Of the Revival era show: toss-up between the Family of Blood made immortal for perpetual suffering -- vs. -- old-Amy being manipulated with hope to being condemned to death plus being dehumanized by the 11th Doctor who leaves with the younger-Amy.
No, but that's the point.
Imagine if you had a major traumatising event that changed your life forever, for the worse. Then, some 30 years later, you have the chance to undo that one event. It's an insane dilemma, because on one hand, you can make sure your suffering doesn't happen, but on the other hand, the version of you who went through all those years is erased. The whole point of the episode is to show that in that situation, there was no right call, just a shitty, and a shittier call - and she does end up choosing the slightly less crap one.
Sure, there’s a version of her out there who gets to live on, but the old Amy still died and never got the ec
experience of being that survivor.
Imagine there’s another universe, identical to this one in every way, except you are going to suddenly die in this universe, but an exact copy of you will live on in the other. In this scenario, you are going to die, and experience whatever afterlife there may or may not be like any other human. Even if, somewhere out there ‘you’ live on, it isn’t you: you don’t experience their life. I don’t think that someone is a drama queen for mourning their own end of life, even if other people like them will live on.
This is especially poignant in a world like the Whoniverse; since time travel is possible, as there’ll always be a version of every character out there, from birth to death and everything beyond. Anyone who’s dead could easily come back and ‘live’ after a quick TARDIS trip, but their life would be predetermined, almost already lived, but live.
There’s also the aspect of the young Amy being, well, *younger*. A lot of old Amy’s living memories would not even be held by the surviving Amy, and a lot of the future Amy’s consciousness, personality and self would die with her, not even being retained in another entity.
It’s a horrible fate for old Amy, and I believe the response was entirely justified, over perhaps even tame for what happened.
Yeah, this one was brutal. Even if we take the read that Eleven's mind was set on younger Amy because it would prevent older Amy wholesale (IIRC he *does* try to get that point across, but older Amy is having none of it), he treated her absolutely *abominably*. Knowing she won't exist in short order in no way stops her from existing right here, right now. A little decorum wouldn't have gone amiss, *especially* if you're functionally killing her.
EDIT: And don't even get me started on the "Two Amys can't be in the TARDIS" line of bullshit.
I couldn’t really get too upset about that one. The way I see it, Old Amy wasn’t a different person from Young Amy, just the same person at a different point in time. She didn’t cease to exist when young Amy left, she was just changed into someone who wasn’t abandoned on the resort planet and traumatized for decades
I wouldn't agree with that. If it had been a matter of that sort change, there would not have been whatsoever this reflexively invoked dehumanization from The Doctor.
That was the Doctor's perspective on it.
And he was rightfully framed as a monster for it.
You're entitled to view Amy as nothing more than a fictional character who only exists for your own enjoyment. Because, objectively, she is. In-universe though, the 2 Amys were different people with different lived experiences and different futures. Old!Amy lived through decades of lonely monotonous anxiety, then died. End of. She didn't "wake up" again as young!Amy.
Fighting for your bare life, every day, alone, in a ragged shack, for decades, wouldn't "change you"?
I can imagine only two motiviations to not give up: either hope for rescue and reuniting, or pure, raw survival instinct.
Whatever it was, the hope was betrayed and and she did not give up her place willingly.
And that's without knowing the Amy we know. If it would be the same Amy, it would be the Amy who'd give up everything, stumble into an unknown and possibly horrific past, just to be with Rory. The Amy who wanted to see everything.
Any way I turn this, it doesn't fly.
After Young Amy left, she didn’t fight for her life every day. The future had been changed and none of that ever happened. “Time can be rewritten” and all that fun stuff
Quick recap: they arrive at a leisure retreat, the robot helpers turn out to be hostile and there’s some pocket-timelines involved that separates Amy from 11 and Rory. They try to come back in the TARDIS and miss by like forty years, in which time Amy comes to resent the Doctor a lot though her love for Rory never dies because we’re never allowed to forget that. She’s old and hardened and fights in hockey pads with a katana and she only assists 11 in saving her younger self on the promise that she gets to walk away. 11 BSes it, locks Amy out and she and Rory have a final talk through the TARDIS door before they leave, she fades into nonexistence and Original Amy is rescued relatively soon after she started waiting.
This episode annoys me for it's set up- I know it needs to be done for the story to play out but if I was Amy I would absolutely be like 'DO NOT go through those doors without me. Literally ANYTHING could happen THE SECOND we're separated. Any time I'm alone all kinds of things go wrong that you were expecting. You can bloody well wait'
It’s also just a straight-up paradox. He sees old Amy. She exists. Amy lived through all of that. But he just erases all that time. It becomes even crazier when Amy is touched by an angel later and all of a sudden the Doctor is like, “Oh, I can’t change that. That’d create a paradox.” Like, sure.
Wellllll, Shirley catches one as is it bounces over to her and there’s a freakin’ face on it that screams! Kate asks the Doctor what happened and he says “they’re dead, I’m sorry” but that might have been more of a guess than actually knowing wtf the Toymaker was able to do… or perhaps it was a more efficient way of saying “they’ll never be the humans they were again; they shall live forever with their consciousnesses spread out across dozens of colorful bouncy balls unless you want to pop and incinerate them all.” Such fun!!
