of his crutches, which has a sharpened edge, to subdue Nefertiti.
• Death by Irony: Solomon is all about the money, so the Doctor lets him have several very shiny, very valuable objects all to himself. The missiles.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Solomon assumes the Doctor is only interested in the dinosaurs for their monetary value; the Doctor berates him for assuming everyone lives by the same values as him.
• Evil Cripple: Solomon had a run-in with a raptor when he invaded the ship, and it ate a lot of his leg.
• Evil Old Folks: Solomon, played by the inimitable David Bradley, has been doing this sort of vile act for a long time.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: Solomon is not nice to Nefi, and she gets very, very genuinely scared. His implied unsavoury intentions call to mind Sharaz Jek (only without Jek's Jerkass Woobie qualities).
• Karmic Death: Solomon really, REALLY deserved being blown up in that ship by missiles. This whole affair was his fault to begin with.
• Kick the Dog: Solomon has several; he orders one of his robots to injure Brian in order to force the Doctor to heal him, he ejected the Ark's crew from the airlock, and, when he decides he wants to sell her, he has the triceratops killed in an attempt to make the Doctor hand Nefertiti over.
• Knight of Cerebus: When he shows up, it starts getting much more serious, as most scenes with him involve showing off what a Jerkass he is with his various Kick the Dog moments.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. Solomon shares his name with an important character from "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks", except that guy was an ally of the Doctor.
• Space Pirates: Solomon is the uncomical, seriously nasty kind. He put out a distress signal so he could board this ship and then killed everyone for their cargo.
• Villains Want Mercy: After committing genocide, threatening to kill everyone unless Nefi becomes his slave and subtly alluding that he intends to rape her, Solomon still expects the Doctor to rescue him. The Doctor refuses.

The Gunslinger

Kahler-Tek (Eleventh Doctor)

Played by: Andrew Brooke (2012)

A cyborg Kahler Super-Soldier who went rogue after remembering who he was, seeking revenge against the scientists who turned him into a monster.

---

• Anti-Villain: The Gunslinger isn't evil; he just wants revenge on the people who made him a monster. He specifically stays out of the margins of Mercy so that no innocent civilians get caught in the crossfire.
• Arm Cannon: He has a rather impressive one on his right arm as part of his cyborg modifications.
• The Atoner: The Gunslinger decides to become Mercy's protector once his purpose is fulfilled.
• Bait-and-Switch: The episode also opens with a monologue about a "guardian angel who fell from the stars". It turns out to be the Gunslinger, not the Doctor.
• Cyborg: The Gunslinger looks half-man and half-machine, with an Arm Cannon and a robotic Eyepatch of Power balanced out by a more human hand and eye.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Gunslinger, to the people of Mercy.
• Evil Sounds Deep: The Gunslinger has a deep computerized voice and starts off as the antagonist. This is then subverted, as he isn't actually evil.
• The Fettered: The first hint of the Gunslinger's real personality is his refusal to endanger an innocent person. He still sticks to this — or, at least, Wouldn't Hurt a Child — after Isaac takes the shot he meant for Jex.
• Flash Step: The Gunslinger is equipped with a short-range teleporter. He uses it to quickly cover distance without breaking his slow, menacing stride.
• Implacable Man: Nothing will stop him from hunting Jex.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: The Gunslinger spends four generations as sheriff of Mercy and hasn't aged a day. This implies he'll protect it forever. It's also awesome in regards to his religion. Imagine how many souls he'd have to carry to reach the mountain top.
• Mirror Character: To the Doctor; another ordinary man who became a monster in order to save a world ravaged by war.
• Never Hurt an Innocent: His only interest is revenge against specific people who wronged him, and he takes steps to prevent anyone else getting caught in the crossfire.
• No Place for Me There: The Gunslinger believes he has no place in the world once his war is over. The Doctor convinces him otherwise.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: "Make peace with your gods."
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: It's mentioned that he hunted down and murdered the other scientists who experimented on him — Jex is the last.
• Shout-Out: The Gunslinger is a cross between the Terminator and Yul Brynner's Gunslinger from Westworld. His Stat-O-Vision even says "TERMINATE". By the end, he has become more like RoboCop once he decides to be Mercy's protector. The writers also intentionally included some similarities to Frankenstein's Monster.
• Was Once a Man: It's shown that he underwent cyborgification in the prequel.
• Weird West: A cyborg alien killing machine posing as a ruthless gunslinger in the Old West.
• What Have I Become?: Implied to be the reason why the Gunslinger went rogue, after battle-damage led him to remember who he was and what Jex and the other scientists had done to him.

Kahler-Jex

Kahler-Jex (Eleventh Doctor)

Played by: Adrian Scarborough (2012)

A member of the Kahler race who took up residence in the Old West town of Mercy, where he acts as a kindly physician and provider of the town's many anachronistic technological utilities. However, Jex hides a very dark secret that ties him to the town's mysterious alien tormentor, the Gunslinger.

