10 Best One-Time Only Doctor Who Villains

5. The Flood (The Waters Of Mars)

Doctor Who The Waters of Mars The Flood
BBC Studios

Doctor Who seems to enjoy making ordinary things feel scary. Shadows, statues, gas masks, things in the corner of your eye... and in 2009's The Waters of Mars, water.

Another base-under-siege story, this chilling standalone episode is set within the Bowie Base One on the planet Mars, where the Doctor and several crew members are forced to try and contain a water-based infection called The Flood, which transforms its victims into zombie-like creatures that are constantly emanating water.

The Flood doesn't have a true physical form, and instead, it spreads between various life forms (scarily, just a single drop of water can lead to infection) and alters the appearance of its hosts, like the humans within the base, who develop cracked skin around their mouths and discoloured eyes. The look of these Flood-infected humans is creepy as hell, with the cracked skin proving some of the most brilliant makeup work we've ever seen in the show.

Combine these chilling looks with the Flood's merciless, relentless and almost unstoppable desire to spread - and the fact that deadly water is a simple yet inherently spine-tingling idea - and this rather moist entity is an absolute winner of a bad guy.

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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!