10 Doctor Who Characters Who Died For No Reason

9. Alaya (Cold Blood)

Doctor Who Cold Blood Alaya death
BBC

Series 5's The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is a decent story from current showrunner Chris Chibnall. It's full of high points - like the Silurians and the humans arguing over the ownership of planet Earth - but it also contains examples of Chibnall's worst writing habits, from extreme contrivances, to ridiculously dumb characters.

At one point early in the second episode, both of those things combine to create one of the most frustrating deaths in modern Who - that of Alaya, a Silurian warrior.

When Alaya's people take several humans hostage, the Doctor decides to capture her, holding her hostage in return. The Doctor then sets off to Silurian base camp in order to arrange for the safe exchange of hostages, and before he departs, he implores his human allies - Rory, Ambrose, and Tony Mack - to keep Alaya safe.

Simple enough, you might think! Alaya is chained up in the basement, so she isn't going anywhere. All the humans have to do is leave her alone.

At this point though, Chibnall comes in with one of those aforementioned dumb character/contrivance super-duper combos, with Ambrose pulling a bizarre move and actually deciding to shoot Alaya, destroying the Doctor's only bargaining chip.

What makes this particularly silly is that Ambrose's son and husband were among the captured humans. To get them back, all she had to do was, y'know, not kill the Silurian hostage - but she couldn't even manage that simple task.

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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!