Doctor Who: 10 Storylines That Will Never Be Revisited

6. The Fate Of The Great Intelligence

Doctor Who Great Intelligence
BBC Studios

The Great Intelligence first appeared in a Second Doctor story in 1967, but the villain was most recently seen during the Eleventh Doctor's era, where it was voiced by Sir Ian McKellen and played physically by Richard E. Grant.

The entity's ultimate goal was to hijack the Doctor's timeline so it could erase all his past victories, essentially dooming the universe to a dark fate. The Doctor has saved billions of lives, so if all that good was then undone... billions would suffer and die.

Surprisingly - for a Doctor Who villain - this plan actually succeeded when the Great Intelligence stepped into the Doctor's time stream on Trenzalore, allowing it to explore the Doctor's history and cherry-pick moments of glory to turn into moments of failure. However, Clara then jumped into the time stream too, rectifying all the mayhem that the Great Intelligence caused. But the villain was never actually "killed".

What actually happened was that it was torn into millions of different versions of itself and scattered throughout the Doctor's timeline. Even though Clara was able to then save the Doctor, there are still technically an untold amount of "Great Intelligences" lurking in the Doctor's past, present, and future. Clara wouldn't have been able to kill that (how can you kill that?), so what is the Great Intelligence doing right now?

Like with Kovarian, there's no way that a villain who hates the Doctor so much would just lay dormant, but at the same time, it feels like the Great Intelligence simply ran its course in terms of being an interesting adversary for the Doctor to face.

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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!