Great Intelligence
The Great Intelligence is an entity who features in Doctor Who.
Contents |
Biography
The Great Intelligence
During the 18th century, the Great Intelligence possessed a Tibetan lama Padmasambhava whilst travelling through the astral plane and forced him to build the robotic Yeti over the next two centuries. (TV: The Abominable Snowmen)
Approximately 40 years later, the Yeti re-activated and the Intelligence manifested as webbing. It ensnared the Doctor's TARDIS in space and forced it to land in the London Underground. Reunited with Travers, the Doctor assisted British military in their battles with the Yeti. The Intelligence re-animated and possessed the corpse of Staff Sergeant Arnold, using him to track the Doctor's actions. The Intelligence captured the Doctor and tried to use a conversion headset to take over the Doctor's body. The Doctor attempted to reverse the process, allowing him to absorb the Intelligence and destroy it. When the control spheres that formed the focus of the Intelligence were smashed by Jamie McCrimmon, the Intelligence vanished. (Episode: The Web of Fear)
Manifesting as living snow, he used Walter Simeon as a tool in its scheme. Simeon's dark thoughts powered it where he poured his darkest dreams into a snowman. Simeon established the Great Intelligence Institute as the snow slowly swarmed to Earth. In 1892, its presence was sufficient enough to consume mankind. Having erased Simeon's mind and memories from after meeting the Intelligence, the Eleventh Doctor was surprised to see the Intelligence survived. He had thought that it had been created by the host Simeon, but discovered that it had learned to survive beyond physical form, becoming the the dream that outlived the dreamer. Controlling the now-mindless Simeon, the Intelligence attacked the Doctor, but was stopped in the last minutes of Christmas Eve when the snow changed to 'rain', mimicking the form of the tears of Captain Latimer's family after Clara Oswin Oswald's death. (Episode: The Snowmen)
The Intelligence did not totally perish, and in fact learned to survive beyond physical form, using Simeon as an avatar. At some point in the late 20th century, while Rosemary Kizlet was still a young girl, the Great Intelligence began to 'whisper in her ear', leading her to eventually found her company. By 2013, the Great Intelligence had influenced Miss Kizlet to establish an organisation based on the 65th floor of the Shard, which used the Wi-Fi and servants nicknamed Spoonheads to capture human minds. The Great Intelligence used the internet as its 'web'. Its operation fell apart when the Eleventh Doctor used a captured Spoonhead to trick Miss Kizlet into being trapped in the Wi-Fi after she refused to release the uploaded Clara Oswald, who was under the Doctor's protection. The workers downloaded Clara, Kizlet and others captured in the server, returning them to their bodies. When UNIT arrived at the Shard, the Great Intelligence ordered Kizlet to restore their employees to their "factory settings", effectively erasing everyone's memories to avoid detection. (Episode: The Bells of Saint John)
The Whisper Men brought the Paternoster Gang to the Doctor's tomb on Trenzalore so the Intelligence could have its ultimate revenge by turning all of the Doctor's victories into defeats. It did so by directly entering the Doctor's time stream, which appeared as an open wound in reality inside the tomb. However, this plan was foiled by Clara, who followed the Intelligence through the wound. Just as he was, she was ripped into countless versions of herself throughout history, (Episode: The Name of the Doctor)
Overview
Personality and attributes
In appearance, the Great Intelligence itself lacked any fixed physical form, existing as a vast, formless consciousness of psychic energy. When manifesting through human vessels such as Padmasambhava or Dr. Simeon, it appeared as an ethereal presence—its voice calm and deliberate, its words laced with an eerie wisdom that betrayed its alien nature. In its earlier manifestations, it was often accompanied by the Yeti—massive, fur-covered automatons whose lumbering movements contrasted with their precision of purpose. In later centuries, its presence became increasingly abstract, symbolized by swirling clouds of luminescent energy, glowing eyes in the dark, or subtle distortions in digital systems. (TV: The Web of Fear)
The Great Intelligence was arrogant and thought very highly of itself, informing the Doctor that his brain was too small to grasp its purpose. (TV: The Abominable Snowmen)
Rosemary Kizlet believed that the Intelligence loved humanity in the same vein that Burger King loved cattle. The Intelligence was unconcerned about feasting on people's minds to grow stronger, and showed little concern for its servants, reverting them back to their original state of mind, although it did take the time to say goodbye to Kizlet before doing so. (TV: The Bells of Saint John)
Powers and abilities
The Great Intelligence had no physical form and thus relied on possession of living creatures to manipulate its environment. It existed on the astral plane and could enter the people it encountered. It allowed Padmasambhava to live over 300 years while he created the Robot Yeti and it also reanimated dead bodies like Staff Sergeant Arnold. It had considerable mental powers such as mind control and could even mentally attack the Doctor, causing him great pain, and travel through time and space.
