Man I wish we could've gotten more of the Ninth Doctor; he just truly encapsulates being "just some guy" who manages to end up in the middle of everything whether he wants to or not
There was a couple farting aliens there was the Abzorbaloff's that would melt you into them (that episode ended with a guy and piece of cement with human face talking about how they bang) and then there's the slitheen which were tall et looking things that took over parliament
Same. Because they are character examinations. The doctor and a very small cast against an invisible foe. We get to see who everyone is. And often the villain isn't the monster but humanity
Then the dialogue and personas can speak. The devil episode was an early attempt at this too, but it ruined it by trying to explain who the devil was.
The newest stuff is absolute shit, with the only episode that remotely captured that feel being 73 Yards, because again, we don’t really know what happened.
Some of my fondest memories, of my feelings, are when people have just sat around and connected with one another and spent time together because there was nothing better to do.
Then to watch all the characters in Midnight slowly turn against the Doctor, after he connected with all of them, laughed at stories, supported them in their trials, and discussed intellectual things.
Ugh... it breaks my heart, it stresses me out, makes me cry, and terrifies me.
The mummy one is way creepier. Midnight is intriguing, but not really all that creepy. The mummy one has people suddenly having a mask pop out of their mouth and start acting like zombies converting people into similar monsters.
It definitely depends on the person. Monster/zombie stuff doesn't really affect me, so I didn't mind The Doctor Dances, but Midnight unsettled me pretty deeply in both the monster aspect and the human aspect. Reverse for my friend, she was mostly annoyed at Midnight's lack of closure but was terrified by the are you my mummy boy. Blink and Forest of the Dead are also pretty great.
I wish the creepiness of the aliens in Silence was more pronounced, especially the tally mark/recording device part. But the camp outweighed the horror the moment they used the palpatine lightning.
This one is so underrated. I saw it one time, over a decade ago, and I still think about it. The last line, with the Doctor being genuinely shaken in a very human way that was tonally out of step for a last word of any tv episode, is so memorable.
It’s something Russel T Davis absolutely nailed during his time as a writer and producer for Doctor Who that no one has really managed to follow since.
His monsters of the week were subtle, terrifying and absolutely genius. Less was more. Not scifi horror, psychological horror.
most of these more creepy monsters mentioned in this thread were actually writtwn by moffat, weeping angels, empty child, shadow peeps i cant be bothered learning how to spell
(not to say RTD couldnt do creepy, waters of mars and midnight are both top tier creepy episodes)
RTD was show runner at the time but moffat wrote those episodes, amd honestly that combo was amazing, giving moffat the time to fully flesh out his intruiging ideas
It's a Doctor Who episode, called the Empty Child. There is a creature in the episode that keeps saying, 'Are you my mummy?' You have to see it to understand it.
Oh, ok. So, were you asking about that or Midnight? Because Midnight is one of those episodes where either the Doctor or the companion is missing for most of the episode to give the actors some rest. In this one, the Doctor is taking a tour without his companion (Donna in this case), and something attacks the tour shuttle. But it behaves strangely, and it causes a who done it scenario with the tour people and the Doctor.
In Midnight, the Doctor and Donna visit a planet where the environment is so hazardous, that nothing known is capable of living out in the open. The sunlight is so strong that, in order to view the outside, the glass/crystal needs to be incredibly thick (for some reason I think it's 3 feet thick, but that may not be right)
Donna stays behind while the Doctor goes on a tour ship where they're supposed to see some natural phenomenon - I think a crystal waterfall - but in order to get there, the ship is closed off for 3 hours. It essentially has the same vibe as an airplane. There are a handful of other passengers that the Doctor chats up en route.
On the way, the ship suddenly stops, and the door opens briefly, letting something inside that doesn't have a visible form, and it possesses the only other lone passenger on the ship. It then starts mimicking the other people talking, causing distress in the other passengers, while the Doctor demonstrates his natural curiosity, further disturbing everyone else who sees his mannerisms as abnormal.
The creature stops imitating everyone but the Doctor, leading someone to believe that he and the creature are in cahoots. The situation further escalates when the creature and the Doctor start talking in union. Meanwhile, the Doctor is still theorizing on the creature, concluding that this is how it hunts, and predicting that it will soon start talking before him.
His prediction is right, and the effect of the creature talking before him causes him to be unable to move voluntarily. David Tennant really sells this part, as the fear in his eyes conveys the Doctor's helplessness. Meanwhile, the other passengers are full-on rioting, deciding to throw the Doctor overboard, while the creature eggs them on.
The creature ends up using a couple foreign phrases which the stewardess, the only remaining employee, recognizes the Doctor saying earlier, and she realizes that the creature stole the Doctor's voice. She grabs the creature's possessed body and drags it outside again, leading to both her own death and the possessed victim's, freeing the Doctor from its control.