As explained by Son of Mine:
“[The Doctor] wrapped my father in unbreakable chains, forged in the heart of a dwarf star. He tricked my mother into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, to be imprisoned there forever. He still visits my sister— once a year, every year. I wonder if one day he might forgive her. But there she is! Can you see her? He trapped her inside a mirror. Every mirror. If ever you look at your reflection and see something move behind you—just for a second—that’s her. That’s always her. As for me, I was suspended in time. And the Doctor put me to work standing over the fields of England, as their protector. We wanted to live forever. So the Doctor made sure that we did.”
Overall a zero out of 5 star customer service experience
Captain Jack. Bro has died a gazillion times, and if you watch ~~Miracle day~~ Children of Earth he gets essentially vapourised and regrows every cell in his body, and he gets buried in cement alive, ignoring all the times he gets shot and when he literally got fried by the time vortex and zapped by a dalek only for the doctor to be like: *sigh*This guy again.
Oh and he has to watch his kids die before him, and all of his loves, and has to kill his grandson because the doctor cba to show up.
The doctor and Martha are talking in a public space and in the background we see Elton pushing a stroller with the paving slab in it.
Just a blink and you miss it Easter egg.
She’s made of stone. Maybe she ends up blowing a time Lord and giving birth to the first weeping Angel. (Don’t ask me how a blowie causes her to get preggers)
He waited a long time for Amy, getting really distraught saying something along the lines of why didn't you come back for me. He eventually aged and died, basically waiting his whole life for her, while she was still young. Time was distorted, and made them hallucinate
Yeah, being buried for thousands of years to die of suffocation/compression slowly, only to wake up again moments later to repeat it, over and over again, feels pretty insanity-inducing.
It gets even worse when you watch Torchwood, especially miracle day. You see more glimpses into Jack's past and see the (many) brutal ways he has been tortured and killed
I'd give Me the edge there TBF.
Jack eventually dies of old age in the year 5 billion, at least. And is apparently able to keep his memories & composure throughout.
Me can't keep track of herself after a mere few hundred years. And lasts until past the year *100 trillion*. Without ANY signs of aging! And then just hops in a time travel machine back to modern times to start it all over again!
I always assumed that he will die with the end of the universe. The explanation of why he is immortal was that he's a fix point in time, so there cannot be a time where he's not alive (at least since his birth). But when the universe dies, time and space will cease to exit, as there were no time and space before the birth of the universe neither. And he cannot be a fix point in time if there's no time, se he can finally die when the universe dies.
One the most horrible deaths in Doctor Who ( which was undone later), was >!Peri's death! She and the 6th Doctor land on a planet and encounter the villain Sil again. The 6th Doctor pretends that he has gone mad, and at some point Peri is captured and is sent to the operating theatre where her head is shaved , and her mind will be taken over by Lord Kiv, Sil's boss. The Time lords collect the Doctor for his trial, preventing him from saving her. The Doctor watches the courts view screen , in horror, as Kiv wakes up in Peri's body. Kiv has completely taken over Peri's mind, as the Warlord Yrcarnos arrives , sees what has happened and kills everyone in the operating room. The Doctor is devastated!!<
Yes! Thats why I mentioned they undid it- it was later revealed that >!Peri's death on the view screen was a result of the Matrix being tampered with by the Valeyard!!<
I will never understand the whole ascension with star eye girl because they had like 2 interactions and she wasn't even nice to Bill. Not exactly soul mates.
Being trapped in the confession dial for over 4 billion years, forced to die over and over again while punching through a mile of solid diamond seems pretty rough
He also wasn’t forced; he could have confessed and escaped at any time; he just stubbornly perpetuated the loop because he knew that eventually he’d emerge on Gallifrey which, actually, undercuts his entire reason for staying in the loop.
Really great episode, though.
Not seen this one mentioned yet… but Adelaide Brooke in ‘The Waters of Mars’. To discover that you’re SUPPOSED to die for your daughter / grandkid to explore the stars must be harrowing enough - but then to kill yourself after the ‘Time Lord Victorious’ saved you… rough.
Maybe not the absolute worst, but one of the worst, Adric.
A young boy died thinking he took the entire world with him. A whole life thrown away, and he doesn't even know that the earth survived. Horrific.
I had to scroll way too far to find this, and I, too was traumatized as a child by this. I feel as though it was the first time I'd seen a major character just die on the show. Also, the first time that it was really made clear that the ability to travel in time and space sisnt automatically mean that the doctor could just indiscriminately fix everything....
Do side/background characters count?
The children kidnapped and given to aliens in Torchwood, children of earth episode. What happened to them is scorched in my brain, it was so dark.
As far as we know the zombie Brigadier is still zooming round on jet boots. Kate should use that particle beam weapon and put him out of his misery.
Also Omega had completely disappeared apart from his desire for revenge. Pretty rough.
Absolutely, not to be too sad but I related a lot to Donna in the fourth episode and the idea of having all my memories of self growth away from the mindset my mother put me in is my worst nightmare.
I'm so glad for the Doctor calling out her mother
I hated this episode because all nice characters died and only the asshole survived. Why? Because he was an asshole and only thought about himself, so he survived. I hate this end.
