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List of Doctor Who villains

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This is a list of fictional villains from the long-running British science fiction television series, Doctor Who.

Contents

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A

Animus

Template:Doctorwhocharacter The Animus was an alien intelligence from an unknown planet which landed on the planet Vortis. It could take over any living creature which had come into contact with gold and had already taken control of the ant-like Zarbi when the Doctor and his companions arrived on Vortis in the serial The Web Planet.

At the end of the story, the Animus's true form was revealed, as resembling an octopus with some arachnid features. The First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki help the Menoptra to destroy the Animus using the Menoptra's secret weapon, the Isop-tope. After that, it is assumed that natives of Vortis managed to resolve their differences peacefully.

The Animus has returned or been mentioned in several spin-off stories. In the Missing Adventure Twilight of the Gods by Christopher Bulis, the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria return to Vortis and encounter a seed of the Animus which had survived. The New Adventure All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane identified the Animus with the Great Old One Lloigor from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Finally, an article by Russell T. Davies in the Doctor Who Annual 2006 says that the "Greater Animus perished" in the Time War, "and its Carsenome Walls fell into dust." These references, like the rest of the spin-off media, are of unclear canonicity.

B

C

Lady Cassandra

Template:Doctorwhocharacter The Ninth Doctor encountered the Lady Cassandra O'Brien Dot Delta Seventeen in the episode The End of the World. They, along with the rich and powerful of the universe, were on Platform One, a space station orbiting Earth five billion years in the future, set up to witness the final destruction of the planet by the expansion of the Sun. The character was a purely computer-generated creation, and was voiced by the actress Zoë Wanamaker.

According to her, Cassandra's parents were the last to be buried "in its soil". She had been born a boy on Earth and lived on the edge of the Los Angeles Crevasse. Married several times, her life had been extended through a series of 708 surgeries, until she was nothing but a piece of skin stretched onto a frame, with eyes and a mouth, connected to a brain in a jar below. The skin had to be constantly moisturised to keep it from drying out. As the rest of the human race had long since left Earth and had interbred with other species, Cassandra considered herself the last "pure" human, and the others as mongrels.

Cassandra used spider-like robots to sabotage Platform One's computer systems and the android Adherents of the Repeated Meme to direct attention away from herself. Her original intent was to create the appearance of a hostage situation and collect the ransom and insurance money to fund further surgical procedures. When that was exposed by the Doctor, she teleported off the station, leaving the others to die — eliminating both the evidence and allowing a hostile takeover of the guests' financial holdings.

However the Doctor reset Platform One's systems, saving the station, and also reversed the teleportation feed, bringing Cassandra back. In the heat, without her assistants to moisturise her, Cassandra's skin stretched and exploded, apparently killing her (although her brain was not seen to be destroyed).

According to Doctor Who Magazine #361, Cassandra will return in the first episode of the 2006 series of Doctor Who (tentatively entitled New Earth), once again portrayed by Wanamaker. It is not yet known whether this means Cassandra survived her apparent death, or if New Earth is set before The End of the World.

D

E

Editor

Template:Doctorwhocharacter The Editor was the mysterious manager of the space station Satellite 5, an orbital news station around Earth broadcasting across the whole of the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire of the year 200,000. The character was played by Simon Pegg.

Little is known about the Editor, except that he managed the operations of Satellite 5 from Floor 500, unseen and unknown to the rank-and-file journalists who packaged and broadcast the news over six hundred channels. He also monitored the thoughts of all those connected to the archives of the station via chips implanted into people's heads, which were required to access the computer systems of the 2001st century. Through these implants, the Editor was able to instantly know whatever the person connected knew, and was even able to sense when a record was fictional or not, or that there was something out of place with a particular individual before a security check confirmed it.

The Editor was a smooth and sinister individual in the mould of an evil genius, but was not the true controller of the station. He reported to the monstrous slug-like extraterrestrial known as the Jagrafess. The Editor claimed that he represented a consortium of interstellar banks whose intent was to subtly control the Empire by means of manipulating the news. In the ninety years since Satellite 5 had been established, the social, economic and technological development of the human race had been retarded, making them inward looking and xenophobic. When the Ninth Doctor investigated this, he and Rose were captured by the Editor.

