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Hands up if you're still not over THAT scene in Turn Left...
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00:00Doctor Who has a well-earned reputation as a scary show, but it also has a long history of more subtly haunting moments.
00:07Scenes that quietly unsettle you whenever they come to mind, like reading too many existentially terrifying news headlines,
00:14or remembering that crack in your bedroom wall when you were a kid.
00:17So, with spooky season upon us, let's take a look at some of these moments, shall we?
00:22I'm Ellie for Who Culture here with 10 Doctor Who moments that will haunt you forever.
00:27Number 10. Just save someone. The Fires of Pompeii.
00:32We all think of the Doctor as somebody who saves people. That's just what they do, and it's basically the premise of the entire show.
00:38As Amy coldly reminds Eleven in Amy's Choice, what is the point of the Doctor if they aren't saving lives?
00:43This in mind can be easy to forget that there are some things that even the Doctor can't change.
00:48It's the sudden confrontation with this fact that makes the Fires of Pompeii such a long-lasting gut punch.
00:54After three series of the Doctor being the infallible hero, he's put in a situation where he cannot intervene, no matter how many people will die.
01:02Pompeii's destruction is too important a historical event, and the Doctor can't just change time with a snap of his fingers.
01:07But even knowing this from the first moment of the episode, it's impossible not to be shocked when the volcano finally erupts,
01:14and the Doctor walks past families begging for salvation, enters the TARDIS, and leaves.
01:18It's only here, with Donna tearfully pleading for the Doctor to save someone, not the whole town, just someone, that he relents.
01:26If only slightly.
01:27Catherine Tate's acting is brilliant in this scene, and it's undoubtedly one of the most underrated tearjerker moments in the show.
01:33While the Doctor extending a hand, literally, to Caecilius and his family ends the episode on a slightly more positive note,
01:40it doesn't erase anybody's memories of Donna pleading with a Doctor who has fully resigned to the fact that he must let thousands of people die.
01:48Number 9. The Silent Credits. Earthshock.
01:52Companions in Doctor Who don't die.
01:54Well, sometimes they do, but they don't die-die.
01:56They end up in a parallel dimension, or living out the rest of their lives in New York City, and so on.
02:01Whether or not that's alright then is up to the viewer, but at the end of the day, they're usually doing quite well.
02:06Except for poor Adrick, that is.
02:081982's Earthshock concludes with the maths whiz about to evacuate a freighter headed for a deadly collision with Earth.
02:14At the last possible second, he realises he knows how to deactivate the Cybermen's control device,
02:19and jumps out of the escape pod, trapping himself on the ship, which then crashes into the Earth.
02:24It's a classic Doctor Who ending, the companion figuring out the solution at the 11th hour,
02:28bravely putting their own life at risk to save the day.
02:31To drive the finality of this moment home, the end credits roll in complete silence
02:35over a shot of Adrick's shattered star of mathematical excellence, an iconic part of his costume.
02:40It's only here that it finally sinks in.
02:42Adrick is dead, and he is never coming back.
02:45Even considering Adrick's wavering popularity with certain parts of the fanbase,
02:49it's no surprise that the quiet credits are remembered as one of the most emotionally impactful moments of the classic era.
02:55This was the first time a long-running companion had been killed,
02:58and the first time the credits had rolled in complete and utter silence.
03:01We're used to humming along to the Doctor Who theme when an episode ends,
03:04so to have Earthshock end in such a unique way rammed home how monumental a moment this was.
03:108. Game Station Massacre – The Parting of the Ways
03:14One mistake people often make when talking about the Daleks is describing them as robots.
03:19Even some of the show's writers have fallen into this trap,
03:22with episodes like Destiny of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks
03:25hinging their plots on the idea that Daleks are creatures of pure logic,
03:28and can be stalemated by other logic-driven robots.
03:31But the Daleks aren't unthinking, unfeeling automatons that carry out orders coldly and efficiently.
03:37The truth is much worse.
03:38Daleks are driven entirely by one single emotion – hatred.
03:42Nowhere is this more evident than in The Parting of the Ways.
03:45During the Daleks' climatic assault on the game station,
03:48all of the contestants not willing to fight are hidden away on the station's bottom floor,
03:52as far as possible from the battle.
03:54But in spite of this, the Daleks opt for one hell of a bloodthirsty detour
03:58and send down a squadron with the express intention of massacring every last one of them.
04:02In other words, the Daleks saw a room filled with scared, defenceless humans,
04:05and they thought, you know what, we need to fix that.
04:07It was a perfect way to demonstrate to a new and unfamiliar audience
04:11the lengths Daleks will go to satiate their endless hatred.
04:14And for those who watched as children in 2005,
04:16it never fails to bring back the shock and horror of realising just how utterly evil the Daleks truly are.
