10 Doctor Who Characters Who Came Back From The Dead

3. Rory Williams (The Big Bang)

Doctor Who The Big Bang Amy Pond
BBC

It was a running joke throughout the Matt Smith era that Rory was prone to dying.

He was killed by an old lady during a dream sequence in Amy's Choice; he was "fake shot" by Canton in Day of the Moon; he drowned (and was then resuscitated) by Amy in The Curse of the Black Spot; he aged 2,000 years and turned into a skeleton in The Doctor's Wife; and then, he died of old age in The Angels Take Manhattan.

Things got so bad that the Silence even joked about his many deaths in The Wedding of River Song, with the villains calling him "the man who dies and dies again".

However, out of all his brushes with the afterlife, there's one that sticks out from the rest. In the Series 5 episode Cold Blood, Rory takes a bullet that is meant for the Doctor, dies, and is then swallowed by a crack in time and wiped from history. Every single moment of his existence was erased: Rory Williams was well and truly gone.

But as if by magic, he returned in The Pandorica Opens, which was just a few episodes later. As previously mentioned though, this wasn't the real Rory - he was an Auton duplicate created in a villainous scheme - and we had to wait until the universe was rebooted in The Big Bang to see the proper, normal, human Rory be restored to life.

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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.