DOCTOR Who is set to face his most blood-curdling enemy to date — a horde of flesh-eating space zombies.
The pre-watershed episode entitled Oxygen is so graphic and “horrible”, even its writer and director are surprised the BBC cleared it for broadcast.
And if the Cybermen, Daleks or The Silence spooked you, you can bet you’ll need a pillow to hide behind this week when the sci-fi show kicks off.
This week Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, Pearl Mackie’s Bill and Matt Lucas’ Nardole will be up against a crew of undead astronauts on a mining station, who were suffocated by their own suits.
They have come back to munch on any remaining survivors on their space station Chasm Forge, and it sounds like these bad guys aren’t like any old B-movie zombies.
Jamie Mathieson, who actually wrote the episode, told Doctor Who magazine: “I went along to see some of the episode being shot and the monsters are horrible.
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“I was thinking: ‘Yeah, they’re not going to be able to use that shot’.
“Even the director said to me: ‘I can’t see them letting us get away with that.'”
Not offering much reassurance, Jamie added: “I saw three or four monsters that they’d made up and they were quite hard to look at.”
The title of the episode comes from the fact there’s a shortage of oxygen on the station, which means time is not in plentiful supply either for the Doctor as he races to save the survivors of The Walking Dead-style disaster.
The trailer for the episode — which is the fifth of ten in this series — appears to show Bill turning into a zombie, though one would hope she’s not off so soon.
Pearl has cryptically said of the episode: “Bill has some pretty serious stuff to go through.”
Mind you, fans may be more worried about who’s taking over the reins as the Doctor when Peter Capaldi leaves.
- Doctor Who episode Oxygen kicks off on Saturday at 7.15pm on BBC One.