10 Doctor Who Episodes With Disturbing Implications

8. The Doctor Forces Countless Innocent Spiders To Die Horribly (Arachnids In The UK)

Doctor Who Journey's End David Tennant Metacrisis Doctor
BBC Studios

Even though the classic and modern years are littered with examples of the Doctor killing people, the character, supposedly, doesn't like to kill.

The Doctor's morals are wildly inconsistent and often quite confusing, and no better is this on display than in Series 11's Arachnids In The UK, where the Doctor's actions result in the slow, painful, offscreen deaths of countless innocent arachnids.

The main threat in this episode is a group of enlarged spiders, which obviously proves quite tricky to deal with. Businessman Robertson simply wants to shoot them, but the Doctor devises a far more "humane" solution, which isn't actually humane at all.

What she decides to do is to lure all the spiders into a panic room and lock them in. We don't get to see what happens to the creatures after this, but we can only assume that they died via cannibalism, suffocation, or starvation, over a long period of time.

Hey Doc, surely it would've been far more humane to end their suffering quickly by shooting them? Just thinking about all the horrific spider death happening inside that panic room makes you seriously question the Doctor's judgement.

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Contributor

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.