Characters / Doctor Who – Aliens and Monsters

Doctor Who characters index
Incarnations of the Doctor
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The TARDIS
Companions and Supporting Cast
Classic Series Companions (K9, Romana) | Revival Series Companions (Rose Tyler, Captain Jack Harkness, The Ponds, River Song, Clara Oswald) | Other Supporting Cast (The Paternoster Gang) | UNIT Staff
Villains
Immortals and Eldritch Abominations | The Master (John Simms' Master, Missy, Expanded Universe Masters)
Aliens and Monsters
Daleks (Davros) | Cybermen | Robots | The Silence | Silurians | Sontarans | Time Lords | Weeping Angels | Slitheen

"There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things. Things that act against everything we believe in. They must be fought!"

— The Second Doctor, "The Moonbase"

The various races who encounter the Doctor in Doctor Who. For specific members of these races, see their respective character sheets.

Robots and other fully mechanical entities can be found here.

As with all Doctor Who characters, they appear not only in the televised adventures, but also in the Expanded Universe branches.

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Classic Series

First Doctor Era Debut

Daleks

They have their own page.

Thals

See the Daleks page.

Voord

Voord (First Doctor)

A race of semi-aquatic, wetsuit-wearing assassins who have attempted to invade many oceanic planets in the past, they menace the Doctor and his companions in "The Keys of Marinus".

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• Arc Welding: The Sixth Doctor comic "The World Shapers" claims that the Voord species eventually evolve into the Cybermen. A throwaway comment in "The Doctor Falls" confirmed this, though made it explicit for the first time that they were one of many origins of the Cybermen.
• Fish People
• People in Rubber Suits
• Professional Killer: The Voord make excellent assassins.
• Submarine Pirates: The Voord travel around in small, one-man barges and in larger submarines.

Sensorites

Sensorites (First Doctor)

A telepathic humanoid race native to the Sense Sphere. Appeared in "The Sensorites".

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• Ditto Aliens: They themselves cannot effectively tell the differences between each other without first having become familiar with them, and relies on sashes and other decorative garbs to identify important individuals.
• Klingon Promotion: If any of the Elders die, they will be replaced with another one who is next to the rank.
• Telepathy: They communicate with each other if they're not close to each other.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The race is vulnerable to darkness and loud noise.
• Yellow Face: They're based on Chinese Communists.

Zarbi

Zarbi (First Doctor)

Giant alien ants from the planet Vortis. Appeared in "The Web Planet" and have shown up in the expanded universe a few times since, usually as a punchline.

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• Anti-Villain: The Zarbi are actually being brainwashed by the Animus.
• Badass Adorable: In their larval form, Zarbi are strangely cute, but can fire a deadly venom.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies
• Bug War: Uniquely, a war between two different factions of bugs. The ant-like Zarbi and the Menoptera, a race of butterfly people.
• Insectoid Aliens: Planet Vortis is full of them. The Doctor and his companions are the only non-insects in the entire serial.
• Meaningful Name: Zarbi is French slang for "bizarre".
• People in Rubber Suits: Really obvious. A rather infamous example, meaning the Zarbi are somewhat of a joke among old-school fandom.
• Running Gag: Whilst the Doctor tangles with formidable foes such as the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Master, Iris Wildthyme keeps running into the Zarbi.

Drahvins

Drahvins (First Doctor)

Beings from the Planet Drahva. They have very few men.

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• Absolute Xenophobe: Maaga and by implication all the other upper-caste Drahvins.
• Ace Custom: The Drahvins are so wedded to their caste system that they self-destructively only give their leader caste the good weapons.
• Ambiguously Human: It is unclear whether the Drahvins are human-looking aliens or a human colony that went in a really extreme cultural direction. Maaga refers to herself and her people as "human" or "human beings" several times, but this could just be translation convention given that it's in the context of "sentient beings deserving of life".
• Bad Boss: Seems to be required by Drahvin law and/or custom.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Defied.
• Brainless Beauty: The barely sentient Drahvin clones.
• The Cameo: River Song namedrops the Drahvins as members of the Alliance in "The Pandorica Opens".
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: The Drahvins can't understand self-sacrifice.
• Fantastic Caste System: The Drahvins have a caste system based on social insects, of female leaders, female workers, and a few males kept solely for the female leaders to sexually reproduce.
• Lady Land: On the planet Drahvin, women dominate the planet. A few men are kept, presumably for breeding, while the rest are killed. Oddly, Maaga doesn't immediately understand when Steven asks her if all the inhabitants of her planet are women, perhaps demonstrating how utterly insignificant and out of mind the men of Drahvin are.

Cybermen

They have their own page.

Second Doctor Era Debut

Macra

Macra (Second and Tenth Doctors)

A race of enormous crustaceans who fed off gases that were poisonous to most other species. The Second Doctor first encountered them when they had enslaved a human colony. The Tenth Doctor later discovered a new breed of Macra living under New New York.

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• Anti-Villain: In a way. In "The Macra Terror", they only enslaved the colonists because the humans had colonised the Macra home world without asking (assuming of course, it is the Macra home world). In "Gridlock", they're merely non-intelligent animals who are defending their territory.
• Deadly Gas: Their primary food source.
• Formerly Sapient Species: After billions of years, the Macra the Tenth Doctor encounters on New Earth have devolved from sapient beings to mindless beasts.
• Giant Enemy Crab: Big enough to crush cars in their pincers.
• Long Bus Trip: Forty years between "The Macra Terror" and "Gridlock".
• Villain Decay: Invoked. After a few billion years, the Macra devolved into a much less intelligent form, so instead of being invisible puppet masters, they're just scavengers living off car fumes.

Ice Warriors

Ice Warriors (Second, Third, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors)

Played by: Bernard Bresslaw, Roger Jones and and Michael Attwell (1967); Tony Harwood (1967–69); Sonny Caldinez (1967–74); Steve Peters and Graham Leaman (1969); Alan Bennion (1969–74); Spencer Wilding (2013); Richard Ashton (2017); Adele Lynch (2017)
Voiced by: Nicholas Briggs (2013)

A race of reptilian aliens who come from Mars, the Ice Warriors were the fourth species of big bads in Doctor Who — resulting in several appearances throughout the Second and Third Doctor eras... but they basically vanished with the end of the Third Doctor's run on the show in 1974 (around the time that space probes in Real Life proved Mars to be barren). Efforts were made to bring them back in the original series from time to time — but the final attempt was scheduled to be in the 1990 season of Doctor Who... and the show was canned/put on hiatus in 1989.

They did eventually get nods in "The Christmas Invasion" and "The Waters of Mars", and finally made their return in the 2013 second half of series 7, during "Cold War".

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• Animated Armour: They find leaving their armour deeply shameful, but if they are forced to do so they can remote-control it.
• Cyborg: According to "Cold War", they're this; it helps them deal with Mars' freezing conditions.
• Disproportionate Retribution: By their code, an attack on one Ice Warrior is an attack on all of them. And they respond in kind, even if the attack doesn't even harm the warrior in question.
• Heel–Race Turn: Their first two serials have them as the villains, but since Jon Pertwee's first brush with them they've alternated between friends and foes (one of them even became a companion in the Expanded Universe).
• Last of Their Kind: Since Mars is somewhat inhospitable to them after some unspeakable event in their past, it's a little hard for the species to continue — especially when they have a nasty habit of getting wiped out whenever they encounter the Doctor. To make matters worse, the Expanded Universe puts the Doctor essentially at fault for said unspeakable event. Whoops. This appears to have been retconned as of "Cold War", with the Doctor saying Martians survive on other planets, and a Martian ship appearing at the episode's end. "Empress of Mars" reveals the survivors lasted on the dead world for some time in suspended animation before being evacuated by a fleet from Alpha Centauri. This is consistent with the fact that they are a significant force as a member of The Federation in the future era of the Peladon stories.
• Logical Weakness: As Ice Warriors used to a cold environment, they are vulnerable to intense heat.
• Mighty Glacier/Fragile Speedster: Both in "Cold War", depending on if they are in or out of their armour. Since they can remote control their armour, they can even fill both roles at once. However, for cultural reasons they remain in their armour.
• Monster Lord: Their leaders are smaller, slimmer and less heavily-armoured than the usual soldiers. They are often referred to in fanon as "Ice Lords", although this is never used in on-screen dialogue.
• New Neo City: Episodes set in the future usually have them living on planets with names like New Mars, Neo Ares or Nova Martia.
• Oh, My Gods!: They tend to swear by "the moons" (Phobos and Deimos).
• Proud Warrior Race:
  • Subverted in the Doctor Who New Adventures novel The Dying Days, where the Ice Warriors encountered there claim to be this but are psychotic monsters.
  • Played Straight in "Cold War," where the Doctor appeals to Skaldak's honour in an attempt to stop him from triggering a nuclear war on Earth.
  • Played Straight again in "Empress of Mars", where they were only fighting because the humans attacked them first. After the commanding officer saves their queen from a Jerkass soldier trying to hold her hostage, he offers to let her execute him in return for letting the other soldiers go free. She's so impressed with his courage that she not only agrees, but spares his life, on the condition that he swears loyalty to her and the Ice Warriors. He agrees.
• Put on a Bus: They basically vanished completely after 1974, but returned in the revival with 2013's "Cold War" and 2017's Empress of Mars.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Their armour has red-tinted lenses.
• Space Romans: Bill Potts compares them to Vikings after hearing the Doctor's description of them, to which he agrees.
• Spare Body Parts: In Doctor Who Meets Scratchman, Charon mentions having to take a Martian Warlord to Hell after taking a sickle to his third spleen.
• Sssssnaketalk: They often speak like this due to them being reptilian.
• Worthy Opponent: This is their view of the Doctor, especially in the Expanded Universe. "The Slow Regard of Silent Stars" mentions that they even gave him a Red Baron as a term of respect. The Doctor always has enormous respect for them and their culture, even when going up against them.
• Zombie Gait: This, combined with their constant shallow breathing, gives the impression that our heroes are in fact being chased around by overweight smokers. They feel compelled to sprint from them anyway.
  • As it turns out, this is down to their armour. Out of it, they are terrifyingly fast. Fortunately, Ice Warriors see leaving their armour as deeply dishonourable... which means that when one does leave it, the situation is desperate, both for the Ice Warrior and their unfortunate opposition.

Krotons

Krotons (Second Doctor)

A crystalline race of aliens. Along with the Quarks, the Krotons are villains from the Sixties who are fondly remembered for having endearingly silly designs. They are also notable for being the first in a long line of Doctor Who monsters created by Robert Holmes.

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• Beware the Silly Ones: In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Alien Bodies, a lone Kroton destroys an entire battleship full of Daleks.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: The Krotons resemble robots made of crystals.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: They have a Tin-Can Robot appearance but are actually sapient tellurium crystals that are technically immortal, with the closest thing to death that they have being to "exhaust" (turn into a gaseous state and leave their vessel). The implication (made explicit in the books) is that they can possess any machine into becoming their body. They are blind, power their machines with mathematical aptitude, Mind Rape people in order to get the power, breathe fluid through hose lines in their chest, and have inexplicable accents.
• Starfish Aliens: Living crystals who resemble robots and power their spaceships with mental energy. Even by Doctor Who standards, they're pretty weird.
• Weakened by the Light: They have poor eyesight in daylight and so have trouble moving around.

Third Doctor Era Debut

Autons

Autons (Third, Ninth, and Eleventh Doctors)

Played by: Hugh Burden (1970), Hamilton Dyce (1970), Noel Clarke (2005), Marcus O'Donovan (2010), David Fynn (2010), Clive Wood (2010), Arthur Darvill (2010)

The Autons are evil living plastic servitors that are controlled by the squid-like Nestene Consciousness. Their best known trick is posing as shop dummies and bursting out of high-street windows, although their second appearance had them trying to kill people in increasingly bizarre ways. They don't need to be humanoid, either; any seemingly inanimate plastic object will do — chairs, toys, even a trash can. The Consciousness can also create more sophisticated "facsimiles" (referred to as "Nestene Duplicates" in the revival) that perfectly mimic the appearance of others... and may even believe their own cover story.

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• Always Chaotic Evil: Although the Nestene Consciousness usually has some grander scheme at play, its Auton minions only ever seem interested in slaughtering every human on sight. As seen under Step Three: Profit, it's rarely explained what benefit this mass destruction actually serves for the Nestene.
• Animate Inanimate Object: So long as it's made of plastic, the Nestenes can bring it to life and kill people with it.
• Arm Cannon: Well, hand cannon.
• Breakout Villain: One of the original run's most iconic monsters, despite only appearing three times. The image of mannequins stepping out of shop windows and attacking was vivid enough for them to get into the revival's first episode.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Shops full of killer aliens? Yeah, that symbolism is pretty obvious.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: As the Third Doctor's tenure was largely confined to the Home Counties in the present day for budget reasons, the Autons inaugurated the grand old Doctor Who tradition of everyday objects trying to kill you.
• Hive Mind: Each standard Auton is merely an extension of the Nestene Consciousness's will so they have no individuality. They all contain a small sliver of it's mind as well. However, the more advanced models with false memories can gain sentience and go rogue.
• Immune to Bullets: The original versions helped inaugurate a long tradition of UNIT's guns being utterly useless against the threat of the week.
• Manchurian Agent: Some later-model Autons come with fake memories.
• May Contain Evil: The shop owners that unwittingly bought these things surely regret their purchases.
• Mooks: The Autons are the Nestene foot-soldiers, doing the work disposing of any threat, since the Nestene lack the mobility to do so themselves.
• Murderous Mannequin: The Autons are most infamous for the ones in the form of store mannequins coming to life, bursting through windows and attacking and killing people.
• Ridiculously Human Duplicates: Some of them are created as creepy versions of humans (Auton!Mickey) but others are so indistinguishable from human that they even believe their own cover stories (the "Romans" and Auton!Rory).
• Step Three: Profit: In the Doctors Revisited — Jon Pertwee special, Steven Moffat felt the Autons' original invasion suffered from this.
  Steven Moffat: It's a genius idea. Conquering the world with shop dummies! For no particular reason other than it's really scary. What was the plan, exactly? We're going to conquer Earth, by planting... shop dummies in windows.
  ...
  Steven Moffat: Terrifying idea. Brilliant. And of course, like all great Doctor Who ideas, completely bonkers.
• They Look Like Us Now: The typical Auton does not look particularly realistic, resembling a mannequin, being robotic in its movements and mute. However, more sophisticated Autons can be created, which look and act human except for a slight plastic sheen to the skin and a flat-sounding voice. In Series 5 of the relaunched series, they are shown as being able to create fully lifelike human replicas, able to fool other humans.
• Uncanny Valley: Autons often attack and replace targets, but they tend to miss certain details. Like how human skin isn't that smooth and shiny. Averted with the ones in 2010, who look and act completely human until the moment arrives.

