10 Horrific Fates Suffered By Doctor Who Characters

6. The Entire Human Race Turns Into Robotic Killing Machines (Last Of The Time Lords)

Doctor Who Toclafane
BBC Studios

The Master's personal hench-bots, we first meet the Toclafane in Series 3's The Sound of Drums, where all we really learn about them is that they're billions in number, and that they're very adept at murdering people with an assortment of lasers and blades.

Their uninspired spherical design and lack of a compelling motivation made them a serviceable villain at best, but everything changed in followup episode Last of the Time Lords, where, in a shocking twist, we learned the truth behind their creation.

The supposedly alien Toclafane were actually human beings from billions of years in the future, with their heads stuffed inside metal balls, reduced to nothing but wires and machinery. The Toclafane were what became of the last of humanity.

The saddest thing about this fate is that these future humans thought they were headed for a paradise called Utopia, but all that waited for them was darkness, and the cold of a metal shell. How very depressing.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!