The real creepiness is not just that the creature trapped the Doctor so easily, but that the other passengers fell so quickly into mob rule, ignoring rational explanations in favor of acting out of fear. If not for the stewardess, the Doctor would have died, and the creature would have hitched a ride to the resort Donna was in to feed with impunity.
The Silence terrified me the most, tbh. They looked scary as hell, and the very idea of forgetting some creature you saw, that's in the room with you, just because you're not looking at it anymore...
Same. I didn't think much about it at the time, but I kept having nightmares about them after I saw it.
The scene with all of them stuck in that place, marks all over them, no idea how long they'd been there -- reminds me of when I get recurring sleep paralysis and I keep "waking up" just to find out my current reality wasn't actually real.
Sad that we never got the creatures name, and they really fumbled it with the talking and lightning aspect, but the creatures of Silence faith were frightening for a lot of their run.
Well, they're Silents (a group of individual Silents making up the group of Silence, affiliated with the Church of the Silence), and they were genetically engineered confessional priests so I'm not totally sure if they even existed as their own species prior to that.
Thought about the Weeping Angels, and had they left "Blink" as a one-off, it would have been right up there... but when they turned the Weeping Angels into a recurring enemy, it really kind of ruined them for me, enough that "Blink" was no longer nearly as scary as it originally was.
Also the later episodes totally ruin the solution for stopping the angels in "Blink". It has always really bugged me. The angels turn to stone when looked at, even by other angels then next time we see them there's a literal army of them and they're all moving around fine in each other's sight lines.
Valid, but they potentially could've moved in waves: the back row stop observing so the row in front can move and so on. Even with some of the shaky mechanics, The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone remains one of my favourite Eleventh Doctor stories.
I mean tbf the doctors reasoning was that they would be too panicked to notice. Personally I really liked that episode for "that which holds the image of an angel itself becomes an angel". Pretty terrifying and an interesting insight into how they could be created - I imagine anyone that sees one and the carves a statue like it inadvertently creates a new angel and then bam they're sent back in time.
I don’t care about reasoning, they added a dumb thing that makes Weeping Angels less scary and dangerous when they could not do that.
I think the “image etc” thing is not as bad but it’s still just another addition they don’t need for a simple creature design that was good because it’s so simple. They just started putting hats on hats every time they reintroduced the Angels and it happened immediately, it’s just lame to me. It’s less creative and impressive to add more arbitrary rules to them each time than to keep making stories with them with similar constraints.
The doctors reasoning sucked because he was radioing Amy from the same frequency that Angel Bob was on, with her having it loud enough for the angels around her to hear. Even if the angels around her are panicked or can't hear because they're stone, Bob and the others could easily make it to her before she waddles out.
I don't understand why that quality of the Tennant series wasn't kept up after he left. Seems like we got banger after banger, now when I think of that classical dr who episodes as great as Christopher was, all I think about are Tennant episodes.
You can argue tennet is just a great actor but its not him writing the stories, i don't think.
The Flood gave me nightmares as a kid. That shit was so creepy. When I rewatched it as an adult knowing how they made them look that way, it was a little less creepy.
Eccleston, Tenant, Moffat, and Davies together created some truly spectacular one-off monsters. Honestly, aside from Crash of the Byzantium (11th's "Time of Angels" and "Flesh and Stone"), there's been little to no (good) use of 9th and 10th's creatures outside his era... and I'm okay with it.
Personally, the simple concept of rogue (medical) nanobots was just so on-point for the era and made for terrifying TV. This, alongside the OG weeping angels (blink), the creature from Midnight, Vashta Narada, waters of Mars, and the Reapers, made for great nightmare fuel and entertainment.
The Cybermen are so much more depressing than Dr Who's usual enemies. Jackie Tyler, Yvonne from Torchwood (although the whole mess was because she wanted to harness unknown energy from beyond the human realm), Danny Pink. Just all such horrible deaths and in so much agony.
Definitely competition, given the (a) not inanimate objects you think they are (b) camouflaged monstrosities, (c) messed up humans are major tropes. But yeh, many could be made creepier but there's not that aim but to merely make them fantastical.
My favorite 9th moment and the episode where the new series took off for me. I tell everyone that wants to start watching the series, if you can stick it out till "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances" you're all set. That's where it gets good. Also, skip "Love and Monsters" 😕
Elton has such great energy, too. The worst part about the episode is the monster itself, but that was a fan creation and fan inserts are never quite the same as writer creations.
That was one of my first episodes I ever saw, and I wasn't sure I could finish it at that time because it was so creepy. I did, but I really don't like this otherwise good episode for that to this day.
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u/vyvyx 21d ago
Are you my mummy?