In order of first appearance

The Adversaries

Sydney Newman's original format banned bug-eyed monsters. Five weeks into the run the production made one anyway, the audience doubled, and the argument was settled permanently. What follows is what the Doctor has had to run from since — arranged by when each first appeared, and coloured by what kind of thing it is.

Daleks Cybermen The Doctor's own kind Prior claim to Earth Conquerors The unseen The Pantheon

Position on the page is time. Colour is lineage — so the Daleks' thread runs from 1963 to 2015 in one hue, and you can see how rarely the show invents a genuinely new kind of enemy.

1963 – 1969

The Monochrome AgeEverything the show would reuse for sixty years

196321 Dec

Daleks

The Daleks

Terry Nation wrote them quickly and for money; Raymond Cusick designed them to conceal the operator and to move like nothing with legs. Inside is the mutated remnant of a Kaled, a species that fought a neutronic war to its own end and then armoured what was left. They were meant to be a one-off. They came back within a year and have never really left.

The single most important creative decision in the programme's history was made in defiance of its own commissioning brief.

1965July

The Doctor's own kind

The Meddling Monk

Peter Butterworth plays a genial vandal who wants to give Harold Godwinson better weapons and see what happens. He matters far beyond his two stories: he is the first other member of the Doctor's species the audience meets, and the first to own a TARDIS. The Doctor stops being unique.

1966April

The Pantheon

The Celestial Toymaker

An immortal who cannot be killed and does not want territory — he wants you to play, and he keeps what he wins. The first enemy the Doctor cannot solve by being cleverer about the engineering, because there is no engineering. Only one of the four episodes survives.

He returns in 2023, after fifty-seven years — the longest gap between appearances of any Doctor Who villain.

19668 Oct

Cybermen

The Cybermen

Kit Pedler was a medical scientist, and the Cybermen come directly out of what worried him: prosthetics, transplants, and the question of how much of a person can be replaced before the person is gone. The Mondasian originals have cloth faces with human eyes visible inside and flat singsong voices, and they are far more disturbing than any of the chrome suits that followed.

They arrive in the same four episodes that kill the First Doctor. The show's second-greatest monster and its greatest idea debut together.

1967Sept

The Pantheon

The Great Intelligence

A disembodied mind that borrows bodies — robot Yeti in a Tibetan monastery, then robot Yeti in the London Underground, which is the more frightening of the two by a distance. It has no form of its own, which is precisely why it keeps being available to come back.

1967Nov

Conquerors

The Ice Warriors

Brian Hayles's Martians are soldiers with a code, which turns out to be the most useful thing about them: within a few years the show is writing them as allies as often as enemies, and by 2017 an Ice Warrior is the most honourable character in the story.

1969June

The Doctor's own kind

The War Chief, and the Time Lords

Another renegade of the Doctor's people is running a war-games experiment on kidnapped human soldiers — and defeating him requires the Doctor to call home, which he has spent six years refusing to do. The Time Lords arrive as the story's real antagonists: absolute, unhurried and entirely without mercy. They exile him and change his face.

The most powerful force in the programme's universe turns out to be the Doctor's own government. It will be used against him again in 1986, 2009 and 2020.

The most powerful force in the programme’s universe turns out to be the Doctor’s own government. The War Games · 1969
1970 – 1979

Exile and GothicEarth invaded weekly, then horror by candlelight

19703 Jan

Conquerors

The Nestene Consciousness, and the Autons

A collective intelligence that animates plastic — which in 1970 means shop mannequins, and in 2005 means wheelie bins. The image of a blank dummy stepping through a shop window into an ordinary high street is probably the single most effective thing the programme has ever put on screen, and it works because nothing about it is alien.

1970Jan

Prior claim to Earth

The Silurians

Malcolm Hulke's reptile civilisation did not invade: they were here first, went into hibernation, and have woken to find primates in the houses. The Doctor spends the serial trying to broker a peace, gets close, and then the Brigadier — his friend, acting entirely reasonably by his own lights — dynamites the caves while he is still negotiating.

The first enemy in the show's history who is demonstrably in the right. Hulke wrote the same idea again in 1972 as the Sea Devils, and the show has never resolved it.

19712 Jan

The Doctor's own kind

The Master

Roger Delgado plays him as an impeccably courteous professional who simply wants everything to burn, and the crucial detail is that he and the Doctor plainly used to be friends. He was conceived as a Moriarty for a Holmes, appearing in every serial of one season — a frequency the character has never had since.

