Here’s something to brighten up your day! Let’s take a deep dive into the Doctor Who stories to see which Time Lord accrued the highest body count. (It’s only pretend, remember…)
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First, full disclosure: we haven’t scrolled through all the Doctor Who stories ourselves and counted each on and off-screen death. This would take far too long as we at Lovarzi, sadly, don’t possess our own TARDIS. But this information comes courtesy of a rather grim website we stumbled upon which has done the counting for us. So what does it reveal about the body count of each Doctor?
Well, you might instinctively think that the highest body count lies somewhere in the Eric Saward era. This was in the mid 1980s, and the incumbent script editor was renowned for penning distinctly violent Doctor Who stories which, sadly, did tend to involve a lot of killing. This was a conscious decision on the writer’s part, as he was keen for the violence in his Doctor Who stories to be depicted realistically; he didn’t want to sugar-coat the grim reality of the Time Lord’s adventures.
And yet, fascinatingly, the Fifth and Sixth Doctor eras seem to have some of the lowest deaths out of all of the Doctors. According to fandom.com, there were only 402 deaths during the Peter Davison era, and 2,381 during the Colin Baker era.
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Staggeringly, 100 of Peter Davison’s deaths occurred in a single story, and if you’ve ever watched classic Who you’ll know which one we’re talking about: ‘Resurrection of the Daleks,’ by Eric Saward. And if that’s too depressing for you, maybe you can unwind with the death-free ‘Enlightenment’ from the year before.
But which of Colin Baker’s Doctor Who stories had the highest death count? Again, Eric Saward takes the crown here with 1984’s ‘Revelation of the Daleks‘ and an eye-watering 2,028 deaths, although it should be noted that at least 1,997 of these occurred off-screen as a result of Davros‘ machinations. In which case, the number is 31 which, while lower, is still a lot of dying.
However, if you want a more fatality-free experience with your Doctor Who stories, the era to watch is Patrick Troughton’s. According to fandom.com, there were only 613 deaths in his entire era, and there are zero deaths in ‘Fury from the Deep,’ unless you count the death of the weed creature.
At the other end of the scale, his bloodiest encounter is his very first adventure ‘The Power of the Daleks‘ in which there are 54 deaths, although 25 of these are Daleks.
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It’s in the modern era that the numbers start to go a bit crazy. That is not to say that the Doctor Who stories are more violent, per se, but there are instances when the deaths of millions (or trillions) are casually mentioned as occurring off screen, which fandom.com has factored into its totals. (One could argue that, whilst these Doctor Who stories were not more violent, they were nothing if not hyperbolic!)
Intriguingly, it is the Twelfth Doctor who fares best here, with ‘only’ 6,409 deaths attributed to his Doctor Who stories. Now, you might think that a good portion of this figure comes from 2015’s ‘Heaven Sent’ where the Doctor effectively kills himself over and over again in order to break out of the confession dial. But according to fandom.com, this only occurred 195 times; how it arrived at this figure is a mystery, given that there were seemingly countless skulls at the bottom of the dial’s lake.
And so the highest figure in Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who stories is attributed to 2017’s ‘The Eaters of Light,’ thanks to the deaths of the 4,992 soldiers who made up the Ninth Legion Roman. Thus, the total of deaths in this adventure is 4,998.
After that, the next highest figure for the Capaldi’s Doctor Who stories can be found in 2014’s ‘Death in Heaven’ – the bombastic finale of Doctor Who Series Eight which saw Missy re-animating dead humans to convert them into Cybermen. And remarkably for a story which is about bringing people back from the dead, the body count in ‘Death in Heaven’ is a high 268, largely due to the 91 Cybermen who blew themselves up.
But if you’re looking for an altogether more ‘relaxing’ Peter Capaldi experience, the episode to watch is Series Eight’s ‘Listen’ in which there are zero recorded fatalities.
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The others Doctors, however, have a number of death-filled Doctor Who stories. The Tenth Doctor’s era is one of the worst offenders with an unprecedented 106,139,445,237 perishing in his adventures. The Ninth Doctor doesn’t fare much better, with 20,000,406,706 across his era – remarkable, given that Christopher Eccleston was only the Doctor for one season.
Similarly, the death count for Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor Who stories is surprisingly high at 21,006,275,335 – all the more incredible given her staunch anti-gun stance!
However, it is the Eleventh Doctor’s era which contains the highest number of fatalities at a (frankly unpronounceable) 1,000,001,000,003,214,064,242 deaths. So how on earth did fandom.com arrive at this figure?
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Well, you can’t blame Eric Saward this time, and neither was it due to a particularly bloody Doctor Who adventure! The majority of these deaths happened off-screen when the Tiberian galaxy exploded, resulting in the deaths of some 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 civilians. Then there were 1,000,000,000,000,019 Daleks destroyed in ‘The Day of the Doctor’ when the various incarnations of the eponymous Time Lord sealed Gallifrey in a parallel pocket universe.
Interestingly, fandom.com doesn’t include the death of the whole universe in ‘The Pandorica Opens,’ presumably because everything was rebooted and the explosion effectively didn’t happen – unless the number was just so impossibly high they decided to ignore it!
And if you’re wondering how the incumbent Time Lord Ncuti Gatwa is doing after his first season at the controls of the TARDIS, you will be unnerved to read that his Doctor Who stories have already racked up 8,192,899,028 deaths, most of which were down to Sutekh turning everyone into dust.
Conversely, there is only one death in ‘Space Babies’ if you’re seeking a more relaxing Doctor Who story – and it’s a butterfly!
So tell us – do these figures surprise you? And are there any statistics you would question? Let us know in the comments below.
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