10 Best Spaceships In The Doctor Who Universe

7. The SS Madame De Pompadour

Doctor Who The Girl In The Fireplace SS Madame de Pompadour
BBC

The SS Madame de Pompadour is so intricately embedded within Series 2's The Girl In The Fireplace that it doesn't just feel like an ordinary ship: it feels like a fully-fledged character within the story.

After being damaged in an ion storm, the Pompadour's human crew was murdered by its clockwork repair droids, whose sole mission was to fix the ship by any means necessary. To that end, they harvested the dead crew for "spare parts", fusing the ship's metals and wires with human flesh and organs.

It says a lot about the complexity of this vessel that some of this machine/organ-melding actually works (at one point, Rose and Mickey stumble across a surveillance camera with a human eye in place of a lens), but this isn't even the biggest modification that the clockwork droids made. As noted by the Tenth Doctor, the ship's warp engines have been unlocked to their full capacity - giving the Pompadour enough power to punch a hole in the universe.

It's a fascinating ship used in a fascinating way, particularly when it comes to the time windows that link the Pompadour with the real-life lady of the same name. Naturally, the Doctor then travels through one of these windows and gives her a big ol' snog - because what else would Tennant's Doctor do in this situation?

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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!