The Whoniverse isn’t always the safest place to shop. Here are five Doctor Who products you might want to remove from your basket…
1) The Master’s daffodils
Everyone likes to have a bit of colour in their lives, but you should stick to flower arranging rather than funeral arranging, as the plastic daffodils peddled by the Master will literally take your breath away. These plastic creations are some of the deadliest Doctor Who products on our list due to their FDA-unapproved propensity to spray a suffocating film over the face of the observer.
Having first appeared in the 1971 story ‘Terror of the Autons,’ these daffodils were part of the Nestene Consciousness’ plan to subdue the population of Britain using living plastic, aided and abetted by the Doctor’s arch enemy the Master.
And avoiding the flowers was no guarantee of safety, as the Master was able to control a wide-range of plastic objects using radio signals, including children’s ‘troll dolls’ and telephone cables – indeed, the former even drew complaints from TV viewers of the 70s, as many children became too frightened to take their teddy bears to bed.
In short, if the Master is involved, the Doctor Who products are probably not safe for use. Which brings us onto the second item on our list…
2) The Archangel Network
Back in 2007, the ever-hypnotic Master found a way to coerce the population into voting for him using a psychic satellite network of his own design. Of course, this was in the days before social media, so who knows what kind of madcap scheme the Master would manipulate people with today.
And of all the malignant Doctor Who products on our list, the Archangel Network was perhaps the most subtle. On the surface, it had all the trappings of innovation – a super-fast satellite network that connected everybody’s phones.
Alas, the Master had embedded a hypnotic signal into the transmissions – the rhythm of four, otherwise known as “the sound of drums” or the heartbeat of a Time Lord. This signal manipulated people into thinking that Harold Saxon (the Master’s alter ego) was the best candidate for Prime Minister in the upcoming elections.
Presumably, the Master had learned his lesson since Daffodil-gate and recognised that a more subtle approach was optimal for world domination. Until he ripped open the sky open and flooded the planet with killer robots, that is.
3) Cybus EarPods
Cybus Industries certainly took the (parallel) world by storm in 2006 with their range of shiny, in-ear EarPods. Long before Apple developed their own similarly-styled earwear, these Doctor Who products were wireless and the human race’s one-stop solution for information, music and… well, daily jokes.
And if you’re thinking these Doctor Who products sound too good to be true, then you’re right; the clue’s in the name. Cybus’ EarPods may have been developed by the innocent-sounding John Lumic, but in the parallel version of Earth, he was responsible for the creation of the Cybermen – and the EarPods were all part of his plan for giving the human race the ultimate upgrade.
How? Well, the EarPods could be accessed remotely and used to extract information from a person’s brain, or feed information directly into it and essentially leave the wearer in a trance-like state. At the same time, they contained extendable Cybermen ‘handles’ which met at the top of head, presumably for the purposes of sending and receiving data.
The ultimate goal of these Doctor Who products was to hypnotise people into willingly going for Cyber conversion, as John Lumic had visions of turning the entire human race into Cybermen, and the EarPods gave him a convenient and highly-fashionable way of achieving his ends.
Take our advice and stick to Bluetooth…
4) Bubble Shock!
2006 was certainly a tough year for Doctor Who products with the Cybus EarPods and the fledgling Archangel Network. And in the world of The Sarah Jane Adventures, a deadly soft drink had captured the imaginations of teens, and of course there was a alien menace behind its creation.
Not that Bubble Shock! had escaped the watchful eye of the Doctor’s best friend Sarah Jane Smith, who soon discovered that this carbonated beverage had in fact been developed by the Bane for the purposes of (you guessed it) controlling the population of Britain. Apparently, Bubble Shock! contained secretions from the Bane mother which allowed her to control the minds of the humans that consumed it. And this was a lot of people, as 98% of the population found the drink irresistible.
There was, however, the 2% of the population who found Bubble Shock! disgusting, as their bodies were not compatible with the Bane enzyme. For this reason, the Bane created their own test child to experiment on, hoping to get the root of the incompatibility. The child was later rescued by Sarah Jane, and he became her adopted son Luke.
5) Anything from Kerblam!
Deadly Doctor Who products can be hard to avoid when they’re sold by one of the universe’s biggest retailers. The final entry on our list of injurious items is in fact a whole company, known as Kerblam! Now, whilst this galactic shopping service wasn’t exactly evil, there was something sinister lurking in its warehouses – namely exploding bubble wrap, which made any product from Kerblam! a serious health and safety risk.
This wasn’t Kerblam!’s fault, however, as the aforementioned bubble wrap had been engineered by one of the retailer’s employees as a protest against the automation of the Kerblam! workforce. Robots had taken over most of the deliveries, and the crooked employee reasoned that, if a sufficient number of Kerblam!’s customers got killed by exploding bubble wrap, then the androids would get the blame.
So if you’re thinking of ordering any of your Doctor Who products from Kerblam!, you might want to scout around for an alternative – or perhaps just get your Doctor Who products from Lovarzi, nudge nudge.
But hopefully, this brief guide has alerted you to the dangers of shopping in the Whoniverse. Honourable mentions must go to the deadly Adipose pills and their pendants, plus the Sontarans‘ lethal Atmospheric Omission System and (if you wait long enough) any television programme made by the Bad Wolf Corporation on the Game Station.
Which of these Doctor Who products will you (not) be adding to your shopping carts? Let us know in the comments below.
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