10 Doctor Who Fates Worse Than Death

This still hurts nearly fourteen years later. Donna Noble's fate was devastating, so much so that Russell T Davies excised a cliffhanger that would tease the Christmas special in order to allow the Doctor, and the audience a minute or two to grieve.

With her inferior human brain too full of Timelord knowledge and her head about to explode, the Doctor wipes Donna's memories of their adventures together. What makes this even more powerful is that only two episodes prior, we saw how miserable her life would have been without the Doctor in it. Dreary office work for bosses with wandering hands, stuck at home with her undermining mother.

It's the fact that Donna's triumphant character arc from small-minded office temp to seasoned time and space traveller is cruelly reset only hammers home the sadness. Her memory wipe is both worse than death, and a sort of dying. The confident Donna Noble dies and is reborn as the woman who thinks she can change the world by shouting at it. She'll never know how great she really was.