Doctor Who: 10 Great Villains Who Were Badly Wasted

10. The Whisper Men

Around this time last year, Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman hinted that a particularly scary monster with a great name would appear in the latter half of Series 7. Excitement began, as a trailer depicting a bow tie-less Doctor in a forest, declaring "I am the Doctor... and I am afraid," surfaced; we caught a glimpse of what looked like a twisted Silent, and guessed that this might be the monster in question. It was in fact the Broken Man, and the forest wasn't actually the fields of Trenzalore. The scary monsters that the cast were referring to were the Whisper Men, a group of faceless but well-dressed henchmen for Richard E Grant's Great Intelligence. Whilst the Whisper Men looked fantastic and their sinister hissing gave audiences the chills, they didn't actually do a lot in 'The Name of the Doctor'. We were all expecting them to pray on another primal fear, just like Moffat's finest creations, but they were only there for tension: surely they should've had some kind of ability to make people spill their darkest secrets? The audience fear that Moffat actually exploited though, was the threat to reveal the Doctor's name. It's a good job he didn't.