8 Doctor Who Villains NOT Improved In The Reboot
5. The Great Intelligence
The Great Intelligence is a somewhat abstract idea, both corporeal and not, so its more frequent use during the Eleventh Doctor's era should have been a home run. While The Snowmen, The Bells of St. John, and The Name of the Doctor are all solid episodes, The Great Intelligence truly comes across as a bit of a weakling. This is perhaps best noted in the latter episode, The Name of the Doctor.
The Great Intelligence, having threatened the Doctor into getting inside his tomb, steps into his timestream to destroy the Doctor's achievements. This is undone seconds later by Clara stepping inside. Where was the foresight here? This was a bafflingly silly plan to enact!
Compare this to the long game that the Great Intelligence played in the classic era. First, it possessed the Tibetan Lama Padmasambhava and forced him to build a robotic Yeti over hundreds of years. Then, it spun a web throughout space that forced the Second Doctor and the TARDIS to land in London, where it was busy reanimating the corpses of fallen UNIT soldiers. The Great Intelligence has a more physical and direct threatening nature here.
The idea for the GI to become WiFi was incredibly interesting, yet the execution, unfortunately, didn't pay off.