10 Best Doctor Who Characters In One Scene Only

4. John (Remembrance Of The Daleks)

Doctor Who Remembrance Of The Daleks Seventh Doctor John
BBC Studios

Remembrance Of The Daleks is full of awesome Dalek action from start to end, but one of the strongest moments in the serial is a quiet conversation between the Seventh Doctor, and a man called John.

Entering the café where John works, the Doctor sits down, deep in thought. He asks for a mug of tea, but what he gets in return is so much more than a delicious, comforting beverage: he and John end up embarking on a brief philosophical discussion about the gravity of our decisions, both big ones and small ones.

John - a Jamaican man - tells the Doctor about how his great-grandfather was kidnapped and sold into the cane-cutting business, a moment in time that created ripple effects with unforeseen consequences. He concludes by telling the Doctor "life's like that... best thing is just to get on with it": in other words, we can't control what's going to happen - we can only make the best of the hand we're dealt.

It's a surprisingly profound moment, especially considering that it occurs slap-bang in the middle of a story about Daleks blowing each other to scrap metal.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!