It’s bleak but I actually quite like that every now and then there’s an episode that shows that the Doctor’s life isn’t always fair; sometimes the good die young and the bad somehow profit from it.
It reminds us that he can’t always ‘win’, and I think that’s important
The worst part of her death for me was that she didn't need to die, at all, she could've probably just jumped to safety, but no she dies for some reason, I guess kylie was too expensive
Surprised I haven't seen anyone say Lynda with a Y. The silent extermination followed by her being sucked into the vacuum of space. Traumatised me as a child.
Dodo. Gets kidnapped, hated by fans for decades, and then unceremoniously dropped and forgotten about it. This is a joke but yeah
EDIT: serious answer I haven’t seen is Jonah from the Torchwood episode Adrift, one of the best filler episodes of any show I’ve ever seen. Its ironically followed up by From Out Of The Rain, which is hands down the worst filler episode I’ve ever seen.
Years later I’m still stunned by what happened to Bill Potts. It’s by far the most brutal fate of modern Doctor Who for a companion.
I loved Bill too and her season was by far the best Capaldi one, so it was a huge gut punch at the end.
I always feel really sympathetic for anyone who is forcibly converted into a Cyberman and is a good person. But to have your mind locked in that thing and waking up in a barn and not knowing why children are afraid of you, and then to look in the mirror and not see your face but this being covered in gauze and metal, and now you're struggling to keep your mind and soul alive. And she waited for years in the creepy hospital with a hole in her chest, waiting for the Doctor to slowly come and save her. And then the only friendly face she saw down there betrayed her.
Owen from Torchwood.
Undying, watching his body eventually decay over years and years from radiation, locked alone in that room... When he screams to Tosh as he realizes what he's in for... I bawled my eyes out. And poor Toshiko dying herself listening to him rage against it. At least she went fairly quickly and her team got to be with her in the end. But Owen... Damn
Ok, maybe an unpopular opinion (?). River Song. Don't take me wrong: her story was really enjoyable to watch, her death very climactic. I loved it. But when you look at it closely, I mean: it suuuuucks.
- she gets to live forever, away from the man she loves but most of all, everything that she loves = adventures and fun. I love books, good or bad, but it's crazy to think living forever in a virtual reality with all the books in a world is actually great. To think that, one must be really afraid to die (which is okay, but I'm not sure it can stay this way forever, it's the whole point with "Me").
- Ok she spends some time with the Doctor. Again, The Husbands of River Song is one of my favourite episodes ever, but still, come on. Spending a NIGHT on a planet. It's cool when it starts and the idea is really romantic. However, did she really spend her last 18 years with the Doctor in the dark? lol That's pretty terrible, I hope the planet has artificial light or something to mimic the day. Sorry if it sounds stupid, but I can't really figure it!
- Again with those 24 years. It does sound romantic. For a human, 24 years is like 1/4 of your lifetime (let's hope so!), so it's a pretty long time. But come on, River is like 200 at that point, so it's more like 1/10 of her lifetime, "only" 8 years in human time, so to speak. It's not that much. Don't get me started with the Doctor, who has just spent billions of years in a bl\*\*dy castle. 24 years is a blink of an eye! It's really sad, because time is relative, and when you look at it, they spend little time together. It's better than nothing, but it's not as long as it sounds to us viewers.... :/
There’s a theory that’s shared by both Moffat and RTD that the Doctor Moon is actually the Doctor, consciousness placed in the mainframe to maintain Cal and the Library as they all wait for River to catch up with them.
If that takes a bit of the edge off River’s fate.
That "24 years just made him feel worse" thing really makes it hard for me to believe in the "therapy" idea. Over 30 years on earth and he'll be watching Donna age and die.
Easy
Bryan Williams. Yes he didn't die, however he never got to see Rory or Amy ever again. Also he was the one to tell Rory and Amy to go with the doctor the last time they met.
Borusa. Sure, there's a strong argument he brought it on himself, but he was the OG paving slab immortal, and it was treated as it should have been. Fucking horrifying, not an excuse for a blowjob joke.
This is not extreme but from an emotional standpoint, Donna.
Her mother constantly berates her to the point where she's READY to leave her like _that_ and never return, she meets the Doctor Who helps her realize she isn't what her mother says she is...only for her to lose all memory of her growth.
Maybe it's because I can deeply sympathize with that situation but it got to me more than say Rose being stuck in a parallel world
Might not be the worst due to length but Owen Harper (torchwood)
He dies due to a gunshot, gets brought back to consciousness (still a walking corpse basically, can’t eat ,sleep, drink and the body doesn’t heal) and later gets caught in a reactor melting down, and has all the radiation flow through him and he slowly decays, still conscious through it all.
Ashildr, she cannot die. last person alive, witnessed the end of the world, even if Clara later came with her. imagine seeing everyone you love die? seeing the world die? and after you've witnessed everything you finally can move?
Love and Monsters - "Being a Doctor Who fan will bring you joy for a while, but eventually it condemns you to a tragic half-life as part of an alien's backside or a paving slab!"
