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Doctor Who may be a show for families - but it's also far from cBeebies...
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00:00People talk about hiding behind the sofa from Doctor Who with good reason. It's a scary show,
00:04especially by the standards of family television, and there's a lot of stuff it probably wouldn't
00:07get away with if it wasn't already grandfathered in with the excuse of, but we've been doing it
00:12like this for decades. Seriously, how many early evening TV series regularly have dozens of people
00:16being brutally massacred by evil fascist alien robo tanks? Not many, I'd wager. But even with
00:21its reputation as a terrifying show, there have been moments in Doctor Who that step over the
00:26threshold from scary to actively traumatic. And while some of these moments are pretty
00:30obvious and right there in the text, there are more than a few that can easily slip under the
00:35radar. Until a handy list like this, that is. I'm Sean Ferrick for Who Culture, here with 10
00:40traumatic Doctor Who facts you'll wish you hadn't heard. Number 10. Mancini's restaurant has a
00:45children's menu. The beginning of Peter Capaldi's tenure as the Doctor marked a sudden and distinct
00:51change of tone. Gone was the whimsical fairy tale atmosphere of the Matt Smith era. In its place,
00:56deep breath introduced us to a 12th Doctor who was dark, brooding, unsure of himself and
01:00potentially even willing to kill in cold blood, depending on how you interpret the episode's
01:04ending. Alongside the darker Doctor was a suitably dark premise, with deep breath seeing a return
01:09of the clockwork droids from the girl in the fireplace. This new group of robots, this time from the
01:14SS Marie Antoinette, quickly get back to their old tricks, setting up the fake Mancini's family
01:19restaurant and harvesting customers' body parts to rebuild their ship. In some particularly gruesome
01:23imagery, they even repurpose their victims' skin to make a hot air balloon. But the most
01:27distressing aspect of this is also the easiest to miss. Mancini's is a family restaurant and they
01:33have a children's menu. As the Doctor confirms to a horrified Clara, we are the menu, which indicates
01:39that the children's menu in question actually consists of kids' body parts, as opposed to turkey
01:44dinosaurs and potato waffles. The robotic staff of the SS Madame de Pompadour massacring its human crew
01:49to use their bodies for scrap is already harrowing enough, but imagining the same happening to innocent
01:53children is on a completely different level. No wonder Moffat decided to leave that one as a
01:57background detail instead of bringing attention to it.
02:00Number 9. The Ood Abattoir. It's not just the way a monster looks that makes them scary,
02:06it's the reason they look the way they do. This was the case for the Suited Silence, the cloth-faced
02:12Mondassian Cybermen, and the Bandaged Foretold. It was also the case for the Ood, not because of their
02:18mottled skin and pink fronds, but because of their translation orbs, which are stitched onto them by
02:23the merciless Ood operations. It's an ironic name for a company that literally performs surgery on
02:28its workforce, removing their secondary hindbrains to make the necessary alterations. It's a grim thought,
02:33but the Ood as we know them have been mutilated. Planet of the Ood writer Keith Temple originally planned
02:39to make this more explicit with a sequence set inside the abattoir-like conversion centre.
02:44Though deemed too horrific for the finished episode, this material was reinstated in the
02:48Planet of the Ood novelisation which was released in 2023, and it reads as follows. The hydraulic
02:53system of surgical devices hanging above the conveyor belt a short distance away had one purpose,
02:58to amputate natural Ood's hindbrains. So if you thought that Donna went through the ringer seeing
03:04the Ood locked in a cage like cattle, her trip to the Ood sphere was nearly much more harrowing.
03:09Number 8. The Extremis simulation wasn't a one-time thing.
03:14Simulation theory has been a topic of discussion on various corners of the internet for years now,
03:19so it's surprising it took Doctor Who so long to get around to using it for an episode,
03:23but when it eventually showed up in series 10's Extremis it did not disappoint. Stephen Moffat's
03:28script really leans into the psychological horror of discovering you live in a simulation,
03:33incorporating more references to and depictions of suicide than most people would think possible
03:38in a prime-time BBC drama. What's more, he really sells that these simulations aren't just two-dimensional
03:44copies of the real characters. They're in many ways sentient in their own right, feeling both the
03:48physical pain and existential dread of the situation they find themselves in. Which makes it all the more
03:54grim when you realise that this isn't the only time the monks have run a version of this simulation. In
03:59fact, they've been creating full, realised copies of our world again and again and again,
04:04repeatedly putting billions upon billions of simulated humans through the same terrifying
04:09experience of realising they're in a game before being switched off. Even the Doctor has died multiple
04:14times over as the monks coldly inform him towards the end of the episode. Killing the Doctor once
04:18is a huge feat, so doing it on repeat takes a frightening level of power.