04:22Number 7 – Tegan bids farewell – Resurrection of the Daleks
04:27Just as all incarnations of the Doctor must eventually regenerate,
04:31all companions must eventually step out of the TARDIS and make a life for themselves without the Doctor.
04:36Sometimes they go back home, sometimes they continue travelling the universe solo.
04:40But they almost always leave on fairly good terms with the Doctor.
04:43That's what makes Tegan's departure in Resurrection of the Daleks all the more haunting.
04:47Standing in an abandoned warehouse filled with dead soldiers and destroyed Daleks,
04:52the exhausted Aussie sadly explains to the Doctor that she's tired of all the death and destruction,
04:57and that travelling with him stopped being fun a long time ago.
04:59After a quick handshake, she runs off, desperate to get away,
05:02while the Doctor pleads with her not to leave.
05:04It's a sad departure for a companion who had been travelling with the Doctor for nearly three whole series,
05:09and it feels all too real.
05:10It's easy to pretend that travelling in the TARDIS would be a magical, fulfilling experience,
05:15but when you actually consider the scale of the death and destruction in your average episode,
05:19it starts to look like Tegan was the only sane person to ever travel through time and space.
05:23Perhaps that's why this moment is still so haunting.
05:25It suddenly breaks down the fantasy of the show.
05:28Tegan can barely look the Doctor in the eye as she says farewell,
05:31and it's uncomfortable to watch.
05:32Number 6 – Steffi's final moments – The Waters of Mars
05:36There are so many side characters that die in Doctor Who that it can be difficult to even think of them as characters.
05:43But when an episode takes the time to really make the audience empathise with its ill-fated cannon fodder,
05:48and does it well, it can hit like a ton of bricks.
05:51The entire sequence at the end of The Waters of Mars,
05:54where the crew is picked off one by one by the flood,
05:56is a haunting piece of television.
05:58But the moment that sticks out the most is the death of Steffi.
06:01Trapped by a waterfall and unable to escape,
06:03Steffi locks herself in a side room and tearfully watches video messages from her children
06:07as she waits for her inevitable death.
06:09Despite her character's relatively short screen time,
06:12it's such an unbearably real and human moment
06:15that she still sticks out amongst the many dead characters all these years later.
06:19It was important that we really felt it when the Bowie Base crew died,
06:23as this would then make us buy the Doctor's rash actions at the end of the episode.
06:27Steffi's death comes mere minutes before he ultimately snaps
06:29and decides to disregard the laws of time,
06:32and having witnessed these events ourselves,
06:34you can't really blame him.
06:36Number 5. The Auton's Rampage, Spearhead from Space
06:40We tend to assume that alien invasions will happen somewhere important.
06:44The Slitheen spaceship crashing into Big Ben,
06:46Cybermen marching down the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral,
06:49Daleks on Westminster Bridge.
06:51To quote Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day 2,
06:53they like to get the landmarks.
06:55Also, sorry for reminding you that that movie exists.
06:57Perhaps that's why the Auton's shop window dummies
07:00attacking innocent bystanders in Spearhead from Space
07:02is such a disturbingly compelling image decades on.
07:05It's not an assault on the government or the military,
07:07but on ordinary people doing everyday things.
07:10The emotionless plastic faces of the Autons,
07:12juxtaposed with the horrified faces of the civilians,
07:15gives the scene a real nightmarish quality.
07:17It's very rare that Doctor Who kills off innocents
07:19who have no connection to the story,
07:21so the horror of Spearhead's commuter carnage stands out even more,
07:24especially as the killing is so wanton and merciless.
07:27It's a truly frightening sequence that chills the blood over 50 years later.
07:32Number 4.
07:33There should have been another way.
07:34Warriors of the Deep.
07:36The Fifth Doctor really didn't have much fun across his era.
07:39Ironically, the incarnation generally considered to be the nicest classic Doctor
07:44was cast slap bang in the middle of one of the most bleak and nihilistic parts of the show's history.
07:48Nothing encapsulates this contrast more than the final line in Warriors of the Deep,
07:52where the Doctor, surrounded by dead humans, sea devils and Silurians,
07:56utters the heartbreaking line,
07:58there should have been another way.
07:59It's such a bleak moment of defeat,
08:01not only in the context of Warriors of the Deep,
08:03but for the Fifth Doctor's tenure overall.
08:05There are a few other incarnations who have been consistently put in no-win scenarios
08:09where there is no right or good option.
08:11He always tries to do right by people, but often it's just not possible.
08:15The way Davison's voice cracks as he delivers the line
08:17just completes this image of the Fifth Doctor as a broken man.
08:21We see how heavily all those defeats weigh on him,
08:23and how he carries the pain of those failures with him.