Genuinely felt so bad for Bill. I know it all kinda worked out for her in the end but I loved her character so much and what she went through was horrifying
Ashildr. Watching your family die, having children and then watching them die. Losing pieces of yourself as the years past and you start to forget and you have to record it. Losing your sense of wonder, losing your morals, your identity. Living until the end of the universe and not even until, you're still alive. You're no longer Ashildr, you're Me.
I will always advocate for the lovely Danny pink. Mr. pink didn’t deserve any of what happened to him and if Clara could have just not flirted with him none of that stuff would have happened
Living the rest of your life self-loathing and never accomplishing anything of too much value in the world when you have the potential for so much more and never even knowing it was mediocre?
Of the Revival era show: toss-up between the Family of Blood made immortal for perpetual suffering -- vs. -- old-Amy being manipulated with hope to being condemned to death plus being dehumanized by the 11th Doctor who leaves with the younger-Amy.
old Amy is so tragic :(
Old Amy is a drama queen. Why wouldn't you want to save your younger self from decades of trauma?
but would your younger self still be you?
No, but that's the point. Imagine if you had a major traumatising event that changed your life forever, for the worse. Then, some 30 years later, you have the chance to undo that one event. It's an insane dilemma, because on one hand, you can make sure your suffering doesn't happen, but on the other hand, the version of you who went through all those years is erased. The whole point of the episode is to show that in that situation, there was no right call, just a shitty, and a shittier call - and she does end up choosing the slightly less crap one.
...Because then what was the point of you going through those decades of trauma, if not to get a happy ending yourself?
Lmao who wouldn't want to just pop out of existence am I right?
Sure, there’s a version of her out there who gets to live on, but the old Amy still died and never got the ec experience of being that survivor. Imagine there’s another universe, identical to this one in every way, except you are going to suddenly die in this universe, but an exact copy of you will live on in the other. In this scenario, you are going to die, and experience whatever afterlife there may or may not be like any other human. Even if, somewhere out there ‘you’ live on, it isn’t you: you don’t experience their life. I don’t think that someone is a drama queen for mourning their own end of life, even if other people like them will live on. This is especially poignant in a world like the Whoniverse; since time travel is possible, as there’ll always be a version of every character out there, from birth to death and everything beyond. Anyone who’s dead could easily come back and ‘live’ after a quick TARDIS trip, but their life would be predetermined, almost already lived, but live. There’s also the aspect of the young Amy being, well, *younger*. A lot of old Amy’s living memories would not even be held by the surviving Amy, and a lot of the future Amy’s consciousness, personality and self would die with her, not even being retained in another entity. It’s a horrible fate for old Amy, and I believe the response was entirely justified, over perhaps even tame for what happened.
Yeah, this one was brutal. Even if we take the read that Eleven's mind was set on younger Amy because it would prevent older Amy wholesale (IIRC he *does* try to get that point across, but older Amy is having none of it), he treated her absolutely *abominably*. Knowing she won't exist in short order in no way stops her from existing right here, right now. A little decorum wouldn't have gone amiss, *especially* if you're functionally killing her. EDIT: And don't even get me started on the "Two Amys can't be in the TARDIS" line of bullshit.
Two Amy’s couldn’t be on the same Tardis but 3 Doctors could? Both in the 50th anniversary and “The Three Doctors” from like 1970 something.
Well in those instances, the moment and the time lords made it happen i don’t remember exactly how tho
The problem is that leaving with both Amys is going to cause a paradox
I couldn’t really get too upset about that one. The way I see it, Old Amy wasn’t a different person from Young Amy, just the same person at a different point in time. She didn’t cease to exist when young Amy left, she was just changed into someone who wasn’t abandoned on the resort planet and traumatized for decades
I wouldn't agree with that. If it had been a matter of that sort change, there would not have been whatsoever this reflexively invoked dehumanization from The Doctor.
That was the Doctor's perspective on it. And he was rightfully framed as a monster for it. You're entitled to view Amy as nothing more than a fictional character who only exists for your own enjoyment. Because, objectively, she is. In-universe though, the 2 Amys were different people with different lived experiences and different futures. Old!Amy lived through decades of lonely monotonous anxiety, then died. End of. She didn't "wake up" again as young!Amy.
Fighting for your bare life, every day, alone, in a ragged shack, for decades, wouldn't "change you"? I can imagine only two motiviations to not give up: either hope for rescue and reuniting, or pure, raw survival instinct. Whatever it was, the hope was betrayed and and she did not give up her place willingly. And that's without knowing the Amy we know. If it would be the same Amy, it would be the Amy who'd give up everything, stumble into an unknown and possibly horrific past, just to be with Rory. The Amy who wanted to see everything. Any way I turn this, it doesn't fly.
After Young Amy left, she didn’t fight for her life every day. The future had been changed and none of that ever happened. “Time can be rewritten” and all that fun stuff
Woah, been a minute since I’ve seen 11’s era but can you refresh my memory what episode that happens in to old/young Amy?