Initially, the Editor was both intrigued and frustrated at the fact that records of their existence did not seem to exist in the archives. However, because the Doctor's new companion Adam had accessed the archives of the Satellite, the Editor acquired the knowledge that the Doctor was a Time Lord and had a TARDIS capable of time travel.

Before he could gain the Doctor's secrets or claim the TARDIS, however, a human journalist named Cathica (who had been following the Doctor's investigation) reversed the environmental controls of Floor 500 that had been kept at an icy temperature vital for keeping the Jagrafess alive. Overheating, the Jagrafess exploded, apparently taking the Editor with him.

In the episode Bad Wolf, taking place on Satellite 5 a century after The Long Game, it was revealed that the Badwolf Corporation was behind the Jagrafess, and that his masters were the Daleks.

F

Fenric

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Fenric was a being described by the Seventh Doctor as "evil from the dawn of time," a malevolent force that survived the clash of energies present at the birth of the universe. In an untelevised adventure, the Doctor had encountered Fenric and defeated him by challenging him to solve a chess puzzle. When Fenric proved unable to solve it, the Doctor then trapped the being in a flask for where he remained for several thousand years.

However, Fenric was still able to manipulate human minds and events through time and space. He set up pawns, bloodlines of families that were under his control and he could use, "The Curse of Fenric" stretching down through generations. These people were known as the "Wolves of Fenric", and their true purpose was unknown even to them. He also had the power to summon haemovores, vampires which were to be the evolutionary destiny of mankind in a possible far future. The haemovores were strong enough to be able to weld metal with their bare hands, and were also immune to bullets. They could be countered, however, with a psychic barrier caused by faith.

Eventually, the flask was brought to a British Army base in Northumberland in 1942, where several Wolves, including the Doctor's companion Ace, were manipulated into freeing Fenric from his flask. He also summoned the Ancient One, the last of the Haemovores from the future, in an attempt to poison the world with a deadly chemical toxin. Fenric then revealed that he had manipulated the Seventh Doctor's life upon several occasions as part of his game, such as creating the time storm that originally took Ace to Iceworld. Eventually, the Doctor convinced the Ancient One to turn on Fenric; the Ancient One then destroyed Fenric and himself with the same toxin.

In Norse mythology, Fenric is another name for Fenrisulfr, the monstrous wolf that will devour Odin during Ragnarök. The Virgin New Adventures novel All Consuming Fire by Andy Lane also equates Fenric with the Cthulhu mythos entity Hastur the Unspeakable. As with all spin-off media, the canonicity of this is unclear.


G

Count Grendel

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Count Grendel of Gracht was a Knight of the nobility of the planet Tara and the Lord of Castle Gracht, his sole on-screen appearance was in the Fourth Doctor serial, The Androids of Tara, part of the Season 16 quest for the Key to Time. The character was played by Peter Jeffrey.

While searching for the fourth segment of the Key, Romana discovered that it was disguised as the head of a statue representing the family crest of Grendel's family. After Romana transformed it into its actual crystalline form, the segment was confiscated by Grendel. Grendel did not know of the segment's true nature; his real intent was to use Romana (who resembled the Princess Strella) in a complex plot to seize the throne of Tara from Prince Reynart.

His plans were ultimately defeated by the Doctor. Although Grendel was considered the finest swordsman on Tara, the Doctor managed to duel him to a standstill, and he made his escape by leaping into the moat of Castle Gracht and swimming away.

A cultured and charming villain, Gracht used his breeding to cover a ruthless and cunning personality. He used and discarded people as easily as he would persuade them to do his bidding, and somehow always managed to live to scheme another day. He also appeared in the spin-off short story The Trials of Tara by Paul Cornell, where another attempt to seize the throne of Tara was foiled by the Seventh Doctor and Benny.