04:237. Gallifreyan children are forced to leave their families
04:27The Time Lords don't exactly have a great reputation as a species, generally being seen as pompous,
04:32arrogant elitists who consider themselves to be above the other races of the galaxy,
04:36but even by their low standards their parenting tactics could use a bit of work. While in most
04:41human cultures a coming of age usually involves a sort of party, or maybe handing down of a family
04:47heirloom to the next generation, or even a knackered old car, the Time Lords have a different take on
04:51things. As the Doctor explains in The Sound of Drums, children of Gallifrey are taken from their
04:55families at the age of eight to enter the Time Lord Academy where they stare into the untempered schism,
05:00a literal hole in the fabric of space and time up in the Gallifreyan mountains. His use of the word
05:05taken implies that the kids don't actually get a say in the matter, and this had results that were
05:09about as successful as you'd expect. In the words of the Doctor, some would be inspired,
05:13some would run away, and some would go mad. We at WhoCulture are not claiming to be parenting
05:18experts, but perhaps the Time Lords would have less trouble with renegade megalomaniacs like the
05:22Master and the Rani if they didn't snatch every eight year old child from their families to stare into the
05:27infinite abyss of all existence. Just a thought. Number six, Unit massacred Silurian civilians.
05:35In modern Doctor Who, Unit is generally presented as a force for good. They share the Doctor's
05:39science-based approach, they employ many of the Doctor's ex-companions and keep a watchful eye
05:43on the rest, and the meetings between Kate Stewart and the TARDIS team are often filled with hugs and
05:47happy reunions. But back in the 1970s was a very different story. Unit, as it first appeared,
05:51was much more militaristic, secretive, and not above completely ignoring the Doctor's advice whenever they
05:56decided they had a better idea, as seen in Doctor Who and the Silurians. After all the usual
06:01misunderstandings between humanity and our reptilian predecessors, the Doctor seems to have
06:05established an uneasy truce between the two Earth species. However, as the Doctor makes his way back
06:10to London, he witnesses an explosion in the distance and realises with horror that the Brigadier has
06:14ordered Unit to destroy the caves above the Silurian bunkers, permanently sealing them in and condemning the
06:20base's entire population to an eventual death in cryostasis. This wasn't just a military installation either.
06:25Considering the Silurian's plans to repopulate the Earth, there will have been civilians in cryosleep,
06:29and maybe even children. Even worse, at this point nobody was even sure whether this was the only
06:34Silurian base still functional. Unit wasn't just committing mass murder, they were attempting a
06:38genocide. For all the Doctors reminiscing about him now, the Brigadier could be a ruthless pragmatist,
06:42and the two rarely agreed on anything. It'll be fascinating to see if events like this get brought up
06:47in the upcoming spin-off, The War Between the Land and the Sea, which deals with a conflict between Unit
06:51and
06:51Silurian's aquatic cousins, the Sea Devils. Number five, Riggsy had to deal with Clara's corpse.
06:58As far as companion's deaths go, Clara's concludes on a comparatively positive note. Though she'll
07:03always have to return to the Trap Street at the moment of her death to prevent any paradoxical
07:07timeline shenanigans, she has her own TARDIS to travel the universe with in the meantime,
07:11and Maisie Williams immortal a shielder to keep her company. Compared to Moffat's other companion
07:14deaths, this seems like a pretty good way to go. But at the end of the day, she is still
07:17dead on Trap Street,
07:18and that's going to be particularly traumatic for one person in particular. Riggsy, Clara's friend,
07:23who she first met in the Excellence Series 8 episode, Flatline. Though this wasn't featured
07:27in the episode itself, the shooting script for Face the Raven contains the rather grim note that
07:32the Doctor tasked Riggsy with taking Clara's body back to her family and informing Coal Hill School
07:37of her death. It's tough to imagine him lugging his friend's corpse out of Trap Street, and he won't
07:40have had much help either. The Doctor can't have returned as his memories of Clara were wiped,
07:44and presumably a shielder won't be able to help either as her return would mean crossing time
07:48streams with her younger self, which means that Riggsy is left alone in the Trap Street with
07:52Clara's dead body and with absolutely no knowledge that Clara actually got to live a full life
07:56travelling around the universe before her death. Poor bloke.
08:00Number 4. There were real bones in the Cave of Skulls?
08:04Doctor Who's second serial, The Daleks, saw the Doctor face his most enduring enemy for the first time.