Quick recap: they arrive at a leisure retreat, the robot helpers turn out to be hostile and there’s some pocket-timelines involved that separates Amy from 11 and Rory. They try to come back in the TARDIS and miss by like forty years, in which time Amy comes to resent the Doctor a lot though her love for Rory never dies because we’re never allowed to forget that. She’s old and hardened and fights in hockey pads with a katana and she only assists 11 in saving her younger self on the promise that she gets to walk away. 11 BSes it, locks Amy out and she and Rory have a final talk through the TARDIS door before they leave, she fades into nonexistence and Original Amy is rescued relatively soon after she started waiting.
This episode annoys me for it's set up- I know it needs to be done for the story to play out but if I was Amy I would absolutely be like 'DO NOT go through those doors without me. Literally ANYTHING could happen THE SECOND we're separated. Any time I'm alone all kinds of things go wrong that you were expecting. You can bloody well wait'
Wtf lol i gotta rewatch this one
"The girl who waited", series 6 episode 10. It is with Apalapucia
"The Girl Who Waited" -- episode 10 of Series 6.
It’s also just a straight-up paradox. He sees old Amy. She exists. Amy lived through all of that. But he just erases all that time. It becomes even crazier when Amy is touched by an angel later and all of a sudden the Doctor is like, “Oh, I can’t change that. That’d create a paradox.” Like, sure.
The Family of Blood 😬
Yea I’ll give you that, they did get it pretty harsh
And being turned into balls by the Toymaker doesn’t sound great either
It’s the circle of life They came from balls And became balls
WELL THAT'S ALL RIGHT THEN
The oldest game of all
were they dead? because I could have sworn on of the heads was still able to scream.
Wellllll, Shirley catches one as is it bounces over to her and there’s a freakin’ face on it that screams! Kate asks the Doctor what happened and he says “they’re dead, I’m sorry” but that might have been more of a guess than actually knowing wtf the Toymaker was able to do… or perhaps it was a more efficient way of saying “they’ll never be the humans they were again; they shall live forever with their consciousnesses spread out across dozens of colorful bouncy balls unless you want to pop and incinerate them all.” Such fun!!
Thats about what I was feeling, the Doctor saying "I can't fix them"
Guess he couldn’t make the Toymaker undo all the deaths caused by him & the giggle as part of winning the game. Should’ve been part of the prize. 🫠
Darkest thing the Doctor has ever canonical done to someone.
They were kinda asking for it though
That scene made me scared of mirrors for a little while there.
It’s been a minute since I watched those eps; remind me what happened to them please
As explained by Son of Mine: “[The Doctor] wrapped my father in unbreakable chains, forged in the heart of a dwarf star. He tricked my mother into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, to be imprisoned there forever. He still visits my sister— once a year, every year. I wonder if one day he might forgive her. But there she is! Can you see her? He trapped her inside a mirror. Every mirror. If ever you look at your reflection and see something move behind you—just for a second—that’s her. That’s always her. As for me, I was suspended in time. And the Doctor put me to work standing over the fields of England, as their protector. We wanted to live forever. So the Doctor made sure that we did.” Overall a zero out of 5 star customer service experience
Meh, I'd say 10/10. The customer demanded immortality, and the customer received immortality.
Touché. Sounds better than my health insurance provider.
Ha ha. They just didn't read the fine print.
r/maliciouscompliance
Damn that is harsh. I think he may have been a bit miffed with them
For your viewing pleasure https://youtu.be/w4xm9NHNUf8?si=7mDLNrFx-QL9M1gf
10 and Martha the doctor becomes human to hide at a school and falls in love. S3
Captain Jack. Bro has died a gazillion times, and if you watch ~~Miracle day~~ Children of Earth he gets essentially vapourised and regrows every cell in his body, and he gets buried in cement alive, ignoring all the times he gets shot and when he literally got fried by the time vortex and zapped by a dalek only for the doctor to be like: *sigh*This guy again. Oh and he has to watch his kids die before him, and all of his loves, and has to kill his grandson because the doctor cba to show up.
Doesn’t all that happen in CoE?
And he had to live for billions of years in a glass box, Jack was the Face of Boe
Paving Stone Girl. Beats all of them.
I was disappointed the paving slab girl never had a cameo in the background of a Donna or Martha episode.
lol how would it work?
The doctor and Martha are talking in a public space and in the background we see Elton pushing a stroller with the paving slab in it. Just a blink and you miss it Easter egg.
LOL
Yeah my head canon is that the 13th doctor eventually figures out a way to de-pavingstone her and goes back right after and fixes her.
Why the 13th doctor specifically?
Can't see 11 or 12 being introspective enough for it
I could see 12 doing it as a duty of care
Also Thirteen had more of a tinkering streak so she's possibly more likely to come up with a solution.
The 13th doctor that let a spider suffocate slowly under its own weight instead of letting it die instantly? That 13th doctor?
But guns though.
Not sure about that one, she even managed to keep her love-life (even though it was with her 2000s esque online safety video antagonist boyfriend)
Mantelpiece ornament occasionally giving gritty BJs? Until one day she gets smashed - or lives forever, long after Elton's death.
PLEASE your use of the word gritty here, oh my god
She’s made of stone. Maybe she ends up blowing a time Lord and giving birth to the first weeping Angel. (Don’t ask me how a blowie causes her to get preggers)
I will never not see Elton without thinking of Clocks again.
clocks?
