10 Terrible CGI Moments In Modern Doctor Who

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

Doctor Who The Eleventh Hour Prisoner Zero true form
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 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!