Silurians/"Homo reptilia"

They have their own page.

Primords

Primords (Third Doctor)

Mutated human beings, created as a result of exposure to ooze emitted by Project Inferno, an attempt to drill through to the Earth's core. At first the change manifested itself in the form of discoloured skin, violent behaviour and the body generating intense amounts of heat, but warmer conditions would cause the transformation to progress to its final stage, causing the victim to vaguely resemble an ape or werewolf.

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• Achilles' Heel: Were very vulnerable to cold, which was the only surefire way of killing them. Well, that and throwing them off a tall building, which isn't always feasible.
• Ax-Crazy: At first, anyway, with people in the early stages of the transformation being inclined towards trying to beat people to death, either with their bare hands or whatever blunt instrument they have to hand. It actually seems to lessen after the transformation completes, when their MO switches more to actively trying to infect others.
• Evil Is Burning Hot: They give off tremendous amounts of heat, so much so that anything they touch will be burning hot for ages afterward, and one slumping against a wall leaves scorch-marks.
• Immune to Bullets: Can easily shrug off multiple gunshot wounds right through the heart, just so long as that isn't combined with any sudden drops in their body temperature.
• It Can Think: Even with the insanity, they're clearly capable of some kind of thought. Transformed primords know exactly what bits of the drilling machinery to smash.
• Kryptonite Factor: Cold. A fire extinguisher can kill them.
• Painful Transformation: Most of the transformations don't seem overly painful, but when the process is accelerated either by greater ambient heat (in the case of the parallel Benton) or exposure to a large amount of the ooze (as with Professor Stahlman), the change is depicted as being much more painful.
• The Virus: The first few Primords in either universe were created by exposure to the green ooze, but after that were capable of infecting others simply by touch.
• Was Once a Man: All of the victims started out as humans, before being infected either by ooze or other transformed people.

Axons

Axons (Third Doctor)

The Axons were part of a gestalt entity known as Axos that came to Earth to devour all of our planet's energy in the serial "The Claws of Axos". They were defeated by the Third Doctor and UNIT. The Axons have also shown up in Big Finish Doctor Who (where they fought both the Sixth Doctor and the Tenth Doctor with Ace and K9) and the comic strip of Doctor Who Magazine (where they battled the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond in Japan).

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• Beauty Equals Goodness: Subverted. They appear as golden angelic humanoids but turn out to be monstrous.
• Glam Rock: The aesthetics of glam rock had a very big influence on the look of the Axons. It was the early Seventies, after all.
• Hive Mind: The seemingly individual Axons are all part of the same entity.
• Light Is Not Good: Gold and orange are the Axons' primary colour palette and they turn out to be evil.
• Organic Technology: The spaceship they arrive to Earth in. Considering that even the ship is part of the Axos hive mind, this makes sense.
• Trojan Horse: The Axons provide the human race with an alien fuel called Axonite, seemingly to help us with our energy crisis but actually to destroy us.

Ogrons

Ogrons (Third Doctor)

Ogrons were strong, ape-like humanoids of limited intelligence, typically used by other species as mercenaries. They were most often employed by the Daleks. They live in scattered communities on an unnamed planet on the outer fringes of the Milky Way, far from the central spaceways. The dominant lifeform on their home planet is a giant slug-like lizard named the Eater, and the Ogrons both pray to and are preyed on by it.

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• Alien Hair: Of the incredibly recessed hairline variety.
• Dumb Muscle: Ogrons are very strong and very stupid.
• Giant Animal Worship: The dominant lifeform on their home planet is a giant slug-like lizard named the Eater, and the Ogrons both pray to and are preyed on by it.
• Killer Space Monkey: They're extremely strong and brutal.
• Mooks: They typically show up as expendable goons for the Daleks and the Master.
• Servant Race: Are this to the Daleks. However, IDW Comics seems to show them more as Punch-Clock Villains.
• Shout-Out: The name may be derived from the mythological creatures ogres.
• Space Orcs: They're large, black-to-purple-skinned caveman-like aliens mainly noted for their stupidity and their aggressive natures. Most live primitive lives on their homeworld; the ones seen on other planets are typically mercenaries and thugs under a villain's employ.

Peladonians

Peladonians (Third Doctor)

The Peladonians (or Pels) were a race of near-humans native to the planet Peladon who retained a feudal culture.

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• Alien Sky: Their planet was known for being especially stormy. Dangers from the wind and rain were constant.
• Feudal Future
• Human Aliens
  • Ambiguously Human: They can breed with humans and produce fertile offspring with no biotechnological intervention, which in a more realistic series would strongly suggest that they're actually a lost human colony. Although in Doctor Who, humans can breed with cats.
• Mark of the Supernatural: One of the few ways to tell them apart from humans is the burgundy streak through their hair.
• Yellow Rocks: Their planet has a mineral called trisilicate (Not to be confused with magnesium trisilicate). Word of God says Barry Letts took the name "trisilicate" from a list of ingredients on the back of a tube of Boots brand toothpaste.

Drashigs

Drashigs (Third Doctor)

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• Extreme Omnivore: Vorg mentions that the Drashigs once ate a spaceship that'd crash-landed on their planet.
• Significant Anagram: The name "Drashig" comes from the word "Dishrag", since Robert Holmes assumed that's what the monsters in this story would be made out of.

Draconians

Draconians (Third Doctor)

The Draconians are an extraterrestrial race of reptilian humanoids. In later interviews, Jon Pertwee cited the Draconians as his favourite of all the monsters he had encountered during his time as the Doctor.

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• Alien Hair: Draconians have beards, but atop their heads they've got a ridged crest instead of humanoid hair.
• Fantastic Slur: Some humans call them "Dragons".
• Feudal Future: The Draconian Empire was a vast spacefaring feudal civilisation centred on the planet Draconia, with a society stratifed along class and gender lines (for example, females were not permitted to speak in the presence of the Emperor) that was bound by a strong code of honour.
• Snake Talk: They have a somewhat subdued version of snake talk, mostly hissing if a word ends on an "s" sound only.
• Wutai: Draconia is basically feudal Japan in space with reptile people.

Sontarans

They have their own page.

Fourth Doctor Era Debut

Wirrn

Wirrn (Fourth Doctor)

The Wirrn were a race of huge, parasitic insects. They initially appeared in "The Ark in Space", and have shown up in Big Finish Doctor Who as well.

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• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The Wirrn stand at around 6-7 feet tall. Not too shabby for an insect race.
• Body Horror: You slowly and painfully begin turning into one of them once a Wirrn stings you.
• The Cameo: A dead Wirrn has a brief appearance in "The Stones of Blood".
• Dying Race: Their main hives have been wiped out, leaving them desperate.
• Fighting from the Inside: Like many infectious Doctor Who monsters, their victims can fight back with strong willpower and emotions.
• Insectoid Aliens: They resemble enormous wasp/ant hybrids.
• It's Personal: The reason the Wirrn try to devour the remaining humans on Nerva Beacon is because their hives across the galaxy were wiped out by pioneering humans.
• Off-the-Shelf FX: One of the most (in)famous examples in Doctor Who's history. A lot of the Wirrn effects were achieved with green bubblewrap, bubblewrap being a new invention in 1974. The effective acting in "The Ark in Space" goes a long way towards making the effect a bit more believable. This was given a nod in the revival series, when Clara Oswald finds a sarcophagus full of green bubblewrap.
• The Virus: Once they sting you, you begin turning into one of them. The Doctor compares the Wirrn to real life parasitic wasps who lay their young inside caterpillars.

Zygons

Zygons (Fourth, War, Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors)

Played by: John Woodnutt (1975), Ian Marter (1975), Lillias Walker (1975), Jemma Redgrave (2013), Ingrid Oliver (2013, 2015), Jonjo O'Neill (2013), Joanna Page (2013), Nicolas Briggs (voice; 2013, 2015)

The Zygons are a race of shapeshifting humanoids. After their planet was destroyed in a stellar explosion, they seek to colonise other planets, including Earth. Thanks to their well-realized design and the fact that "Terror of the Zygons" is considered a classic by the fandom, the Zygons became very popular despite having only one appearance in the original run of the show. David Tennant has named the Zygons as his favourite Doctor Who monsters.

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• Always Chaotic Evil: Averted. Most of the Zygons living on Earth just want to live in peace and at worst are Punch-Clock Villains for Zygon High Command.
• Anti-Villain: Their home planet was destroyed, so they understandably seek a new one. Unfortunately, they want Earth, an already-inhabited planet.
• Attack Animal: The Skarasens (as seen in "Terror of the Zygons" and the Tenth Doctor novel Sting of the Zygons) were massive creatures, large enough to crush a human with one clawed foot. They were cybernetically altered to suit the Zygons' purposes. They were invulnerable to any force short of a nuclear weapon. Their skins were highly durable and their skeletons were fused with an extremely tough alloy.
• The Cameo: In "Attack of the Graske" (a Tenth Doctor mini-sode) and "The Power of Three", albeit in human guises in the latter.
• Disintegrator Ray: One application of their ability to shoot electricity from their hands.
• Face of a Thug: Despite their horrendous appearances and hideous-looking faces, most Zygons are peaceful in nature and simply wish to be left alone. This trope is partly downplayed by the fact that Zygons can assume human forms and thus not look so monstrous.
• Fatal Flaw: Their arrogance proves their undoing in "The Day of the Doctor".
• Foreshadowing/Cerebus Retcon: In "The Day of the Doctor", it is revealed that the destruction of the Zygons' homeworld mentioned in their first appearance was in fact an extremely early impact of the Time War on the Doctor's own adventures.
• Hive Mind: The novelization to "The Day Of The Doctor" says Shapeshifter Baggage won't let them turn into animals as small as a rabbit but a Zygon could turn into a group of mentally linked rabbits if they didn't move too far apart.
• Holographic Disguise: The above novelization says their clothes are hologram shells.
• Long Bus Trip: 38 years between "Terror of the Zygons" and "The Day of the Doctor". The Zygons had, however, had a handful of appearances in official novels and audio plays.
• Organic Technology: The Zygon ship seen in their first appearance. Played with in that while the interior is very organic, the exterior of the ship is a metal hull. "The Zygon Invasion" features a Zygon organic computer that the Doctor interacts with.
• Poisonous Person: They can poison humans with a touch. They also have, as the Tenth Doctor would attest, venom sacs under their tongues.
• Shapeshifter Baggage: Not only can they impersonate humans (who are much smaller than them), Zygons can also shapeshift into other non-humanoid lifeforms such as horses and (maybe) rabbits. In "The Zygon Invasion", the paranoid Colonel Walsh says that "any living thing" on Earth could be a Zygon in disguise.
  • The novelization to "The Day Of The Doctor"says they wouldn't be able to turn into something as small as a rabbit but would have to turn into a group of rabbits connected by a Hive Mind.
• Shock and Awe: In "The Zygon Invasion" and "The Zygon Inversion", the Zygons can shoot electricity out of their hands that can disintegrate humans into piles of hair and skin. It's not clear if this is a natural ability or some kind of bio-weapon.
• Stock Ness Monster: One of their Skarasens lived in Loch Ness for centuries and inspired the legend.
• Technically Naked Shapeshifter: The novelization to "The Day Of The Doctor" also says they use hologram shells to mimic clothing but can't make functional objects like Osgood's inhaler.
• They Look Like Us Now: The Zygons' ability to assume human form is what makes them so paranoia-inducing.
• Underestimating Badassery: Lampshaded in "The Day of the Doctor". Their arrogance meant they never stopped to consider that their own commander might have been killed and subsequently impersonated by Elizabeth I, instead of the other way around.
  Elizabeth I: I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but at the time, so did the Zygon!
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: They have the power to transform and reshape their bodies to impersonate humans and, as seen in "The Day of the Doctor", other non-humanoid lifeforms such as horses and (maybe) rabbits, although they do need to keep the being they're impersonating alive as a genetic and psychic "body print". In "The Zygon Invasion", it's claimed that this condition isn't needed any more; Osgood states that "the rules have changed".

Krynoid

Krynoid (Fourth Doctor)

Carnivorous alien plants with big appetites. First showed up in "The Seeds of Doom" and have popped up in Big Finish Doctor Who a few times since. A Krynoid also faced off against the Eleventh Doctor in the e-book Tales of Trenzalore.

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• Alien Kudzu: It infests entire planets.
• Body Horror: Their victims slowly start turning into giant plant creatures.
• Combat Tentacles: As Mary Whitehouse put it: "Strangulation by obscene vegetable matter."
• Green Thumb: Krynoids have the ability to telepathically control nearby plant life.
• Man-Eating Plant: On planets infected by the Krynoid, the plants eat the animals.
• Palette Swap: The Krynoid costumes are just Axon (in their true form) costumes painted green instead of orange.
• Plant Aliens
• The Virus: When a Krynoid lands on a planet, it will consume all animal life to create more of itself.
• When Trees Attack: The Krynoid's ability to control plant life leads to this.

Rutans

Rutans (Fourth Doctor)

Played by: Colin Douglas (1977)

The Rutans (or Rutan Host) were a race of amorphous green blobs who waged war with the Sontarans.

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• Arch-Enemy: To the Sontarans.
• Barrier Warrior: The novel, Shakedown says they could also use electrical energy to produce a force field to absorb energy from weapons, though this required great effort.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Shakedown says they can survive in a vacuum.
• Electric Jellyfish: Pretty much a space version of this.
• The Empire: The Rutan Empire used to rule the entire galaxy until the Sintarans beat them back to the fringes.
• Face Stealer: The Rutan dissects the first two lighthouse operators in order to learn enough human physiology to take the form of Reuben for the final two episodes. Later victims it just kills.
• Forever War: They've been at war with the Sontarans for a long time, and they'll still be at it thousands of years later. From what little we know of their war, the Rutans seem to have the upper hand most of the time.
• The Ghost: They're appeared a grand total of once in the series, compared to their nemesis race. They do a little better in the wider Who media (once in an Eleventh Doctor Adventure game, a very short Story Arc with the Fifth Doctor in Big Finish Doctor Who, etc.), but appear nowhere near as much as the Sontarans.
• Greater-Scope Villain: In most Sontaran stories, the Sontarans' motivation is to gain a strategic advantage over the Rutan Host.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: The Doctor is quite surprised by the Rutans' interest in Earth. It turns out to be fairly mild.
  Fourth Doctor: Why invade an obscure planet like Earth? It's of no value to you.
  Rutan: The planet is obscure, but its strategic position is sound.
• Shock and Awe: They can generate bioelectricity to fry their foes.
• Sickly Green Glow
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: With great effort.

