The Most Terrifying Weapon In Doctor Who Isn't What You Think

Every sci-fi universe needs an end-all, be-all, undefeatable existential threat. Doctor Who, having now been around (off and on) for the better part of 60 years, has had plenty of time to cook up a laundry list of doomsday-facilitating fictional whatnots. There's the Cybermen, for example, with their endless ranks and their ability to wipe clean a species' individuality, or the Weeping Angels, one of which is directly behind you. Honestly, the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and its jets of Bat Belt-adjacent deus ex machina are pretty terrifying, assuming that the problem that they're being pointed at isn't made out of wood.

And it goes without saying that the Daleks, depending on who's writing the episode in question, are nigh-unkillable juggernauts of genocidal destruction. Their force fields are nearly impenetrable, as are their metal shells, and their gunstick energy weapon sidearms have been seen exploding houses. Their warships burned the hyper advanced bubble cities on Gallifrey. Most damningly of all, most contemporary records show that they've caused every single child in the UK, without exception, to hide behind a sofa in direct defiance of their parents' reminders to keep calm and carry on.

Of course, the problem that the Time Lords ran into when trying to defeat the Daleks was the old Nietzschean chestnut that "he who fights with militaristic Swingline rubber fingertips should look to it that he himself does not become a militaristic Swingline rubber fingertip." After a war spanning all of time and space, one of their soldiers got the bright idea to employ an ancient Time Lord weapon — one so powerful that it could destroy whole galaxies, so advanced that it developed a personality, and so unspeakably hazardous to the well-being of those around it that it was blonde.

The Moment, first seen in the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor, was named for its capacity for destruction: entire galaxies could be wiped out in a fraction of a second when it was put to use. Locked away in the Time Lords' Omega Arsenal, it was a weapon with such bleak implications attached to it that nobody considered using it.

Then along came the War Doctor, so tired from generations of fighting that he was willing to shrug off warnings that the Moment had developed not just a mind of its own, but also a conscience. Taking the form of the Bad Wolf Girl, it taunted the Doctor, opened rifts in time so that he could see what his proposed actions would do to him in the future, and forced him to contemplate the repercussions of wiping out not just his enemies, but his own people as well.

To date, the Moment hasn't made another appearance on the Doctor Who television series, but it has popped up in comics, novels, and audio adventures. It's been seen changing the timeline, rescuing good guys, and, in at least one alternate reality, being used to its full destructive potential to wipe out the Cybermen. Given its morality and capacity for violence, it would be a perfect character to bring back in a main role, especially juxtaposed against the Time Lord that it saved back in the day. The Doctor could be its companion.