Doctor Who: 10 Worst NuWho Villains

3. The Isolus (Fear Her)

Doctor Who Fear Her
BBC Studios

Something that happens quite a lot in Doctor Who is that great concepts are executed poorly. This can be due to the tight runtime of each episode, the show's limited budget, or, in the case of Fear Her, some truly atrocious acting.

The idea for the villain in this episode is a genuinely solid one: an alien creature called an Isolus has taken over the body of a young human girl, Chloe Webber, giving her the ability to trap people inside drawings - including the Doctor.

Looking at Chloe's crude childish scribbles and knowing that these are real people trapped inside the paper is quite an unsettling thought, but any sense of tension or fear is consistently undermined by child actress Abisola Agbaje's terrible acting and cringe-inducing dialogue delivery.

Combine this with the laughably bad CGI of the scribble monster and an absolute joke of a final confrontation with the image of Chloe's father, and the Isolus is a fine example of how to butcher a potentially awesome villain.

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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!