10 Doctor Who Side Characters With Tragic Backstories

6. Auntie And Uncle

Doctor Who A Town Called Mercy the Gunslinger
BBC Studios

Described by the Eleventh Doctor as "patchwork people", the dark history of Auntie and Uncle is evident by simply looking at their unusual bodies.

In The Doctor's Wife, we meet these two oddball figures on their adopted home planet - a sentient, definitely-quite-evil asteroid known as House. After falling through a rift in time and space, they arrived here decades, perhaps even centuries earlier, and while it's implied that they were once ordinary humanoids, they ended up transforming into monsters as the years ticked by.

With the aid of House, Auntie and Uncle would steal body parts from other creatures that fell through the rift, essentially committing murder in order to harvest spare parts. They would then fuse these parts with their own bodies, in order to extend their lives - it's pretty grim stuff. At one point, they even butchered a Time Lord called The Corsair, stealing his arm, spine, and kidneys.

While Auntie and Uncle aren't entirely innocent, it's clear that, in some way, they are victims of House - it seems like it was his power that led them down this dark path in the first place.

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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.