10 Doctor Who Moments That Will Haunt You Forever

There are so many side characters that die in Doctor Who that it can be difficult to even think of them as characters. But when an episode takes the time to really make the audience empathise with its ill-fated cannon fodder (and does it well), it can hit like a ton of bricks.

The entire sequence at the end of The Waters of Mars where the crew is picked off one-by-one by the Flood is a haunting piece of television, but the moment that sticks out the most is the death of Steffi.

Trapped by a waterfall and unable to escape, Steffi locks herself in a side room and tearfully watches video messages from her children as she waits for her inevitable death. Despite her character’s relatively short screentime, it’s such an unbearably real and human moment that she still sticks out amongst the many dead characters all these years later.

It was important that we really felt it when the Bowie Base crew died as this would then make us buy the Doctor's rash actions at the end of the episode. Steffi’s death comes mere minutes before he ultimately snaps and decides to disregard the laws of time, and having witnessed these events ourselves... you can't really blame him.