Doctor Who: 9 Things You Never Knew The Ninth Doctor Did
3. He Fought The Clockwork Men
WHAT: Viewers of Deep Breath will remember these eerie, clockwork androids who operate with sharp claws and single purpose. The Tenth Doctor encountered these creatures as they hunted down Madame de Pompadour to replace their ship's parts, the Eighth Doctor fought them as they were manipulating people "between the ticks of the clock" and the Twelfth Doctor took them on, and their leader the Half-Face Man, in Victorian London as they skinned the local population. These robots are ferocious and are occasionally sentient. The Half-Face Man could hold debates with the Twelfth Doctor about morality and human decency - ironic, as neither of them were actually human. However, it was rather strange that the Twelfth Doctor could not recall facing these before. He battled Clockwork Soldiers in the Land of Fiction in his second Incarnation and, as the Ninth Doctor, he and Rose took on Clockwork Men in 1920s London. HOW: Intent on visiting the British Empire Exhibition, the Doctor and Rose are embroiled in the hunt for a strange hulking figure that ticks like a clock, and are then in turn hunted by an alien bounty hunter, named Melissa, who mistook the Doctor for an exiled tyrant. She is the one sending the Clockwork Men in knights' armour after the Doctor to kill him. While the Doctor and Melissa concurrently do their own investigations and discover the alien tyrant, he in turn is revealed to be a Clockwork man duplicate, while the tyrant had wired Big Ben to explode on the hour and generate enough energy for his ship to recharge and travel away, never mind the thousands of people who would die. The Doctor and Melissa team up to stop the tyrant and the Clockwork doppelgänger sacrifices itself to stop the explosion and save the day. SO: It doesn't really help that the Cybermen are much better android villains, but the Clockwork Men are scary in their own right. In Justin Richards' The Clockwise Man, though, the Clockwork Men are shown in another light - an android that didn't even know it wasn't human and learnt enough from its surroundings to sacrifice itself to save others. Not since Kamelion had such a sacrifice been made in this way, although, unlike Kamelion, the Clockwork Man didn't have to beg for the Doctor to kill him. Just like any old foe, the Clockwork Men have popped up here and there for their own gains, and just like any old foe, someone needs to be there to stop them. Tick tock, Doctor.