08:10However, debut instalment An Unearthly Child had sent the first TARDIS travellers to an environment
08:15that was arguably just as hostile. The Daleks might be proper monsters, complete with grating voices and
08:21metal tanks, but the cavemen aren't much better, nor is prehistoric Earth much better than the
08:25petrified jungle of Skaro. And if that wasn't bad enough, things were pretty grim behind the scenes
08:29too. Aside from the pressure of this being the first Doctor Who story to go before cameras,
08:33it was all manner of unsavoury set dressing to contend with. Shrubbery ridden with insects,
08:37fur skins ridden with fleas, and for the Cave of Skulls set, countless replica skulls with some
08:42real bones thrown in for good measure. Yep, that's right, Doctor Who's first ever story featured actual
08:46bones, sourced from an abattoir by designer Barry Newbery. As you can imagine, under those hot studio
08:51lights they didn't exactly smell like roses. It's pretty shocking and a stark reminder of how different
08:55production standards were in the 1960s compared to today, where you would fully expect something like
09:00that to be a constructed prop. Number three, not all cyber conversions are painless. Cyber conversion
09:07is already a pretty horrific process. It's hard not to be slightly traumatized by the idea of having
09:11your body forcibly modified, your brain stuffed into a metal shell, and all of your emotions and free will
09:16artificially suppressed, leaving you an unthinking, unfeeling machine. But if that's all that happens
09:21to you when you're caught by the Cybermen, you can count yourself lucky, because for some people it's
09:25even worse. Sometimes people are awake and conscious during the conversion process. The most notable and
09:31spine chilling example of this is probably in Rise of the Cybermen, when the homeless test subjects
09:36kidnapped by Cybus Industries can be heard screaming in agony as the cyber conversion process begins.
09:41Possibly even more horrific is in 1985's Attack of the Cybermen, when the Doctor encounters Lytton,
09:47a recurring character audiences were already familiar with, midway through the conversion process.
09:51Not only is Lytton fully aware of what's happening to him, he is able to communicate,
09:54begging the Doctor to kill him and end his suffering before he finally becomes a Cyberman. Lisa from
10:00the Torchwood episode Cyberwoman is another example of this, with the Cybermen needing soldiers quickly
10:04toward the end of the Battle of Canary Wharf and therefore not having the time to put people under
10:08before the conversion process began. We're largely led to believe that cyber conversion is fast and
10:13painless, but this isn't always the case. Number 2. Skye was planning to take her life.
10:19I doubt there was anybody watching Doctor Who in 2008 who isn't still a little traumatized by the events of
10:24Midnight, which sits alongside Blink and Turn Left as one of the scariest, most disturbing episodes of the
10:29Tenth Doctor's era. It's impressive then that there are still additional layers in the behind the scenes
10:33that can make the episode even more traumatizing. In the episode's DVD commentary, writer Russell T.
10:38Davis reveals that Skye Silvestri, the unfortunate woman who is possessed by the mysterious entity and
10:43later killed, was planning to take her own life once the Tor Shuttle reached the planet's waterfall destination.
10:48This undoubtedly was related to her recent breakup, which is mentioned in the episode itself, but the
10:52exact reason she's on that shuttle is never disclosed. As Russell explains, she's on her
10:56way to a waterfall palace, but she says, I'm on a schedule, which is like, what for? What on earth
11:01are you going to a waterfall on a schedule for? From this we can infer that the Midnight entity didn't
11:06just choose Skye at random. It was specifically taking advantage of somebody at their absolute emotional
11:10lowest and using them to hurt others. To make matters even worse, she was lucky enough to be on the
11:15shuttle with the Doctor. In any other scenario, he would have attempted to stop Skye from going
11:19through with it, but instead all he could do was watch her die. Number one, the Doctor painted Clara's
11:25portrait. Heaven Sent is widely considered to be one of the high points of modern Doctor Who,
11:30and arguably one of the best episodes in the series' entire run. Part of the reason this episode is held
11:35in such high regard is that, due to its endlessly looping narrative, there are so many little details
11:40and intricacies that only become apparent on the second, third or even fourth rewatch, so it's no wonder
11:44that we're still realising little details that passed us by all these years later. One of the
11:48most heartbreaking elements of the time loop, yes, even sadder than the mote of 12th Doctor's skulls,
11:53is the portrait of Clara. Why is it there, and how did it get there? Well, that first part is
11:58easy
11:58enough to answer. The confession dial is designed to beat the Doctor into submission, so taunting him
12:02with the ghostly image of his dead friend is a pretty cruel way to wear him down, but what isn't
12:07so
12:07apparent is that, according to the writer Stephen Moffat, this painting of Clara was actually created by the
12:12Doctor himself. This means that in one of the earlier loops the grieving Doctor took the time to somehow
12:16find paint, brushes and a canvas and painstakingly draw a portrait of his lost friend, all while
12:22dodging the mysterious wraith that perpetually stalks the castle. As if Series 9's finale wasn't sad enough
12:27already. And on that cheerful note that is everything for our list today folks. Thank you so much for
12:32watching along, you are awesome, you are wonderful, keep things wibbly-wobbly and make sure that you're
12:35following us on the various socials. We are at Whoculture, I am at Sean Ferrick, most importantly make
12:39sure that you are subscribed to the channel and look after yourself. I will see you again soon, thanks so
12:43much for
12:44being here, bye-bye.
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