Ogri

Ogri (Fourth Doctor)

A species of silicon-based lifeforms native to Ogros, which resemble large rocks or menhirs. They can move slowly from place to place, live for thousands of years, and feed on globulin found in blood via touch.

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• Bullfight Boss: The Doctor gets one of the Ogri to charge over the edge of a cliff this way, accompanied by Spanish background music.
• Living Statue: Before the Weeping Angels made it cool, no less!
• Golem: The Ogri are a mix of this and Living Statue, since they're part of a stone circle.
• Rock Monster
• Silicon-Based Life
• Starfish Aliens
• Stripped to the Bone: The Ogri can do this to anyone who touches them.

Megara

Megara (Fourth Doctor)

The Megara are tiny microcellular biomechanical droids also known as "Justice Machines". They take the form of floating orbs, and are charged with upholding galactic laws and regulations. Unfortunately, their rule-obsessed pedantry means that they're more than a little bit trigger happy...

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• Amoral Attorney: Even the Megara that's supposed to defend the Doctor pleads the death penalty.
• Everything's Better with Sparkles: The Megara are pretty much just sentient sparkles.
• Judge, Jury, and Executioner
• Rules Lawyer
• Space Police: They uphold Galactic Law.
• Spark Fairy: As seen in the picture, they look like floating sparkles.
• Starfish Aliens: Sentient sparkles. Enough said.

Mandrels

Mandrels (Fourth Doctor)

Large, furry predators from planet Eden. Mandrels have the curious distinction of decomposing down into a pile of white powder after being electrocuted to death: the dangerous, addictive drug vraxoin, which is highly prized throughout the galaxy.

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• Fantastic Drug: Mandrels decompose down into a pile of white powder after being electrocuted to death: the dangerous, addictive drug vraxoin, which is highly prized throughout the galaxy.
• No Body Left Behind: They collapse into powder when electrocuted.
• Non-Malicious Monster: The Mandrels are certainly dangerous, but they are unintelligent wild animals.
• Piñata Enemy: Monsters that turn into a highly sought-after narcotic when you kill them.

Nimons

Nimons (Fourth Doctor)

Voiced by: Clifford Norgate (1979-80)

"THE NIMON BE PRAISED!"

— Soldeed

A race of parasitic nomads, the Nimons travel from planet to planet posing as gods to other civilizations. However, the Nimons eventually drain the planet of its life energy and move on to the next world. Their sole appearance on television is "The Horns of Nimon", but the Nimons also made a memorable appearance in Big Finish Doctor Who and were alluded to in the new series episode "The God Complex".

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• Energy Weapon: Uniquely, the Nimons fire lasers out of their horns.
• Evil Sounds Deep: They have deep, booming voices.
• God Guise: Their modus operandi when it comes to their invasion plans.
• Large Ham: "The Horns of Nimon" is so full of hammy acting it would offend Israel, and the Nimons themselves are no exception.
• Life Drain: How they feed. It leaves people, and entire planets, as desiccated husks.
• Milking the Giant Cow: The actors in the Nimon costumes are really going for it. Oh, and no jokes about "giant cows".
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: The Nimons greatly resemble the Minotaur of Greek myth.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Black fur/skin with bright red eyes.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: The Nimons use black holes to power their technology and as wormholes to travel the universe.

Foamasi

Foamasi (Fourth Doctor)

• Animal Motifs: The Foamasi, with their penchant for disguise, look rather like chameleons.

Tharils

Tharils (Fourth Doctor)

Fifth Doctor Era Debut

Terileptils

Terileptils (Fifth Doctor)

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• Mark of Shame: The Terileptil leader has face markings (which double as a nasty disfigurement) that mean if he goes back to his home planet he'll be killed. It's never specified if this was intentionally done by the authorities, or merely the result of being sent to the uniquely dangerous prison/mine. Other criminal Terileptils in the story without speaking roles did not have similar scars.
• People in Rubber Suits: The Terileptil Leader is notable in that it's the first rubber-suit monster to feature animatronics inside the head, which allowed its gills to move and eyes to blink.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: The Terileptil gets a pretty nice retort to the Doctor's request for diplomacy.

Trions

Trions (Fifth Doctor)

Trions are an alien species that the Fifth Doctor's companion Turlough belongs to.

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• Deep Cover Agent: According to Turlough, the Trions had undercover agents on every civilized planet, including Earth.
• Human Alien: Trions look identical to humans and can survive in similar conditions. Since the nurse at Turlough's school had no problem when examining him, that would imply that Trions have similar, if not identical, internal structure to humans. Though based on Turlough's comments, he may be older than he looks, implying a different rate of ageing.

Sixth Doctor Era Debut

Androgums

Androgums (Second and Sixth Doctors)

An incorrigibly barbaric race of humanoids that specialise in butchery and carnivorism. Working alongside the geneticist Dastari and the Sontarans, they plotted to unravel the secrets of time travel by experimenting on the Second Doctor's symbiotic cells, forcing the Sixth Doctor to embark on a mission to rescue his past counterpart.

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• Aliens in Cardiff: Androgums prancing around in the serene countryside of Seville, Spain in this case.
• Barbarian Tribe: Their main hat, besides being excellent cooks.
• Blood Lust: Even the cool, composed Chessene goes gaga at the sight of a Time Lord's blood. It's what convinces Destari that he was mistaken in given an Androgum too much power.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: It's in their nature to betray their allies.
• Crazy Consumption: Pure Androgums like Shockeye have scarily insatiable appetites and therefore must eat constantly, otherwise they are driven to insanity. Genetically altered Androgums like Chessene have more control over their impulses, but have similar curiosities nonetheless.
• Eviler than Thou: They prove to be a greater threat than the Sontarans.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Infamously, the Sixth Doctor outright murders Shockeye with his bare hands by choking him out with cyanide, though it was in self-defence. With "The Two Doctors" already being an incredibly dark and violent serial, his death scene is often deemed one of the last straws that forced the BBC to consider revamping the show after a hiatus.
• Fantastic Racism: The Doctor, surprisingly, has nothing but contempt for Androgums, believing them to be irredeemable savages who would ravage all of time and space if they had the opportunity. Considering that the Doctor tolerates even the strangest alien races, their reputation must be very bad.
• The Hedonist: Shockeye claims that Androgum culture is all about indulging their base impulses. Chessene has greater aspirations for their kind.
• Human Aliens: While Androgums generally have stockier features and, in Shockeye's case, horrendously ugly warts, they otherwise look indistinguishable from humans. Shockeye considers humans primitive, until he discovers their talents for the culinary arts, from which he concludes that they are actually similar.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: Shockeye gets very creepy and handsy with Peri, though he only has eyes for eating her rather than anything else untoward.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Shockeye points out that humans' unchecked appetite for meat is similar to the Androgums', with our industrial-scale slaughter of domesticated animals impressing him most. If you can't tell, their debut story, "The Two Doctors", promotes vegetarianism.
• Proud Warrior Race: Not as much as their Sontaran collaborators, but they pride themselves on their hunting and butchery skills.
• Space Jews: Based on Shockeye's tartan clothes, large ginger eyebrows and stereotypical aversion to vegetables, they're basically Space-Scots. Funnily enough, they fight Jamie in their debut serial.
• Villain Team-Up: With the Sontarans, of all monsters.
• Women Are Wiser: As she was genetically modified by Destari, Chessene is much more intelligent and composed than her unaltered male counterpart Shockeye. She does all the scheming, he does all the chopping.

Vervoids

Vervoids (Sixth Doctor)

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• From a Single Cell: The Doctor claims the Vervoids have the ability to reproduce from a single leaf.
• Plant Aliens: Technically they're manufactured by humans on a colony world, but the Vervoids see themselves as being different enough to animals that they indiscriminately slaughter them.
• Slave Race
• Starfish Aliens
• Turned Against Their Masters: The Vervoids, though they never really accepted that whole thing about being slaves to begin with.
• Unfortunate Character Design:invoked The first thing most viewers above a certain age will notice about the Vervoids is how much their heads look like a certain part of the female anatomy...

Seventh Doctor Era Debut

Haemovores

Haemovores (Seventh Doctor)

A race of vampiric, aquatic creatures that served Fenric, as the antagonists of the Season 26 episode, "The Curse of Fenric". They are implied to be the future descendants of humanity, mutated by toxic slime into bloodthirsty abominations. They are also partially psychic, and can be telepathically repelled if enough faith is exhibited in close proximity to them.

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• Bad Future: Humanity will apparently evolve into Haemovores if Fenric succeeds in conquering Earth in the 1940s. It's not clear whether this potential future has been averted by the end of the episode.
• Frozen Fashion Sense: The sequences where the Haemovores rise up to feast on the living display everything from Elizabethan doublets to eighteenth century seawool. Justified, as they've all been holed up since they were turned, and haven't exactly had a chance to nip down to the shops and pick up something more trendy.
• Holy Burns Evil: Haemovores can be repelled by faith itself. The Doctor repels them by repeating the names of all his companions, the fervently Communist Sorin repels them with a red star badge from his uniform, and Reverend Wainwright sadly fails to repel one using a bible, as the horrors of World War II destroyed his faith.
• Immune to Bullets: Bullets slow the Haemovores down, but can't kill them.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The Doctor states that the Haemovores are not "vampires". Anyone to refer to them as such is immediately corrected.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Besides acting more like zombies than vampires, Haemovores can be blocked by a psychic barrier created by one's faith.
• Viral Transformation: How the Haemovores are created.

Revival Series

Ninth Doctor Era Debut

Gelth

Gelth (Ninth Doctor)

A once organic, now intangible race of aliens who have been left as refugees as a result of the Time War. As a result of their wraithlike forms, they have to depend upon possessing and inhabiting decomposing human corpses in order to survive.

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• False Innocence Trick: The Gelth claim to be refugees from the Great Time War who have lost their bodies and only want to use dead humans as Meat Suits. It turns out that there are many more of them than they claimed, and they want to take over all humanity, not just the dead ones. Granted, they're not actually lying — the key here is that they just need dead bodies. A few billion. Which means a majority (if not all) of the human population of Earth at the time.
• Invading Refugees: The Gelth were fleeing the Time War and claim to only be peaceful refugees when they arrive on Earth, with the Doctor helping them come to a compromise to only take over dead bodies in order to survive. However, the Gelth never intended to honour this and wanted to take over all of humanity.
• Nightmare Face: The Ambassador takes on a demonic visage when it reveals its true evil nature.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The Gelth aren't called ghosts in the story, which is fair enough since they aren't actually ghosts, just gas creatures. They can also possess human bodies for a little zombie action.
• Puppeteer Parasite: They take over dead bodies.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: You know the Gelth aren't what they claim when the one speaking through Gwyneth changes from a soothing uniform blue to having red eyes.

Raxacoricofallapatorian Slitheen

They have their own page.

Gas Mask Zombies

Gas Mask Zombies (Ninth Doctor)

The result of an elaborate con by the spacefaring rogue Captain Jack Harkness to sell a stolen Chula warship (specifically, an ambulance ship) and drop it in London at the height of the Blitz, knowing that it would be destroyed by a German bomb. The advanced nanogenes — tiny artificial organisms designed to heal injuries — that were inside the ship leaked out and latched onto a young boy who was killed during the bombings. As the Chula nanogenes had no interaction with humanity, their programming led them assume that the boy, Jamie, was the default image of a healthy human, despite his obviously horrific injuries. His gas mask permanently fused to his face, Jamie was reanimated as a nigh-unstoppable zombie with only one driving goal: to reunite with his mummy. As he searched throughout London, Jamie unwittingly spread the nanogene plague to hundreds of others in a hospital, giving them all the exact same physical injuries and, most disturbingly, the same creepy gas mask visage.

The concept of nanogene infection was revisited in a different way many years later in the form of the Daleks' unwilling Manchurian Agents, also known as Dalek Puppets. See the Daleks' dedicated page for more info.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: On paper, nanogenes are perfect medical tools, able to instantaneously repair any injury. However, they are only acquainted with Chula biology and wrongly assume that a physically traumatised young boy wearing a gas mask is what all humans should look like; therefore, they need to "fix" everyone else. In turn, the Doctor initially assumes that whatever force behind the plague must be an idiot, but the nanogenes are non-sentient machines and were never meant for human consumption, so it's hard to blame them for following their programming as best they can. Besides, when they eventually figure out how to properly heal a human, they reverse all the effects of the gas mask plague and even heal the hospital patients of injuries they had before the outbreak, so no harm done.
• Arch-Enemy: In "Fugitive of the Judoon", Jack laments that the nanogenes seem to have some vendetta against him, as a swarm neutralises him during his theft of a spaceship.
• Beyond the Impossible: The Empty Child can make telephones ring, which is strange enough, but it can also communicate through any device with a speaker grill, including the fake phone attached to the TARDIS doors.
• Body Horror: Being transformed into one of these things is nothing short of nightmarish. Dr. Constantine's face hideously contorts as the gas mask nozzle forces its way up his throat and out of his mouth while his eyes expand into black visors; all of this is shown in graphic detail, complete with audible bone-crunching. While the zombies don't look in such bad shape from a distance, closer inspection reveals that they all have identical signs of severe injuries that no human should be able to survive, including massive chest trauma and brain damage. It's enough to make you want to hide behind the sofa!
• Borrowed Catchphrase: In later stories, the Doctor himself has been known to borrow the Empty Child's "Are you my mummy?" at rather inappropriate moments.
• Broken Record: "Are you my mummy?" and variations of it. The first of many Steven Moffat-made monsters to conform to this trope for horror purposes.
• Death Is Cheap: It is to nanogenes. After all, what's life to them, but "nature's way of keeping meat fresh"?
• Evil Counterpart: The Chula nanogenes were used purely for medical purposes, whereas the Dalek nanogenes forcibly convert other organisms into brainwashed slaves with Dalek eyestalks sticking out of their skulls.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Some of the creepiest examples put to film.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Before the gas mask bursts through your face-hole, an early sign of Empty Child Syndrome is the sudden development of a scar on the right hand. After that, your days are seriously numbered.
• Hive Mind: All of the zombies act as one hive mind, with the original Empty Child being the central "command node" of sorts. When the Doctor sternly tells them to go to their rooms in the hospital, Jamie also reacts to his words, despite being miles away at that point.
• It Can Think: Averted. It's useless trying to communicate to one that you are or aren't its mummy. They'll just keep mindlessly asking the same question like a Broken Record. They do, at the very least, understand how to follow rudimentary instructions, so long as you talk to them like children.
• Manchild: They all have the same mental age as Jamie, a 4-year-old boy, so it's possible to make them back down by telling them off like a stern parent. There's definitely something disturbing about seeing grown adults calling out for their mothers like scared children.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: As Dr. Constantine explains, they just don't die.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Most of the time, they're actually quite docile and will just sit there motionlessly as long as they remain undisturbed, but that doesn't make them any less creepy.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Played Straight in their first and only appearance, since there's really no applicable term to describe what they are. However, whenever they are referred to in subsequent episodes, the characters call them Gas Mask Zombies for simplicity's sake.
• Super-Persistent Predator: If you give them any reason to suspect that you're their mummy, nothing will stop them from chasing you until you become like them.
• Super-Strength: Apparently, this comes as a bonus on top of the nanogenes' usual "repairs" based on their knowledge of Chula biology. The Empty Child effortlessly smashes through a brick wall while chasing the heroes through the hospital.
• Super-Soldier: One of the reasons Jack's little con goes so wrong; it was an ambulance. A war ambulance, designed to get Chula soldiers back up on their feet and into the fray again, with all sorts of handy abilities.
• Touch of Death: Although the conversion process may not be instant, anyone even slightly touched by these "mummy"-mumbling zombies is effectively marked for death.
• The Virus: The infected gain all the same physical injuries as the original Empty Child, which baffles the Doctor and the hospital staff.
• The Worm That Walks: The zombies are hollowed-out corpses powered only by crazy mixed-up nanogenes that they spread through touch.