---

• The American Dream: Despite being a foreigner (from outer space) with a dodgy past, he was taken in by the marshal of Mercy and given a fresh start as a well-loved town doctor.
• Anti-Villain: While the Doctor certainly considers him worse than the Gunslinger, it's specifically pointed out that Jex isn't evil, either. He's a nuanced individual with both good and bad qualities, though he is overall a reasonable, well-intentioned man.
• The Atoner: Jex certainly sees himself as this, as he believes that helping the people of Mercy will absolve him of his past sins. However, as the Doctor points out, Jex's chosen "punishment" barely even counts as one considering the magnitude of his crimes and he shouldn't have the freedom to choose how or when his debt is paid. This speaks to Jex's rather short-sighted view of how atonement really works.
• Be All My Sins Remembered: In Kahler culture, it is believed that in order to pass onto the afterlife, the recently deceased have to carry the souls of everyone they've wronged in their lifetime. Because Jex has hurt and killed countless people, he fears that his penitent journey would be especially arduous.
• The Dead Have Names: Jex claims to remember the names of every Kahler he experimented on, and he can still hear their screams every time he closes his eyes. Kahler-Tek was the only survivor.
• Driven to Suicide: He ultimately decides to blow himself up in his ship to prevent any further bloodshed, as the Gunslinger was never going to stop pursuing him and hurting the people he cared about.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: He gives the townsfolk easy access to electricity and a cure for cholera.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: It's specifically pointed out in the episode that Jex doesn't neatly fit into one category. He is neither a Mad Scientist war criminal nor an innocent local physician. Jex assumes that the Doctor's Black-and-White Morality makes him incapable of understanding this basic level of nuance, but the Doctor understands Jex perfectly. After all, the two are very much alike: two aliens who committed atrocities in the name of the greater good and chose exile as their punishments.
• Human Aliens: Aside from a distinctive tattoo-like face marking that he shares with Kahler-Tek and every other member of the Kahler race, Jex easily passes for a human.
• I Did What I Had to Do: He justifies his past crimes in much the same way as the Doctor: he sacrificed many lives to save millions more.
• Mad Scientist: Averted. Jex may have committed some pretty terrible experiments on his own kind, but he's not the callous monster he expects the Doctor to view him as.
• Mirror Character: More so than the Gunslinger, he fits the bill for the Doctor. The Doctor has an unusually hateful and aggressive reaction to Jex, perhaps disproportionate considering the kinds of irredeemable monsters he faces on a near-daily basis, because Jex mirrors him to such an uncomfortably close extent. They are both men of science who were forced to commit unspeakable atrocities as part of a war effort on their home planets, and they both had to deal with immense survivor's guilt upon narrowly escaping with their lives. They both attempt to hide the truth of their past crimes by performing good deeds for the "little people". The only real difference is that whereas the Doctor never stops running in order to save both himself and the people he cares about, Jex decided to stay in one place and inadvertently risked the lives of the townsfolk by drawing the Gunslinger to their doorstep.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: His storyline bears some resemblance to real life Nazi fugitives who escaped justice at the end of World War II and proceeded to live ordinary lives in other countries, with his horrific experimentation on his own kind making those comparisons even more obvious. The Doctor also indirectly compares Jex's crimes to those of the Daleks during an impassioned rant.
• Nothing Is Scarier: When the Doctor snoops around Jex's ship and discovers all of his personal files, we hear some agonised screams while only seeing the Doctor's subtly horrified reaction to the video footage. The Doctor's subsequent actions against Jex's person make it clear that whatever Jex did was bad.
• Offstage Villainy: While we are frequently told that Jex's war crimes and experiments were depraved and monstrous even by Doctor Who villain standards, we only see the results of them in the form of the Gunslinger. As such, the Doctor's explicit comparisons to the Master and the Daleks may count as an example of Take Our Word for It.
• One-Steve Limit: Invoked. Among the townsfolk, he prefers to simply be called "the Doctor". To prevent confusion, his real name has to be used when the Definitive Article himself arrives.
• This Is Unforgivable!: When the Doctor discovers the extent of Jex's war crimes, he is beyond furious and seriously considers shooting Jex dead on the spot. Even after being talked down by Amy, the Doctor still advocates leaving him to the mercies of the Gunslinger.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: During the war on the Kahler's home planet, Jex justified his experiments as necessary to hasten the end of the conflict.

Mrs. Gillyflower

Winifred Gillyflower (Eleventh Doctor)

Played by: Diana Rigg (2013)

A nutty old woman who runs Sweetville, a factory town in Victorian Yorkshire which only invites the best and brightest prospective employees for permanent residence, alongside her unseen benefactor, Mr. Sweet. She is connected to a slew of murder victims strewn across the city whose bodies are bleached bright red.

---

• Abusive Parents: Winifred is monstrously cruel to her daughter Ada, who went her whole life believing that her father blinded her and served her mother loyally in spite of all the emotional abuse she gets from her. Of course, Winifred was also responsible for destroying Ada's eyesight while experimenting on her with Mr. Sweet's venom, which proves to be the last straw that breaks Ada's filial loyalty.
• Adam and Eve Plot: She keeps her chosen survivors in pairs so that they may reproduce after the apocalypse.
• Ax-Crazy: Even the Doctor considers her a lost cause, since any attempt to reason with her proves futile. By the end of the story, she's frantically shooting a loaded gun at the protagonists and even threatening her own daughter with it.
• The Beautiful Elite: Bordering on Master Race. She only allows the most perfect and pure specimens who survive the Red Leech venom's freezing process entry to Sweetville. Clara makes the cut and survives the process. Gillyflower also considers Jenny and the Doctor, though the latter gets rejected due to his Time Lord biology making him react badly to the venom. Gillyflower's enforcers are all similarly pristine, causing the Doctor to nickname them "attack of the supermodels".
• Card-Carrying Villain: She's evil and she knows it. When the Doctor says how devastating Mr. Sweet's poison could be in the wrong hands, she proceeds to grin and open her palms out to him...
  Mrs. Gillyflower: You know what these are?... The wrong hands!
• The End Is Nigh: She preaches about the coming armageddon like a Sinister Minister, but she is secretly engineering said apocalypse.
• Evil Is Hammy: An elderly Diana Rigg playing a cackling Doctor Who supervillain. It's a sight to behold.
• Evil Laugh: Lets out a belter when she launches her rocket from the secondary firing mechanism.
• Evil Old Folks: One of the Doctor's most decrepit enemies, yet her deeds are no less diabolical.
• Evil Plan: She plots to unleash Mr. Sweet's deadly toxin into the upper atmosphere with a giant rocket, potentially wiping out all humanity, while allowing her perfect human specimens to thrive in the aftermath.
• Eye Scream: She inflicted horrific scars around Ada's eyes, blinding her.
• It's All About Me: Gillyflower experiments on her own daughter, blinding her in the process, all to find an antitoxin that would allow herself to survive the poison outbreak. She bears zero remorse in admitting it when the truth eventually comes out.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Her obsession with eugenic perfection leads to her dismissing her own daughter as an impure specimen, unworthy to live in her new era.
• Never Mess with Granny: You might be surprised that Gillyflower's packing heat!
• People Jars: Sweetville isn't a match factory, it's a giant preservatory for Gillyflower's abductees, who are literally suspended in large glass jars as protection from the coming apocalypse.
• The Symbiote: She has a symbiotic relationship with Mr. Sweet, a gross little parasitic organism from the Jurassic period. He suckles on her chest while she mines his lethal poison for use in her apocalyptic master plan.
• Villainous Breakdown: She has an almighty one when she realises that Jenny and Vastra removed the poison payload from the rocket.
  Mrs. Gillyflower: Very well. If I can't take the world with me... you will have to do. DIE, YOU FREAKS! DIE! DIE!

Twelfth Doctor era debut

Half-Face Man

Half-Face Man (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Peter Ferdinando (2014)

"We will reach the promised land."

The main antagonist of "Deep Breath", the Half-Face Man is a robotic drone using human skin and organs to rebuild himself and his race. His ship, the SS Marie Antoinette, crashed into Earth millions of years ago, leaving him and his crew stranded on the planet. His business, Mancini's Family Restaurant, is a front for his organ harvesting, and his ultimate goal is to make it to The Promised Land.

Strangely enough for such an important character, he isn't even named in the episode, but the name "Half-Face Man" is used for him in the credits and behind-the-scenes video.

