Doctor Who: 10 Bizarre Powers You Forgot The Doctor Has

7. Storing Thoughts Inside A Hypercube

Doctor Who David Tennant
BBC

Wizards have owls, humans have the Royal Mail, but Time Lords... they have hypercubes.

Described by the Eleventh Doctor as a "messaging system" for Time Lords, hypercubes can store warnings, random thoughts, distress signals - basically anything that a particular Time Lord wants - and can then be sent across time and space.

Hypercubes first appeared all the way back in the late '60s, during the Second Doctor serial The War Games. Here, the Doctor decides to contact the Time Lords, and so, he forms a cube (by entering a meditative trance) in order to send them a message.

More recently, hypercubes were seen in the Eleventh Doctor episode The Doctor's Wife, with the Doctor receiving one at the start of the story, drawing him to a dark bubble universe - the place the cube was sent from.

Doctor Who The Doctor's Wife hypercube
BBC

Imagine being able to write a letter that you can send anywhere in the universe, without being restricted by the laws of time - that's pretty bonkers, right?

We haven't seen hypercubes much in the show (although they've popped up a lot in novels and audio dramas), but considering how useful they have the potential to be, we almost certainly haven't seen the last of them.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.