Tenth Doctor Era Debut

Sycorax

Sycorax (Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth and Thirteenth Doctors)

Played by: Sean Gilder (Sycorax leader, 2005)

"SYCORAX STRONG. SYCORAX MIGHTY. SYCORAX ROCK!!!" ^note As in the modern sense "they rock".

The Sycorax were a superstitious race of warriors. They often wear skeletal masks, with equally skeletal faces underneath.

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• All There in the Manual: Most notably covered in Doctor Who Files 4: The Sycorax. The Visual Dictionary establishes that the belts worn by the Sycorax are made from Judoon skin.
• The Cameo:
  • A Sycorax is seen at the space bar where the Tenth Doctor visited Jack Harkness one last time before his regeneration in "The End of Time".
  • The Sycorax make a brief appearance in "The Pandorica Opens" as part of the Alliance formed to trap the Eleventh Doctor.
  • In "The Name of the Doctor", the Great Intelligence mentions them as one of those that left the Doctor blood-soaked.
  • A Sycorax was present in the Maldovarium when Colony Sarff visited the establishment while searching for the Twelfth Doctor on behalf of Davros in "The Magician's Apprentice"
  • A Sycorax appears as a prisoner alongside the Thirteenth Doctor in "Revolution of the Daleks".
• Blood Magic: They were able to control everyone on Earth with A positive blood after acquiring a sample.
• Call a Human a "Meatbag": When they broadcast a message to human's demanding Earth's surrender, the translator programme the British government use to decode the message translates their word for "humans" as "cattle".
• Duel to the Death: They believe in solving disputes by honourable combat, often to the death. The Sycorax Leader, however, violates this by attacking the Doctor even after he wins the fight and spares his life, leading to the Doctor triggering a nearby trap door that sends him plummeting to his death. Apparently the other Sycorax felt this either satisfied honour or didn't want to test the Doctor's patience, since they left shortly afterwards.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: After being beaten by the Doctor, the human race take the opportunity to fire upon them as they're peacefully leaving Earth, vaporising the entire asteroid.
• Historical In-Joke: The Doctor feeding Shakespeare his own lines. Specifically, it resolves the Brick Joke of the Sycorax set up in "The Christmas Invasion"; Sycorax is a witch mentioned in The Tempest, and where Shakespeare got the name is a bit of an academic mystery — as far as anyone can find she's not a figure from mythology, and if it's a Meaningful Name it's far from obvious what the meaning is. "The Christmas Invasion" uses it as the name of an alien species, with no explanation/comment, and this episode has Shakespeare hear the Doctor talking about them and likes the sound of it.
• Insufficiently Advanced Alien: Not touched upon much, but they seem to believe in witchcraft and curses (it's how they describe the Doctor's regeneration). One can only guess what they think of Carrionites.
• Named After Their Planet: Doctor Who Files 4: The Sycorax calls their home planet "Sycorax".
• Planet Spaceship: The Sycorax come from an asteroid named Fire Trap, which was retrofitted into a starship when one fell upon its surface. They eventually built an entire Armada out of captured and colonised asteroids.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: They believe in solving disputes with a Duel to the Death.
• Wizards from Outer Space: It's left vague whether their blood magic is actual magic or some kind of technology.

Catkind

Catkind (Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors)

A species of humanoid aliens which resemble felines, who hail from a planet called New Savannah. The Catkind first appear as an order of nuns called the Sisters of Plenitude in "New Earth". A subspecies called Leonians antagonises Ashildr and the Twelfth Doctor in "The Woman Who Lived".

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• Cat Folk: Part of the grand NuWho tradition of aliens based on real life animals.
• Cute Kitten: What the babies of this species resemble.
• Dominant Species Genes: A Catman and human female husband and wife produces a litter of kitten offspring.
• Female Feline, Male Mutt: Ultimately averted. Although the first Catkind we meet are unanimously female, this is because Rose and the Tenth Doctor visited a convent. Later on, the Doctor meets male members of the same species.
• Half-Human Hybrid: According to the reference book "The Monster Vault" their species is the result of crossbreeding between Humans and Tandonians (A race descended from Housecats).
• Saintly Church: The Sisterhood run a hospital founded by charity to heal the sick.
  • Corrupt Church: What they’ve become by the time the Doctor arrives on New Earth, several members being more concerned about their reputation being tarnished than being shown a more ethical way of curing patients.
• Wolverine Claws: All Catkind have retractable claws. However, they aren't overly effective against disease-ridden zombie people, nor do they look that intimidating to begin with.

Krillitanes

Krillitanes (Tenth Doctor)

A race of assimilators who physically absorb traits of the dominant species and cultures they have conquered. Their current forms resemble large, monstrous bats. They come to Earth disguised as human school teachers as part of a plot to manipulate earthling children to crack the Skasis Paradigm, a computer code that can unlock the building blocks of the universe itself.

For more information on their leader Mr. Finch, see this page.

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• The Assimilator: They physically absorb traits of species they conquer. The Doctor compares it to human cultures' propensities for absorbing aspects of other nations' cultures. Their current bat-like forms were unrecognisable to him, since when he last saw them, they resembled long-necked humans.
• Bat Out of Hell: Thirteen big bat people. They even sleep upside down.
• Children Are Special: They need the powerful imaginations of human children to help crack the Skasis Paradigm.
• Evil Teacher: Sadistic, carnivorous aliens disguised as human school teachers. Every child's worst nightmare.
• Kryptonite Factor: Krillitane oil, the stuff they laced into the school lunches to make the kids cleverer, is actually toxic to the Krillitanes themselves since they have altered their physiologies so much over the years. The fact that they keep barrels of it around the school proves to be their undoing.
• Loud of War: Appropriate for bat-like creatures with super sensitive hearing, they are paralysed when a student cleverly sets a fire alarm off.
• Morphic Resonance: Mr. Wagner, the black teacher, has a darker-skinned Krillitane form that makes him stand out from the rest of his kin.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Inverted, as the Krillitane oil is their own resource, but they are incapable of using its intelligence-boosting effects to solve the Skasis Paradigm themselves as the oil has become toxic to them, hence why they need human children to crack it for them.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: In contrast to the Slitheen's crude methods of human disguise (which they would use for a similar plot involving infiltrating a British school only a year later), the Krillitanes can shapeshift into human forms effortlessly.
• Would Hurt a Child: Kids that don't measure up to their expectations are sent to "detention" (read: eaten alive).

Ood

Ood (Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth and Thirteenth Doctors)

Voiced by: Silas Carson (2006–10, 2012)

"The circle must be broken, so that we can sing."

A race of telepathic humanoids native to the Ood Sphere (which is in the same region of space as the Sense Sphere). They were used as slaves during the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, until they were liberated by the Doctor, Donna and a spy for the Friends of the Ood.

For more information on Ood Sigma, see Doctor Who – Companions and Supporting Cast

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• Bizarre Alien Biology: They're born with secondary brains in their hands. The company that enslaved them cuts them off to make them docile.
• The Cameo: An Ood is briefly seen as a resident of the trap street in "Face the Raven", repairing a Cyberman.
• Cthulhumanoid: A mass of tentacle like appendages hanging from where mouths should be.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Zigzagged. Despite their monstrous appearance, the Ood are peaceful and gentle. However, they wind up taking an antagonistic role in almost every appearance. A large part of the problem is that their hive mind leaves them open to Demonic Possession.
• The Dragon: While lacking a natural predisposition to evil, their common use as slaves means they often end up serving bad people. One of their number serves as muscle for House in Series 6 and another as a technician for Tecteun.
• Happiness in Slavery: Assumed to be the case in their debut episode, as the Torchwood Archive team say that the Ood shrivel up in a corner and die unless they are given tasks to do. Their next appearance reveals the sinister truth that every Ood is essentially lobotomised by an evil corporation and definitely do not enjoy their lives of slavery.
• Hive Mind: Governed by a large living brain situated on their planet called the "Ood Brain", without it the Ood would die.
• Perfect Pacifist People: They are naturally a peaceful race, which is why the humans chose to turn them into a Slave Race.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: When they were controlled by the Beast. And later again when the Ood Brain managed to reach out and make the Ood take revenge against their human captors.
• Shout-Out:
  • Russell T Davies has acknowledged the Sensorites as an influence on the basic concept of the Ood in "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit". Computer read-outs (and a mention by Davies in an episode commentary) revealed that the Ood Sphere and Sense Sphere are part of the same star system.
  • Also Mind Flayers — aside from their appearance, the flayers eat brains (the Ood vomit one of theirs forward upon maturing), and both serve an Elder Brain.
• Slave Race: Humans in the distant future use the Ood for labour, but they are mostly unworried by the fact that they are casually ordering slaves, which disturbs Rose and Donna.
• Weak-Willed: In addition to their status as a Slave Race, the Ood seem to be particularly susceptible to possession by outside entities.
  • Explained by Donna Noble and confirmed by the Doctor that it's due to the fact that they're born with their brains in their hands. With such a glaring evolutionary weakness, they have no choice but to trust everything simply as a survival mechanism.
• We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future

Judoon

Judoon (Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth and Thirteenth Doctors)

Voiced by: Nicholas Briggs (2007–10)

"FO! SHO! RO! KO! BLO!"

The law enforcement arm of the Shadow Proclamation, Judoons look like bipedal rhinos in Badass Biker gear. They are extremely fond of rules and regulations, as seen in The Sarah Jane Adventures, and a bit thick.

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• Ascended to Carnivorism: The Judoon are based on Rhinos, but they have an omnivorous diet according to a BBC Bitesize Game based on "The Sarah Jane Adventures".
• Berserk Button: Damaging a Judoon's nose-horn is the single most insulting thing you can do to them.
• The Bus Came Back: After their debut in "Smith and Jones", it would take 13 years for their next major appearance on Doctor Who proper in "Fugitive of the Judoon".
• By-the-Book Cop: Played with; although the Judoon strictly obey the letter of the law, their "book" allows for a lot of Cowboy Cop or even Knight Templar behaviour on their part.
• The Cameo: All of their appearances on Doctor Who between "Smith and Jones" and "Fugitive of the Judoon", with their most prominent appearances otherwise being in "The Stolen Earth" and the prequel to "A Good Man Goes to War".
  • Ashildr's bodyguards in "Face the Raven" are revealed to be Judoon when the misdirection circuit is temporarily disrupted.
• Cowboy Cop: The Judoon are known to bend the rules to help find their target. They can transport a whole hospital offworld and use unsanctioned tech and weaponry if it gets the job done.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Strike a Judoon? Sentence: execution, by means of disintegration. Interfere with its interplanetary police work? Expect the same. Live on the same planet where a mass-murdering criminal has taken refuge? Your whole blasted planet gets destroyed if the Judoon haven't been instructed to recognize you as a species worth protecting.
• The Dragon:
  • As a whole, for the Shadow Proclamation.
  • The Time Lords hired them to find a fugitive.
• Dumb Muscle: As the Tenth Doctor puts it, they're thick. The ones he encounters nab an entire hospital to find one patient, then wipe the hospital records, requiring them to go on an extensive patient-by-patient search which allows their target to hide. And when they find an alien, they immediately shoot to kill, not bothering to check said alien is the one they're looking for.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Their armour is decorated with leather-like armour and a fustanella.
• Horrifying Hero: They are there to do their job, they don't care about being nice or polite while doing so.
• I Gave My Word: Once a Judoon platoon takes a contract, they will finish it. The Thirteenth Doctor learns this the hard way.
• Inspector Javert: They are mercenaries that operate as a police force in the galaxy. As such, they don't particularly care about the rules as long as they get the job done. If they are looking for an alien on earth, they will kill any alien on Earth as long as they finish the mission.
• Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Any crime is punished with execution, no matter how understandable that crime is. One patient felt threatened and strikes a Judoon officer with an ornament, something that the Judoon leader took great offence to and disintegrated him immediately after declaring the man as guilty of striking an officer. It was subverted in Prisoner of the Judoon, as Tybo chose to revoke Clyde and Rani's interplanetary travel rights for locking him in a shielded room because they still helped him capture an escaped prisoner.
• Law Enforcement, Inc.: They are intergalactic mercenaries that operate as a police force for the highest bidder. While they had their own code of conduct, they will follow the laws of each planet.
• Lawful Stupid: The Judoon have an almost one-track sense of justice. They will execute anything and everything for the slightest offence, no matter if they're lashing out because they feel cornered, an alien criminal, or just in the way. But if you get on their good side, they might simply ground you from space travel.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Prior to Fugitive of the Judoon and Prisoner of the Judoon, the Judoon were banned from operating on Earth after an unexplained incident.
  • On their home planet, they had a sport called "Nukeball" that had to be banned due to the sheer devastation it caused.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: While they were hunting the plasmavore, they were barred from Earth due to an unexplained incident. Since the plasmavore was hiding on Earth in a hospital, they just brought the hospital to them by the H₂O Scoop.
• Perpetual Frowner: Their faces seem set in this expression.
• Pet the Dog: They do offer compensation to beings they have inadvertently hurt.
• Rhino Rampage: Alien rhinos, and are naturally depicted as burly and aggressive.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After they executed the plasmavore, they decide to leave the building because their contract is fulfilled and don't care if the humans survive.
• Space Police: Or police-for-hire, as the Doctor puts it.
• Trigger-Happy: They prefer to shoot first and ask questions later, as long as it gets the job done.
• Unscrupulous Hero: At best, they are only concerned with fulfilling their contract, if someone tries to interfere with their mission then they'll resort to more aggressive methods or even execute lawbreakers as long as they get the contract done.