---

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: As with the S.S. Madame de Pompadour droids, the Half-Face Man has taken a cannibalistic approach to repairing his ship but over his millions of years of existence he has become considerably more ambitious and desperate to embrace humanity.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • A striking example for the show is the purposefully ambiguous fate of the Half-Face Man: did he kill himself voluntarily or was he pushed by the Doctor? A reader poll was even conducted by Doctor Who Magazine which asked this question and the response was a near halfway split, with viewers who believed he committed suicide barely edging out with 53% of the votes. The fact that the question has to be asked at all is a huge part of the Twelfth Doctor's character arc.
  • He made it to Missy's "Heaven", but was he then converted into a Cyberman afterwards like most other dead souls uploaded to the Nethersphere despite being a robot already? Steven Moffat theorises that Missy likely "threw him away" once she realised his incompatibility.
• Back from the Dead: Despite falling to his death, he wakes up at the end of the episode to meet Missy in a garden that she tells him is The Promised Land. Actually averted, given The Reveal about Missy and the Promised Land.
• Badass Boast: He attempts to intimidate the Doctor by gloating about how he murdered a Tyrannosaurus rex for an extremely petty reason.
  Half-Face Man: I burned an ancient, beautiful creature for just one inch of optic nerve. What do you think you can accomplish, little man?
• Call-Back: His ship is the sister ship of the SS Madame de Pompadour from "The Girl in the Fireplace", and he's a variant of the clockwork robots from that episode.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: What he threatens to inflict on Clara. Thankfully, the Doctor stops him.
• Cyborg: Using human flesh and organs to become more humanoid.
• Determinator: 65 million years after his ship's crash on Earth and he's still determined to repair it at any cost.
• Disney Villain Death: He falls to his death out of the escape pod, but he has apparently ascended to his coveted 'Promised Land' at the end.
• Driven to Suicide: Possibly. He falls to his death, but whether he jumped or was pushed is left ambiguous.
• Emergent Human: The Half-Face Man harvests human body parts and grafts them onto himself so that he can become human enough to make it to The Promised Land. As a result, he is the only one of his kind to express emotion and sentiment, albeit in a very limited and mechanical way. The Doctor points out how he's far more human than machine at this point.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: He's a man (by a lenient definition) with half of a face.
• Evil Is Petty: While he killed the dinosaur for a practical purpose, the fact that he gloats about only doing so to procure a tiny shred of optic nerve from its corpse hints that he has picked up some petty sadism during his slow embrace of humanity. The T. rex died scared, confused, alone and in pain, having only been transported to Victorian London because of the Doctor's mistake.
• Evil Sounds Deep: He has an extremely deep, rumbling voice for a mostly monotone machine.
• Eye Awaken: At the end of the episode, after his supposed death.
• Face Stealer: Just about any organic part is appreciated, actually.
• Facial Horror: The left side of his face is missing, leaving the metal framework and a suspended eye completely visible.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: Has a blowtorch built into his arm.
• Foil: The thematic parallels between the Half-Face Man and the Twelfth Doctor are palpable. They are usually positioned opposite to each other in various shots throughout the episode to reinforce this.
  • Both are ancient, nigh-immortal beings that have worn many faces and struggle to grapple with their identities as a result, especially in regards to reconciling their humanity and alien/robotic natures. While the Doctor tries to "patch the holes" in his new persona after his regenerative trauma by contemplating who he truly is, the Half-Face Man does so more literally. The Doctor would later embrace his status as a "half" thing by claiming to be the Hybrid.
  • Madame Vastra speculates that the Doctor's regeneration into an older body is an attempt to reveal his true self, whereas his previous young and handsome bodies were merely a façade he wore to feel accepted by the world. The Half-Face Man, in turn, tries to conceal his robotic nature in public, but has a gaping hole in the side of his head that exposes the clockwork mechanisms within.
  • After many years of reinventing themselves, they no longer have anything of their "original" selves left and struggle to find reasons to keep going. Twelve finds motivation in protecting humanity, but he has several existential crises throughout his tenure and, like the Half-Face Man, really doesn't want to keep going indefinitely.
  • As they note to each other, they both have "basic programming" that they shouldn't go against (self-destruction for the Half-Face Man, murder for the Doctor) but one ultimately goes against it depending on your interpretation of the scene.
  • The Half-Face Man is obsessed with reaching the Promised Land as a reward for his eons of dedication. The allure of a reward has crossed the Doctor's mind many times, but by the time of the episode he has given up any expectation of getting one.
  • Lastly, whenever the Half-Face Man has to use his blowtorch weapon, he severs his face and places it on his jacket's lapel, a distortion of the First Doctor's iconic character tic of clutching his lapels. The Twelfth Doctor is technically the "first" of his new regeneration cycle and also frequently mimics the behaviours of his own past incarnations during his journey of self-discovery.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: He claims that self-destruction goes against his basic programming, but he may have been lying.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: He winds up like this, on Big Ben no less.
• Keystone Army: He is the "control node" of all the Marie Antoinette droids. When he dies, they shut down.
• Kill It with Fire: His calling card is incinerating his victims after he's taken what he's needed. Most impressively (and horrifically), he does it to a time-displaced T. rex just to procure a tiny piece of its optic nerve.
• Literal-Minded: When a random bystander says that his eyes are his greatest gift, the Half-Face Man takes it as a charitable offering.
• Mix-and-Match Man: He is a Frankenstein-esque patchwork of both human organs and mechanical parts that have been constantly degraded and replaced over millions of years. The Doctor notices that his hands don't match and that he has some Ancient Roman metalwork still in his head.
• No Name Given: His nickname is only given in the credits and behind-the-scenes content. He may not even have a true name or designation, and if he does he probably can't remember it.
• Oh, Crap!: He has one when he realises that either he or the Doctor are lying about their "basic programming". Considering that the Doctor already made his intentions to protect humanity clear and has a body count in the millions, it was likely the first time the Half-Face Man ever experienced fear.
• The Promised Land: His ultimate goal for his race. He gets there in the end. Supposedly.
• Starter Villain: The first villain of the Twelfth Doctor's era. He was purposefully created to be a very "simple" baddie for the newly regenerated Doctor to face, but Moffat purposefully gave the droid leader many rich parallels to the Doctor to keep him interesting.
• Suddenly Shouting: His voice has a characteristic monotonous quality to it, but he furiously shouts at Clara during her interrogation, which is as jarring as it is terrifying.
• Theseus' Ship Paradox: Alongside the rest of the Marie Antoinette's crew, the Half-Face Man has constantly replaced his degrading clockwork parts with new ones for millions of years until the original parts have been outstripped countless times over. The Doctor even references this conundrum while trying to get through to him.
• Time Abyss: It's indicated that the Marie Antoinette was flung into the past and crash-landed on Earth before the K-T extinction event, over 65 million years ago, making the Half-Face Man truly ancient. Of course, the original command node droid ceased to exist eons ago. The Half-Face Man we see in the episode is merely the result of the Theseus' Ship Paradox mentioned above; after years of replacing every part of himself, nothing of his original self remains.
• Uncanny Valley: Invoked, as he's a very ancient machine trying — and very badly failing — to be human. His movements are very mechanical and stilted, and he rarely emotes with either his face or voice.
• Villain of the Week: Of "Deep Breath".
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Were it not for his unwavering determination to reach the Promised Land, he would likely have given up trying to repair his ship centuries ago.

Skovox Blitzer

The Skovox Blitzer (Twelfth Doctor)

Voiced by: Jimmy Vee (2014)

An alien battle robot that wound up in London, in the vicinity of Coal Hill School, with the potential to kill everyone on Earth.

