Told you we’d get back to this. Grace was a doctor who accidentally kills the Seventh Doctor on the operating table when she’s confused by his alien biology, but her guilt is alleviated when a dashing Paul McGann-looking version of the same man comes back and takes her on an adventure on New Year’s Eve 1999.

Unfortunately, she gets possessed by the Master as part of his bid to open the Eye of Harmony (again, it’s not worth explaining the one-night-only rules of this story) and he throws her to her death when she breaks free of his control and puts the TARDIS in a holding pattern to prevent the destruction of the world. Once the Master has been foiled and the Eye is closed, time reverts back to a few moments before midnight and Grace is brought back to life.

Chang Lee

Died/reborn: The TV Movie

Another character who’s killed at the climax of the TV Movie, only he meets a rather more violent end. The Master snaps his neck when Lee comes around to the idea that the Time Lord might actually be quite a villainous sort, but he also enjoys the benefits of time being reversed in time for the new millennium. All of his mates got killed off in the shootout that mortally wounded the Seventh Doctor anyway, so we’re sure that he never endured any gangland reprisals hereafter.

Kroagnon

Died/reborn: Paradise Towers

The Great Architect of Paradise Towers and other masterpieces had his mind removed from his body and installed in the basement of his own building on Earth. There, Kroagnon had to content himself with eating dead residents of the Towers with the help of his collaborator, the Chief Caretaker. He eventually brought himself back to life by possessing the Chief and enacting a plot to gas the residents and preserve his own architectural perfection. Fortunately, inbetween resident Pex made short work of him by pushing him down an elevator shaft and blowing them both up.

Pex

Died/reborn: Paradise Towers

Pex lives.

Captain Cook

Died/reborn: The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

Like the Doctor, Cook was an intergalactic explorer who travelled around with a companion, in this case a werewolf called Mags. Unlike the Doctor, Cook is a cowardly Darwinist bastard who allies himself with the Gods of Ragnarok and their henchmen and tricks various characters to their deaths at the Psychic Circus. Mags kills him in the ring, but the Gods reanimate him in order to try and recover their medallion, but he falls to his (second) death by pit in the process.

The Valeyard

Died/reborn: The Ultimate Foe

The Valeyard is an amalgamation of the darker sides of the Doctor’s nature that manifested somewhere in between his twelfth and final incarnations, whereupon he went back in time to try and take the Sixth Doctor’s remaining regenerations by putting him on trial. This comes across very quickly in the final story of the season-long trial arc, which seemingly ended with the Valeyard being killed by a feedback surge. However, the final shot reveals that he’s still around and he laughs at the camera. He hasn’t been back in the series proper, but going by the description and the post Time Of The Doctor-numbering, he ought to have manifested somewhere between David Tennant and Matt Smith…

Lord Kiv

Died: Some time ago…

Reborn: Mindwarp

The Mentors were a race of amphibious capitalists who were first represented in Vengeance On Varos in the form of Sil. During the Trial Of A Time Lord arc, we meet Sil again as he conspires to resurrect the leader of the Mentors, Lord Kiv, by transferring his ever-expanding brain into a healthier body. However, the mind that previously occupied the body kept influencing Kiv, forcing him to make designs on the Doctor’s companion Peri…

Peri Brown

Died??? Mindwarp

Reborn: The Ultimate Foe

It’s another retcon, but this was far weirder than the Strax one. Mindwarp ends with the shocking reveal that Kiv successfully deleted Peri’s mind and Yrcanos, a besotted and battle-mad alien king played by Brian Blessed, killed her and the rest of the Mentors in a fit of rage when he discovered their success. The Doctor, having not been present for this, doesn’t find out until later that this was a false memory created by the Valeyard and Peri actually survived to randomly get married to King Yrcanos. Varoonik, indeed!

Luke Ward

Died/reborn: The Mark Of The Rani

Luke was an aide to inventor George Stephenson in this Sixth Doctor story, but he fell afoul of a bizarre plot cooked up between the Master and the Rani to lead Peri into a minefield. These particular mines didn’t kill people so much as it turned them into trees and Luke stepped on one while hypnotised by the Master. As with certain Cybermen on the list though, he retains some of his personality when he saves Peri from stepping on another mine with his branches later. Yep, really.