Delgado died in a car accident in Turkey in 1973. The loss was a direct factor in Jon Pertwee's decision to leave.

1972Feb

Prior claim to Earth

The Sea Devils

The Silurians' aquatic cousins, and the same argument at sea — with the Master in a prison on the coast, watching The Clangers and taking notes. One of the few classic serials shot with full Royal Navy cooperation, which is why the hovercraft look real.

197230 Dec

The Doctor's own kind

Omega

Season ten opens with the first multi-Doctor story, and with the revelation that Time Lord civilisation was built on someone it left behind: the stellar engineer whose supernova gave them time travel, and who has spent aeons alone in an antimatter universe knowing exactly who abandoned him. He is owed. That is what makes him dangerous.

He returns in 2025, fifty-three years later, in The Reality War.

197315 Dec

Conquerors

The Sontarans

Robert Holmes introduces Linx: a cloned warrior from a species at war so long it has forgotten what for, hatched by the million, identical, and vulnerable only at the probic vent on the back of the neck — which means a Sontaran can never turn his back on anything. A whole military philosophy expressed as one design detail.

19758 Mar

Daleks

Davros

Twelve years in, the Daleks finally get a creator — and he is the thing they are not, which is a villain who can argue. Michael Wisher plays him from a chair with one working hand and half a face, and the scene where he asks whether he would release a virus that destroyed all life, and answers his own question, is the best writing Terry Nation ever did for the show.

Davros gives the Daleks something they had lacked entirely: a scene partner. Nearly every major Dalek story since has been about him.

197530 Aug

Prior claim to Earth

The Zygons

Shape-stealing refugees whose world is gone, hiding in a Scottish loch with an organic ship and a cover story. One serial in 1975, then nothing for thirty-eight years — after which the revival makes them central to the fiftieth anniversary and then builds an entire two-parter out of the politics of a ceasefire.

197525 Oct

The Pantheon

Sutekh

An Osiran held in a pyramid on Mars by his own brother, because killing him was not possible. Gabriel Woolf plays him almost entirely seated and almost entirely in a whisper, and it is the most genuinely frightening performance in the show's history. His stated goal is not conquest. It is that nothing should exist.

Forty-nine years later he turns out to have been clinging to the outside of the TARDIS the whole time.

197630 Oct

The Doctor's own kind

The Master, at the end of his rope

Out of regenerations and physically rotting, the Master returns as a corpse in a cowl with nothing left but spite and a plan to crack open the Eye of Harmony. The Deadly Assassin also strips Gallifrey of its mystique for good, recasting the Time Lords as a shabby, ceremonial oligarchy.

197929 Sept

Conquerors

Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth

Splintered into twelve fragments across human history, quietly accelerating civilisation so that the twentieth century will be advanced enough to build him a time machine. Douglas Adams's plot turns on the fact that the explosion he is trying to prevent is the one that started life on Earth.

1980 – 1989

The Late ClassicContinuity as both a strength and a trap

1982Mar

Cybermen

The Cybermen kill a companion

Absent for seven years, the Cybermen return in Earthshock in a reveal that genuinely was not spoiled — and then do the thing the programme had never allowed. Adric dies on the freighter. The closing titles run over his broken badge with no music.

198519 Jan

The Doctor's own kind

The Rani

Kate O'Mara plays a third Gallifreyan renegade who is neither good nor evil but simply a scientist with no ethics committee — she finds the Doctor and the Master equally tiresome, and regards a planet's population as a supply of raw material. Two televised stories in the eighties, then nothing at all for forty years.

198519 Jan

Conquerors

Sil

Not a warlord — a sales representative. Nabil Shaban's Mentor is a grotesque little profiteer negotiating mineral rights over a planet whose government funds itself by televising executions. Vengeance on Varos is the show's sharpest piece of media satire and was attacked at the time for exactly the violence it was criticising.

1986Sept

The Doctor's own kind

The Valeyard

The prosecutor at the Doctor's trial turns out to be the Doctor: an amalgamation of his darker sides drawn from somewhere between his twelfth and final incarnation, bargaining with the Time Lords for the rest of his own regenerations. The most conceptually vicious idea the classic series produced, and it has never been resolved.

19885 Oct

Daleks

The Daleks turn on each other

Two Dalek factions — Imperial and Renegade — fight a civil war in 1963 Shoreditch over racial purity, which is a subtext the creatures had been carrying since 1963 and which Remembrance of the Daleks finally says out loud. It also reveals the Doctor has been setting the trap since his first episode.