URSULA 🫣😭
Rory's fake death in the house controlled tardis, maybe? Pretty horrific way to go. I'm also pretty sure Dodo had a horrific fate in the EU
Oof, Rory's "death" there was brutal
Remind me please how that one turned out.
He waited a long time for Amy, getting really distraught saying something along the lines of why didn't you come back for me. He eventually aged and died, basically waiting his whole life for her, while she was still young. Time was distorted, and made them hallucinate
Wild. The Rory and Amy Era is too wobbly for my tastes.
Jack, who literally cannot die. Ever. Even when everything else has.
Yeah, being buried for thousands of years to die of suffocation/compression slowly, only to wake up again moments later to repeat it, over and over again, feels pretty insanity-inducing.
Yeah. Undermined by the show having him be good old Jack again after like, five minutes.
it's like him getting shot in the head, his brain heals back to being good old Jack
Fair enough. Though that seems like a messier line since he's clearly traumatised by his past experiences. And he didn't just heal back from Adam.
Children of Earth with him buried in concrete made me feel claustrophobic
Yeah but he did eventually die
How did he become the face of boe though?
headless monks lopped off his head, then he evolved over millennia
Jesus. That's terrible.
That’s just a fan theory, there’s nothing that suggests Jack gets his head lopped of by the monks.
Isn't he >!the face of Boe, who we do see die!
I like to personally think that after boe dies a few minutes or hours later, they revert back to jack and keeps going
Sure, but by then he hasn’t been Jack for a very long time.
But it means he does eventually die.
It gets even worse when you watch Torchwood, especially miracle day. You see more glimpses into Jack's past and see the (many) brutal ways he has been tortured and killed
Children of Earth was a horrible way to die (vaporised) and then we see him reborn in agony
Miracle day wins this topic for the category 1 humans if we count Torchwood.
Yeah I didn’t think it was that bad until Jack was literally blown up and had to recover from that.
Yeah, but he seems to atleast have fun sometimes
I'd give Me the edge there TBF. Jack eventually dies of old age in the year 5 billion, at least. And is apparently able to keep his memories & composure throughout. Me can't keep track of herself after a mere few hundred years. And lasts until past the year *100 trillion*. Without ANY signs of aging! And then just hops in a time travel machine back to modern times to start it all over again!
I always assumed that he will die with the end of the universe. The explanation of why he is immortal was that he's a fix point in time, so there cannot be a time where he's not alive (at least since his birth). But when the universe dies, time and space will cease to exit, as there were no time and space before the birth of the universe neither. And he cannot be a fix point in time if there's no time, se he can finally die when the universe dies.
The Absorbaloff victims
one of them forced to be his ass
One the most horrible deaths in Doctor Who ( which was undone later), was >!Peri's death! She and the 6th Doctor land on a planet and encounter the villain Sil again. The 6th Doctor pretends that he has gone mad, and at some point Peri is captured and is sent to the operating theatre where her head is shaved , and her mind will be taken over by Lord Kiv, Sil's boss. The Time lords collect the Doctor for his trial, preventing him from saving her. The Doctor watches the courts view screen , in horror, as Kiv wakes up in Peri's body. Kiv has completely taken over Peri's mind, as the Warlord Yrcarnos arrives , sees what has happened and kills everyone in the operating room. The Doctor is devastated!!<
Later in that same story arc, isn't it revealed that that was just fabricated to manipulate the doctor and she went and lived a happy life elsewhere?
Death or being married to Brian Blessed? Yikes.
why is everyone misspelling BRIAN BLESSED?
MY NAME IS NOT HARD TO SPELL Mr. Blessed, how is Gordon? GORDON’S ALIVE
Yes! Thats why I mentioned they undid it- it was later revealed that >!Peri's death on the view screen was a result of the Matrix being tampered with by the Valeyard!!<
For 30 years my fan-brain refused to accept that her death was undone, until that mini episode promoting the Blu ray set brought her back properly
Bill
At least she got to assend to space lesbian, which is, of course, the ultimate form of being.
I will never understand the whole ascension with star eye girl because they had like 2 interactions and she wasn't even nice to Bill. Not exactly soul mates.
But LESBIANS
Makes less sense than Clara and Ashildr going off together in a space diner
THANK YOU!
In a short story realised during the pandemic, Bill and Heather are on a break.
“WELL THATS ALRIGHT THEN!”
Dang, do I need to go finish Gideon the Ninth?
You absolutely should
"She waited for 10 years, you missed her by 2 hours"
Tbf turning into a mondassian cyberman is pretty low on my bucket list
I came here for this.
Being trapped in the confession dial for over 4 billion years, forced to die over and over again while punching through a mile of solid diamond seems pretty rough
It was 20 feet not a mile but still
He also wasn’t forced; he could have confessed and escaped at any time; he just stubbornly perpetuated the loop because he knew that eventually he’d emerge on Gallifrey which, actually, undercuts his entire reason for staying in the loop. Really great episode, though.
Bill felt cruel
Especially the long death of it all like Christ
The Empress of the Racnoss, made to watch and listen to her children drown and then drown herself. Brutal. One of 10s darker moments imo
Doesn’t the Empress teleport back to her ship, only to be shot down by the British army?
