10 Traumatic Doctor Who Facts You'll Wish You Hadn't Heard
Who says Doctor Who is a family show?
People talk about hiding behind the sofa from Doctor Who with good reason. It’s a scary show, especially by the standards of family television, and there's a lot of stuff it probably wouldn’t get away with if it wasn’t already grandfathered in with the excuse of "but we’ve been doing it like this for decades."
Seriously, how many early evening TV series regularly have dozens of people being brutally massacred by evil fascist alien robo-tanks? Not many, I’d wager.
But even with its reputation as a terrifying show, there have been moments in Doctor Who that step over the threshold from scary, to actively traumatic. And while some of these moments are pretty obvious and right there in the text, there are more than a few that can easily slip under the radar – until a handy list like this, that is.
From the horrors of Cyber-conversion to UNIT violating the Geneva Convention, here are 10 Traumatic Doctor Who Facts You'll Wish You Hadn't Heard...
10. Mancini's Restaurant Has A Children's Menu
The beginning of Peter Capaldi’s tenure as the Doctor marked a sudden and distinct change of tone.
Gone was the whimsical, fairytale atmosphere of the Matt Smith era – in its place, Deep Breath introduced us to a Twelfth Doctor who was dark, brooding, unsure of himself, and potentially even willing to kill in cold blood, depending on how you interpret the episode’s ending.
Alongside the darker Doctor was a suitably dark premise, with Deep Breath seeing a return of the clockwork droids from The Girl in the Fireplace. This new group of robots (this time from the SS Marie Antoinette) quickly get back to their old tricks, setting up the fake Mancini’s Family Restaurant and harvesting customers’ body parts to rebuild their ship.
In some particularly gruesome imagery, they even repurpose their victims’ skin to make a hot air balloon.
But the most distressing aspect of this is also the easiest to miss: Mancini’s is a family restaurant, and they have a "children's menu". As the Doctor confirms to a horrified Clara, "We ARE the menu", which indicates that the children's menu in question actually consists of kids' body parts, as opposed to turkey dinosaurs and potato waffles.
The robotic staff of the SS Madame de Pompadour massacring its human crew to use their bodies for scrap is already harrowing enough, but imagining the same happening to innocent children is on a completely different level. No wonder Moffat decided to leave that one as a background detail instead of bringing attention to it!