Broadcast to some of the lowest ratings in the show's history, opposite Coronation Street.

198925 Oct

The Pantheon

Fenric

An evil from before the universe, bound in a flask, playing a chess game against the Doctor across centuries in which every person in the story turns out to be a piece already positioned. To win, the Doctor has to destroy his companion's faith in him on purpose. Six weeks later the series was over.

1996

One Night OnlyA single enemy, for a single film

1996May

The Doctor's own kind

The Master, in someone else's body

Executed by the Daleks in the opening minutes, the Master survives as a residue, possesses an ambulance driver and spends the film trying to steal the Doctor's remaining lives. Eric Roberts plays him as an American action heavy in sunglasses — a long way from Delgado, and a fair summary of what the co-production was asking the show to become.

2005 – 2010

The Time War LegacyOld enemies, reintroduced to an audience that had never met them

200516 Apr

Conquerors

The Slitheen

A crime family from Raxacoricofallapatorius wearing dead politicians as suits, faking a first-contact event in order to start a nuclear war and sell the wreckage as fuel. Broad, farting, aimed squarely at children — and underneath it a plot about a government manufacturing a pretext for war, broadcast in 2005.

200530 Apr

Daleks

“Dalek” — one is enough

Robert Shearman's episode does the necessary work of reintroducing a creature that a generation knew only as a punchline about stairs, by putting a single damaged one in a bunker and letting it kill two hundred people. It also establishes the Time War as a thing that happened to both sides, and shows the Doctor as the more hateful of the two in the room.

The Dalek elevates and the survivors, who have been hiding upstairs, understand what has happened to them. It is the single best rehabilitation of an old monster the show has ever done.

200613 May

Cybermen

Cybus Industries

The revival rebuilds the Cybermen in a parallel universe as a consumer-technology company: a dying billionaire, an earpiece everybody already wears, and an upgrade programme. It swaps Pedler's surgical horror for a corporate one, and it gives them the sound — the marching stamp and the flat "DELETE" — that the originals never had.

20063 Jun

The Pantheon

The Beast

Chained beneath an impossible planet at the edge of a black hole, claiming to predate the universe and to be the original of every devil in every human religion. The Doctor's response is the interesting part: he does not disprove it. He simply says that he does not know, and acts anyway.

20079 Jun

The unseen

The Weeping Angels

Quantum-locked: they cannot move while anything is looking at them, which means the monster is a statue, costs nothing to film, and is already standing in every graveyard the viewer has ever walked through. They do not kill. They send you back in time and let you live to death. Steven Moffat's cleanest idea.

Written as a low-budget "Doctor-lite" episode to be shot while the leads were filming elsewhere. Constraint produced the most-imitated monster of the revival.

200716 Jun

The Doctor's own kind

The Master, elected

John Simm's Master arrives having already spent eighteen months becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom under an assumed name. The revival's key addition is the drumming — a four-beat rhythm in his head since childhood, which reframes him from evil to broken, and which is the same four beats as the programme's own theme.

200831 May

The unseen

The Vashta Nerada

Carnivorous swarms living in shadow, on a planet-sized library, that strip a body in an instant and then keep walking around in the suit. "Count the shadows." Like the Angels, a monster made of something already present in every room.

200814 Jun

The unseen

Whatever was in Midnight

Never named, never seen, never explained. It gets into a stranded shuttle, learns to repeat speech, then to speak in unison, then to speak first — and the passengers turn on the Doctor within forty minutes. The only Doctor Who monster that wins, and the only one about which the audience learns nothing at all.

20085 Jul

Daleks

Davros and the reality bomb

Julian Bleach's Davros returns with a weapon that unravels the atomic structure of every universe simultaneously, and with the accusation that does more damage than the bomb: that the Doctor takes ordinary people and turns them into weapons. The finale's own guest cast is the evidence.

200925 Dec

The Doctor's own kind

Rassilon, and the end of the Time War

The Time Lords come back — and the revival's final move is to reveal that they were the reason the Doctor ended the war. Timothy Dalton's Rassilon intends to ascend beyond physical form and let creation burn to do it. The Doctor's people are not the rescue. They are the thing he locked away.

Position is time. Colour is lineage. Six decades produce perhaps seven kinds of enemy. The adversaries, counted
2010 – 2017

Things That WaitEnemies built out of memory, attention and time

201019 Jun

Alliance

The Pandorica Alliance

Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, Autons, Silurians and a dozen more stop fighting each other long enough to build a prison for the Doctor, because they have concluded he is the most dangerous thing in the universe. The trap is not a fight. It is a consensus.

