Doctor Who: 10 Bizarre Powers You Forgot The Doctor Has

7. Storing Thoughts Inside A Hypercube

Doctor Who The War Games hypercube
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 over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!