Nightmare Fuel / Doctor Who — 60th Anniversary Specials

• "The Star Beast"
  • Everything about The Most High A.K.A Beep the Meep. After the reveal, it was Evil All Along, the Meep goes from being an innocent and cuddly critter to an evil and vicious alien overlord who attempts to destroy all of London by using a rocket to escape from the planet.
    Meep: OHH, TO HELL WITH THIS! EXHIBIT C! [pulls a firearm out and shoots the Wrarth Warriors] NO STUN GUNS FOR ME! JUST DIIIIIEEEEE!!!
  • The Meep is also revealed to have brainwashed a squad of UNIT Soldiers to fight off the Warths hunting it, and those UNIT Soldiers are forced to hold the Doctor and Donna's family hostage as it attempts to escape Earth.
  • After the Meep is beaten, it warns the Doctor about how his boss would be interested in finding him. Just who hired this thing in the first place?
  • After her memories are restored, it's revealed that Donna would only have fifty-five seconds to live before the Metacrisis burned her from the inside-out.

• "Wild Blue Yonder"
  • The sheer buildup of the episode qualifies. When the Doctor and Donna first arrive, they find that the ship is entirely silent and seemingly empty, with only a single motionless figure in the distance of the extremely long hallway. Then the TARDIS seemingly takes off on its own- leaving them without a way off the ship, a way to translate alien languages, or even the Sonic Screwdriver- and the Doctor realizes that it was the result of the HADS being reactivated… meaning something aboard the ship is so bad that the TARDIS ran away from it. The more they continue exploring, the more things don't seem to add up: the "figure" is actually a robot moving at a glacial pace, an intercom voice keeps announcing strange words, the walls are constantly shifting, the last recorded activity anywhere on the ship is an airlock opening and closing three years ago, and the Doctor insists that no life signs are displayed anywhere on the ship… which is very much at odds with the POV shots from pipes and vents that the audience occasionally gets. It's almost- almost- a relief when the monsters finally make themselves known.
  • As with any shapeshifter tale, the setting and atmosphere is rife with Paranoia Fuel, with both the Doctor and Donna constantly questioning if they can trust their surroundings and each other.
  • The Dissonant Serenity from the Not-Things is unnerving as well, with each shapeshifter casually warping and mangling their bodies out of what seems to be a sense of genuine curiosity, with one such example being the Not-Doctor's jaw dropping all the way down to the floor — it makes Miss Evangelista's distorted face look like nothing!
  • Throughout the episode banging sounds can be heard against the ship's walls. At first it seems like they might be caused by whatever hostile being is on board, but then it continues even as the shapeshifters confront the Doctor and Donna in the control room. The Doctor eventually realises it's the body of the ship's captain bumping against the outer hull. The captain killed herself by walking out of the airlock without a helmet, a horrifying way to go but the only option she had that the Not-Things couldn't interfere with.
  • The fact that the Not-Things nearly get exactly what they want; the Doctor is tricked into bringing Donna's duplicate aboard the TARDIS, leaving the real Donna to die on the exploding ship. Thankfully, he's able to avert the crisis at the last second, but who knows what would've happened had he not realized.
  • The episode ends with Wilf informing the Doctor and Donna of an unknown crisis, with things exploding in the street, people aggressively fighting each other, and riots breaking out. The episode ends as a plane crashes near the TARDIS and explodes, with the Doctor, Wilf and Donna barely managing to take cover behind the blue box.

