From Androzani Minor to Zolfa Thura, from the dawn of the universe to barren worlds at the end of time, the TARDIS has seen it all.
Here CultBox takes a look at our five favourite alien worlds from the show’s modern era…
1. Skaro
Although restricted to a somewhat brief scene at the beginning of last year’s ‘Asylum of the Daleks’, the ruins of Skaro were perfectly calibrated to get fan pulses racing. The shattered remnants of the Dalek home world appeared amid a storm of sulphuric rain as the Doctor responded to a suspicious plea for help.
Presumably restored at some point during the Time War, after the Seventh Doctor’s earlier destruction of the planet, the Eleventh Doctor was summoned to a meeting in eyestalk of an enormous Dalek statue.
2. Ember (Sardick’s World)
The first festive adventure for Matt Smith, 2010’s ‘A Christmas Carol’, involved a visit to an utterly bizarre place. Sardicktown was an ostensibly Victorian environment that carried the sort of twist that only Doctor Who dares provide: The population shut their porthole like windows when the mist descended for fear of flying fish, from tiddlers to sharks.
Clouds of ice crystals full of electrical charge filled the sky of this odd world, forcing the Doctor to go to extraordinary lengths to save Amy and Rory from plummeting through the atmosphere on their honeymoon liner. Though not named on screen, the planet was name-checked in 2012’s Brilliant Book of Doctor Who.
3. San Helios
Visited by accident on a double-decker bus, the barren desert world of San Helios offered some of the most stunning vistas the show has ever produced. The production team went all out for this first foray into HD, with location filming in Dubai for the 2009 Easter Special ‘Planet of the Dead’.
San Helios in the Scorpion Nebula was once a thriving world with a hundred billion inhabitants but it was devastated, reduced to a planet of lifeless sand under the blazing heat of its three suns after invasion by a race of parasitic stingrays.
4. Alfava Metraxis
For ‘The Time of Angels’, Series 5’s rematch between the Doctor and the Weeping Angels, the TARDIS travelled to the crash of the Byzantium fulfilling a teased promise made by the dying River Song some two years earlier.
Former home of the Aplans and now a human colony, Alfava Metraxis provided a superb wind swept beach and then a cave system full of perilous ruins and statues to explore.
Filmed at Southerndown Beach in the Vale of Glamorgan, the location featured frequently in the series, as the engine room in ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’ and as the heart breaking Bad Wolf Bay from ‘Doomsday’ and ‘Journey’s End’.
5. The Ood Sphere
This snow covered planet in the Horsehead Nebula became the centre of a shocking human slave trade in alien servitors. With a mountainous landscape and ice glaciers, the planet hid a terrible secret at the heart of the Ood Operations company.
Named in sympathy with The Sense Sphere, from the 1964 story ‘The Sensorites’, the Tenth Doctor visited the Ood Sphere twice. Firstly with Donna in 2008’s ‘Planet of the Ood’, where they assisted in overthrowing Ood Operations, and secondly when responding to a fateful summons at the beginning of his final journey in ‘The End of Time Part One’.
What’s your favourite alien world in Doctor Who? Let us know below…
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