Doctor Who Symbolism: What 10 Famous Villains Really Mean

10. The Editor Was Rupert Murdoch

Russell T Davies wasn't exactly subtle in his satirical skewerings during his tenure on the rebooted Who. Davies was the showrunner who brought the show back from the dead, and in doing so he hoped also to revive the sort of social commentary which had always been in the background of the show, but came out especially in the villains of the Sylvester McCoy era. One such example was The Editor, the primary antagonist of the Christopher Eccleston episode "The Long Game", which Davies wrote himself. Played with scenery-chewing delight by Simon Pegg, he oversaw a satellite which produced and broadcast news throughout the cosmic human empire some 200,000 years in the future. The Editor's desire to control humanity through the press (himself manipulated by a gelatinous alien called the Jagrafess) is obviously analogous to Rupert Murdoch, whose NewsCorp own everything from Fox News to the News Of The World, and recently got caught up in the whole phone hacking scandal - making this villain both symbolic and eerily prescient.