10 Darkest Endings In Doctor Who

Inspired by the real-life disappearance of three lighthouse keepers at Flannan Isles in 1900, this horror tinged Fourth Doctor serial is a perfect example of the more gothic tone that producer Phillip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes brought to the show during their tenures.

The Doctor and his companion Leela find themselves trapped inside a lighthouse in the early twentieth century, as the crew and three shipwrecked members of high society are picked off one by one by a mysterious alien force, who seems to be hijacking their corpses and feeding off the electrical energy of the building. The Doctor eventually confronts the alien, a gelatinous blob known as a Rutan, and destroys it along with its mothership by focusing the searchlight into a high-powered laser.

This story has the dubious distinction of being one of the rare few where only the Doctor and their companion survive the ordeal. Every other person in this episode is brutally killed by the rampaging Rutan, and their bodies are left behind to be forgotten by time. The Doctor is usually the one who swoops in and saves everyone, but it looks like not every alien invasion can be bloodless.