10 Best Doctor Who Characters In One Scene Only

3. Old Canton (The Impossible Astronaut)

Doctor Who The Impossible Astronaut Canton
BBC

We're going to bend the rules a little here and include the older version of Canton Everett Delaware III. Look, this is a Doctor Who list - if there's one show where we should be free to discuss alternate versions of the same character, it's this one!

Anyway, the younger Canton - who's also a fantastic character - appears as a regular throughout The Impossible Astronaut and Day Of The Moon, but the elder Canton only gets a single, highly memorable scene at the start of the former episode.

This older, grizzled Canton pops up out of nowhere while the Doctor and the Ponds (all three of them) are enjoying a picnic on the shores of Lake Silencio. Though it's clear that the Doctor knows him, his arrival goes unexplained, which immediately makes him an intriguing figure - and this intrigue is only heightened when he suggestively plonks a can of gasoline next to the Doctor's corpse.

Canton then reveals that he knows who Amy, Rory, and River are, even though they've got no idea who he is. This mystery is then unpacked over the course of the story, but not before Old Canton exits his scene with a real mic-drop of a line, one that can only be described as Moffat:

"I won't be seeing you again... but you'll be seeing me."

Also, fun fact: William Morgan Sheppard - the actor who plays old Canton - is the father of Mark Sheppard, who plays young Canton. Talk about perfect casting.

In this post: 
Doctor Who
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

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!