10 Most Useless Doctor Who Characters

Mickey Smith, or "Mickey the Idiot" is a character so useless that he lost a fight with a wheelie bin. Originally written by RTD as mundane, ordinary, and cowardly, Mickey represented everything that Rose Tyler wanted to leave behind. In Doctor Who's 2005 pilot episode, Rose, Mickey is so useless that he can be convincingly replaced by a plastic replica who can barely string a coherent sentence together.

Seeing what Clarke brought to the character as a performer, RTD gave Mickey more depth as Doctor Who continued into its second series. However, he's still pretty pointless. He risks detection by screaming at a cupboard full of rats in School Reunion, and while the Ninth Doctor is impressed by Mickey in World War Three, he's only really been following the Doctor's orders the whole time, rather than thinking for himself.

It's only when he's presented with a parallel universe doppelgänger that Mickey decides to stand up for himself, becoming an action hero and resistance fighter against John Lumic's Cybermen. It's this more heroic version of Mickey that appears in the Series 2 and Series 4 finales, where he fights against the Daleks and the Cybermen. However, it doesn't change the fact that for the first few years of his time on Doctor Who, he was pretty darn useless.