Dream Lord - Toby Jones

30 Days of New Who Challenge | Day 3 - Favourite Villain/Monster/Alien/Baddie of the Week

“If you had any more tawdry quirks, you could open a tawdry quirk shop! The madcap vehicle, the cockamamie hair, the clothes designed by a first-year fashion student… I’m surprised you haven’t got a little purple space dog, just to ram home what an intergalactic wag you are!”


The Dream Lord is the ‘dark’ dimensions of the Doctor’s subconscious. He showed us the Doctor’s innermost thoughts and doubts about the course of his life and perhaps ‘cavalier’ treatment of others, including self-loathing, guilt, arrogance, selfishness and even lust. Eleven said to the Dream Lord not long after they met, that he knew who the Dream Lord really was because only one person hated him as much as the Dream Lord did.

I love his disappearing/reappearing acts (or in eleven’s words: cheap cabaret act), his flair for the dramatic, the sharpness of his tongue and his changing of costumes to make a point or better facilitate a joke. In the end, he will never truly be defeated. He is a constant reminder to us that heroes need monsters to slay and they often find it within if not without.