H

I

J

Jagrafess

Template:Doctorwhocharacter The Jagrafess, or, to give its full title, The Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe was a gigantic, gelatinous creature similar to a slug in shape. Its origins or home planet (or even the name of its species) are not known, but it was sentient and able to communicate in a series of growls. It had a life span of about 3000 years, with sharp, vicious teeth and several vestigial eyes. Its metabolic rate, however, meant that it had to be kept at low temperatures to survive. Its first and only appearance to date was in the episode The Long Game.

The Jagrafess was the supervisor of the mysterious and sinister Editor on board Satellite 5, a space station that broadcast news across the whole of the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire of the year 200,000. The Editor (who called the Jagrafess "Max" for short) claimed that the Jagrafess had been placed with Satellite 5 some ninety years before by a consortium of interstellar banks. The intent was to use the news broadcasts to subtly manipulate the Empire, retarding its social, economic and technological growth and turning it more inward looking and xenophobic. Control was enhanced by the use of computer chips in every human that allowed the users to access the computer systems of the 2001st century, but at the same time allowed the Jagrafess and its cohorts to monitor people's thoughts. In this way, the human race was reduced to slavery without them even realising it.

The environmental systems of Satellite 5 had been configured to vent all heat away from Floor 500, keeping it cold enough for the Jagrafess to survive, attached to the ceiling of the main control room. When the Ninth Doctor, Rose and Adam arrived on board, the Doctor recognised that human development had been deliberately obstructed and began to investigate. Ultimately captured by the Editor and about to be killed by the Jagrafess, the Doctor and Rose were saved by the actions of Cathica, a human journalist, who reversed the environmental systems. The Jagrafess overheated, bloated up and exploded, apparently ending its threat and the scheme to hold back the human race.

In the episode Bad Wolf, taking place on Satellite 5 a century after The Long Game, it was revealed that the Badwolf Corporation was behind the Jagrafess, and that its masters were the Daleks.

Sharaz Jek

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Sharaz Jek was a partner of businessman Morgus. Together they planned to harvest the rare Spectrox drug on the planet Androzani Minor using androids built by Jek. Morgus, however, supplied Jek with substandard equipment and Jek was caught in a mud burst on Minor leaving him hideously disfigured. Jek thereafter bore a pathological hatred for Morgus.

When the Doctor and Peri landed on Androzani Minor, they soon became entangled in a three way struggle between Jek's androids, drug runners and Androzani Major troops. Jek found Peri beautiful and coveted her strongly. When the Doctor and Peri were to be executed by the Major troops, Jek replaced them with realistic androids.

When Morgus and the leader of the of the drug runners, Stotz, arrived at Jek's base, Jek attacked Morgus and killed him, but was himself shot by Stotz.

K

Kandyman

The Kandyman was a pathological, psychopathic robotic killer from 1988's Seventh Doctor story, The Happiness Patrol. Employed by the egocentric Helen A, the Kandyman delighted in creating methods of torture and destruction using confectionary.

L

M

Master of the Land of Fiction

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The Master of the Land of Fiction was a human writer from the year 1926 who was drawn to the Land of Fiction and forced to continuously write stories which were enacted within that realm. The Master's name was never revealed, but he did identify himself as the writer of "The Adventures of Captain Jack Harkaway" in The Ensign, a magazine for boys. He was freed by the Doctor, and returned to his own time.

In the Virgin New Adventures novel Conundrum by Steve Lyons, the Land of Fiction found itself a new Master in the form of Jason, a teenager from the late 20th century. His creations included superheroes, psychic detectives, a Famous Five type children's group and a version of the Doctor called "Dr. Who", based on the TV Comic comic strip portrayal, complete with his grandchildren John and Gillian. Jason also appeared in Head Games (also by Lyons), where he became "Dr. Who"'s companion in the real world for a while before the Seventh Doctor set things right.

The Master of the Land of Fiction should not be confused with the renegade Time Lord known as the Master.