Carrionites

Carrionites (Tenth Doctor)

A race of aliens who use the power of words to perform what looks like magic to human eyes. Sealed away long ago by the Eternals, a trio managed to break free in Elizabeathan times and tries to set about freeing their sisters.

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• Aerith and Bob: The three Carrionites are Mother Doomfinger, Mother Bloodtide, and... Lilith.
• All There in the Manual: Supplemental material sheds a little more light on them that "The Shakespeare Code" didn't.
• And I Must Scream: With actual screaming. The trio are stuck inside a glass ball, ineffectually howling and scratching away forever. The Doctor says he plans to stash them in the TARDIS attic, and a year later in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" they're still there, still howling.
• Been There, Shaped History: They're responsible for the shape of the Globe Theatre, the fourteen sides being part of their plan to bust their can open and free the rest of their kind.
• Femme Fatale: Our introduction to Lilith has a young lad serenading her. Things go very poorly for the kid when she invites him to meet her moms. He is quite literally ripped to shreds. Later on, Lilith pretends to cop a feel on the Master of the Revels so she can acquire a genetic sample and kill him.
• Game Face: Lilith can disguise herself as a good-looking human gal, but when she's about to kill someone shifts to a more stereotypically witchy look.
• I Know Your True Name: The power of a name temporarily weakens them, but It Only Works Once.
• Leaking Can of Evil: Sealed away when the Eternals found the right words to lock them up. The trio escape thanks to the grief Shakespeare felt after the death of his son.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Both the name of their species and individuals in there.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: The Carrionites don't muck about. The minute someone gets in their way, they kill them. The Doctor and Martha only survive thanks to the Doctor being a Time Lord and Martha being from the future.
• One-Gender Race: There were male Carrionites once. Then all the females killed them.

Toclafane

Toclafane (Tenth Doctor)

In the year 100 trillion, when the universe is finally ending, the Master manages to trick the last vestiges of humanity into escaping to Utopia, where they are forcibly turned into the Toclafane. Named after creatures from a Gallifreyan fairy tale, the humans of the far future have been twisted into psychopathic cyborgs with the minds of children integrated into spherical, mechanical shells. The Master used them as muscle when staging his invasion of Earth during "The Year That Never Was".

---

• Children Are Innocent: Averted. The Toclafane display childish personalities and speech patterns, but they are psychotic, sadistic and callous, even when fighting their own ancestors.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: They mutilated themselves into their current state and are willing to kill off their ancestors.
• Cyborg: They are human heads encased inside robotic spheres.
• Expy: Of Jimez Smoot's descendants from Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future. Both are small, cybernetic descendants of modern humans that travel back to earth (via Time Travel for the Toclafane, just by space travel for Jimez Smoot's descendants) and devastate the planet, and attack and enslave other humans (evolutionary cousins in Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future, the Toclafane's own ancestors here).
• For the Evulz:
  Martha: But why? Why come all this way just to cause all this death and destruction?
  Toclafane: Because it's FUN!
• Grandfather Paradox: The Master's Paradox Machine allows the Toclafane to freely murder their own ancestors without worrying about this. When it's destroyed, the timeline corrects itself.
• Hive Mind: They share each other's memories.
• Human All Along: The Toclafane turn out to be the humans from the far future from "Utopia".
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The Toclafane are the future of humanity, who turned themselves into cyborg Psychopathic Manchildren in a desperate attempt to survive the collapse of reality. Why are they slaughtering their own species? Simply because it's fun.
• Madness Mantra:
  Toclafane: We shall fly and blaze and slice! We shall fly and blaze and slice!
• Natural End of Time: They were originally the last of humanity at the end of the universe, who sought out Utopia to avert their destruction. Unfortunately it was a wasteland and they devolved into the Toclafane to survive. And when that failed, the Master offered them to invade the 21st century and have another 100 trillion years to rule.
• Psychopathic Manchild: An entire race of them, no less.
• Same Story, Different Names: The Toclafane's origin story mirrors that of the classic Cybermen in "The Tenth Planet". In that episode, the Earth's lost "sister planet" of Mondas returns along with humanity's evolved cousins, who turn out to be metallic fossils of their former selves. Those events prove too much for the First Doctor, who dies of exhaustion. Ten fares a little better here, though he still ages a lot, and his faith in humanity is once again shaken. The Twelfth Doctor, while not directly referencing them, discusses that humanity eventually cybernetically upgrading themselves in order to survive in extreme circumstances is an inevitability, the various origins of the Cybermen simply a case of parallel evolution. In that respect, the Toclafane effectively are a very twisted and insane version of the Cybermen. The key difference is that Cybermen eliminate their emotions while the Toclafane openly take sadistic pleasure in killing.
• Transhuman: The last generation of humanity transformed into cybernetic spheres.

Zocci and Vinvocci

Zocci and Vinvocci (Tenth Doctor)

Two closely-related species with spiny, cactus-like skin. Zocci are short and red, whereas Vinvocci are tall and green.

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• Aerith and Bob: The Vinvocci pair in "The End of Time" go by normal English aliases, Addams and Rossiter, a far cry from Bannakaffalatta.
• Ascended Extra: While Bannakaffalatta was a memorable side character in "Voyage of the Damned", the Vinvocci play a much larger role in "The End of Time" and are partly responsible for kickstarting the plot.
• Butt-Monkey: The Vinvocci duo in "The End of Time" are reluctantly dragged into the Doctor's mess with Wilfred, the Master and the Time Lords' return, and spend most of their screentime completely exasperated with the whole situation.
• Cowardly Lion: Rossiter the Vinvocci is highly skittish and effete by nature, but he manages to knock out the Master with the butt of a rifle and later shoots down several missiles with his ship's anti-meteorite lasers alongside Wilf.
• Fantastic Racism: Played for Laughs. Comparing them to cactuses (or cacti) is racially offensive.
  • Bannakaffalatta presumably gets a double dose due to his nature as a cyborg. On planet Sto, cyborgs do not yet have equal rights and the prejudice against them apparently so ingrained that even Max Capricorn, the richest man on the planet, cannot escape judgement for being one.
• Insistent Terminology: Bannakaffalatta staunchly refuses to go by any kind of shortened nickname, implying that it's considered offensive in his culture to do so. While he would rather call him "Banna" for expediency, the Doctor respects his wishes.
  • The Vinvocci are not keen on being conflated with their Zocci cousins. And they're certainly not cacti!
• Locked Out of the Loop: Addams and Rossiter have absolutely no stake in the Doctor's business with the Master and the Time Lords. In fact, they seem completely unaware of the Time Lords and the Time War.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: As a Zocci, Bannakaffalatta is short and unassuming, but his cyborg modifications give him the ability to release a massive electromagnetic pulse, which he uses as a fatal last resort in order to short-circuit a squad of Heavenly Host androids.
• Plucky Comic Relief: In both of their appearances, the goofy cactus-people are a prime source of comedic relief when the stakes are high.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Of course, the Vinvocci have to conceal their true green-skinned forms when undercover as human scientists in Naismith's mansion, so they use "shimmer" disguises.
• Wham Line: When Addams the Vinvocci reveals what the Immortality Gate is actually used for. Or, more accurately, what the Master could quite easily misuse it for.
  Addams: It doesn't just mend one person at a time. It mends whole planets.

Adipose

Adipose (Tenth Doctor)

A friendly race of marshmallow-like blob creatures that appeared primarily in "Partners in Crime", created from living fat.

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• Baby Talk: A justified example, as in their debut they were babies.
• Black Bead Eyes: Their eyes lack any detail, being simple black circles.
• Blob Monster: In the words of Matron Cofelia, "the fat just 'walks away'."
• Breakout Character: Merchandise-wise; the species has only had a major role in "Partners in Crime" and minor roles in a few other episodes, but (mainly thanks to their cute and huggable design) they're still a major part of the merchandise to this day, being sold mainly as plush toys.
• Children Are Innocent: Pointed out by the Doctor, to Donna. Being newborns, they're not responsible for the methods Matron Cofelia used to bring them into the world.
• Human Resources: A special "weight-loss" pill you took would convert your fat into Adipose. Unlike most examples of this trope in general, this actually leaves you better off since you've lost weight and they harmlessly leave when you're asleep with you none the wiser. Just make sure that they don't begin emergency parthenogenesis...
• The Ghost: While we see enough of the human-born babies, we never see what the adult Adipose look like outside of their mothership. A fully-grown Adipose was supposed to appear in "The Stolen Earth" among other alien criminals imprisoned by the Shadow Proclamation, but budgetary issues caused the scene to be shelved.
• Mascot Mook: The Adipose are the mascot of the show's official Tumblr blog, mostly due to how incredibly cute and huggable they are.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: When they are created via emergency parthenogenesis, the person they come from dissolves into Adipose and dies. This is not their fault, but rather the fault of their "foster mother".
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Baby Adipose look like walking marshmallows or plush toys.
• The Worm That Walks:
  • In "Partners in Crime", they were born when the fat of a taker of an Adipose pill dissolved into a swarm of them.
  • Used in a darker vein in "Turn Left", when in the altered timeline, millions of Americans were dissolved to create them.

Pyroviles

Pyroviles (Tenth Doctor)

Magma-monsters who hail from the stolen planet of Pyrovillia, they attempt to turn humanity into Pyroviles by harnessing the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

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• The Assimilator: They intend to parasitize and convert the entire human race to rebuild their species, starting with the population of Pompeii.
• Evil Is Burning Hot
• Hostile Terraforming: When the Doctor tries to turn them off of invading Earth by pointing out that it's 70% water outside of Vesuvius' magma chamber, Lucius retorts that water can be boiled away, making it clear that the Pyroviles will simply convert the planet to their own bio-volcanic needs.
• Living Lava: Creatures of magma and molten rock that vaguely resemble Roman centurions.
• Made of Incendium
• Psychic Powers: They're capable of activating them in the Sibylline priestesses, and all the other seers in Pompeii.
• Silicon-Based Life: They look like giant rock golems.
• Taken for Granite: A side-effect of the Pyroviles taking over their human hosts is stone limbs.
• Take Over the World: The Pyroviles plan to emulate Rome by taking over the entire known world — and likely everything else on the planet.

Hath

Hath (Tenth and Twelfth Doctors)

Bizarre-looking, man-sized fish people. First encountered as a clone army by the Tenth Doctor.

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• Androcles' Lion: The Hath trust Martha because she helps one of them with a dislocated shoulder.
• Clone Army: They, like their former human collaborators, have been relying on Progenation Machines to generate new soldiers from each other's DNA.
• Ditto Aliens: They all look pretty much alike.
• Fish People: Rather large fish people, at that.
• Future Imperfect: The human/Hath creation myth is actually their arrival by spaceflight on this planet. It might have to do with the "countless generations", even if the terraforming ship only landed there last week.
• Mobile Fishbowl: The Hath breathe a nutrient liquid, and have to wear a mask containing a flask of it while in Earth-like atmospheres.
• The Unintelligible: The Hath communicate by bubbling the odd containers of green liquid in their mouths.

Vashta Nerada

Vashta Nerada (Tenth Doctor)

Hey, who turned out the lights?

"These are our forests. They are our meat."

Also known as "The Shadows that Melt the Flesh", the Vashta Nerada are tiny scavengers that hide in the shadows, any shadows, before consuming their prey. They are found on every world, including Earth.

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• Broken Record: Someone consumed by a Vashta Nerada will have their neural chip "ghosting" and repeating the same phrase on a loop.
  Proper Dave: Hey, who turned out the lights? Hey, who turned out the lights?
• The Croc Is Ticking: You can tell that a swarm of Vashta Nerada has eaten someone when the microphone starts acting like a Broken Record and repeats the same phrase over and over.
• Darkness Equals Death: If you enter a shadow that the Vashta Nerada occupy, you will be devoured.
• Dark Is Evil: Living Shadows that devour humans and strip them to the bone.
• It Can Think: They are very quick learners. When one of the group is eaten, they hijack the suit and project more shadows around them, turning it into an "Instant Death" Radius, in order to increase their hunting capabilities. Then they start to tweak the suit's data ghost to speak and learn how to do so fluently within the next few hours at most.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Despite having no way of actually fighting them, the Doctor intimidates the swarm into withdrawing just by daring them to look up his name.
• Living Shadow: A swarm of Vashta Nerada looks like a dark shadow moving across the ground. They can even form the shape of a humanoid to animate spacesuits.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: "The Shadows that Melt the Flesh" doesn't sound very appealing, does it?
• Non-Malicious Monster: Played With; Normal Vashta Nerada are benign and mostly live off of roadkill and carrion. The ones in the library are unusually aggressive.
• Primal Fear: They are implied to be the reason that many species have a natural fear of the dark.
• Stripped to the Bone: When they devour humans and a chicken leg, all they leave are bare bones.
• The Swarm: They're thousands of microscopic carnivores working in unison.
• The Worm That Walks: The swarm invaded a spacesuit and devoured the original occupant. They started piloting the suit to capture other prey. They haven't perfected it yet, they are quite slow and stiff.
• Zombie Gait: It's not like spacesuits are designed to be piloted by swarms of thousands of miniscule creatures that ate the previous occupant.

Tritovores

Tritovores (Tenth Doctor)

Fly-like aliens encountered by the Doctor and Lady Christina on the desert planet San Helios.

---

• Eaten Alive: Both Tritovores are devoured by the Flying Stingrays.
• Fantastic Diet Requirement: Yes, their species name is derived from "detritovore", which means they only eat detritus (i.e. shit) like real flies.
• Insectoid Aliens: Though aside from their obviously fly-like heads and hands, they have humanoid proportions and lack wings.
• Running Gag: Yet another alien species created by Russell T Davies that resemble common Earth animals. The Tritovores are particularly quirky and unthreatening, but they are just innocent traders, after all.
• Starfish Language: Their language is composed of insectoid ticks and croaks. The Doctor can actually speak it, despite lacking the necessary mouth organs.
• Those Two Guys: The two Tritovore traders, Sorvin and Praygat, are identical and never seen apart.

