10 Terrible CGI Moments In Modern Doctor Who

7. Prisoner Zero's True Form (The Eleventh Hour)

Doctor Who The Lazarus Experiment
BBC

For the most part, Matt Smith's debut episode looks stunning.

One of the first Doctor Who stories to be filmed in HD (a trend that started with 2009's Planet of the Dead), the picturesque village of Leadworth, the playful new TARDIS, and one particularly inspired use of lens flare give the episode a magical, fairytale vibe, and the whole thing just pops off the screen like a colourful 3D storybook.

Unfortunately though, one thing that pops off the screen in a bad way is the weak CGI used to create the true form of Prisoner Zero.

While the villain appears as a human for the majority of the episode (oh hey, it's Olivia Colman!), it transforms into a slippery snake-like creature on a few different occasions, and, for lack of a better term, this thing just looks unfinished.

It genuinely does look like the penultimate render of something, like the effects team ran out of time to add more details to the skin. The creature looks too smooth and glossy, and like the previous entries, it fails to blend in with its realistic surroundings.

"Prisoner Zero has escaped" - yeah, escaped the computer far too early.

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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.