• "The Giggle"
  • The way the Toymaker drives the world mad: Making every single person on Earth believe they're right in anything. Cue chaos, perhaps the biggest being a pilot crashing a plane because he thought he was totally right landing it anywhere he wanted in London.
    • Kate demonstrates this by having Shirley disable her Zeedex band while her brainwaves are projected on screen. Immediately, her brain activity spikes so hard it looks like she's having a seizure, and the otherwise mild-mannered and level-headed Kate rips her Zeedex off and starts screaming at everyone in front of her, accusing the Doctor of helming an alien invasion, concluding that Donna and Mel are plotting a conspiracy because they're both redheads, and screaming at Shirley that she's faking her disability because Kate has seen her walk before (which, as any ambulatory wheelchair user can tell you, is not an uncommon accusation in real life). Two security guards have to restrain her to put her Zeedex back on, and as soon as she comes back to her senses, Kate apologizes to the Doctor and Shirley in a state of horrified shock before she manages to collect herself.
  • The Toymaker makes his return to TV in a little over half a century, and boy does he make an impression. Despite his silly demeanor, with his whimsical outfit and tendency to switch accents, he's an amoral, monstrous being who also just so happens to possess Reality Warper abilities well beyond the Time Lords' own, a truly deadly combination.
  • The Toymaker kicks off his reunion with the Doctor with a Humans Are Bastards story for the ages, all while juggling and throwing balls at the Doctor.
    The Toymaker: The ball is the first game ever being invented. Stone Age Man, he picked up ein rock. He said, "Ah! Das ist ein ball!" He threw it, and it killed a man. He said, "Oh, what fun!" And now, everybody loves the balls! Until the year five billion, when the very last human kicks off the skull of his enemy, and said, "That is the final ball of all."
  • The fact that TV, the medium through which Doctor Who has been presented, has been covertly driving the human race insane since its very invention through carrying Stooky Bill's Giggle.
  • The Toymaker casually mentions he eliminated the White and Black Guardians and God Himself by beating them in games and turning them into toys, another frightening reminder of his power. However, he makes mention of "The One Who Waits", a being even he doesn't want to tango with.
    "…that's someone else's game…"
  • The Toymaker apparently played a game with The Master, won, and turned him into one of his gold teeth. The most recent version of The Master razed Gallifrey to the ground with little to no effort, and The Toymaker beat him. At the end of the episode, the gold tooth is snatched away, hinting The Master will still return some day.
    • Serves as a callback to when the Master's ring was taken from his funeral pyre at the end of Series 3, complete with the Master's laughter.
    • Look closely when The Toymaker shows off the gold tooth; the makeup and prosthetic artists gave him extra teeth.
  • In the Toyroom, the Doctor comes across Charles Banerjee, the man who first bought Stooky Bill off the Toymaker, who has been turned into the Toymaker's puppet. The effect of a real life human's head on top of a CGI wooden body looks wrong (a good intentional use of the Uncanny Valley). Meanwhile, Donna comes across Stooky Bill's family, who take Creepy Doll to great effect.
    • Poor Charlie isn't the only one. though; the Toymaker then taunts him by turning Banerjee into a puppet of the Doctor, made even more terrifying by his unbroken, almost sadistic smile.
  Puppet-Doctor: (in a sing-song voice) I though I was clever... I thought I was clever...
  • The Toymaker's invasion of UNIT:
    • After a few funny moments of dancing and teleportation, his slamming Kate into a wall once he's finished dancing with her and spinning Mel around so hard that she's thrown across the room and lands hard on the floor, both of them crying out in pain, is a Kick the Dog moment made all the nastier by its mundanity.
    • He turns a pair of UNIT soldiers into dozens of balls, with their screaming faces stretched out on the surface of the rubber; Shirley reflexively catches one and yelps in horror as she throws it from her. Kate asks what the hell just happened, while The Doctor can only confirm they're already dead.
    • The entire dance scene in general, really. Wildly over the top? Sure. But it's also essentially a Hostile Show Takeover as seen from the inside — a being of unimaginable power and heartless cruelty has taken complete control of your reality, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Every part of the routine gives across one message: this is the Toymaker's world, and he can do anything he likes.
    • The Doctor's tendency to give metaphors for sci-fi effects before saying that they don't actually explain it is done less jokingly here— the Doctor asks Shirley if she'd believe that the Toymaker "manipulates atoms with the power of thought", before snapping that that isn't what he does and humans have no way to understand him, let alone fight him.
    • The Toymaker's Badass Boast, in response to the Doctor's attempt to reason with him, is a chilling reveal of his Blue-and-Orange Morality, making it clear that he really is an Eldritch Abomination wearing human skin, and utterly unconcerned with the petty human concern for the logic of his actions:
      The Doctor: I don't understand why you're so SMALL! You can turn bullets into flowers! Think of the good you could do. So tell me why you don't!
      The Toymaker: You know full well this is merely a face concealing a vastness that will never cease, because your good and your bad are nothing to me. All that exists is to win or to lose.
    • How The Toymaker kills Fourteen, in a call back to 12's death by a Cyberman blasting a hole in his chest except this time with Unit's anti-satellite galvanic beam, where we are treated to a prolong scene of the beam blasting clean through Fourteen's chest with no resistance.
    • While initially stunned by the Doctor's bigeneration, Toymaker then has the bright idea of killing the Doctor more times so that they endlessly split in two until there's a wide field of them for him to play with.
  • Even as the Toymaker is folded up like paper after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctors defeat him, he remains Defiant to the End as he vows that his legions are coming.

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