10 Doctor Who Moments That Will Haunt You Forever

Doctor Who has a well-earned reputation as a scary show, allegedly inspiring generations of children to hide behind the sofa in terror of whichever monster or alien was chasing the Doctor and friends that week.

But beyond the jump scares and creepy scenes and terrifying enemies, it also has a long history of including more subtley haunting moments – things that are less immediately horrifying, but stick in your brain and bug you for years to come. Scenes that quietly unsettle you whenever they come to mind, like remembering a bad dream, or reading too many existentially-terrifying news headlines.

These aren't necessarily out-and-out scary moments – sometimes they are, but often they're just sad (which, lest we forget, is just "happy for deep people"), and always effective enough for you to still be randomly thinking about them years or even decades after their respective episodes originally aired.

We all think of the Doctor as somebody who saves people. That’s just what they do, and it's basically the premise of the entire show. As Amy coldly reminds Eleven in Amy's Choice, what is the point of the Doctor if they aren't saving lives?

This in mind it can be easy to forget that there are some things that even the Doctor can’t change.

It’s the sudden confrontation with this fact that makes The Fires of Pompeii such a long-lasting gut-punch. After three series of the Doctor being the infallible hero, he’s put in a situation where he cannot intervene, no matter how many people will die. Pompeii’s destruction is too important a historical event and the Doctor can’t just change time with a snap of his fingers.

But even knowing this from the first moment of the episode it’s impossible not to be shocked when the volcano finally erupts, and the Doctor walks past families begging for salvation, enters the TARDIS, and leaves.

It’s only here, with Donna tearfully pleading for the Doctor to "save someone... not the whole town... just someone", that he relents, if only slightly. Catherine Tate's acting is brilliant in this scene and it's undoubtedly one of the most underrated tearjerker moments in the show.

While the Doctor extending a hand (literally) to Caecilius and his family ends the episode on a slightly more positive note, it doesn’t erase anybody’s memories of Donna pleading with a Doctor who is fully resigned to the fact that he must let thousands of people die.