Monarch

Monarch (portrayed by Stratford Johns) was the megalomaniac leader of the planet Urbanka, which he destroyed through over mining, and destruction of its ozone layer. He had similar plans for the Earth, in order to have resources to travel faster than light, hoping to travel back before the dawn of time and meet God. Monarch was killed when the Fifth Doctor threw a toxin over his body — the very toxin which he planned to use on the Earth. He appeared in the serial Four to Doomsday

Morbius

In The Brain of Morbius, Morbius was a renegade Time Lord from the Doctor's birthplace, Gallifrey. He was executed by his fellow people for his crimes. However, his brain survived. The remaining organ was taken away by the fanatical scientist Solon, who was planning the resurrection of Morbius.

The Doctor found Morbius in Solon's castle. A Frankenstein's monster body from the bits of dead aliens was what Solon wanted to use for Morbius. Solon drugged the Doctor, intending to use his head for Morbius's brain, but insisted that it would be no cruel butchery.

Sarah Jane Smith foiled his plans. Solon had a Plan B for the head of Morbius - a goldfish bowl head with two eyestalks. This time round, the plan worked.

Morbius fought the Doctor in a series of violent encounters. Their final confrontation was a battle of the brains. It left them damaged. What was known as the Sisterhood wanted rid of Morbius. He died after a fall from a cliff.

N

O

P

Q

R

S

Josiah Samuel Smith

Template:Doctorwhocharacter Thousands of years in the past a creature called Light launched a survey expedition to catalogue all forms on the planet Earth. Josiah Samuel Smith was a member of the crew of Light's ship.

In the late 1880s, Smith began to evolve towards a human form, discarding husks of previous insect like bodies. He planned to seize power in the British Empire by assassinating Queen Victoria, but his plans were thwarted when Light was reawakened from his slumber, and another member of the survey team's crew known as Control escaped Smith's imprisonment. When Light was defeated by the Seventh Doctor, Control who was also evolving into a human departed in Light's ship, taking Smith as her prisoner.

Shadow

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The Shadow was a servant of the Black Guardian, and at least partially responsible for a war between the planets Atrios and Zeos. The extent of the Shadow's involvement with starting the war was unstated, but when the Zeons eventually abandoned their planet rather than continue the war, he had a Time Lord named Drax build a computer named Mentalis which would co-ordinate the remaining Zeon forces. Once Drax completed work on Mentalis he realised just who he was working for, but was imprisoned by the Shadow so as not to disrupt his plan. The Shadow then waited on a space station in orbit of Zeos (invisible to either the Atrians or Mentalis) and waited for the Doctor to arrive. In the meantime, Mentalis was more successful in fighting the war than the Zeons and pushed the Atrians to the brink of defeat.

The Shadow knew that the royal family of Atrios held the secret of the sixth segment of the Key to Time, and when the Fourth Doctor arrived he arranged for the Doctor and the last survivor of the family, Princess Astra to be kidnapped. With this done, the Shadow ordered Mentalis to cease its attacks and duped Atrios' military leader, the Marshall, into making a nuclear attack on Zeos — the result of which would have been that Mentalis would set off an explosion powerful enough to destroy both planets.

Eventually the Shadow worked out that Astra herself was the sixth segment, and transformed her into the segment. Before he could attach it to the other five (which he had stolen from the Doctor), the Doctor stole the segments back and with Drax's aid dismantled Mentalis. Finally, using the TARDIS, the Doctor set up a force field which diverted the Marshall's missiles into the Shadow's space station, destroying it. The Shadow perished in the explosion, but not before informing the Black Guardian of what had happened.

Sutekh

Template:Doctorwhocharacter Sutekh was a renegade member of the powerful race of Osirians — an ancient but now extinct race — whom even the Time Lords feared. After destroying his home planet Phaester Osirius, he was hunted down by Horus and the remaining 740 Osirians, who imprisoned him in a pyramid on the planet Earth, where the Eye of Horus, beaming a signal from Mars suppressed Sutekh's powers. The tales of the Osirians were remembered in Egyptian mythology — Sutekh as the god Set, brother of Horus.