The Flood

The Flood (Tenth Doctor)

No not them, but remarkably similar. The Flood are water-dwelling microbes capable of possessing other species. The Ice Warriors froze the Flood into a glacier underneath a crater on Mars, but thousands of years later, it found its way into a human space base built inside the crater after the failure of a water filter. It wanted to find its way to Earth after finding out just how much more water there is there, compared to Mars.

---

• Aliens Speaking English: The Flood speak a couple sentences through Maggie, but mostly scream.
• Body Horror: The people infected by the Flood become water-bloated, ruptured-skin-sporting, dead-eye-having monstrosities.
• Demonic Possession: Contact with Flood-infected water turns people into extensions of it, killing their original personality.
• Dug Too Deep: There was something living in the ice that The Team dug up for drinking water.
• Eldritch Abomination: A viral life-form with a hive mind, lurking in the Martian water, that turns people into craggy, water-spewing zombies with unholy screams. It's even seemingly hinted that there might be a real Eldritch Abomination frozen within the glacier which the Flood's viral form is merely an extension of.
• Hive Mind: The Flood exhibit this. It's technically millions upon millions of viral microbes distributed through water and constantly self-replicating, yet they're able to plan and act collectively as a single gestalt. And there's the way Andy and Tarrak are perfectly synchronized when the Flood in them hears Maggie's scream.
• Humanoid Abomination: The infection in the water turns anyone afflicted by it into humanoid, dead-eyed water fountains functioning as nothing more than a Living Bodysuit for some ancient horror buried under the ice.
• Invincible Boogeymen: While Flood hosts can be slowed down, nothing in the long run can stop them - as the Doctor puts it, "water always wins". One by one the crew of "Bowie Base One" on Mars become infected, as only one drop of water is all that takes to convert someone.
• It Can Think: Those infected by the contaminated water are not stupid, they even managed to short out the systems of an airlock to bust it open.
• The Juggernaut: The characters in "The Waters of Mars" have no way to slow down or stop the Flood after it's loosed other than blowing up the entirety of Bowie Base One. As the Doctor says, "water is patient".
• Making a Splash: It can generate new, infectious water, and the infected hosts can even shoot it at high pressure.
• Murder Water: Contact with just one drop of Flood-infected water is enough to cause possession. Infected can also create water jets strong enough to cut through steel.
• Nightmare Face: Humans infected by the Flood develop white irises and cracked skin around their mouths, with black teeth and water constantly seeping out of the mouth.
• Nothing Is Scarier: It is never revealed where the Flood came from, with available evidence making it equally likely that the virus was natural or some artificial creation made by the ancient Ice Warriors, particularly since a host responded to the Doctor talking to it in Ancient Martian.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Flood turns humans into water zombies. They've got the creepy eyes and the infected status, but absolutely no Zombie Gait. They're faster than you are, and the Flood turns the infected hosts somewhat into Technically Living Zombies. The Flood makes the hosts produce copious amounts of virus-carrying water from their orifices and their skin (which they breathe in place of air), their eyes might change color, the skin around the mouth becomes cracked-looking, and the host exhibits an internal fission which blackens the teeth and enables them to survive in Mars' freezing conditions.
• Plague Zombie: The Flood is a waterborne sentient virus, and it makes its infected hosts leak infectious water like a sliced major vein. And the infected can fire pressurized hose-like blasts if they wish! A single drop of water is enough to infect and turn someone — just one drop...
• Possessing a Dead Body: Downplayed in that the hosts' bodies are still alive, but it seems that when the Flood takes over a host, it effectively kills or consumes their original mind and personality entirely, leaving only the virus' Hive Mind puppeteering their shell.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Humans accidentally released Sealed Evil in a Glacier when they tap it for water.
• Technically-Living Zombie: The Flood's infected hosts. Maggie's bio-scan shows they exhibit a decreased heartbeat, while electrical activity in the brain (which is implicitly now occupied by the Flood) is "haywire".
• The Virus: The Flood is a viral life-form that can turn you into a zombie with just one drop. It's also a sentient Hive Mind, though there's no apparent Hive Queen, with the closest hint of a possible one being the active Flood's attempt to free its frozen microbes from the glacier. Notably, the Flood can avoid Glamour Failure by voluntarily delaying taking over an infected host, as it attempts to do with Maggie. The Flood's primary objective is to infect as many people as possible, and to get into as much water as possible, which is why Earth appeals to it so much.
• Water Source Tampering: Exaggerated with the aliens in the water and spreading via contamination of the base's supply.

Eleventh Doctor Era Debut

Atraxi

The Atraxi (Eleventh Doctor)

A cosmic police force of flying crystalline aliens, who are also the wardens of an inter-dimensional prison. They track down escaped convicts and terminate them with extreme prejudice... unfortunately, "extreme prejudice" means that they're willing to destroy an entire planet to eliminate their quarry.

---

• Apocalypse Wow: They almost incinerated the Earth to take out Prisoner Zero.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: They prioritize capturing prisoners, with little regard for collateral damage of the planet. When the Doctor scolds them for so carelessly destroying a Level 5 Planet, they seem confused and unaware the Earth was important.
• Canon Immigrant: The planet Atraxi 3 is first mentioned in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Vampire Science.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: The Atraxi are capable of hijacking every transmission on every TV and radio channel on Earth in their search for the escaped Prisoner Zero.
• Faceless Eye: Giant flying eyeballs surrounded by a crystal snowflake.
• Giant Eye of Doom: They're nothing but the eye.
• Kill It with Fire: How the Atraxi intend to deal with Prisoner Zero and the human "residence".
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Defied by some skinny dude in the bow tie, they research Earth's history and discover exactly who they're threatening. After that realization, they quickly and wisely decide to get the hell out of dodge and never return.
• Oculothorax: The Atraxi are a Giant Eye of Doom that can fly through outer space — though that part is implied to be a starship, or fleet thereof.
• Oh, Crap!: After they realise that not only is Earth very familiar with alien visitors, there's a reason it's still intact... and that reason is standing right in front of them.
  The Doctor: Hello. I'm the Doctor. Basically... run.
• Space Police: Even more alien and more callous than the Judoon, after a fashion. They're prepared to torch an entire planet just to make sure Prisoner Zero doesn't escape. On the other hand, they're not as hair-trigger about "crimes" as the Judoon are, so much less likely to kill or threaten random civilians.
• Starfish Aliens: They put the "alien" in "alien police" with their big eyeballs and crystalline web ships.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: They aren't evil per say, they just prioritise eliminating a prisoner over all else, even if it's an entire planet.

The Silence

They have their own page.

Gangers

Gangers (Eleventh Doctor)

"It's us or them."

The Gangers were a clone race created by humans from an artificially created organic substance called the Flesh.

Gangers were primarily created so workers who had extremely dangerous jobs could work without the fear of bodily harm or death. The Ganger is just an avatar, a robot-like being that is mentally controlled by the original. If a Ganger is destroyed or gets mortally wounded, another Ganger is created for the consciousness to inhabit. Well, that's how it's supposed to work, at least. In the story they initially appear in, the Gangers are cut off from the originals, leading to them developing minds of their own (and retaining all of the original's memories), essentially turning them from avatars to clones. They immediately understand what has happened, and plot to escape the base, not particularly caring if the originals get killed in the process. (After all, they aren't actually different. At all.)

---

• And I Must Scream: The partially melted down Gangers; rotting but fully alive and conscious.
• Body Horror: The rotting Gangers — partially melted but still conscious. There are eyes in one of the walls, made of more living Flesh.
• Chekhov's Gun: In "A Good Man Goes to War", a Ganger is used as a duplicate for Melody.
• Clone Angst: After being cut off from the people they're based on, they have a violent identity crisis because their memories say they are real but their circumstance says they're not.
• Clones Are People, Too: Heavily explored and established, especially with the Gangers of Jennifer and Jimmy.
• Continuity Nod: In "The Almost People", one decommisioned Ganger resembles the villainous Cassandra from "The End of the World" and "New Earth". The Gangers also seem to be "force-grown clones", like Chip, Cassandra's servant.
• Deadly Euphemism: Gangers, being considered implements, are not killed but "decommissioned". Justified in that originally they were avatars of people, not sentient beings in and of themselves.
• Finishing Each Other's Sentences: This happens with the Doctor and his Ganger; same wavelength!
• Glamour Failure: The Gangers occasionally shift back to their gooey, half-formed selves for a brief moment.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Ganger!Jennifer completely loses it thanks to all her memories of being "decommissioned".
• Hive Mind: The two Doctors manage to act as if they were still occupying the same skull. Which, in a way, they are. Both being essentially exactly the same person, it would make sense that they would know exactly what the other was thinking. The fact that Time Lords are telepathic couldn't have hurt, either.
• In-Series Nickname: The TARDIS team seem to have dubbed them "Flesh Avatars".
• Meaningful Name: "Ganger" comes from both "doppelgänger" (a duplicate of a person) and "ganger" (a menial labourer assigned to a large work gang, i.e. on old-fashioned railroads).
• Nightmare Face: An incomplete Ganger has a gooey white face.
• Replacement Goldfish: Two of the original humans are killed and their Gangers resume their lives for them.
• Rubber Man: Ganger!Jennifer is able to stretch her hand all the way from inside of a toilet stall to punch the mirror on the other side of the room.
• Tomato in the Mirror: The Gangers of the factory staff, after the solar tsunami that made them sentient, don't immediately realize that they're not the originals, and are somewhat unnerved when they learn this, as demonstrated with Cleaves.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The Gangers are designed to be expendable — their purpose is to mine the acid, a horribly dangerous job, without putting humans at risk. Naturally, they aren't happy about this.

Tivolians

Tivolians (Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors)

Played by: David Walliams (Gibbis) (2011); Paul Kaye (Prentis) (2015)

"If you occupied us, you'd be home by now."

The Tivolians are a race of rodent-like humanoids from the planet Tivoli. Their homeworld is the most invaded planet in the galaxy, to the point where the Tivolians now actually enjoy being conquered and oppressed.

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• All There in the Manual: The Brilliant Book 2012 explains that Gibbis fears Weeping Angels because he knew them to have no interest in conquest, only killing.
• Les Collaborateurs: They willingly comply with any conquerers. It's implied to be a species-wide survival strategy: if everyone knows they can be effortlessly conquered, no one ever tries to exterminate them.
• Dirty Coward: They straddle the line between these this and Lovable Coward. In "The God Complex", Gibbis' cowardice is often the source of humour, but his lack of bravery also gets someone killed and the Doctor is very unhappy with Gibbis after that.
• Jerkass: Gibbis takes enjoyment in discovering Amy's fear, as it might be somewhere inside the hotel.
• Planet of Hats: An extreme example even for Doctor Who. An entire race of people who love being oppressed by invaders.
• The Quisling: An entire planet who welcome any and all alien invaders. Their planetary anthem is "Glory to <Insert Name Here>".
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Tivolians look like humans with rodent-like features.
• Stockholm Syndrome: One interpretation for why the Tivolians enjoy being oppressed.
• You Dirty Rat!: The species has rodent-like features. They are also shameless cowards who'd throw others under the bus for their own safety.

Whisper Men

Whisper Men (Eleventh Doctor)

Played by: Paul Kasey

"The trap is set. The Doctor's friends. Will travel where the Doctor ends."

Mysterious beings who work for the Great Intelligence. They appear to be extensions or manifestations of the Great Intelligence himself, as if he destroys his current form, he can then take the body of one of his Whisper Men.

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• Badass in a Nice Suit: Dress in Victorian era garb.
• The Blank: Lack facial features except for one large gaping mouth.
• Foil: To the Silence; while both wish to destroy the Doctor, they do so in completely opposite ways. The Silence wish for "Silence to fall" and their ultimate goal is to prevent the Doctor from saying his name. The Whisper Men want the Doctor to say his name aloud so the Great Intelligence can enter the Doctor's tomb. This also extends to their physical appearance, while both have Nightmare Faces and wear suits, there is one very important contrast. The Silence have large eyes and no mouth, the Whisper Men have a big gaping mouth and no eyes.
• Intangible Man: When Strax tries to strike them, his weapon passes right through. They can also phase their hands through their enemies' hearts.
• Invincible Boogeymen: Absolutely nothing can stop these guys. Trying to fight them just has weapons going through them. In the end they never get defeated, merely deactivated as the Great Intelligence got what he wanted and no longer has any use for them.
• Mooks: To the Great Intelligence.
• Nightmare Face: Faceless horrors, save for one large snarling mouth.
• Remote Body: They're a collective extension of the Great Intelligence. If it chooses, they can assume the appearance of Walter Simeon so that it can directly interact with people.
• Rhymes on a Dime: Always speak in rhymes.

Twelfth Doctor Era Debut

Dream Crabs

Kantrofarri, aka "Dream Crabs" (Twelfth Doctor)

"The Dream Crab induces a dream state. Keeps you happy and relaxed in a perfectly realized dream world, as you dissolve."

— Twelfth Doctor

The Kantrofarri, colloquially known as the Dream Crabs, are telepathic parasites which feed on humanoid brain matter, and have the appearance of giant misshapen hands. They keep victims in a placid dream like state as they dissolve their brains.

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• Big Creepy-Crawlies: They're colloquially called "crabs", and have spider-like movement, but actually resemble giant, misshapen hands.
• Dream Within a Dream: They create layer upon layer of dreams, so that the victim can never discern dream from reality.
• Enemy Within: Sort of. Once they've latched onto your face, your only means of survival is realizing it's a dream and breaking out from within your mind.
• Expy: Of the Facehuggers.
• Face Hugger: They latch on to their victims' faces so they can eat their brains.
• No Body Left Behind: They crumble to dust once they die. The Doctor explains that this is a "carnivore's hazard, food has teeth too".
• Schrödinger's Butterfly: The Doctor states that there is no one who can ever be sure whether or not they are dreaming or not, and the Dream Crabs who create a Dream Within a Dream certainly make this much harder.
• Starfish Aliens: Creatures which look like misshapen hands, with no eyes, ears, nose, or mouth and rely on telepathy to detect the image within other nearby organisms.
• Sweeping Ashes: The first time they die and crumble to dust, Shawna comes in and sweeps them up.
• Telepathy: The only way they can sense the world around them, literally homing in on the image of themselves in their prey's mind.

