Old School Doctor Who Villains Who Deserve To Return

Before you say anything, we get it: Doctor Who is a series that is lousy with robots. This includes the occasional good guy (or should we say good boy?) like K-9 as well as infamous villains such as the Cybermen and the robot-adjacent Daleks. Why, then, would we want The Raston Warrior Robot to make a return?

The simple answer is that he left an amazing impression when he briefly popped up in The Five Doctors: when The Doctor and Sarah Jane were running from some Cybermen, our favorite Gallifreyan lured his foes near this new robot. The robot immediately destroyed the Cybermen (one of the most dangerous races in the galaxy) and was never heard from again. He’s ultra-powerful and ultra-mysterious, and that makes for the kind of Doctor Who villain (or perhaps even antihero) we’d love to see return.

Doctor Who has had a few shapeshifters over the years, including the Zygons in the modern era. However, those particular villains have often been disappointing because of the lethal combination of stupid outfits and convoluted backstories. Because of that, we’d love to see the return of the Doctor Who villains The Chameleons that were last seen tangling with the Second Doctor in “The Faceless Ones.”

In addition to shapeshifting, The Chameleons have a fascinating backstory: due to a mysterious explosion on their planet, these creatures have lost their original faces and identities, and they are forced to steal the looks and identities of others to survive. That gives them a compelling motivation, and they are certainly dangerous, with the aliens themselves claiming they are the“most intelligent race in the universe.” If nothing else, we want these Doctor Who villains back so we can have some paranoid episodes in the vein of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

While Doctor Who has pitted the Doctor against many surprising foes over the years, they are usually sci-fi monsters (like evil scientists, robots, and evil aliens of all stripes). The character normally doesn’t channel his inner Buffy and fight vampires. But that all changed in the serial “State of Decay,” in which our hero fought the King Vampire and the Three Who Rule (human astronauts that were transformed into monstrous creatures).

We’d love to see more of these Doctor Who villains because it would be fun to see the Doctor struggle to save more corrupted humans from vampiric influence. There is also a built-in moral dilemma in which the Doctor would have to decide between his distaste for killing and the need to remove the threat by destroying the King Vampire’s heart. Finally, considering these villains hail from E-Space (no, it’s not where the e-girls live, stop asking us), their return would be the perfect excuse for modern Doctor Who writers to create weird stories around everyone’s favorite pocket universe.

Maybe it’s just because we’re writing this on Halloween, but in addition to bringing vampires back to Doctor Who, we’d like to bring back werewolves…sort of. Specifically, we’d like to see the villains known as the Primords come back to the show (they last popped up in the series “Inferno”). If you’re wondering what their deal is, they are basically like werewolves who can transform others into werepeople simply through personal contact.

We’d love to see these Doctor Who villains return because we’ve already seen what they can do: in a parallel universe, these guys helped to destroy the Earth, something not even the Doctor could stop. Furthermore, they add a zombie-like urgency to any narrative because the longer the Doctor takes to stop them, the more of them there will be. Finally, they can be temporarily held at bay with fire extinguishers, and that’s just the brand of goofiness we enjoyed best in the older episodes of this classic BBC series.