10 Doctor Who Characters Who Came Back From The Dead

And no, this isn't just a list of Rory's resurrections.

By Danny Meegan /

Within the weird and wonderful world of Doctor Who, pretty much anything is possible. Severed heads can talk. Christmas trees can attack people. Planets can vanish. And perhaps most bizarrely of all, a man can look good while wearing a stick of celery.

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In addition, the miracle of resurrection is also possible too, something that the show has proven time and time again across its classic and modern eras.

Pretty much every episode of Doctor Who contains a death of some description, but a lot of the time, the writers will find a way to reverse or retcon said death by the end of the story, whether by having the Doctor hit a giant reset button, by bringing a character back as a hologram, an android, or a ghost, or - most commonly - by employing some timey-wimey shenanigans to bring the deceased back from the dark abyss of doom.

As a result, characters come back from the dead all the darn time in this show, but here are ten specific cases: characters who truly, unequivocally died (let's try and avoid the many, many fakeout examples, shall we?), and then properly returned to life.

10. The Ninth Doctor (Father's Day)

Most of the Doctor's existence is spent rescuing his companions and dealing with their screw-ups, and Rose Tyler - though it was understandable why she did - made one hell of a screw-up in the Series 1 episode Father's Day.

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Wanting her father - Pete Tyler - to live again, Rose saved his life after journeying into the past with the Doctor, creating a massive disturbance in an established timeline. This meddling resulted in a group of Reapers - winged creatures that are drawn to temporal paradoxes - showing up and killing a bunch of people at random.

And one of the people they killed was the Doctor, who gave his life to shield a group of survivors. A Reaper straight-up gobbled him whole, and he only came back to life when Pete bravely sacrificed himself, an act which re-established his death, fixed the timeline, sent the Reapers packing, and brought back everyone they had killed.

So if Pete hadn't made such a courageous decision? The Doctor may have stayed dead, which would've been bad news for pretty much the entire universe.

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