Mawdryn

Died/reborn: Mawdryn Undead

As the title suggests, Mawdryn arrives in this story having already died. After an accident during his search for the secret of Time Lord regeneration, he condemned himself and his crew to an eternity of regeneration through mutation. Taking advantage of the Fifth Doctor’s companions Nyssa and Tegan being particularly thick in this story, he persuades them that he is a newly regenerated Doctor in a bid to get hold of– you guessed it– his remaining regenerations. He and his crew were eventually released from their immortality by the temporal energy caused by the Brigadier of 1977 meeting and shaking hands with the Brigadier of 1983. Whoomph!

Kerensky’s chicken

Died/reborn: City Of Death

In one of the finest Doctor Who stories ever made, Professor Kerensky is working on accelerated time field technology that he believes will be used to solve world hunger. He demonstrates this to the Fourth Doctor by accelerating a live egg into a full-grown chicken. Alas, it also ages to death and the Doctor explains to Kerensky where he’s going wrong by reversing the polarity (take a shot if you’re playing the drinking game) and reverting the poor bird to egg-hood.

Davros

Died: Genesis Of The Daleks

Reborn: Destiny Of The Daleks and on a couple of other occasions.

The creator of the Daleks programmed his soldiers to see other forms of life as inferior, and yet he’s surprised at the end of his first story when they turn on him and damage his primary life support system. We learn in Destiny Of The Daleks that he was placed in suspended animation when his secondary systems kicked in and he’s been cheating death in one way or another in each successive appearance.

We’ve seen him fall victim to a virus designed by the Movellans to attack Daleks, his ship destroyed by the Gallifreyan weapon known as the Hand of Omega and he’s even been scooped out of the jaws of the Nightmare Child during the most hellish days of the Time War. Over the years, Davros has given his own creations a run for their money in terms of sheer durability.

Eldrad

Died/reborn: The Hand Of Fear

Eldrad appears in Sarah Jane Smith’s original final story, characterised as an egotistical scientist who betrayed his own people, the Kastrians, and got himself sentenced to death by obliteration. With various parts of his corpse scattered across space, one of his hands imprinted on Sarah Jane, eventually growing a new, female form of itself. Eldrad eventually discovered that the Kastrians would rather destroy themselves than allow their heritage to be exploited and was defeated. The Doctor doubted that Eldrad was that easy to kill and sure enough, the character also appeared in the Big Finish audio adventure Eldrad Must Die, this time grown from an eye.

Morbius

Died/reborn: The Brain Of Morbius

The renegade Gallifreyan was another bodysnatcher and another mad President of the High Council of the Time Lords, but he died many years before The Brain Of Morbius begins. Spin-off media has it that the Sisterhood of Karn (who reappeared in The Night Of The Doctor and the recent S9 prequel scene) were present at the trial and execution of Morbius, but unbeknownst to the war-mongering Time Lord’s enemies, his brain had already been removed by a loyal scientist called Solon.

When the Fourth Doctor caught up with Solon, he had collected the rudimental elements of a new body for his master, who clung to life inside a plastic brain-case, and stitched them together a la Victor Frankenstein. After failing to appropriate the Doctor’s noggin for this homunculus, Morbius found himself disorientated in his new body and he was chased off a cliff by the Sisterhood.

Professor Sorenson

Died/reborn: Planet Of Evil

By our reckoning, it’s quite rare for a character to make it out alive after being possessed by another creature, but Sorenson manages it. As leader of an expedition to find a new energy source to save his dying people, Sorenson went against the Fourth Doctor’s advice and stowed a volatile canister of anti-matter aboard their ship. He was promptly infected by the anti-matter and ultimately pushed into a pool of the stuff and killed as the planet tried to reclaim its energy. Luckily for Sorenson, the Doctor and Sarah Jane then found him restored to his usual self and suffering from memory loss by the side of the pool.

And in conclusion- just about everyone else on Earth too…

In recent series finales, we’ve seen a whole lot of resurrection. In Last Of The Time Lords, more than a tenth of the world’s population is brought back once the Master’s reign of terror un-happens. In The Pandorica Opens, the whole universe ceases to exist and then gets brought back in The Big Bang through a combination of the titular explosion and Amy’s wicked memory skillz. And even with all of the characters from Death In Heaven on this list, that whole episode hinges on everyone who ever died being turned into Cybermen.

Death and resurrection are undoubtedly a major part of Doctor Who‘s longevity and with another series about to start, you can bet that we’ll be able to expand this list considerably in years to come.