---

• Calling Your Attacks: The Skovox Blitzer calls out everything it does, not just its attacks.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: Its origin, motivation and reason for being on Earth are never given. It's justified as the Blitzer's presence in the plot is secondary to the Love Triangle between the Doctor, Clara and Danny.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: For a supposedly advanced killing machine, Skovox takes the phrase "spray n' pray" to a great extreme. The only person he manages to shoot is a stationary police officer.
• Informed Ability: The Skovox Blitzer is described as having enough firepower to destroy a planet. In practice, it can't even hit Clara.
• Killer Robot: Can't go wrong with one, can ya?

• Thrown Out the Airlock: The Doctor pitches the deactivated Skovox out the TARDIS doors and into space.

Gus

Gus (Twelfth Doctor)

Voiced by: John Sessions (2014)

"Isn't this exciting?"

Gus is the AI aboard the Orient Express in Space, and was programmed to collect data on the Foretold.

---

• Affably Evil: Always polite and cheerful, even as he sucks the air out of the Orient Express to asphyxiate everyone aboard.
• Expy: He's quite similar to Ash from Alien. He has an ulterior motive unknown to the rest of the crew that involves harnessing the power of a dangerous being to be used as a weapon, the difference being that Gus actually succeeds in his mission.
• High-Class Glass: See the picture. His digital avatar has a monocle.
• Karma Houdini: Gus' creator goes unseen and unpunished, a rarity amongst Who villains (for a time it seemed like he could become an Arc Villain, but after a couple of seasons and a new showrunner that's not the case any longer). This isn't the case with Gus himself, who blows himself up in order to ensure his creator's status as one.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Gus kills a whole train car full of people to get the Doctor to cooperate. And when the Doctor tries to track the signal back to the source, it just blows up the whole train.
• The Team: He (or his unseen creator) lures a perfect research crew of assorted historians, scientists and mythology specialists, and of course the Doctor^note of intestinal parasites, onto a luxururious Orient Express space cruise, only to reveal that the space-train is actually a large laboratory. Gus blackmails them all into working together to find a way to stop the Foretold. Ironically, Captain Quell and Chief Engineer Perkins prove to be much more useful in solving the mystery than the scientists.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Pulls this when the Doctor solves the mystery of the Foretold.

The Foretold

The Foretold (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Jamie Hill (2014)

The Foretold is a creature of ancient legend; those who see it are marked for death, and those who see it have only 66 seconds left to live. It always appears in the vicinity of an ancient scroll, a scroll left on the Orient Express where the Doctor and Clara decided to board. The monster is impossible to kill, impossible to run away from and it is impossible to say who is the next victim. The truth of it turns out to be far more bizarre; it's actually a soldier who has been alive for a while, and the malfunctioning technology it's attached to is keeping it alive and forcing it to fight for a war that's been over for several millennia.

---

• Absurdly Dedicated Worker: It's obliged to keep killing those it sees as enemies until whatever mission it was programmed with is completed, and looks visibly relieved when the Doctor figures out how to disable it.
• Anti-Villain: It's really just a soldier that doesn't know it's fighting a war that has been over for centuries.
• Cyborg: The Doctor deduced that it's being kept alive by malfunctioning medical implants.
• The Dreaded: It's basically death personified.
• Foil: The sole surviving soldier of a forgotten war, forced to stay alive and keep fighting long after the conflict's conclusion thousands of years ago. Parallels can be drawn to the Doctor himself, and his arc throughout Series 8 dealing with his resentment toward other soldiers. Notably, the Doctor acts quite respectful towards the Foretold after successfully deducing its true identity.
• Implacable Man: The creature is nigh impossible to kill, much less fight against. It's Immune to Bullets, any sort of weapon thrown at it just passes right through it, and it's impossible to run away from. The Foretold will chase after you no matter what you do and it will kill you.
• Intangible Man: Weapons can't touch it.
• Invisible to Normals: Only shows up for people it has marked for death.
• Just Following Orders: The Foretold is a soldier just doing what it's told.
• Life Drinker: How it kills its victims. It sucks all their bodily energy, such as those that their cells produce, and leaves them completely lifeless.
• Mummy: Being chased down by an indestructible Super-Soldier is bad enough; it's even worse when it looks like a rotting, wheezing corpse wrapped in bandages.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: An alien soldier from an ancient civilisation, kept alive by Cyborg technology, it looks like a Mummy, and it kills by leeching energy from its victim's body like a vampire.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: It's merely a soldier doing its duty.
• Our Monsters Are Different: For one thing, it's a millennia-old soldier being kept alive by malfunctioning tech.
• Super-Soldier: Described as such by the Doctor. The Foretold is indestructible, Immune to Bullets, and can follow its victim no matter where they go. Also there's the fact that it's a soldier that fought in a war that ended long ago.
• Tragic Villain: The Doctor implies this, given that he's forced to remain alive for centuries after the war ended.
• Touch of Death: Its modus operandi.
• Villain Teleportation: Its victim can run as much as they like, the Foretold will always appear next to them and kill them.
• Zombie Gait: Slowly shambles towards its victim, which makes it all the more scary.

Seb

Seb (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Chris Addison (2014)

"iPads? We have Steve Jobs!"

Seb is Missy's right-hand man, often meeting new deceased people when she's too busy. He's known to be sarcastic, affable and enjoys cracking jokes; often at inopportune times. He greets the officer from "The Caretaker" and Danny Pink after they both die and "helps" them get acquainted to the "Afterlife", aka the Nethersphere.

---

• Affably Evil: He does help Missy create her Cybermen army and even seems to enjoy what he does, but he's still polite, charitable and upbeat. He helps the deceased, offers Danny a coffee and when he gives Danny his iPad to delete his emotions and thus turn him into a Cyberman he doesn't pressure or threaten him, instead giving him a choice. He even does it in a way that makes it seem like a favour. Heck, even Chris Addison himself has called him "polite and charming". It seems that Missy created him to be affable to lull deceased people into a false sense of security so that they would delete their emotions.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Averted, as he does exactly what he's programmed to do and doesn't revolt against his master. But he's still working for a bad guy.
• Ambiguously Evil: It could be argued that he's not actually a bad guy as he was created with "evil" intentions, kind of like how a computer virus isn't evil, only its programmer.
• Bearer of Bad News: You suddenly wake up at a desk in a blank room with this guy smiling warmly back at you. Your last memory is some deadly scenario you can't remember escaping from. Then Seb has to explain that, indeed, you didn't escape.
• Deadpan Snarker: His quote above? That's just one of many of his sarcastic quips, jokes and affable demeanour.
• I Can See My House from Here: Says this when Danny looks out his office window and sees the inside of the Nethersphere. Then he apologizes since it probably wasn't helping.
• Squee: What ultimately gets him killed by Missy, since he was already annoying her and that was just the final straw.

Fisher King

Fisher King (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Neil Fingleton (2015)

Voiced by: Peter Serafinowicz (speaking voice); Corey Taylor (roar) (2015)

The Fisher King is a brutal alien warlord that conquered the planet Tivoli until he was overthrown. He's the mastermind behind the ghosts in "Under the Lake"/"Before the Flood".

