10 Doctor Who Side Characters With Tragic Backstories

Doctor Who tends to do the "villain with good intentions" thing quite a lot, and The Landlord is one of the best examples of this in recent years.

As his name implies, The Landlord is a property owner, but he isn't exactly someone you'd want to go into business with. This is because of his gameplan, which is not to give people a comfortable place to live - it's to lure them into his property and feed them to a swarm of alien insects.

Okay, sure, that definitely doesn't seem like "good intentions" at face value, but peeling back the layers of The Landlord's history reveals that his heart is genuinely in the right place.

In reality, his murderous behaviour is actually a way for him to save his mother, Eliza, from death. When he was just a boy, Eliza contracted a serious illness, and despite the best efforts of her doctors, there was nothing they could do to keep her alive. By chance, The Landlord then stumbled upon those aforementioned insects, Dryads, and discovered that they were capable of healing Eliza over time.

For the next several decades, The Landlord would lure unsuspecting students to his house in order to feed them to the Dryads and keep Eliza healthy. He's far from being a saint, but at the end of the day, The Landlord is nothing more than a scared kid who wants to help his mum - a plight that we can all probably empathise with.