That did happen. Teleported to the ship, no energy for the defense system and was obliterated
She does actually but even still the watching of her children drown must have been brutal
Not seen this one mentioned yet… but Adelaide Brooke in ‘The Waters of Mars’. To discover that you’re SUPPOSED to die for your daughter / grandkid to explore the stars must be harrowing enough - but then to kill yourself after the ‘Time Lord Victorious’ saved you… rough.
bill potts. girl actually had to go through cyber-conversion and didn’t get the sweet release of death to forget the trauma
Maybe not the absolute worst, but one of the worst, Adric. A young boy died thinking he took the entire world with him. A whole life thrown away, and he doesn't even know that the earth survived. Horrific.
Yes. I was traumatized by this when I watched it for the first time as a teenager.
As a teenager now who has watched it it was horrible! Fantastic though.
I thought Adric. He never even got to know if he was right!
I had to scroll way too far to find this, and I, too was traumatized as a child by this. I feel as though it was the first time I'd seen a major character just die on the show. Also, the first time that it was really made clear that the ability to travel in time and space sisnt automatically mean that the doctor could just indiscriminately fix everything....
it's like the ending of Red vs Blue season 13 "aint that a bitch..."
"Now I'll never know if I was right." 🥺
Didn't Adric's death kick start human evolution?? In other words we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Adric's death...
Yes. But he died thinking he destroyed the earth in the future.
Being a paving slab sex toy.
To be fair, Myrtle looked pretty in to it….
It's Torchwood, but Miracle Day, when the woman gets crushed in the car.
....and she is alive inside that crushed mangled wreck of metal. That sucks.
Do side/background characters count? The children kidnapped and given to aliens in Torchwood, children of earth episode. What happened to them is scorched in my brain, it was so dark.
Doctor Who. Delivering bad fates to all kinds of characters since that old woman in the cave of skulls in 1963.
As far as we know the zombie Brigadier is still zooming round on jet boots. Kate should use that particle beam weapon and put him out of his misery. Also Omega had completely disappeared apart from his desire for revenge. Pretty rough.
I'm pretty sure the Brigadier followed all his Cyberman brethren in blowing themselves up. He just made sure Kate was safe before doing so.
Omega's breakdown is still one of my favourite moments in Classic Who.
Donna Noble, to have all that knowledge and self realisation taken away from her was heartbreaking. I cried
Absolutely, not to be too sad but I related a lot to Donna in the fourth episode and the idea of having all my memories of self growth away from the mindset my mother put me in is my worst nightmare. I'm so glad for the Doctor calling out her mother
First character that popped in my mind was Astrid from Voyage of the Damned. I loved her and to do her like that...Damn you RTD! 😢
I hated this episode because all nice characters died and only the asshole survived. Why? Because he was an asshole and only thought about himself, so he survived. I hate this end.
It’s bleak but I actually quite like that every now and then there’s an episode that shows that the Doctor’s life isn’t always fair; sometimes the good die young and the bad somehow profit from it. It reminds us that he can’t always ‘win’, and I think that’s important
Yeah you are right. I don't think it was a bad episode, just I wanted something more cheerful for a Christmas special :')
Undeniably fair - setting Kylie up as the perfect companion then having her die in an explosion is pretty heart wrenching
The worst part of her death for me was that she didn't need to die, at all, she could've probably just jumped to safety, but no she dies for some reason, I guess kylie was too expensive
Surprised I haven't seen anyone say Lynda with a Y. The silent extermination followed by her being sucked into the vacuum of space. Traumatised me as a child.
Dodo. Gets kidnapped, hated by fans for decades, and then unceremoniously dropped and forgotten about it. This is a joke but yeah EDIT: serious answer I haven’t seen is Jonah from the Torchwood episode Adrift, one of the best filler episodes of any show I’ve ever seen. Its ironically followed up by From Out Of The Rain, which is hands down the worst filler episode I’ve ever seen.
And let's not forget what The Master did to her in "Who Killed Kennedy"
Doesn't count because it wasn't from a run-in/adventure with the Doctor, but Owen Harper deserves an honorary mention. Yikes.
Years later I’m still stunned by what happened to Bill Potts. It’s by far the most brutal fate of modern Doctor Who for a companion. I loved Bill too and her season was by far the best Capaldi one, so it was a huge gut punch at the end.
I always feel really sympathetic for anyone who is forcibly converted into a Cyberman and is a good person. But to have your mind locked in that thing and waking up in a barn and not knowing why children are afraid of you, and then to look in the mirror and not see your face but this being covered in gauze and metal, and now you're struggling to keep your mind and soul alive. And she waited for years in the creepy hospital with a hole in her chest, waiting for the Doctor to slowly come and save her. And then the only friendly face she saw down there betrayed her.
Owen from Torchwood. Undying, watching his body eventually decay over years and years from radiation, locked alone in that room... When he screams to Tosh as he realizes what he's in for... I bawled my eyes out. And poor Toshiko dying herself listening to him rage against it. At least she went fairly quickly and her team got to be with her in the end. But Owen... Damn
...I thought the implication of his death was that the room would flood immediately and break him down fairly quickly.