---

• Arc Villain: Of "Under the Lake" and "Before the Flood".
• Dead All Along: Due to the Timey-Wimey Ball nature of his two-part episode, the Doctor and Clara arrive on Earth in 2119 to be attacked by his ghostly minions, which prompts the Doctor to go back to 1980 and fight and kill him in that timeline, then hide in the Fisher King's own coffin when he is buried at sea and come back in 2119 the long way; the ghosts were accidentally activated by the humans who found said coffin but the Fisher King was never truly a threat because he had been killed long ago... From a Certain Point of View.
• Defiant to the End: When the Fisher King sees the incoming flood that's about to crush him, he stands and roars at it until it crushes him.
• Evil Is Bigger: He's an imposing alien warlord that stands at about 8 feet tall.
• Evil Plan: The Fisher King's plan was to use the hijacked souls of the dead to transmit a message to his people so they would come and invade Earth.
• Faking the Dead: It was believed that he had been killed by the Arcateenians when they liberated Tivoli from his tyrannical rule. However when his body was transported to Earth to be buried, it turns out he was still alive and was using the opportunity to set another invasion plot in motion.
• Fisher King: It's in the name. He intended to summon his armada so they would drain the planet of its oceans and subjugate humanity. According to this behind-the-scenes featurette, the Fisher King originally hails from an arid, desert-like place, which helps explain the meaning behind his name.
• Necromancer: He possesses technology to restore the souls of the recently deceased as ghosts and enslave them to his will.
• Spikes of Villainy: His armour and body have several curved spikes on them.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: His race may not be Time Lords, but they have the technology to manipulate souls, something even the Doctor thought was impossible.

Bonnie the Zygon

Bonnie the Zygon (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Jenna Coleman and Ingrid Oliver (2015)

"It's not fair!"

A radical Zygon who, unhappy with the treaty between Zygons and UNIT, seeks to start a war so that Zygons will have the "right" to exist as "themselves". As the commander of the rebels she infiltrates and undermines UNIT by kidnapping Clara and assuming her appearance.

---

• Arc Villain: Of "The Zygon Invasion"/"The Zygon Inversion".
• The Atoner: She becomes the new second Osgood to make amends for disrupting the peace between humans and Zygons.
• Didn't Think This Through: As Twelve points out, she didn't put a lot of thought into her "revolution".
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: She has a lot of analogies in her characterisation to ISIS.
• Easily Forgiven: Twelve forgives her for all the mayhem she causes. Having been responsible for far, far worse atrocities as the War Doctor in the Last Great Time War, he understands her way of thinking. (Not for nothing do the Osgood Boxes resemble the Moment.) This is an invoked trope, as he deliberately forgave her to break the cycle of vengeance.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Yes, the leader of a Zygon uprising is named... Bonnie!
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Is quick to anger when something does not go her way.
• Heel–Face Turn: At the end, though she takes a lot of convincing from Twelve to get there.
• Hypocrite: She despises humans for making Zygons hide their true form, but she spends her entire arc disguised as Clara even in the presence of other Zygons. Not to mention, she has a human name!
• I Did What I Had to Do: Claims this, though the Doctor isn't taking it.
• It's All About Me: She says at one point that all Zygons who do not share her views should not be allowed to have that option.
• I've Come Too Far: She believes she's come too far to repent — until Twelve convinces her otherwise.
• Karma Houdini: Despite being responsible for the deaths of a lot of Zygons and UNIT personnel, she receives no punishment.
• Living Lie Detector: The mental link with Clara syncs their heartbeats which in turn allows her to know when Clara is lying to her.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Twelve calls her a tantrum-throwing child who doesn't know what she wants; indeed, she throws a lot of actual tantrums when things don't go her way in "The Zygon Inversion".
• The Reveal: It's only in the final minutes of "The Zygon Invasion" that the audience and other characters even learn of her existence, as she has been most convincingly impersonating Clara for the bulk of the episode!
• Tom the Dark Lord: The leader of the rebel Zygons who wants freedom for her species at any price has the very human name "Bonnie".
• Villainous Breakdown: She loses it when she finds out the Osgoods and later the Doctor have tricked her with regards to the Osgood Boxes.

The Veil

The Veil (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Jamie Reid-Quarrell (2015)

A cloaked and hooded figure, the Veil is a representation of the Doctor's deepest, most intimate fears. Based on a childhood memory the Doctor had of a dead Gallifreyan woman, who died on a hot day and despite being covered by a veil began to attract flies before she could be buried. This unstoppable figure hunts the Doctor relentlessly through the clockwork castle he finds himself trapped in during the events of "Heaven Sent", and it has only one purpose: to kill the Doctor. It was created by the Time Lords to scare the Doctor into revealing the truth about a creature called "the Hybrid." However, other truths can be used to stall it, like when the Doctor tells it that he ran from Gallifrey because he was scared.

---

• Anthropomorphic Personification: It has been interpreted to represent several things, but it most pressingly embodies the concept of death and the Doctor's immense grief over Clara's death. Word of God states that it is the nightmares from the Doctor's mind given physical form.
• Bedsheet Ghost: The Veil resembles one due to wearing veils, as it's based on the Doctor's memories of a veiled corpse he saw while young.
• Clockwork Creature: It turns out to be this, matching with the rest of the castle's nature.
• Critical Existence Failure: When the Doctor does the impossible by escaping the confessional dial, the Veil crumbles into a pile of cogs and gears.
• The Grim Reaper: Thematically, the Veil is Death itself.
• Hell Is That Noise: Its thumping footsteps are a constant reminder of its presence, but the sound of buzzing flies serves as a sign that it is very close.
• In the Hood: The Veil wears a dusty robe that conceals virtually its entire body, including its face — the key visible parts of it teased in the trailers are its grey, mottled, clawed hands. It bears a strong resemblance to the Grim Reaper. It's inspired by a bad memory from the Doctor's childhood of seeing a dead, veiled woman surrounded by flies, and is effectively an embodiment of his fear of death.
• Ominous Walk: The Veil constantly walks at the same pace towards the Doctor. It has a limp, meaning every step is a thump.
• Robotic Reveal: When the Doctor finally breaches the wall, the Veil is revealed to be a clockwork, falling into a pile of gears.
• The Speechless: It never says a word.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Like Death himself, it's slow, predictable and can even be paused for brief moments, but it will always catch up to its victim in the end.
• Threshold Guardian: The Veil serves as the Doctor's opponent in the Belly of the Whale. It is something he must overcome to reach the outside world.
• Time Stands Still: The Doctor confessing a sufficiently juicy secret causes it and even the flies buzzing around it to completely freeze momentarily.
• Touch of Death: If it touches you, you will die, but not immediately.
• We Have Ways of Making You Talk: The Veil is the Time Lords' personal interrogator for the Doctor, designed from his very nightmares to scare the living shit out of him until he spills the beans about the Hybrid prophecy and any other useful confessions. The Doctor is shocked at how effective it is at terrifying him, though its primary weapon is its unwavering persistence.
• Why Won't You Die?: Averted as the Veil is seemingly not sentient, simply doing what it's programmed to do. However, over several billion years, it fatally wounds the Doctor countless times only for him to summon a fresh copy of himself from the teleporter to start the cycle over again.

