Doctor Who: 10 Most Underrated Villains And Monsters
4. The Gelth - The Unquiet Dead
The Unquiet Dead was a big moment for the debut series of Doctor Who's revival. It was the first story not written by showrunner Russell T Davies and the first onscreen trip into Earth's history since The Curse of Fenric some sixteen years prior. A lot was riding on this and the episode ultimately delivers in some departments while faltering in others. And its standout is undoubtedly the Gelth.
The Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler land in 1869 Cardiff on Christmas Eve and end up running into Charles Dickens, who is attacked by a walking corpse emitting a strange blue vapour. The Doctor and Rose trace these ghostly happenings to a funeral parlour and find that the corpses are being inhabited by Gelth, incorporeal beings who wish to reobtain their physical forms.
Yes, the Gelth's motivations might be slightly simplistic, wanting to kill all the humans on Earth so that they can inhabit their bodies, but when has that ever stopped a Doctor Who villain from being fantastic? From the haunting voices that whisper in the funeral parlour to their ghostly blue appearance, the Gelth terrify at every turn and make sure that our first trip into the past with this new Doctor won't be forgotten anytime soon.