10 Darkest Alternate Timelines In Doctor Who

2. The Great Intelligence Negates The Doctor's Victories (The Name Of The Doctor)

Doctor Who Clara The Name of the Doctor
BBC Studios

In terms of preserving life and ensuring that the bad guys can't run rampant, the Doctor is surely the most important figure in the Whoniverse.

With thousands of years of galactic adventures under their belt, the character has saved countless people, civilisations, and even entire planets. If all those victories were somehow erased... it would be a dark day for the universe indeed.

And so, it's quite unfortunate that this is exactly what happens in Series 7 finale The Name Of The Doctor, with the powerful Great Intelligence scattering its rather nasty self throughout the Doctor's timeline.

This allows the Great Intelligence to turn every single one of the Doctor's victories into failures: we see the villain encounter several classic Doctors, as the Eleventh Doctor, in the present, lies on the floor, screaming with agony.

Almost immediately, several core star systems disappear from the sky, Jenny is wiped from existence, Strax turns hostile, and the Doctor's past selves are killed.

We only get a brief glimpse of this Doctor-less reality before Clara sacrifices herself to undo the Great Intelligence's meddling, but a brief glimpse was all it took to show us that a universe without the Doctor would totally suck.

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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!