King Hydroflax

King Hydroflax (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Greg Davies (2015)

Suit voiced by: Nonso Anozie (2015)

A ruthless intergalactic tyrant who holds dominion over several races and planets. He has a fearsome reputation and an intimidating visage thanks to a giant suit of armour, but his actual biomass is his disembodied head, and his armour has a mind of its own. River Song seduced him into marrying her as part of a ruse to extract a precious diamond that was driven into his skull during a raid on the Halassi Vaults.

---

• Ambiguous Robots: The armour is quite clearly robotic, but the TARDIS's Real Time Envelope protocols classify it as Hydroflax's body, implying that there is organic stuff in there somehow. The TARDIS cannot take off if a person is simultaneously inside (Hydroflax's head) and outside (the armour) the console room, which prevents the possibility of a nasty and impolite Portal Cut.
• Animated Armor: His armour has a mind and voice of its own, but in contrast to Hydroflax's highly emotional head, it operates on cold, robotic logic.
• Bad Santa: In grand Christmas special tradition, Hydroflax's design bears a twisted resemblance to Santa. Except instead of a fat, jolly old man in red, it's a monstrous old tyrant's head on an oversized red Powered Armor.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Seems to be one of his favourite kinds of death threat, the other being variations of "CRUSH! KILL! DESTROY!"
• Even Evil Has Standards: Subverted. He claims that he doesn't endanger his subjects for no reason, but threatens to destroy an entire star system with the stabilised black hole in his armour, on the grounds that he's cross.
• Evil Is Hammy: Holy crap, yes. Greg Davies has a blast in the role. Even the design of his suit is hammy and extravagant, resembling something out of a Super Sentai show.
• I Am a Humanitarian: He is said to devour his defeated enemies in battle, which presumably includes the human colonists of Mendorax Dellora.
• Laughably Evil: Hydroflax himself is so ridiculous that neither the Doctor or River can take him seriously (he is played by Greg Davies, after all). When allowed to act autonomously, his armour manages to be quite a bit more menacing.
• Living MacGuffin: The precious diamond lodged in his skull.
• Losing Your Head: The reveal that Hydroflax is little more than a living, disembodied head on top of a giant robot lessens his intimidating reputation quite substantially. River and the Doctor stealing his head (and the diamond lodged within it) causes Hydroflax's armour to chase after them with a vengeance.
• Off with His Head!: In the absence of Hydroflax's head, the Powered Armor takes other people's heads as temporary replacements. Nardole and Ramone become its victims, and it threatens to do the same to the Doctor and the treacherous passengers of the Harmony and Redemption.
  • Fortunately, Nardole's head was extracted and his body rebuilt, but it's unknown what became of Ramone. He may have been freed as well, or he remained in control of the armour and continued working as a waiter at the restaurant on Darillium. A semi-official fan story submitted for the Doctor Who: Lockdown! event speculates that Ramone's body became the founding member of the Order of the Headless, rallying Hydroflax's Warrior Monks to his side.
• Powered Armor: His armour is several times larger than humans, extremely powerful, and capable of self-propelled flight.
• Tin Tyrant: Hydroflax is a quintessential Evil Overlord who flies into battle wearing a giant suit of armour.
• Unholy Matrimony: The Doctor is disturbed to find that River married a monster like him, even if it was all a ploy, especially since she is supposed to be the Doctor's (and Ramone's) wife as well. River insists she married the diamond, not Hydroflax.
• Warrior Monk: Employs a group of Warrior Monks who wield sentient laser swords and are genetically engineered to have anger issues as his personal bodyguards.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Because nobody actually arrived to perform surgery to remove the diamond from Hydroflax's head, combined with the fact that the head was being tossed around in a burlap bag for several minutes, the diamond caused irreparably fatal damage. When the armour discovers this, it declares this trope and performs a Mercy Kill on Hydroflax. It updates its mission parameters to instead take any suitable head as a host.

Lord Sutcliffe

Lord Sutcliffe (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Nicholas Burns (2017)

A wealthy noble and businessman of the Regency era who plans to use the tourist-attracting Frost Fair to feed attendants to a massive serpent located beneath the ice of the Thames to sell it's excrements as fuel.

---

• Aristocrats Are Evil: An incredibly unpleasant nobleman who embodies the absolute worst impulses of his social class.
• Blue Is Heroic: Inverted. He wears a bright blue jacket but is completely reprehensible.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Sutcliffe embodies this trope so much the only thing missing is a classic mustache twirl.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: He profits off feeding people to a serpent and has no moral qualms with doing so.
• Dead Hat Shot: His hat flies off him as he's pulled under by the serpent-fish himself.
• Hate Sink: Sutcliffe is a racist, sexist, and greedy slimeball who has people (including kids) fed to a sea monster so then he can profit off their remains. There is nothing remotely likable about him.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Despite the Doctor and Bill's original belief that Sutcliffe is an alien, he turns out to be completely human; the giant serpent in the Thames is his prisoner and not openly malicious, just an animal eating the food that comes its way.
• Karmic Death: Devoured by the creature he's been feeding people to.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The very first thing he does is start racially abusing Bill the instant he sees her.

The Landlord and The Wooden Lady

John and Eliza (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: David Suchet and Mariah Gale (2017)

While looking for student accommodation, Bill and her uni friends find a great offer for a large, luxurious property and decide to move in together. Of course, the offer is too good to be true, and the creepy Landlord appears to be responsible for the house's long history of vanishing tenants. Hidden and isolated in the tower attic of the house is the mysterious Wooden Lady, whose existence is kept secret from everyone but the Landlord.

---

• Armor-Piercing Question: The Landlord asks the Doctor if he would go to similar length to save the life of someone he loved. The Doctor has no answer, which the Landlord takes as confirmation. Of course, the Doctor had almost went to much worse lengths to save Clara only one series (and a handful of Christmas specials) prior.
  • Cut dialogue from "Knock Knock" would have made the parallels to the aforementioned events of "Hell Bent" more explicit, with the Doctor instead admitting that he would torch the universe to a cinder to save a loved one and only hope that someone would be able to stop him.
• Driven to Suicide: The Doctor helps Eliza to realise that she has been kept alive by the Landlord, but in isolating her completely from the outside world, she hasn't been allowed to truly live. The fact that her son transformed into a dangerous serial killer to preserve her life makes the situation all the more unbearable, so she embraces John one last time before allowing the Dryads to disintegrate them.
• Evil Old Folks: From the offset, the Landlord an undeniably creepy and suspicious character, and while his motivations are revealed to be sympathetic, he has become too bitter and callous to care about the consequences of his actions.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: Initially, we are led to believe that the Wooden Lady is the Landlord's daughter, but the opposite is true; Eliza is John's mother. He naturally aged into an old man while she was steadily transformed by the Dryads into an immortal wooden creature. As her memory deteriorated, he lied about his true relationship to her to keep her docile.
• Genre Refugee: The Landlord would be quite at home in a pulpy Gothic Horror short story set in a dark old mansion on a hill. People in such stories don't tend to question the weird anachronisms, but the Doctor is Genre Savvy enough to catch the Landlord out with questions about the modern world that he doesn't know the answers to.
• Load-Bearing Boss: When Eliza dies, the Dryads dissipate and the house collapses.
• Mood-Swinger: He swings from calm and polite when first interacting with the students, to sharp and authoritative when ordering Harry to stay away from the tower. More disturbingly, he regresses to a mewling, childlike personality when in the presence of his mother.
• No Name Given: Narrowly Averted, but the Landlord's given name of John is only revealed in an almost inaudible line of dialogue from Eliza that we only see in subtitles. Their surname goes unrevealed, though.
• Plant Person: Eliza has slowly transformed into a bark-skinned creature after many years of unwittingly feeding on the house's unfortunate tenants.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Deep down, the Landlord is a little boy who refused to grow up and spent his entire adult life protecting his terminally-ill mother with the help of the Dryads. When the Doctor and Bill reveal the horrible truth to Eliza and help her find peace, but John orders the Dryads to kill them both out of spite. Eliza thankfully overrides the bugs to instead disintegrate both John and herself.
• Trapped in the Past: The Landlord has distinctly old-fashioned mannerisms and seems to be completely out of touch with the modern world beyond the walls of his old house. When the Doctor playfully interrogates him, John can't name the current prime minister.