Handmines

Handmines (Twelfth Doctor)

A bionic defence system employed by the Thals against the Kaleds in the Thousand Year War for Skaro, these sinister hands burrow under the ground and are triggered by noise or footsteps. They then emerge and grab their victims by the ankles, pulling them underground. As a child, Davros was caught in a Handmine field before being rescued by the Twelfth Doctor.

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• Eyes Do Not Belong There: The hand mines have eyes on their palms.
• Helping Hands: They don't seem to exist from the elbow down.
• Living Weapon
• Mythology Gag: The eye on the palm of the hand may be the same kind of cybernetic eye which Davros later has embedded in his own forehead.
• Quicksand Sucks: When the handmines grab people, they drag them beneath the dirt.
• Schizo Tech: As is quite common in the Thal-Kaled war. The Handmines are highly advanced, while the Thals also have biplanes mounted with laser weaponry.

Sandmen

Sandmen (Twelfth Doctor)

An artificial lifeform formed from the sleep dust in human eyes after humans had their brain chemistry changed by sleeping in Morpheus pods.

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• Assimilation Plot: The Rassmussen who had been turned into a Sandman, created a video and attempted to transmit all over the solar system to create more Sandmen from anyone who watches the video.
• Sentient Sands: They are creatures made up of sleep dust from human eyes, but otherwise have the appearance and composition of sand.
• To Serve Man: They fed upon living humans by absorbing them into their bodies.
• The Virus: It's revealed that humans are capable of being converted into Sandmen, which is what happens to their inventor Professor Rassmussen.

Shoal of the Winter Harmony

Shoal of the Winter Harmony (Twelfth Doctor)

A race of brain-like parasitic creatures who infiltrate races by surgically removing the brains of inhabitants and then having one of their race put in place to pilot the body as a vessel. When they arrive on Earth they try to Take Over the World by enslaving the leaders.

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• Ascended Extra: They go from being relatively minor villains in "The Husbands of River Song" to the Big Bad of "The Return of Doctor Mysterio".
• Bald of Evil: Scratch, their spokesman in "The Husbands of River Song".
• Brain in a Jar: They literally appear as brains in jars before they are transplanted to a new host.
• Brain Theft: They infiltrate planets by transplanting their brains into that of civilians.
• Evil Plan: Take Over the World. Of Course.
• Expy: They are not unlike the Slitheen as aliens who pretend to be humans by wearing the skins of their victims.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: They can be spotted as having a telltale diagonal scar running across their faces, which can actually split open.
• Grand Theft Me: The modus operandi of this alien menace, who swap themselves into human hosts while removing their brains.
• Hyperspace Mallet: Harmony Shoal members are able to store things in their heads. Literally. They just split open their head and pull the item out.
• Kill and Replace: They surgically remove the brains of their victims, before one of their species is put inside the body as a vessel.
• Manipulative Bastard: Their Evil Plan is so brilliant that even the Doctor is impressed, before complaining how his side never comes up with ideas like this.
• Red Right Hand: Harmony Shoal Members can be distinguished by a telltale seam running diagonally down the side of their face, some of which may also have a tendency to exude blue liquid out of the openings in their faces.
• Villain of the Week: They serves as the main threat of the 2016 Christmas special.

The Pilot

The Pilot (Twelfth Doctor)

Played by: Stephanie Hyam (2017)

"I'm the Pilot. I can fly anything. Even you."

A mysterious liquid entity formed out of spaceship oil that desires to consume a "Pilot" so that it may be controlled and return to the stars where it belongs. It was attracted by Heather's star-shaped defect and desire to "escape" and fused with her. From there it pursued Heather's crush, Bill Potts, across space and time, driven by her promise not to leave without her.

It was unknown how much of Heather's humanity survived the fusion with the sentient oil. As it turns out, all of it did. Including her love for Bill.

---

• Chekhov's Gunman: While she was a Monster of the Week, Pilot!Heather returns just in time save Bill from total Cyberman conversion and gives her the power to become a Pilot in the season 10 finale.
• Elemental Shapeshifter: Can transform into a pure liquid form. Even in human form, it is constantly dripping wet.
• Implacable Man: Absolutely nothing can get in between the Pilot and its assigned passenger. Not the TARDIS. Not a Dalek. Not even the Time Vortex itself.
• Inexplicably Awesome: Why a puddle of alien oil merged with an ordinary human woman equals a Physical God, we may never know.
• Intangibility: As a liquid entity, anything thrown at it just passes straight through harmlessly.
• Offscreen Teleportation: After consuming Heather, it gains the ability to form itself out of humid surfaces such as puddles or the steam in mirrors, allowing it to follow the TARDIS around.
• The Power of Love: Bill and Heather's love was strong. So strong that the Pilot kept something of hers, her own life water, as a way to hold onto Bill so that she could return to her one day.
• Reality Warper:
  • Alongside its teleportation abilities, the Pilot is capable of time travel, shapeshifting, instant regeneration and mimicry.
  • As of its return in "The Doctor Falls", Pilot!Heather seems to have mastered atomic reconstruction, making it a literal example of this trope.
• Riddle for the Ages: It is never revealed where the spaceship that left behind the oil that became the Pilot came from.
• Stalker with a Crush: After consuming Heather, the Pilot creature begins pursuing the TARDIS to transform Bill Potts into a "Passenger"; these impulses are caused by Heather's feelings for Bill.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: After possessing Heather's form, it invokes the imagery with its pale skin, association with water and the fact that it relentlessly haunts its victims.
• Super-Persistent Predator: It can and will follow its target anywhere and anywhen.
• Swiss-Army Tears:
  • The tears planted on Bill by Pilot!Heather are used to locate and rescue her after her conversion in the Mondasian Ship.
  • After leaving the Doctor's corpse in the TARDIS, Passenger!Bill leaves a tear on his forehead, allowing his regeneration to resume.

The Dryads

The Dryads (Twelfth Doctor)

A species of small, possibly alien insects capable of merging and transforming people into wood, a group of them inhabit the Landlord's house, obeying his commands through high-pitched sounds.

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• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Each dryad seems to be about the size of a fist.
• Insect Queen: The Landlord seems to be the one ordering the Dryads and giving them sustenance. Averted when it turns out Eliza, the Landlord's mother, is the one with an actual psychic connection to the lice, hinting at a possible Hive Mind.
• Plant Person: The Landlord's mother, Eliza, was transformed into living wood by the Dryads many years before the events of the story, recieving sustenance from the people fed to the dryads by the Landlord.

The Monks

The Monks (Twelfth Doctor)

An unnamed race of beings that appear to the human race as creatures resembling mummified corpses in red monk robes. They possess technology that allows them to create highly elaborate illusions and simulations.

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• Arc Villain: Of a trilogy consisting of "Extremis", "The Pyramid at the End of the World" and "The Lie of the Land".
• Backstory Invader: They invade all of human history.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: They fall into this big time in "The Lie of the Land". They do very little to actually stop the Doctor and his companions foiling them.
• The Chessmaster: They run simulations of a race's entire history to find the perfect moment to manipulate that race into asking to be conquered. They also have the common chessmaster weakness of complacency; because their plans are normally foolproof, they're very badly prepared to react to said plans hitting a snag.
• Deal with the Devil: They offer to save humanity from an inescapable doomsday scenario which will cause the extinction of all life on Earth, in exchange for humanity submitting before them and permitting them to rule planet Earth.
• Evil Old Folks: All Monks have the appearance of withered corpses, with the Giant Monk looking especially decrepit and skeletal.
• Evil Wears Black: The leader of the Monks wears a black cloak, as opposed to red or orange ones the other Monks wear.
• Foil: To the Silence; while they both alter memories, they do it for the opposite purpose. The Silence have been ruling from the shadow and convincing people that they don't exist, the Monks convince people they were always there to get them to accept their rule.
• Hong Kong Dub: The mouths of the Monks don't sync with the words they say.
• Internal Retcon: They maintain their rule with a signal that makes everyone believe they've always been in charge.
• King Mook: The Monks are led by a black-cloaked monk who also acts as the nexus of their (literal) Propaganda Machine.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: They remove all trace of themselves from Earth after they are defeated.
• Mass Hypnosis: The main source of the brainwashing of humanity all across the world.
• Oddly Small Organization: They go to great lengths to establish a worldwide presence, but there are at most a dozen of them.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Even though they are powerful enough that they could conceivably subjugate Earth through force and rule through fear, they consider fear an inefficient means of control and insist on gaining humanity's consent to be ruled (via a Deal with the Devil) before they take over the planet.
• Propaganda Machine: The Monks have a literal propaganda machine which they use to alter humanity's perception of their history so they believe the Monks are benevolent and have always been in charge.
• Prescience by Analysis: Given enough time and data to work with, their computers can predict a planet's future down to a remarkably fine level of detail.
• The Power of Love: In order to conquer somewhere, they need to have consent from an individual acting out of pure love. This lets them establish a link to brainwash the rest of the planet.
• Reality Warper: Can perform such feats as teleporting a submarine to a desert and restoring someone's sight.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute:
  • Much like The Trickster from The Sarah Jane Adventures, the Monks have Reality Warper powers but need someone's consent in order to use them.
  • The also have similarities to the Silence. Both use religious imagery, have similar appearances and use lightning as a weapon.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Once their brainwashing has been undone, the Monks immediately hightail it and take off in their pyramid ship.
• What Measure Is a Human?: A rather dark variant. The Monks are assuming the form of what they see humans as, not A Form You Are Comfortable With. To the Monks, humans are literally rotting corpses due to their brief lifespans.

The Giant Monk

Played by: Jamie Hill (2017)

The leader of the Monks' invasion of Earth and mind behind the machine. The Giant Monk is tasked with rewriting the history of invaded planets and provides the main link between the consenting victim and the hapless population.

---

• Battle in the Centre of the Mind: In order to free humanity from the Monks, the Doctor tries to hijack the signal being sent by him to rewrite history. Though he's successful at first, the Giant Monk fights back and overpowers him. Then Bill has a go at it. Though the Monk starts rewriting her memories, he's unable to rewrite a memory of her mother which Bill made up on her own. Seeing this, the Doctor has her think of nothing but that fake memory, which overpowers the Monk and frees everyone.
• Evil Wears Black: Unlike the other Monks, he is dressed in black.
• Facial Horror: While the other Monks are certainly no lookers, the Giant Monk stands out for being particularly decayed. On top of that, his exposed skull has a protruding snout similar to a horse.
• Non-Action Big Bad: The Giant Monk didn't even appear in the previous two episodes, giving the effect that the Monks had no leader at all. He is immobilized in the propaganda machine and doesn't even seem to notice the Doctor's party. Even when they're directly interfering with him, the best he can seem to do is fight back mentally.
• Non-Indicative Name: He's no larger than any other Monk. His name presumably indicates his high rank.
• Ominous Multiple Screens: His throne room has many triangular screens set in its walls which show all the changed history he is broadcasting.

The Eaters of Light

The Eaters of Light (Twelfth Doctor)

A race of quadrupedal beings from another dimension who enter our universe through a tear in space located in ancient Scotland, if let loose they are capable of consuming entire stars to satiate their hunger.

---

• Energy Absorption: They can feed on all forms of light, even that located inside living beings, killing them instantly.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: Time runs slower inside their dimension compared to Earth, causing days to pass when one spends only seconds inside. This proves instrumental to their defeat, as a group of Picts and Roman soldiers blocking the gateway for a few days at max is enough to keep them at bay until the portal collapses naturally.

Testimony

The Testimony Foundation (First and Twelfth Doctors)

Glass avatars from the Testimony Foundation, they travel through time snatching up people who are close to death, duplicate their memories into digital format, and then put them back to their human bodies at the moment of their death with no pain or strife, or any memory of the Testimony process. The memories and personality then could be uploaded into the avatar, and live on after their demise.

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• Artificial Afterlife: What they benevolently aim to provide.
• Brain Uploading: Their whole M.O. is to collect memories of the dead as a living memorial of sorts.
• Dark Is Not Evil: They don't exactly make a friendly first impression with their poorly-lit throne room and foreboding demeanours. However, they turn out to be a purely benevolent organisation from the distant future.
• Fantastic Racism: A strange case considering that Testimony was created in the far future where humanity regularly interacts with other species, but Testimony exclusively targets deceased humans for some reason. Nardole is the exception only because he guilted them into taking him, but that only proves that alien species are compatible with the system's matrix, thereby removing that as a valid excuse.
• Final Boss: To both the First (retroactively) and Twelfth Doctors, but as it turns out, Testimony were Good All Along.
• Good All Along: Twelve is thoroughly stumped when he discovers that Testimony aren't actually evil.
  "Oh, it's not an evil plan... I-I don't know what to do when there isn't an evil plan!"
• Good Counterpart: To the Nethersphere, another Artificial Afterlife created by Missy for decidedly more sinister purposes that appeared as the Arc Villain of the Twelfth Doctor's first series, thereby giving his entire tenure a sense of thematic closure. Both Testimony and the Nethersphere even use physical avatars to host each dead consciousness.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Every dead person downloaded into Testimony that we see appears to be perfectly content with eternal life in the foundation's database.
• Living Memory: Testimony believe that memories are all that makes a person who they are, so a replica with exactly the same memories is functionally no different to the original. The Twelfth Doctor is skeptical of this notion and ultimately remains unconvinced that the Testimony replicas of Bill and Nardole are the "real" Bill and Nardole, even as they comfort him in his final moments. He summarises that all they amount to are echos of dead people's memories held in glass, not flesh-and-blood people.
• No Antagonist: The Glass People do plan something, but they aren't malevolent.
• Poor Communication Kills: The whole episode could have been resolved in 10 minutes tops had the Glass People explained what they were doing right up front and why.
  • Downplayed, as no one is really harmed as a result of this miscommunication and the only real negative consequence is the waste of some time. Testimony also wanted to fully "get to know" the Doctor's character, which they deem to be good after observing his actions in the episode.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: After the Twelfth Doctor does his usual grandstanding, they show him a thorough montage of his darkest moments throughout the franchise while reeling off a long list of his foreboding monikers ("The Valeyard", "The Butcher of Skull Moon", "The Doctor of War", etc), which greatly disturbs the First Doctor.
  The Twelfth Doctor: To be fair, they cut out all the jokes.
• Silicon-Based Life: Glass People are humanoid but completely see-through when they aren't serving as avatars of the dearly departed, like living glass sculptures.

