Doctor Who: 10 Times The Doctor Faced Consequences For Their Actions

When Captain Jack Harkness makes a short surprise cameo in Fugitive of the Judoon, he makes a very clear and simple warning to the Doctor: “Don’t give the Lone Cyberman what it wants, or we're all as good as dead…” - I'm paraphrasing here, but you get the point.

Simple enough warning, right? Lone Cyberman + what he wants = BAD.

Enter The Haunting of Villa Diodati, and The Doctor’s first encounter with The Lone Cyberman: Ashad (finally, a Chibnall era villain that really sticks the landing). Ashad is hunting for the Cyberium, an AI containing the combined knowledge of all Cybermen, past and future. With the Cyberium, Ashad would possess the knowledge required to rebuild the Cybermen, stronger than ever.

It transpires that the Cyberium has latched onto the famous poet, Percy Shelley, and was hiding both him and itself in the basement of Villa Diodati using a perception filter - this leads to a tense stand-off between The Doc and Ashad. If the Cyberium stays inside Shelley’s head, it will destroy his talented mind completely, but if she removes it, she risks Ashad getting exactly what he wants. After an excellent scene that finally gives Whittaker a chance to sink her teeth into the darker shades of Doctor for the first time, Thirteen concludes she can’t trade one life for others, tricking The Cyberium into releasing Shelley by showing him his future death by drowning.

Of course this, in turn, leads to Ashad strong-arming Thirteen into surrendering the Cyberium to him, which leads to the rise of a Cyber empire, the start of the Cyber Wars, and ends with the corpses of the Time Lords being desecrated and revived as Cybermen. As consequences go, these are less than peachy.

And the cherry on the cake of this whole thing - Percy Shelley was doomed to die young anyway, a mere six years later…

MORAL OF THE STORY: Once in a while, prioritise the lives of the many over the lives of the few, especially when you’ve been warned of the exact consequences.