The Giant Monk

The Giant Monk (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Jamie Hill (2017)

The leader of the Monks' invasion of Earth and mind behind the machine. The Giant Monk is tasked with rewriting the history of invaded planets and provides the main link between the consenting victim and the hapless population.

---

• Arc Villain: As the Monks' leader and main villain of the Monks trilogy even though he only appears in the last episode.
• Battle in the Centre of the Mind: In order to free humanity from the Monks, the Doctor tries to hijack the signal being sent by him to rewrite history. Though he's successful at first, the Giant Monk fights back and overpowers him. Then Bill has a go at it. Though the Monk starts rewriting her memories, he's unable to rewrite a memory of her mother which Bill made up on her own. Seeing this, the Doctor has her think of nothing but that fake memory, which overpowers the Monk and frees everyone.
• Evil Old Folks: Considering that all Monks have the appearance of withered corpses, the Giant Monk looks especially decrepit and skeletal.
• Evil Wears Black: Unlike the other Monks, he is dressed in black.
• Facial Horror: While the other Monks are certainly no lookers, the Giant Monk stands out for being particularly decayed. On top of that, his exposed skull has a protruding snout similar to a horse.
• Mass Hypnosis: The main source of the brainwashing of humanity all across the world.
• Non-Action Big Bad: The Giant Monk didn't even appear in the previous two episodes, giving the effect that the Monks had no leader at all. He is immobilized in the propaganda machine and doesn't even seem to notice the Doctor's party. Even when they're directly interfering with him, the best he can seem to do is fight back mentally.
• Non-Indicative Name: He's no larger than any other Monk. His name presumably indicates his high rank.
• Ominous Multiple Screens: His throne room has many triangular screens set in its walls which show all the changed history he is broadcasting.

Queen Iraxxa

Queen Iraxxa (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Adele Lynch (2017)

The ruling matriarch over the Ice Warrior colonies hibernating beneath Mars' North Pole, she and her troops are awakened after her sentinel, "Friday", returns to the planet with a group of Victorian soldiers sent to search for her tomb with the promise of gold and riches.

---

• Anti-Villain: She only antagonises the heroes to protect her own people.
• Fold-Spindle Mutilation: Her armour, as well as those of her troops, are equipped with laser cannons that cause the victim's body to contort around itself.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Subverted: She is menacing and not above killing her enemies, but has the same sense of honour and duty as any other Ice Warrior. Moreover, she is trying to protect her people from hostile Earthlings. In the end, the message left on the surface of Mars really refers to her rather than Queen Victoria!
• Honour Before Reason: One of the reasons she is so quick to want to kill the humans is because they made one of her warriors their servant, even declaring "Ice Warriors do not serve". This is despite the fact that, as Friday points out, it was a necessary arrangement to free her, and overall he himself doesn't seem to care.
  • However, it's her honourable nature that ultimately makes her spare the commanding officer, previously disgraced for cowardice, after he offers his own life in exchange for the lives of his men.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Girl, in her case. It works both negatively and positively.
• The Smurfette Principle: She's the first female Ice Warrior ever shown on screen in fifty years. About time, huh? And what better way to commemorate the anniversary of their debut by finally reintroducing them in the form of the fairer sex?

Thirteenth Doctor era debut

Tzim-Sha

Tzim-Sha (Thirteenth Doctor)

Played by: Samuel Oatley

A hunter from a race called the Stenza, who comes to Earth hunting a specific trophy to make himself the next leader of his people.

---

• Battle Trophy: He takes a tooth from every person that he kills and implants it in his face.
• Big Bad: He ultimately serves as the main threat of the Series 11 opener and closer, as his actions, mostly his part in Grace's death, provide the overall arc.
• Dirty Coward: A Stenza seeking leadership must make the hunt with no assistance or tools. He uses both. The Doctor even calls him out on it.
• Enclosed Extraterrestrials: Downplayed. His species, the Stenza, have a naturally lower body temperature than humans, and it's implied his armour was designed to help him cope with the temperature of earth and planets with similar climates. However, unlike most examples of this trope, he can expose his face and hands without any ill effect.
• Facial Horror: His face is covered with the teeth of people he's killed.
• A God Am I: After millennia of pretending to be the Ux's "Creator", the power at his disposal caused him to believe he really was a god, at least functionally.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Doctor tricks him into absorbing the DNA bombs he'd had his data coil implant in the Doctor and her friends. The data coil he was using to cheat on his ritual hunt. It's likely that had he not used the coil, he wouldn't have been caught at all.
• An Ice Person: The Stenza are a low-temperature species, and he can freeze humans to death with his touch.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Those he takes alive he puts in stasis pods, preserved in a state of something between life and death, and well-aware of their fate as trophies. This is ultimately his own fate.
• Malicious Misnaming: The Doctor mishears his name as "Tim Shaw" and continues calling him as such for the rest of the episode. Even the credits refer to him as such, and he's called such by the group in later episodes.
• Starter Villain: The first enemy of the Thirteenth Doctor.

Krasko

Krasko (Thirteenth Doctor)

Played by: Josh Bowman

A racist time criminal and mass murderer who was imprisoned in Stormcage.

