The Foe From The Future

Okay, so last time I was banging on about the whole Ultimate Villain poll thing and how utterly ridiculous half the entries were. And I was left wondering why it was that outside of the 2 Steven Moffat created entries there was such a lack of anything from the new era of Dr Who that could be considered even slightly appropriate, let alone a reasonable contender for second place after the Daleks.

Unless we're talking about these Daleks of course, which are different and thus must be feared and hated.

And thus it is I feel compelled to embark on an in depth analysis of original monsters from the 9th, 10th and 11th Doctors run and see if we can come up with anything a bit more iconic. So strap yourselves in, this might take a while....

So, how do we go about this exactly? Well, first of all we have to discount any monster or villain that had it's first appearance in a classic story. So no Autons, Daleks, Cybermen, Macra, Master, Sontarans, Silurians, Great Intelligence or Ice Warriors. This, in all honesty, doesn't narrow the list as much one might think. Sure, there have been a lot of Dalek stories. But the new series has been fantastically consistent in presenting new creatures and villains every week, saving up the classics for a couple of appearances per series. So what's next?

Well, we need to remember that we're focussing here on candidates for Ultimate Villain status. So next I guess we need to focus on actual VILLAINY, before we move on to things like power level or iconic status. For example, the Crooked Man from Hide.

ohmygodtheyremakingafigureofthisguywhydontIownitalready?

Awesome gnarly monster, sure. But in the end, not actually hostile. Neither is the Siren from Curse Of The Black Spot. Miscommunication, misunderstanding and malfunction do not imply malice. There's the question of volition. For example, whilst the Host are the monsters in Voyage Of The Damned, they are at the end of the day simply robots obeying their programming. The actual VILLAIN is Max Capricorn. So to qualify for our list any hostile action must be deliberate and intentional. This cuts out many of the various zombies for a start. The Chula made Gas Mask Zombies from The Empty Child are particularly scary BECAUSE they're the result of a simple, thoughtless mistake but that hardly qualifies them as villainous. The plague zombies from New Earth were hardly what you'd describe as culpable. They just looked manky and would kill you by touching you, but that's hardly their fault.

We should probably make a point of deliberately not including any entire species based solely on the actions of a few individuals or minority groups, if only to ensure that we don't put Humanity itself down. Because it wasn't the Ood themselves that were the problem in Planet Of The Ood. Obviously we can still list specific groups and individuals should they be sufficiently noteworthy though.

 Should we include animal and other sub-sentient intelligences? I'm inclined to say no. We after all looking for a villain rather just a monster. So no Reapers or flying Stingray things from Planet Of The Dead.

So we're looking for intelligent, maliciously hostile forces that actively refuse any chance of a peaceful resolution. After all, if you can reason with them then they're not exactly irredeemably villainous.

So that's a good start, but then we still have the whole Ultimate part of Ultimate Villain to address. This is slightly trickier. We need to take into account factors both in story such as the level of power and hostility presented, as well as out of universe factors such as strength of concept, popularity and iconic status.

So, where does this all leave us?

In the 9th Doctors series probably only the Gelth and the Slitheen make the cut to the possibility stage. The Slitheen are more visually interesting (I.E. make good action figures), but aren't really the strongest in terms of concept or power level. On the cosmic scale they're pretty low level, though not without possibilities. The Gelth are more interesting from a conceptual standpoint, but in practice are basically just more zombies. So I guess we'll go with the Slitheen. A better choice than Clockwork Robots, but only just. I gotta admit, I'm not really feeling it yet.

The 10th Doctor provides us a lot more possibilities, which frankly makes the choices that did somehow make the list even more baffling. In terms of sheer scale of threat and power we have the Beast from the Satan Pit, which makes WAY more sense than the Ood. You want popular Iconography? How about the Werewolf from Tooth & Claw? The Vashta Nerada might make a reasonable option, were we not saving the Moffat slots for the Weeping Angels and Silence. But how about the Racnoss? Or maybe the Flood from Waters Of Mars. Deadly, implacable, iconic looks..... Way better options than the Judoon.

For the 11th Doctors run we honestly don't need to worry so much. The Silence and Weeping Angels are clearly the strongest contenders from his time to date (at least in terms of new series creations), and already represented in the list. I think the next nearest to Ultimate we have in his run is probably the surprise return of the Great Intelligence, but we're focussing on the newer creations here.

So, what sort of conclusions are we left with here? Is the new series suffering from some lack of proper, iconic foes? Well.... No. Not really. We're comparing to rather different time scales here after all. The classic series ran for nearly 30 years after all. The new series has been on for about 8. To have a convincing shot at 2nd and 3rd place in an Ultimate Villain list is pretty respectable achievement, all things considered. Credit where credit is due.

However this doesn't really change the fact that whoever put together that list of nominations had no bloody clue what they were doing. I hope I've done my small part in showing that.