10 Horrific Fates Suffered By Doctor Who Characters

5. Bill Potts Is Shot In The Chest And Converted (World Enough And Time)

Doctor Who Bill Potts shot
BBC Studios

Plenty of Doctor Who characters have been turned into Cybermen in the past, but none have hit harder than the case of Bill Potts.

Like every other companion before her, she trusted the Doctor implicitly, believing that he would always save the day and get everyone out unscathed. So when that gun went BANG in World Enough and Time and the camera panned down to reveal a black, charred hole in Bill's chest, it was truly shocking, both for us and the characters.

And just when it looked like things couldn't get any worse, they did. Bill was taken away by some mysterious figures dressed in white, and at the end of the episode, we learned that she'd been converted into a Mondasian Cyberman.

A camera shot follows that pushes inside her Cyber eye-hole to show the real Bill, a single tear leaking from the corner of her eye. It really hits home that this is a terrified human person who's been operated on and stuffed inside this creepy-looking machine.

The Doctor completely failed to save his companion - not something that happens very often - and as a result, she became someone's twisted surgical experiment.

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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!