It’s Not the First Time Doctor Who Has Destroyed the Earth

“The Well” was an episode full of disturbing twists. So full of disturbing twists, that there was barely time to worry about what might have been the biggest one. We have discovered at least part of the reason the TARDIS can’t get back to the 24^th of May 2025. Yes, the pyramids and Eiffel Tower and taxi floating in space might have been a dead giveaway, but now we know for sure – the Earth has been destroyed.

Properly destroyed. 500,000 years from now humans are supposed to be spread across the cosmos, “dancing” with all the aliens and evolving to look like trampolines. Instead, nobody has ever heard of us (or presumably, cat people, or evolved trees). For reasons unknown, the Earth is properly gone.

But it’s hardly the first time. Yes, the Doctor has saved the Earth more times than we can count, but it has to be said, they don’t have a 100% hit rate. In fact, over the course of Doctor Who’s history, the Earth has been blown up or rendered uninhabitable even more times than Gallifrey and Skaro combined…

The Ark (Season 3, 1966)

Doctor Who got barely three seasons in before the first time the Earth got smashed. Arriving on a colony ship occupied by humans and Monoids (one-eyed alien refugees who arrived on Earth and helped humans build their ark). The Earth itself is falling, steaming into the sun by the end of part two, but the Doctor barely even notices, he’s far more concerned with having accidentally introduced the Common Cold to a generation of humans with no immune defence against it.

This story is also a rare example of the Doctor returning to a location where he has saved the day to see what the lasting consequences of his actions are. The entire story is apparently wrapped up by the end of episode two, with the Doctor having cured the disease, wished the colonists farewell and returned to the TARDIS.

But in part three, the TARDIS lands on the same ship 700 years later, to find that the Monoids are now the ship’s overlords…

The Ark in Space (Season 12, 1975)

A few regenerations later the Doctor runs into another Ark, the Space Station Nerva, floating in orbit around Earth with a collection of frozen humans and a massive alien insect. The Earth has been rendered uninhabitable again by humanity’s oldest enemy, the sun.

As far as destructions of the Earth go, this one was temporary (even by the time they transmat down to the planet in the next story, “The Sontaran Experiment”, there is already grass down there), but it also had the most far-reaching implications. It is implied that not just Space Station Nerve, but also the Starship UK in “The Beast Below”, and the Erehwon from “Smile” were refugees of this solar flare emission in particular. Even Tom Baker’s own “The Sun Makers”, which sees humanity relocated to Pluto, has Earth rendered uninhabitable by solar activity.

The Pyramids of Mars (Season 13, 1975)

When the Fourth Doctor encounters Sutekh the Osirian, the Ancient Egyptian God of Death, Sarah Jane Smith is sceptical that the God is all that. After all, the year is 1911, and Sarah Jane would have remembered reading about the Sutekh killing everyone in the history books.

The Doctor considers explaining the butterfly effect, the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics, and the fluid and changeable nature of spacetime. He doesn’t have the attention span for that, so instead he takes Sarah Jane back to her home era of 1980, and shows her what it looks like. 1980 is a barren, hopeless desert completely inhospitable to life – and not just because Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister.

Earthshock (Season 19, 1982)

Now, maybe you do think this one counts. This is the Cybermen story that famously ends with the spaceship they’re all on being catapulted backwards in time and crashing into the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs and Adric (one of these things is more upsetting than the other).

But spare a thought for the poor dinosaurs.

The End of the World (Series 1, 2005)

The clue is in the name. Once again, the sun has it in for old Earth, and this time it’s not pulling any punches. The great and the good (well, the rich) gather for a cocktail party and murder aboard Platform One, including the “last” “pure” human, Cassandra the trampoline.

This is probably the most definitive destruction of the Earth you’ll see, even more than the melting snowball in “The Ark”. The sun finally expands past its National Trust-imposed forcefields and blasts the Earth into tiny little bits. The Earth doesn’t get more decisively dead than that.

That said, it does spawn a host of sequels, as we see in “New Earth” and “Gridlock”…

Orphan 55 (Series 12, 2020)

The Thirteenth Doctor and fam teleport to a holiday resort because Graham got some coupons from the TARDIS’s coffee machine (The Chibnall Era was a special time). In a twist that nobody who has never seen a Doctor Who episode could have seen coming, it turns out that the resort has a sinister secret, and soon guests and staff alike are being murdered by ravenous monsters.

Then, in a twist that nobody who has never seen a sci-fi movie before could have seen coming, it turns out that the desolate, toxic wasteland the resort is built on is actually a future Earth, and the ravenous monsters are humanity’s mutated descendants.

In fact, they’re not far off the mutated and vampiric “Haemovores” that come from back from another polluted and uninhabitable future Earth in the Seventh Doctor’s “The Curse of Fenric”. That, combined with the Toclafane (sadistic and murderous cyborg heads from the heat death of the universe in “The Sound of Drums”), it looks like “Bitchy Trampoline” is one of the better outcomes for the human race.

The Devil’s Chord (Series 14, 2024)

In the Richard Curtis movie Yesterday, based on an idea by Jack Barth, the Beatles never existed. The film argues that A: The Beatles were a unique and powerful musical phenomenon, attracting unprecedented mass acclaim, changing the musical landscape forever and having a tremendous artistic and social impact that would be felt for decades, and B: That if they had never existed the world would look mostly identical to the way it is now (Except that maybe the Beatles inspired Harry Potter?).

“The Devil’s Chord” takes a different approach, arguing that if it wasn’t for people’s ability to listed to “I Am the Walrus” in 1967, all hope would drain from the world, rapidly leading to a mass nuclear exchange that would leave the London of 2024 an ashy wasteland.

Once again, the Doctor can’t be bothered to deliver two minutes of exposition, so takes Ruby to see this desolated Earth in person.

The Empire of Death (Series 14, 2024)

Not saying that Ncuti Gatwa’s first season in the TARDIS didn’t go well, but it’s the only season of Doctor Who to have two stories on this list. In the finale of his first series (we’re saying it this way as a way to get around having to call it “Season One”), Sutekh returns and kills everything. Not just everyone now, but everyone that ever has or will be (don’t try and think about the time travel logic of this, just know it’s bad).

All of existence, including the Earth in the past, present and future, is reduced to a sandy graveyard. Of course, once again, and not for the first time it got better (and also maybe Gallifrey?)

Honourable Mention: The Pandorica Opens (Series 5, 2010)

We should also include a mention of “The Pandorica Opens” and “The Big Bang”, where the Doctor’s TARDIS explodes and destroys every single planet in the universe except the planet Earth. The human race develops mostly as it otherwise would have under a starless sky in a dead universe, kept warm by the light of the exploding TARDIS. This is important to mention, because it’s the only time that the Earth actually manages to outlive its continued arch nemesis, the sun (although in the real world, apparently we’re working on that?)

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