The Great Intelligence was a non-corporeal extra-dimensional entity of immense psychic strength, and as such, it possessed no physical body or biological limitations. Its power derived from its ability to manipulate and possess both organic and mechanical forms, extending its will through telepathic and electromagnetic means. It could animate inanimate objects, transfer consciousness between hosts, and influence human thought on a planetary scale. When anchored through a physical conduit—such as Padmasambhava or advanced technology—it gained the capacity to project matter, control weather phenomena, and reconstitute its energy field after apparent destruction. Despite its immeasurable intellect, the Intelligence’s dependence on host forms and psychic links rendered it vulnerable to feedback or disruption, particularly when confronted by the Doctor’s advanced understanding of psychic resonance. The Great Intelligence existed as both a sentient will and a metaphor for the dangers of knowledge without empathy—forever reaching into the physical universe, but never able to fully belong to it. (TV: The Name of the Doctor)
The Great Intelligence could also manifest itself in simple forms such as a slime that glowed brightly, a dense fog that consumed anything that entered it, and a poisonous web/fungus that could trap the Doctor's TARDIS and could not be destroyed by chemicals, explosives or flamethrowers.
Among its many servants were the Whisper Men which were humanoids with white featureless faces depressions where the eyes should be and a mouth with sharp teeth. They were dressed in Victorian era garb where they moved slowly and had a number of abilities such as appearing or disappearing at will along with the capacity to phase their hands into a persons body to clutch organs inside. The Whisper Men often spoke in rhyme and they could morph into an appearance resembling Walter Simeon at will with this one being an avatar for the Great Intelligence. (Episode: The Name of the Doctor)
Notes
- The Great Intelligence was originally created by Henry Lincoln and Mervyn Haisman where it made its first appearance in the 1967 serial episode "The Abominable Snowmen" a an enemy of the Second Doctor.
In other media
Novels
- In Doctor Who: Millennial Rites, the Great Intelligence appeared in the setting of the non-canon Virgin Missing Adventures novel. According to the book, the Great Intelligence was originally Yog-Sothoth who was a member of a race of beings called the Great Old Ones and was their military strategist. Their kind were akin to the Time Lords of the previous universe where they shunted themselves into a parallel universe allowing them to survive the end of their cosmos. Upon emerging in the current universe, they discovered that they had been transformed into god-like beings were each enacted their own schemes as well as plans for the cosmos. Over the course of millennia, the Great Intelligence had mounted millions of campaigns against inhabited worlds across space. In 1999, Anne Travers, who had been left traumatised by the Intelligence's first attempts to enter the universe, believed millionaire Ashley Chapel would try to use a special program, the Millennium Codex, to summon the Intelligence to Earth. She prepared a counterspell to force it back into its own reality. However, this had destructive effects, including dragging the Intelligence back to Earth and merging it with the benevolent god Saraquazel into a single malevolent being. It altered reality around London to form the Great Kingdom, a realm partly obeying the laws of the Intelligence's universe, N-Space, and Saraquazel's universe; here, the Doctor's TARDIS was worshipped as 'the Lady TARDIS' and the Intelligence was worshipped as "the key and the guardian of the gate," forming the triad of gods with Saraquazel. Anne sacrificed herself to fix reality, but instead of destroying the Intelligence, she banished it. The Intelligence became stranded on the edge of the universe, riding the blue shift outwards into infinity.
- In Doctor Who: All-Consuming Fire, the Great Intelligence appeared in the setting of the non-canon Virgin New Adventures novel. It was said that the Great Intelligence and his brethren survived the end of their universe by passing through a parallel universe that ended one second after theirs. Shifting again allowed them to enter the current universe shortly after it began expanding.
Appearances
- Doctor Who: "The Abominable Snowmen" (1967)
External Links
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