Doctor Who Finally Pays Offs Its Scariest Line
Doctor Who is a franchise that has many scary moments and scarier villains, including the fascistic Daleks and the creeping Weeping Angels. The dialogue can be just as frightening, and while it’s tough to pick the scariest line in the show, we’ve always been fond of the description of the Villengard weapons factories as the “nightmare of the Seven Galaxies.” We never got to see what these weapons factories could do until the recent Doctor Who episode “Boom” paid off that earlier line by showing us how manipulative and insidious Villengard can actually be.
The Nightmare Of The Seven Galaxies
What is notable to longtime Doctor Who fans is that Villengard has often been one of the more abstract dangers faced by the Doctor. The weapons manufacturer is first mentioned in the episode “The Doctor Dances” when Jack produces a blaster from Villengard and the Doctor proudly tells him that he destroyed that factory and replaced it with a banana plantation.
Later, we learn more about this weapons manufacturer in “Twice Upon a Time,” where the Doctor notes how the now-abandoned weapons factories were once the “nightmare of the Seven Galaxies.”
We See Their Weapons At Work
In any other show, the fact that we saw the factories abandoned would mean that we’d never get a chance to see them in action. Of course, Doctor Who is a show that involves traveling back and forth in time, meaning that fans held out hope to see the height of Villengard’s villainy.
Fittingly enough, that happened in “Boom,” an episode written by Steven Moffatt, the man who wrote the two previous episodes referencing this weapons manufacturer.
In the Doctor Who episode “Boom,” we don’t actually see the factories of Villengard, nor do we see any of its executives. Instead, we see the kinds of weapons they create and the kinds of immoral actions they take in order to boost profits.
For one thing, they are all too happy to do business with the Church, a group of fascists who at one point clashed with the Doctor for centuries before agreeing to a truce.
Making War On Nothing
While dealing with Doctor Who baddies as notorious as The Church would have been bad enough, we also discover how Villengard took advantage of their client in a way that got countless soldiers killed.
The Anglican Marines in “Boom” thought they were at war with tenacious aliens that somehow lived inside the fog. The reality was that no aliens were there and Villengard’s creepy technology was actually manipulating the soldiers into waging an endless war against nothing at all so that the Church would have to continue buying more weapons.
Maintaining Casualties
Part of how these Doctor Who goons pull this trick off is that Villengard deployed “ambulances” powered by amoral AI that determine whether injured soldiers should be instantly killed or not. The goal here wasn’t to actually save lives but to maintain a certain level of casualties. This helped the fake war claim more and more lives and once again necessitated the purchase of more weaponry.
Villengard Is More Terrifying Than We Realized
In the hands of veteran writer and former Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffatt, “Boom” pays off that line about Villengard being the “nightmare of the Seven Galaxies” in some truly creepy ways. We were expecting big and scary guns, but it looks like this weapons manufacturer became the terror of the universe through a combination of AI, manipulation, capitalism, and murder.
Considering how much we see the intersection of all of this in governments around the world, it’s fair to say that Villengard is now much scarier than foes like the Daleks because they could very well represent our own dark future.