Ok, maybe an unpopular opinion (?). River Song. Don't take me wrong: her story was really enjoyable to watch, her death very climactic. I loved it. But when you look at it closely, I mean: it suuuuucks. - she gets to live forever, away from the man she loves but most of all, everything that she loves = adventures and fun. I love books, good or bad, but it's crazy to think living forever in a virtual reality with all the books in a world is actually great. To think that, one must be really afraid to die (which is okay, but I'm not sure it can stay this way forever, it's the whole point with "Me"). - Ok she spends some time with the Doctor. Again, The Husbands of River Song is one of my favourite episodes ever, but still, come on. Spending a NIGHT on a planet. It's cool when it starts and the idea is really romantic. However, did she really spend her last 18 years with the Doctor in the dark? lol That's pretty terrible, I hope the planet has artificial light or something to mimic the day. Sorry if it sounds stupid, but I can't really figure it! - Again with those 24 years. It does sound romantic. For a human, 24 years is like 1/4 of your lifetime (let's hope so!), so it's a pretty long time. But come on, River is like 200 at that point, so it's more like 1/10 of her lifetime, "only" 8 years in human time, so to speak. It's not that much. Don't get me started with the Doctor, who has just spent billions of years in a bl\*\*dy castle. 24 years is a blink of an eye! It's really sad, because time is relative, and when you look at it, they spend little time together. It's better than nothing, but it's not as long as it sounds to us viewers.... :/
There’s a theory that’s shared by both Moffat and RTD that the Doctor Moon is actually the Doctor, consciousness placed in the mainframe to maintain Cal and the Library as they all wait for River to catch up with them. If that takes a bit of the edge off River’s fate.
I didn't know that thank you! i'll think about it
That "24 years just made him feel worse" thing really makes it hard for me to believe in the "therapy" idea. Over 30 years on earth and he'll be watching Donna age and die.
Ashildr.
Me.
The girl who got fused with the sidewalk
Moaning Myrtle.
Sara Kingdom in daleks master plan. Video has been lost, but she was aged into dust.
Easy Bryan Williams. Yes he didn't die, however he never got to see Rory or Amy ever again. Also he was the one to tell Rory and Amy to go with the doctor the last time they met.
Spinoffs? Everyone in Children of Earth. That version of earth and the people on it are all awful and miserable.
Miracle Day, all of it.
Oswin and the glass dalek man from revelation of the daleks got it pretty bad.
Borusa. Sure, there's a strong argument he brought it on himself, but he was the OG paving slab immortal, and it was treated as it should have been. Fucking horrifying, not an excuse for a blowjob joke.
This is not extreme but from an emotional standpoint, Donna. Her mother constantly berates her to the point where she's READY to leave her like _that_ and never return, she meets the Doctor Who helps her realize she isn't what her mother says she is...only for her to lose all memory of her growth. Maybe it's because I can deeply sympathize with that situation but it got to me more than say Rose being stuck in a parallel world
Peri - getting stuck with Brian Blessed, a worse fate than having Kiv’s brain transplanted.
That girl who ended up as pavement
I know it's not as dramatic as some of the other potential options, but Donna's ending always made me so devastated
I don't know about worst... but Miss Evangelista's death scene always hits me so hard.
Might not be the worst due to length but Owen Harper (torchwood) He dies due to a gunshot, gets brought back to consciousness (still a walking corpse basically, can’t eat ,sleep, drink and the body doesn’t heal) and later gets caught in a reactor melting down, and has all the radiation flow through him and he slowly decays, still conscious through it all.
Captain Jack probably because at one point he's buried in the ground for hundreds? of years. All thanks to his immortality.
The lady who became a face tile.
That UNIT soldier and Harrison Chase in Seeds of Doom. Fed into a giant meat grinder whilst still conscious. Oof.
Ashildr, she cannot die. last person alive, witnessed the end of the world, even if Clara later came with her. imagine seeing everyone you love die? seeing the world die? and after you've witnessed everything you finally can move?
I know Bill's eventual fate was ok but the way she died traumatised me, ngl.
Love and Monsters - "Being a Doctor Who fan will bring you joy for a while, but eventually it condemns you to a tragic half-life as part of an alien's backside or a paving slab!"
Genuinely felt so bad for Bill. I know it all kinda worked out for her in the end but I loved her character so much and what she went through was horrifying
family of blood, companion specific though I'd say Bill
Adric, he died and the Tardis crew got over it in 5 minutes.
Every actor that appeared during Chibnall’s run. No one deserves to be in those episodes
Ashildr. Watching your family die, having children and then watching them die. Losing pieces of yourself as the years past and you start to forget and you have to record it. Losing your sense of wonder, losing your morals, your identity. Living until the end of the universe and not even until, you're still alive. You're no longer Ashildr, you're Me.
I will always advocate for the lovely Danny pink. Mr. pink didn’t deserve any of what happened to him and if Clara could have just not flirted with him none of that stuff would have happened
Before the newer episodes, Donna.
I mean that just seemed mediocre at worst, probably worse for wilf
Living the rest of your life self-loathing and never accomplishing anything of too much value in the world when you have the potential for so much more and never even knowing it was mediocre?
And then giving away your chance for atleast not struggling or suffering more in that mediocrity. For reasons you can't recognise or understand a
Sabalom Glitz fell over a bottle...