10 Doctor Who Characters You Didn't Realise Probably Died Horrible Deaths

Excuse me, WHAT happened to the Fourteenth Doctor?!

Doctor Who The Power of the Doctor David Tennant Fourteenth Doctor
BBC Studios

There have been a lot of horrible character deaths in Doctor Who. It didn't get that 'hide behind the sofa' reputation for nothing, after all.

Side characters are repeatedly dispatched in all manner of brutal and terrifying ways, ranging from strangulation, to disintegration, to ray-guns that cause "massive internal displacement." Yeesh.

These deaths are all memorable in their own ways because we get to see them in some capacity. But what fans might not realise is that there is also a sizeable contingent of characters who suffer various ignominious or painful deaths offscreen.

Whether it's companions being abandoned in completely unwinnable situations, side characters dying in ways that only reveal their true horror after you really stop and think about them, or entire civilisations being exterminated between episodes, death has a habit of catching up to everyone, and sometimes, you might not have realised just how horrible those deaths might have been.

10. The Corsair

Doctor Who The Power of the Doctor David Tennant Fourteenth Doctor
BBC Studios

The Corsair dying offscreen is one of the driving incidents in The Doctor’s Wife, but most people probably don't appreciate just how grim this Time Lord’s death is implied to be.

At some point before The Doctor’s Wife begins, the Corsair is lured into a bubble universe by House, where they are killed and their body is used as spare parts to repair Auntie and Uncle.

Now, an issue with this otherwise straightforward plan is that the Corsair is a Time Lord, and so their body regenerates when it’s damaged. And with expanded media indicating that it was only the Ninth Corsair that was killed by House, it's not even like they were on their final life.

So what exactly do you have to do to a Time Lord to kill them and remove certain body parts without triggering the explosive regeneration process at any point?

It’s worth remembering that the Tenth Doctor had his hand chopped off in The Christmas Invasion while he was still alive and it grew back pretty much straight away, but only because he was still within the first few hours of his regeneration, which wouldn't have been an option for the Corsair.

In other words the poor bloke must've been absolutely butchered, and it makes you wonder just how many tiny pieces he was carved into.

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Alix Cochrane hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would probably end up sitting in a notes file for months, gathering dust and never actually being uploaded.