10 Best One-Time Only Doctor Who Villains

by Danny Meegan

1. The Vashta Nerada (Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead)

Doctor Who Vashta Nerada
BBC

Despite not having a unique visual appearance, despite not normally being able to speak, and despite only featuring in a single TV story, the Vashta Nerada are consistently cited as one of the best baddies in the Whoniverse.

Introduced by Steven Moffat in 2008's Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, the Vashta Nerada are brilliant in their simplicity. They're carnivorous creatures that resemble shadows, living within those dark corners of buildings, waiting, hiding. Step across one of these shadows? Your flesh will be torn from your bones. Yum.

By playing on one of the most basic human fears, the Vashta Nerada made an entire generation of kids even more scared of the dark than they already were.

Hell, they're such a nasty villain that even the Doctor can't stop them - in Forest of the Dead, he leaves them to munch on the planet because there simply isn't much else he can do - and there's no higher praise you can give to a villain on this show.

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Got any other great Doctor Who villains that only appeared once? Leave your picks in the comments section!

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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!