In the year 1911, the archaelogist Professor Marcus Scarman broke into the inner chamber of the Pyramid of Horus on Earth, discovering Sutekh and setting in chain a sequence of events which could have allowed Sutekh to escape his bonds. The Fourth Doctor was eventually able to defeat Sutekh by trapping him in a time tunnel for thousands of years — longer even than the extended life span of an Osirian.

T

U

V

Henry van Statten

Template:Doctorwhocharacter Henry van Statten was an American billionaire from the year 2012. His first and only appearance to date was in the episode Dalek.

Van Statten was a man who wielded enormous wealth and influence, apparently enough even to sway the course of presidential elections. Intelligent, arrogant and self-assured, he treated his employees like chattel, to the point of mindwiping them when they left his employ so they could not betray his secrets. His personal helicopter had the callsign "Bad Wolf One" and his corporation was called Geocomtex.

Van Statten had been collecting extraterrestrial artefacts on the grey market for several years, buying bits and pieces of alien technology at auctions and then reverse engineering them to create "new" technologies which he would then exploit commercially. He claimed to "own" the Internet, and said that broadband was derived from technology scavenged from the Roswell crash. He kept these artefacts in a private collection, inside a bunker called the Vault, fifty feet below ground in Utah near Salt Lake City.

When the Ninth Doctor and Rose arrived in the Vault in answer to a distress call, the Doctor discovered to his horror that Van Statten's sole living specimen (which he had dubbed a "metaltron") was in fact a Dalek. Van Statten had acquired the Dalek at an auction some time before and had been torturing it to try and get it to speak, but it had refused to do so until it recognised the Doctor as the mortal enemy of its race.

Despite the Doctor's warnings to destroy it, Van Statten captured the Doctor instead, to examine his alien physiology. The Dalek managed to regenerate itself by absorbing the DNA of the time travelling Rose and escaped, killing two hundred personnel before it eventually self-destructed. Van Statten's personal assistant, Diana Goddard, took charge at this point and ordered that Van Statten be taken away, mindwiped and dumped on the streets, "somewhere beginning with an 'S'." When last seen, Van Statten was being escorted away by his own guards to his fate. The website of Van Statten's company can be seen at Geocomtex.net

W

The War Chief

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The War Chief was a renegade Time Lord who assisted an alien race known as the War Lords in the 1969 serial The War Games. He was played by Edward Brayshaw.

The War Lords had been kidnapping soldiers from various wars in Earth's history to play war games on an unknown planet. The War Chief provided the War Lords with TARDIS-like travel machines, which they used to kidnap the human soldiers.

When the War Chief and the Doctor came face to face, they recognized each other. The War Chief wanted the Doctor's help to double-cross the War Lords and seize power for himself. The Doctor refused, and instead summoned the Time Lords for help. The War Lords found out the War Chief's plans, and executed him.

Although the War Chief was apparently killed at the end of The War Games, some fans choose to believe that the Master (the Doctor's arch-enemy, introduced in Terror of the Autons a couple of years later) is the War Chief in a new guise, due to similarities between the two characters' appearances and modi operandi.

The spin-off novels (which are of debatable canonicity) include both a novel featuring the return of the War Chief (Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks) and a novel featuring the Master set before The War Games (The Dark Path by David A. McIntee), establishing that the two are not the same person.

X

Y

Z

Zaroff

Template:Doctorwhocharacter Professor Zaroff was a mad scientist who planned to destroy the world. Some of his scientific inventions included food made from plankton, and the ability to graft gills to humans to enable them to breathe underwater.

As part of his diabolical plans, he allied himself with the leaders of Atlantis telling them he would raise their city back to the surface or lower the ocean level by draining the water through an fissure in the Earth's crust. The Second Doctor immediately realised that this would create super heated steam that could destroy the Earth. Zaroff was defeated when the Doctor and his companions sabotaged the generator he was using to pump the water. Zaroff was left to drown when his laboratory filled with water after the sea walls protecting it collapsed.

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