Doctor Who: 8 Times The Doctor Has Killed

2. He Blew Up An Entire Legion Of Cyber-Ships

Doctor Who Rory Cyber-ships explosion A Good Man Goes To War
BBC

There's some argument as to whether or not killing a Cyberman counts as taking a life, since they're mostly just emotionless voids that are fuelled by one sole desire: to delete their enemies.

Then again, they have proven capable of possessing a bit more humanity (like when Cyberman Danny Pink was able to have a tearful goodbye with Clara), albeit under exceptional circumstances. So we can't really say whether or not their lives should be given less value than your average warrior from any other race.

Even if you are of the mindset that they all deserve to die, the Doctor's explosive antics at the start of A Good Man Goes To War still feel like a bit much.

The opening few minutes of the episode find the Doctor and Rory attempting to track down the recently-kidnapped Amy Pond. To do this, Rory boards a Cyber-ship and questions them about her location, informing them that he has a message from the Doctor to boot. When the Cybermen ask what this message is, the entire fleet of ships in the sky behind Rory explodes in a massive ball of flame.

To be clear, that's thousands of Cybermen all gone in an instant, and all because the Doctor wanted to gather some information. The Time Lord has eliminated Cybermen before, true, but never on this scale, and never with such disregard for their lives.

He couldn't have found out Amy's location some other way? Been a bit stealthier? Was blowing thousands of Cybermen to hell really the only option here? It was a badass visual at least, so there's that.

Contributor
Contributor

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!