10 Important Doctor Who Details That Are Almost Never Mentioned

In Let’s Kill Hitler, the Doctor, Amy, and Rory come across the Teselecta, a time-travelling android-like vehicle piloted by miniaturised people whose mission is to put history’s greatest criminals on trial.

They do this by kidnapping the criminals right at the end of their historically-recorded lives and torturing them for however long they deem appropriate, before eventually returning them to the original moment of their deaths, to avoid any disruption of the timeline.

Despite mucking up their maths and arriving in the wrong year for Hitler's trial, this doesn’t seem like the Teselecta’s first rodeo. If anything, its mission is presented as reasonably mundane, which implies that they've done this many other times before.

If we’re being honest, the Teselecta comes across as more of a plot device than anything else, providing setup for how the Doctor will eventually escape his own death.

Still, it’s weird to think that pretty much any historical villain you can think of – including ones the Doctor has encountered, like Genghis Khan and Napoléon – has more than likely been kidnapped and tortured by this strange machine from the future.