20 Things Doctor Who Wants You To Forget
6. The Vengeance Of The Doctor
In The Five Doctors, the Time Lord Borusa brought the Doctors to the Death Zone on Gallifrey to inadvertently aid him in his quest for immortality. He gets what he wished for, only to discover that it is a poisoned chalice, when he ends up eternally trapped within Rassilon’s sarcophagus.
The Doctor must have taken inspiration from Rassilon’s trap, because he goes a step further when years later he nets out individually tailored punishments to the Family of Blood. They too wanted to be immortal, and get more than they bargained for. “We wanted to live forever. So the Doctor made sure that we did.”
In the Doctor’s defence, he gave up being a Time Lord, using the fob-watch in order to avoid such an outcome. But when that plan backfired, did he really have to be so creative with his punishments? The Father is chained forever in an underground chamber, the mother trapped in the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, the daughter hidden inside every mirror in existence, and the son time-locked as a scarecrow. It takes quite an effort to be so cruel. Either the Doctor really didn’t want to return to being a Time Lord or he’d learnt far too much in his short spell as a human.