---

• Badass Normal: A thug with a clever brain and dangerous technology makes for a very bad combination.
• Flat Character: He exists to push the plot because he's racist and that's it. No Freudian Excuse, no sympathetic backstory, just a thug with access to time travel and a racist agenda. Justified as the true villain of his episode were racism and bigotry, he's just another mouthpiece for it.
• Greaser Delinquents: He dresses like one and sabotages cars in the story. He's also a white supremacist who hates non-whites and possibly non-humans.
• Hate Sink: Really has to be one of the most despicable villains in all of Doctor Who. He's not a megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur like the Master or Davros, or genetically modified like the Cybermen or Daleks. He's just a thug who hates anybody who isn't white and decides to meddle in the events of history to undo any progress any people of colour make towards equality.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: He's a white supremacist from the 79th century, who gets sent into the distant past with his own time-displacement weapon by Ryan, a black man from the 21st century, which would be the past to Krasko.
• Manipulative Bastard: His whole shtick since he can't kill anybody, just manipulate time in subtle ways to get what he wants — in this case, make sure Rosa Parks never inspires the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
• Noodle Incident:
  • He was imprisoned in Stormcage for an incident which killed 2,000 people.
  • It's never explained how he knows what a TARDIS is, but it's implied it may have something to do with the time machine black market.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He's a racist who's trying to prevent non-white people from gaining equality.
• Restraining Bolt: Before he was released from Stormcage he was fitted with one to stop him from hurting anybody. This doesn't make him any less dangerous.
• Ripped from the Headlines: It's no coincidence that his episode coincides with a global uptake in public bigotry and hate crimes.
• Smug Snake: Even when he realizes a Time Lord is on his trail, figures out his Evil Plan and wipes out most of his equipment he still acts like a cocky thug convinced he can still win, even as Ryan sends him into the distant past with his own weapon.
• Tattooed Crook: He has a tattoo on his left wrist identifying him as a former Stormcage inmate.
• Trapped in the Past: First, the Doctor destroys his vortex manipulator while he's in 1955. Then Ryan zaps him even farther into the past with his own temporal displacement weapon.

Jack Robertson

Jack Robertson (Thirteenth Doctor)

Played by: Chris Noth

A sketchy real estate mogul with a chain of resorts and eyes on a presidential bid.

---

• Corrupt Corporate Executive: In "Arachnids in the UK", he's a shady businessman who hides a landfill under a luxury hotel. "Revolution of the Daleks" further cements this by showing him to be a tax dodger in cahoots with a Corrupt Politician.
• Flanderization: He was somewhat comical and stereotypical in his debut, but his second appearance exaggerates his "slimy right-wing politician" persona even more, to the point that he can barely go a few sentences without talking about money or his political ambitions.
• Genre Refugee: Robertson is a recurring human villain in a sci fi show where other members of the Rogues Gallery are aliens. He doesn't even know what the TARDIS is, and is just a Corrupt Corporate Executive that is better fitted in a show with political intrigue.
• Genre Savvy: He's greedy, corrupt and short-sighted, but even he realizes that cloning an unknown alien creature is a horrible mistake.
• Hate Sink: He's a Bad Boss and Dirty Coward who will happily throw even people loyal to him under the bus to save himself, and is ultimately responsible for all of the deaths related to the spiders because his shady business practices created them in the first place.
• Karma Houdini: Both of the episodes he appears in end with him facing no on-screen consequences for his actions or role in the events (though the start of "Revolution of the Daleks" does claim that the toxic waste dump scandal from "Arachnids in the UK" soured his first attempt at becoming U.S. president). However at the end of "Revolution", it is implied he might try again.
• Never My Fault: The very epitome of a blame-foisting politician.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: For most of the two episodes he appears in, he is presented as a comic relief villain, but this guy shoots a spider creature with no remorse, and sides with the Daleks. This guy can switch from Large Ham to cold schemer in moments, and he is one person who repeatedly says that he doesn't answer the Doctor.
• The Quisling: He has no problem working with a Dalek death squad, or selling out the rest of the human race and the Doctor to get them on his side.
• Trumplica: One big poke at President Trump. Though funnily enough, he hates the guy.

Daniel Barton

Daniel Barton (Thirteenth Doctor)

Played by: Sir Lenny Henry

A powerful tech mogul who heads the Mega-Corp VOR, and is in league with two powerful allies for unknown purposes. He was previously an MI6 agent.

---

• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Heads a powerful technology company that's sucking up everyone's data as part of his plan to take over the world.
• Double Agent: Used to work for MI6 before he stopped cooperating with them, and the agency's head suspects he's turned double agent. He has, now working with the Master.
• Karma Houdini: Escapes and phones for an extraction team after the doctor wrecks his plans.
• Professor Guinea Pig: His DNA reads as only 93% human. He wants to rule the world by turning the majority of humanity into living hard drives, and he had the Kasaavin rewrite part of his DNA as a proof of concept.
• Rags to Riches: Grew up living on a council estate before he became rich and powerful.
• Self-Made Man: Seems to have cultivated his wealth himself.
• Self-Made Orphan: He has his mother, whom he has a strained relationship with, killed by the Kasaavin via lethal rewriting of her DNA.
• Take Over the World: His goal.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Is last seen in "Spyfall" fleeing his tech demo phoning for an extraction team due to the Doctor thwarting everyone's plans.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: He has a very strained relationship with his mother, who is not impressed by his wealth and power at all. When he asks her what it's going to take to get her to say "Well done", she says the phrase very sarcastically.

The Grand Serpent

The Grand Serpent (Thirteenth Doctor)

Played by: Craig Parkinson

A scheming, paranoid intergalactic dictator whom Vinder once served under. He later interferes in Earth’s history under the pseudonym of Prentis.

---

• Arch-Enemy: For being the only person in UNIT to successfully defy him, Kate Stewart has earned a special enmity from him, to the point that he wanted to personally hunt her down.
• Big Bad Ensemble: One of the many primary antagonists of Flux, alongside Swarm, Azure, the Sontarans, and the Division (led by Tecteun).
• Corrupt Politician: Back when Vinder was working for him, he had arranged for the deaths of relatives of a political opponent as part of a deal.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The fate inflicted on his victims with his psychic worm parasite is gruesome even by this show's standards, as it spawns inside their bodies before burrowing its way out through their mouth, causing them to die in agony. It doesn’t help that the worm creature itself looks hideous.
• Hate Sink: While we don’t know much about him, the Grand Serpent manages to be one of the pettiest, most despicable megalomaniacs that the show has featured in quite some time. He takes advantage of the chaos and confusion caused by the Flux wave to make a deal with the Sontarans, whose victory he ensures by interfering with the history of UNIT via time travel, cold-bloodedly murdering every poor soul who opposes him along the way. His smarmy, accusatory personality hardly wins him any favours in the charm department, either.
• Karma Houdini: He gets off pretty lightly at the end of Flux, as Vinder decides to exile him through one of Joseph Williamson’s tunnel doors, which leads to an asteroid in empty space from which he will no doubt escape eventually.
• The Man Behind the Man: He travels throughout Earth’s past to influence the creation of UNIT, becoming an elusive yet high-ranking figurehead in the process. Creating UNIT turns out to be part of an elaborate scheme to lower Earth’s defences at the right moment during the Sontaran invasion going on in the present.
• Mysterious Past: Very little is known about him yet.
• The Paranoiac: His Establishing Character Moment sees Vinder casually voice his agreement to some innocuous statement the Grand Serpent makes, only for the Grand Serpent to immediately begin accusing Vinder of wanting to usurp him. He’s incredibly insecure about the possibility of losing his position of power, which ironically leads to his eventual removal from office.

---