08:26Warriors of the Deep certainly isn't winning any awards,
08:28but this was a powerful final note to end on.
08:32Number three, that's what they called them last time,
08:35Turn Left.
08:36Turn Left contains enough bleak moments that it could populate this entire list.
08:40That said, there's one scene that stands head and shoulders above the rest
08:44when it comes to leaving you shell-shocked.
08:46Later in the episode, as the world without the Doctor becomes increasingly hopeless,
08:50and the United Kingdom slides further into authoritarianism,
08:53the Colasantos, the friendly Italian family the nobles are house-sharing with,
08:57are sent to a labour camp.
08:59This is already suitably horrifying, but the scenario is made infinitely worse
09:03with one simple line of dialogue from a distraught Wilfred Mott.
09:06That's what they called them last time.
09:07With just seven words, Russell T. Davis is able to evoke such horrific imagery
09:11that this scene managed to leapfrog any of the actual depicted moments of horror
09:15and become the definitive scene in Turn Left.
09:18It's that moment when the penny drops, for us and for Donna,
09:21and you realise what is actually happening to the Colasantos that was done so incredibly well.
09:26It leaves you stunned, like Wilf himself.
09:28It's the understated nature of the scene that makes it stick with audiences many years later.
09:33It doesn't just create historical parallels to the Holocaust.
09:36It emphasises the powerlessness ordinary people have in the face of the authoritarian regimes
09:40that create these things.
09:42It's a dark reminder that the Daleks might not actually be the most evil creatures in the universe.
09:48Number 2. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
09:52Remembrance of the Daleks.
09:54The Doctor ordering a lone Dalek to kill itself has become one of the most well-remembered moments
09:58of Series 1, and a defining point in the Ninth Doctor's character arc.
10:02It's a shocking moment of the Doctor going too far,
10:05giving in to the sort of hate and anger he's supposed to be fighting against.
10:09As is later pointed out, he is acting like a Dalek.
10:11But it's not nearly as bad as that time the Seventh Doctor actually forced the Dalek into self-destruction.
10:16At the end of Remembrance of the Daleks, both Dalek factions have been eradicated,
10:20Skaro has been destroyed, and Davros has been sent scurrying off with his tail between his legs once again.
10:25All that remains is the Supreme Dalek.
10:27The Doctor calmly and forcefully talks the Dalek into taking its own life,
10:31pushing just the right buttons until it has a complete mental collapse and destroys itself.
10:36Satisfied with his work, and seemingly not that concerned with the destruction he's personally wrought across the previous four episodes,
10:42the Doctor scrapes the tip of his umbrella through what's left of the Dalek,
10:45muttering, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
10:48What makes this moment so eerie is that for all intents and purposes,
10:51this is the introduction of a new Doctor.
10:53Gone is the idiot in a box, bumbling around the universe, writing wrongs as they crop up.
10:58Instead, we're left with a cold and calculating Doctor who has a plan,
11:01and no qualms about doing whatever needs to be done to execute it.
11:05A Doctor like that is more than a little bit terrifying.
11:09Number 1.
11:10I have until the rain stops.
11:12Blink.
11:13You'd be hard-pressed to find a moment in Blink that isn't iconic.
11:17There's a reason it's considered one of the best episodes ever.
11:19But after nearly two decades, the most haunting scene in the episode is one of its most low-key.
11:24About halfway through the episode, Sally Sparrow meets charming police officer Billy Shipton,
11:28who, after a bit of light but successful flirting, is sent back in time by the Weeping Angels.
11:33The next time they meet, Sally is ten minutes older, but Billy is on his deathbed.
11:37And according to the Doctor, he has until the rain stops.
11:41The very same rain that was falling when he first met Sally mere minutes ago.
11:45What follows is a beautifully quiet scene that expertly plays with themes of ageing,
11:49death, the time we have, and the fleeting nature of life.
11:52Billy is both clearly the same person, and yet so fundamentally changed by time.
11:57The youthful and energetic young man, now frail and aged.
12:00The scene is incredibly sad, and captured beautifully by director Hetty MacDonald,
12:05with the shadows of the rainfall sweeping across Billy's face as he speaks,
12:08almost counting down to the inevitable.
12:10Blink is, of course, a belter of an episode, with moments of genuine horror,
12:14witty writing, clever sci-fi, and more.
12:16But this is yet another example of how important the human moments are to Doctor Who,
12:21and how, when done well, they are often the most affecting parts of their stories.
12:25And that concludes our list, and in the spirit of spooky season,
12:29I hope you're all feeling eerily haunted now.
12:32But if you think we missed an example, then do let us know in the comments down below.
12:36In the meantime, I've been Ellie for WhoCulture,
12:38and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye, sweeties.
12:41WhoCulture, and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye, sweeties.
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