10 Doctor Who Characters Who Came Back From The Dead

5. The Master (The End Of Time)

Doctor Who The Big Bang Amy Pond
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The Master has been a recurring character in Doctor Who since the early 1970s, when Roger Delgado first assumed the role opposite Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor. And across his lengthy tenure, he's died a lot. Or at least, he's appeared to have died a lot, suffering seemingly fatal injuries only to show up alive and well in a future episode.

In the Fifth Doctor story Planet of Fire, for instance, he was burned alive by a swirl of flames. In the Paul McGann TV movie, he was sucked into the Eye of Harmony and vaporised. Hell, in 2017's The Doctor Falls, he killed himself, with John Simm's Master shooting Michelle Gomez's Missy in the back with his laser screwdriver.

However, one of the most clear-cut and notable examples of The Master fully dying and then returning from the dead occurred during the Tenth Doctor's era.

At the end of the Series 3 finale, the John Simm iteration of the character was shot by his wife, Lucy Saxon, before dying in the Doctor's arms after refusing to regenerate out of spite: with his death, he concluded that he'd "beaten" the Doctor.

He then returned in David Tennant's final story, The End of Time, after being brought back to life by a group of fanatics in a botched ritual. And as an added side effect, he also had bleached-blonde hair! Because reasons.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.