'Doctor Who': 5 horrible fates the human race has met on the show, including the Dregs, Cybermen and Toclafane
Over the years, 'Doctor Who' has presented some truly hideous monsters but there's a special kind of horror that comes from finding out the monsters are actually human (or human-ish).
On the titular Time Lord's many trips through time, we've seen quite a few terrible things happen to the human race but these five are the worst of the worst, at least in the modern era.
The Dregs
In Series 12 Episode 3 'Orphan 55', we meet the Dregs, mutated monsters who were once humans before being abandoned to die in a nuclear winter that has devastated the Earth.
They're pretty gruesome and the fact that they're presented as consequences of things like global warming makes them quite terrifying but the Dregs don't rank too high on this list because it is implied that at least part of the human race survived and continued to thrive.
Lady Cassandra, the Living Trampoline
A very popular villain of the Russel T. Davies era, Lady Cassandra was the last human not because the human race died out in a catastrophe but because the rest of the species evolved past the human form.
Insisting on maintaining her genetic purity while constantly extending her lifespan, Lady Cassandra underwent hundreds of surgeries that eventually turned her into a patch of skin stretched over a frame with eyes and a mouth, connected to a brain stored in a jar.
Cybermen in a parallel universe
Another storyline from the Russel T. Davies era saw the majority of a parallel Earth's population transformed into Cybermen. Not only did the transformation turn most of the human race into mindless killer machines, but it also indirectly led to Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) getting stuck on the other Earth (for a while at least).
Enslaved by the Silents
The Silents started out as a genetically engineered species of priests created by the Papal Mainframe (a space church) who were designed in such a way that anyone looking at them would forget their encounter the instant they looked away, a very useful ability to have during confessions.
Some of them were part of the group that split off from the Mainframe and dedicated themselves to killing the Doctor and to this end, they enslaved the human race, controlling our evolution from the shadows using a form of hypnosis until the Doctor managed to overthrow them.
Transformed into the Toclafane
By far the worst thing to ever happen to humanity on 'Doctor Who' has to be the transformation of the species into the Toclafane, twisted cyborg monsters from the end of time.
What's truly tragic about the Toclafane is that they really had no hope of a happy ending. The universe was dying all around them and even if the Master hadn't corrupted them and turned them into monsters, their destruction was already guaranteed. After all, everything ends, even the universe.
'Doctor Who' Series 12 Episode 4 'Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror' will air on BBC America on January 19.