201123 Apr

The unseen

The Silence

You forget them the instant you look away. The consequence is that they have been on Earth since prehistory, running it, and nobody has ever noticed — including the people with tally marks drawn on their own arms. It is a monster designed so that the audience experiences the same failure the characters do.

201225 Dec

The Pantheon

The Great Intelligence returns

Forty-five years after the Yeti, the disembodied mind comes back — first as snow in Victorian London, then, in the following year's finale, as something that throws itself into the Doctor's own timeline to undo every victory he has ever had. Richard E. Grant plays the intermediary.

20141 Nov

The Doctor's own kind

Missy

Michelle Gomez's Master is the funniest and least predictable version of the character anyone has written, and her plan is the strangest: to raise an army of Cybermen from the Earth's dead and give it to the Doctor as a birthday present, to prove they are the same. Later series hand her a genuine attempt at reform, and then kill her for it.

The first female incarnation of a Time Lord on screen, three years before the Doctor's own casting changed.

201519 Sept

Daleks

Davros, as a boy

The season opens with the Doctor finding a child in a minefield, asking his name, and leaving him there. The two-parter that follows puts a dying Davros and the Doctor in a room together for most of an hour, each trying to con the other, and the con only works because some of the affection is real.

201724 Jun

Cybermen

Mondas, again — and two Masters

On a colony ship falling into a black hole, time runs faster at one end than the other, so an entire Cyberman civilisation evolves from scratch in a hospital while the Doctor watches from above. The cloth faces and the surgical horror come back exactly as Pedler built them in 1966 — and Simm and Gomez play the same person, fifty years apart, failing to agree with themselves.

2018 – 2022

Rewriting the PastThe largest revisions the mythology has taken

20187 Oct

Conquerors

Tzim-Sha

A Stenza warrior hunting a human at random as a trophy, with the teeth of his kills set into his own face. The launch episode deliberately introduces no returning monster at all — the first season opener in the show's history to bring back nothing.

20201 Jan

The Doctor's own kind

The Master burns Gallifrey

Sacha Dhawan's Master reveals himself by having already destroyed their home planet — because of what he found in its records about what the Time Lords did to become Time Lords. It is the setup for the Timeless Child, and it is the angriest the character has ever been.

202016 Feb

Cybermen

Ashad, the Lone Cyberman

A conversion that failed halfway: still visibly human in patches, still in pain, and — uniquely among Cybermen — capable of rage. Patrick O'Kane plays him as a zealot rather than a machine, which is a genuinely new idea for a monster whose entire premise is the absence of feeling.

202131 Oct

The Pantheon

Swarm and Azure

Ravagers: entropy given a face and a sense of humour, released to dismantle the structure of the universe itself. The six-part Flux serial was written and shot under COVID restrictions, which is visible in the cast sizes and audible in the plotting.

2023 – 2025

The PantheonThe show stops writing aliens and starts writing gods

20239 Dec

The Pantheon

The Toymaker, after fifty-seven years

Neil Patrick Harris plays him as a music-hall turn with a rotating set of accents and absolutely no interest in whether anyone survives. More importantly he arrives with an announcement: the Doctor's salt ritual let something through, and the Toymaker is not unique. There is a Pantheon behind him.

The single longest return in the programme's history — 1966 to 2023, in a story whose original serial is almost entirely lost.

202411 May

The Pantheon

Maestro

The Toymaker's child, played by Jinkx Monsoon, eating every piece of music on Earth in 1963 — which strands the Beatles in a recording studio with nothing to play. A villain whose defeat has to be musical, in an episode that stops for a full song.

202422 Jun

The Pantheon

Sutekh, all along

The season's answer is that the Osiran the Fourth Doctor flung into the time vortex in 1975 caught hold of the TARDIS and never let go — riding it invisibly through every story since, and using it as the delivery mechanism for death itself. Gabriel Woolf returns to the voice after forty-nine years.

2025May

The Doctor's own kind

The Rani, and Omega

The neighbour who had been hanging around since 2022 turns out to be the Rani — Anita Dobson's Mrs Flood, alongside a second incarnation played by Archie Panjabi — returning after forty years to do what she always did: run an experiment on a scale that requires a planet. What she is trying to summon is Omega.

Two of the classic series' deepest cuts, 1985 and 1972, brought back in the same finale.