20 Things Doctor Who Wants You To Forget

20. I've Made A Terrible Mistake

This Christmas the Doctor will be coming face to face with an actual superhero in The Return of Doctor Mysterio. All will probably not be as it seems, but the contrast between the kind of hero the Doctor is and the superheroes of the American comic-books, will almost certainly be explored in one way or another.

The Doctor is a fallible hero, one who according to Steven Moffat wrestles with and overcomes his weaknesses. But in truth there have only been a few occasions in which he has got things so spectacularly wrong that he has made an already bad situation 1,000 times worse. In The Horror of Fang-Rock he unwittingly locks the enemy inside the lighthouse and almost everybody ends up dead as a result. The usually controlling Fourth Doctor cries out in anguish, ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake.’

In The God Complex the Eleventh Doctor encourages Rita to turn to her faith with confronting the Minotaur, only to realise that the creature was feeding off faith and not fear. It is tempting to see the character’s eagerness to run into danger as a way of running away from himself.