Thirteenth Doctor Era Debut

Stenza

Stenza (Thirteenth Doctor)

A Proud Warrior Race from a very cold planet who hold ritual hunts on other worlds. They are also conquerors who have wiped out most life on one planet, and are "cleansing" another... and that's just what we know about so far. They have apparently conquered parts of twelve galaxies.

---

• Arc Villain: Subverted, it seems like they were being set up as the Doctor's primary adversary for Series 11, but in the end Tzim-Sha is the only Stenza she faces.
• Battle Trophy: Stenza warrior Tzim-Sha takes one tooth from each of his victims, implanting them in his face.
• Enclosed Extraterrestrials: They wear armour on Earth because it's much warmer than their homeworld, and presumably it helps them deal with the different climate. However, they can expose their hands and faces briefly with no ill effects.
• Hive Mind: In "The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos", Tim Shaw reveals that the Stenza have one, allowing him to recreate their technology while trapped on Ranskoor Av Kolos.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Their ritual hunts involve sending a warrior to another planet, such as Earth, to hunt one randomly designated inhabitant. The trophies are taken back to the Stenza homeworld and kept in a state between life and death.
• Karma Houdini: Whatever happened to Tzim-Sha aside, the Stenza don't get punished for their cruelty and the Doctor, for all her disgust of their barbaric customs, doesn't bother to hunt them out and put an end to them.
• Kill It with Ice: Their body temperature is so low they can kill humans via lethal freezer burns on skin contact.
• Must Be Invited: Their hunts must be permitted by a resident of the planet it's taking place on before a pod can be teleported there. However, this permission takes the form of a glowing button with no instructions, so it's perfect Schmuck Bait for a person to ignorantly press without knowing what they're agreeing to.
• No-Gear Level: Their ritual hunts are supposed to be completed without any weapons.
• Proud Hunter Race: "The Woman Who Fell to Earth" shows their tradition of ritual hunts as part of their succession ritual, where one individual on a target planet is randomly selected and then hunted without the use of weapons. Trophy collection is a big part of Stenza culture, as shown by the Stenza hunter Tzim-Sha wearing his prey's teeth embedded in his skin.
• Proud Warrior Race: "The Ghost Monument" reveals that they also conquer and ravage worlds.

Pting

Pting (Thirteenth Doctor)

A species of little space gremlins, capable of devouring any form of inorganic matter. Classified by the Tsuranga computer as item Seven Alpha Cubed.

---

• Cute Monster: They're surprisingly adorable-looking for how dangerous they are.
• Extreme Omnivore: And we mean any form of non-organic matter, from screws to particle accelerators.
• The Juggernaut: They can eat through anything that would restrain them or block their path, and cannot be harmed by any known weapon. The spaceship computer's entry on them simply advises to stay far away from them. Not to mention, the one encountered on the Tsuranga is shown floating in space, otherwise unaffected.
• Metal Muncher: Although vicious, they are strictly non-carnivorous and cannot consume organic matter. They can consume, however, any inorganic material, including the Thirteenth Doctor's sonic screwdriver, which makes it virtually impossible to contain or confine them.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: They're immune to most conventional weaponry. Even the one weapon that does affect the one seen merely stuns it for a few seconds.
• Non-Malicious Monster: They only attack starships because they're hungry and sees them as food. They don't even appear to be sentient.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: They're only about the size of a baby, but are extremely fast and dangerous, considering the Tsuranga didn't have any threat level higher than the one they were assigned. General Cicero mentions she previously encountered a Pting that devastated an entire fleet.
• Poisonous Person: Their skin secretes a toxin lethal to all other lifeforms.

Thijarians

Thijarians (Thirteenth Doctor)

An ancient race of assassins, there are only two left, as their planet was destroyed. Now, they bear witness so that others won't have to die alone.

---

• The Atoner: The Thijarians were once feared assassins, until their world was destroyed. Now, they live as travelling priests, and bear witness for the dying.
• Bat People: They have remarkably large bat-like ears and fangs which protrude from their mouths. Combined with their Extra Eyes, the overall effect makes them look like bat/spider hybrids.
• Dark Is Not Evil: They didn't bother to change their black-and-red outfits and Spikes of Villainy after turning over a new leaf.
• The Dreaded: They gained a reputation as the universe's finest assassins. When the Doctor realizes who they are, she's terrified.
• Due to the Dead: They have taken up a mission of doing this by bearing witness to the deaths of those who would have otherwise died alone and unmourned.
• Foil: To the Testimony. Both entities operate on giving Due to the Dead and each encounter their respective Doctor through an unfortunate misunderstanding; convincing them they're a Monster of the Week. The Testimony means well from the start and interacts with others through memory-fueled proxies to give the living closure whereas The Thijarians prefer to witness the deaths of those without closure from afar rather than interact, which causes a misunderstanding.
• Extra Eyes: They have a lot of eyes on their faces.
• Good All Along: The Thijarians in "Demons Of The Punjab" spend the episode as background boogeymen The Doctor's terrified of. When she finally confronts them however, they reveal their true intentions to simply witness Prem's death and mourn his loss.
• Last of Their Kind: Almost all of their species was wiped out in an intergalactic war that destroyed their homeworld, with the two appearing in "Demons of the Punjab" being the only confirmed survivors.

Morax

Morax (Thirteenth Doctor)

A race of sentient mud that was imprisoned under a tree in Bilehurst Cragg, Lancashire. Their goal is to escape their imprisonment and take over the planet, by taking over the bodies of people they come in contact with.

---

• Body Horror: All the people who become vessels for Morax don't come back looking so pretty. And then when we meet the Queen, it gets downright horrifying.
• Demonic Possession: This is what their preferred method of conquest looks like to the people of 16th century England. Doesn't help that they can take over dead bodies in addition to living ones.
• Dishing Out Dirt: The Morax are able to control soil, and suffuse the bodies of the living and dead with it in order to possess them.
• Evil Is Hammy: The Morax Queen possessing Becka Savage eats the scenery with every line.
• Leaking Can of Evil: Becka opens up part of the Morax's prison by chopping down the sacred tree because it was blocking her view, allowing for the bodies of several victims of her witch hunts to be possessed by the Morax.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The mud-like aliens possess the corpses of female villagers who have been drowned as witches, whereas the Morax Queen forcibly takes over a human body while the human is still alive. The Morax hosts have a shambling gait, and they change the eyes of their hosts as well as making the skin become gray, wormy and leak mud, whilst the Queen drastically changed her host's skin to create a wood-like texture.
• Parasite Zombie: They're sentient aliens basically reduced to living mud, who seep into dead bodies and possess them. The Queen however, infects a living host by lashing her with a tendril.
• Possessing a Dead Body: After being freed from their prison, the Morax first manifest as energised mud that forms itself into tentacles, and eventually binds itself to the corpses of the witch trial victims.
• Puppeteer Parasite: What they really are is mud that fills into a host body.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: They've been reduced to primal elements and buried beneath Pendle Hill, trapped inside a prison made to look like a tree on a hill in Lancashire, as punishment for war crimes. Until Becka Savage's pettiness and unawareness of the creatures resulted in a Leaking Can of Evil.
• Take Over the World: The Morax Queen intends to use humanity as vessels for her people.
• Voice of the Legion: As Becka is taken over by the Morax Queen, her voice turns dark and echoes with several reverberating and piercing sound effects. It makes for a very scary effect that causes the Queen of the Morax to have a spine-chilling emergence.

Ux

Ux (Thirteenth Doctor)

A race of religious, nigh-immortal Reality Warpers only found on three planets in the universe, with only two existing at any one time.

---

• Facial Markings: They have raised, scar-like spiral markings on their cheeks.
• Obliviously Evil: The coincidental arrival of ailing Stenza warrior Tim Shaw on their planet led to the older Ux, Andinio, assuming that he was their Creator and doing his bidding, which eventually included stealing multiple planets. Due to the Ux being rather naïve, it wasn't until the Doctor arrived and proved that she knew the "Creator" that Andinio was shaken out of this belief. The younger Ux, Delph, was more skeptical from the beginning.
• Reality Warper: They have the power to shape reality through their thoughts.
• Really 700 Years Old: The two Ux seen in "The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos" barely age in 3,407 years.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: The only thing that distinguishes them from humans are the raised spirals on their cheeks.
• Single Specimen Species: There are only ever two Ux in existence at any one time.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Their eyes glow golden when they're using their powers.

Dregs

Dregs (Thirteenth Doctor)

A species of apex predators native to the wasteland planet Orphan 55, where there wasn't supposed to be any life at all.

---

• Adaptive Ability: This is how they survived their planet's devastation, and the Tranquillity Spa security force has to have power randomizers built into their guns in order for sustained fire to be effective against them.
• It Can Think: They are smarter than they initially seem to be, with the leader breaking a Mexican Standoff involving breathing air in a sealed room by allowing itself to be put into a cage.
• Was Once a Man: Orphan 55 used to be Earth. The Dregs evolved from the humans who survived the devastation and weren't able to escape offworld.

Skithra

Skithra (Thirteenth Doctor)

A species of scorpion-like scavengers who live off stolen technology from other species.

---

• Allegorical Character: They are a distillation of all of Thomas Edison's flaws, with none of his redeeming qualities - They both exploit inventors like Tesla for their own benefit, but unlike the merely-less-prolific Edison, the Skithra don't create anything at all.
• Creative Sterility: They steal all their technology, and not only refuse to invent anything themselves, but kidnap brilliant minds from other species to figure their tech out for them.
• Hive Mind: They have one centred on their queen, so if she dies, they all go down.
• Hive Queen: Their queen is the center of their Hive Mind and they can't function without her.
• Keystone Army: If their queen dies, then so do the rest of them.
• Insufficiently Advanced Alien: They steal all their technology and refuse to invent anything themselves. If they need a repair, they'll abduct a suitable engineer from elsewhere.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Mostly black, with red highlights.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Most of them except for their queen have glowing red eyes, even when disguised as humans.
• Scorpion People: They are giant scorpions with energy weapons in their tails, although the Queen is much more humanoid in appearance.

Fourteenth Doctor Debut

Wrarth Warriors

Large insectoid looking aliens who show up on Earth hunting the Meep.

---

• Adaptational Heroism: In the original story, they threatened the Doctor. Here, they do no such thing.
• Canon Immigrant: As with the Meep, they originate from a Doctor Who Magazine story.
• Good All Along: While they initially seem to be antagonists, speaking in deep voices and growling about hunting the Meep, they turn out to be alien police.
• Law of Alien Names: The two main Wrarths are Zogroff and Zreeg.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Mostly insectoid, but their right arms end in crab-like pincers.
• There's No Kill like Overkill: In trying to catch the Meep, they blast up the Noble household and cause a small shooting war with UNIT.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Despite the Meep's laundry list of crimes, the Wrarth Warriors aren't shooting to kill; their guns are set to stun. Even when the Meep is caught, the only sentence given is life imprisonment.

Fifteenth Doctor Debut

Goblins

That's right: actual, baby-eating fantasy goblins. They travel (sorry, Doctor, they bumble) through time in their wood-and-rope airship, engineering coincidences to "season" their food.

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• Abstract Eater: While the goblins feast upon human flesh, they also find coincidence quite tasty, so they seek out and create coincidences around their targets to season the meat, in a way.
• Adipose Rex: The Goblin King.
• All There in the Manual: Tie-in posters name the members of the Goblin band as Janis Goblin, Gob Dylan, Brian Fairy, Ralph McTelf and Pixy Not.
• Bamboo Technology: Goblins have no electronics, not even any screws, all they use are knots. Still they have flying ships and time travel capability.
• Clarke's Third Law: While the Goblins are technically creatures of Fantasy and Myth, the Doctor insists their "magic" is really just a different kind of science (not unlike the Carrionites appearing to be witches).
• Commonality Connection: Why the goblins target Lulubelle, she's a foundling born on Christmas Eve that ended up fostered by Carla Sunday, just like her new foster sister Ruby, who was also found on Christmas Eve. Once they rescue Lulu, the goblins overhear the Doctor mention he was also a foundling like Ruby, so they decide she is a viable target as a baby and travel back in time to snatch her.
• Contrived Coincidence: Enforced by the goblins, who engineer bad luck streaks in humans they target to build up coincidences around them, apparently as some sort of abstract seasoning on the material flesh of their victims.
• Eats Babies: "The Goblin Song" is an entire Villain Song dedicated to how they're going to prepare and eat a human baby.
  We've got a baby, we can feast! / We can dine three days at least!
• The Fair Folk: The goblins are similar to stories of fae in that their ways are esoteric but what's apparent is their malicious mischief and predatory targeting of human infants. Oh, and they have a thing for music, even by mortal singers, which can be a good way to distract them. They also appear to be actual supernatural goblins and not just goblin-like aliens, with no "they're from Planet Such-and-such" explanation given for them.
• For the Evulz: The goblins give Ruby a bad luck streak to invoke specific circumstances in her life that drew them to steal her baby foster sister. They give Davina McCall a much worse bad luck streak that more seriously injures her and would have eventually killed her without the Doctor's intervention, apparently just for fun.
• Hungry Menace: Downplayed. The Goblins eat people, and most of their acts are dedicated to feeding — but they also show genuine cruelty and malice outside of this, most notably tormenting and nearly killing Davina McCall in a way that doesn't benefit their plans at all.
• Keystone Army/Load-Bearing Boss: The Goblin King's death causes all of the goblins and even the ship itself to disintegrate.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Having been prevented from eating Lulubelle, the Goblins opt to travel back in time and abduct Ruby as a baby instead.
• Meaningful Name: The Doctor tells Ruby that goblins get their name from the fact that they'll gobble you up.
• No Body Left Behind: The Goblins all dissipate with their ship after the King dies.
• Our Goblins Are Different: According to the Doctor they live on the fringes of Earth's dimension up in the sky, dipping in to orchestrate bad luck surrounding select humans as a prelude to kidnapping victims to eat. Like the Carrionites, their science of manipulating and exploiting coincidences can look like magic to humans. Their technology is based entirely around knotwork on wooden parts, not even having screws for the Sonic to work on.
• Sky Pirate: The goblins fly around on a flying ship, some in pirate attire. According to the Doctor they come from another dimension that intersects with Earth in its skies.
• Time-Traveling Jerkass: Goblins have access to time travel technology and use it to set up coincidences of bad luck to make their victims tastier. They also set up much worse bad luck just for fun, culminating in lethal accidents when the victim is too injured to survive any more.
• Villain Song: "The Goblin Song".

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