THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS
The Voord
Reviews

Remembering the Voord by Niall Jones 30/3/25

'The Voords --- anyone remember the Voords? Well, they're now running a small but successful kebab house in Radlett.'

Jimmy Mulville, 27 July 1982

The answer to Jimmy Mulville's question, posed on the short-lived BBC radio comedy series Injury Time, is probably no. Although almost 10 million people saw the Voord --- or Voords (I prefer the former, but the latter is arguably more correct) --- make their TV debut in 1964's The Keys of Marinus, the black-suited baddies have long-since slipped out of the public's consciousness. Even Doctor Who fans listening to Mulville probably didn't remember the Voord, and if they did, they probably did so second-hand, via reference books, rather than from remembrances of a nearly twenty-year-old television serial. The Voord are simply very obscure, which is clearly Mulville's point. Here, they stand in for all the less-than-successful Doctor Who monsters, all rubber suits and wooden acting, who turned up once, did some menacing, were easily defeated and then promptly forgotten.

Appearing only once, however, isn't necessarily a sign of weakness. After all, there are plenty of Doctor Who villains who only appeared once in the classic series, but who nevertheless made a big impression: Morbius, Sutekh, the Zygons, to name but a few. The real problem with the Voord is that they're just not very memorable. In their sole TV appearance, they come across as generic villains, with little in the way of motive. Their one saving grace is their design. They may be men in rubber suits --- the script even suggests that this might literally be the case --- but their all-black, deep sea diver look is stark and sleek, while their angular helmets, complete with antenna, give them a blank, menacing appearance.

The Voord's moment in the sun was rather briefer than most. The Keys of Marinus may be a six-part story, but they only feature in the first and final episodes. Led by the villainous Yartek, they aim to take control of Marinus's Conscience Machine, which will then allow them to take over the planet. Things don't go quite to plan, however, as Ian manages to trick them into blowing up the machine --- and themselves with it.

This is where the Voord's story would seem to end, leaving them as little more than a footnote in Doctor Who's early history. In fact, they were only the second alien threat to be encountered by the Doctor and companions, after the Daleks, and, like the Daleks, were created by Terry Nation, who rapidly wrote The Keys of Marinus after another script unexpectedly fell through. The prevalence of historical adventures in early Doctor Who also meant that, by the end of the first season, the TARDIS crew had only encountered three main alien threats: the Daleks, who fast became a phenomenon; the Sensorites, who turned out to be far less sinister than initially assumed; and the Voord. This relative lack of competition meant that, for a brief time, the Voord assumed a status far greater than their limited screentime would seem to merit.

In fact, they wasted no time in making a return, albeit in a surprising medium. In 1964, Cadet Sweets launched a Doctor Who tie-in in the form of a series of colourful picture cards. Each pack of ten sweets contained one out of a possible fifty cards, one side of which featured a colourful illustration and the other a snippet of text. When collected in full and arranged in order, these cards recount two stories about the Doctor. Although it is the Daleks who get top billing, the first of these stories also involves the Voord.

The small amount of space available on each card means that the style of writing is incredibly terse. For example, the first card describes how '"Dr. Who" travels to Marinus, planet of the Voords. He is astonished to find Daleks fighting Voords. Daleks find that Voords are planning to travel to earth in search of a mysterious power. They join forces.' As literature, this leaves something to be desired, but the text was never intended to be read in isolation. Instead, it acts as a caption for the illustration, contextualising it within a wider narrative. On this front, it very much succeeds. The illustrations are exciting and dynamic, exhibiting a sense of scale that would have been impossible to achieve onscreen. The story is epic, featuring armies of Daleks, huge red rockets and --- perhaps more surprisingly --- mind-altering fungi.

Although these cards are more obscure than the annuals and Dalek Books which, in the 1960s, where the main other sources of original Doctor Who stories, they served a similar purpose, providing the kinds of tales that viewers might have imagined Doctor Who could tell, but which would have been unachievable on a BBC budget. In doing this, they established a number of things that it would take the show decades to achieve, such as showing Daleks in space (in the story, they soar about on devices called 'Hoverbouts') or having the Doctor's two biggest enemies face off against each other.

Writing about early Doctor Who stories, the critic Elizabeth Sandifer describes them as 'part of the cultural memory of the show' and makes the case for them as canon, defining this elusive and controversial concept as 'the established body of literature the show can draw on… the menu of things you can reference'. Despite their apparent marginality, texts like these mattered because they introduced a series of images that became part of the idea of Doctor Who. In fact, there is even a case to be made that texts like the 1966 Annual --- which also includes a story featuring the Voord --- and the Dalek Book were more influential in shaping ideas of what Doctor Who was than the TV series itself. Television in the 1960s was a fundamentally ephemeral medium, existing only in the moment of broadcast, so it was easy for viewers to forget the details of what they had just seen; by contrast, annuals could be read repeatedly and at leisure, with each subsequent perusal reinforcing a mental image of the show that risked replacing the one gained from watching it on TV.

Although the Voord never took off as recurring enemies, the success of the Daleks can at least in part be attributed to their frequent appearances in spin-off material, such as The Dalek Book and the two Peter Cushing films, which, notably, were often repeated on television. Sandifer even cites them as major influences on Russell T Davies' depiction of the Daleks in episodes such as The Parting of the Ways and Journey's End.

While the Cadet Sweets cards may now seem little more than an obscure piece of ephemera, it is worth noting that they were never intended as a niche product, instead appealing to a mass market of children and their parents. It was assumed that children would recognise the Voord just as easily as they would the Daleks, not because they were huge Doctor Who fans, but simply because they had seen the show. The Voord were just part of what Doctor Who was in 1964, something that has never been true at any time since.

Since 1964, the Voord have returned several more times, despite never making a second onscreen appearance. Their first reappearance came in The World Shapers, a 1987 Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, best-known for being written by Grant Morrison, who would go on to have a successful and acclaimed career in the wider comics industry. It is also notable for having the Voord evolve into Cybermen. This is certainly an unexpected move, taking one of Doctor Who's least well-remembered adversaries and giving them a central position within the show's lore, but it also makes an odd kind of sense, at least in retrospect. In 2017's The Doctor Falls, the story was referenced as evidence of the Cybermen's multiple origins, and there has always been something Cyberman-like about their uniform appearance. They also look oddly like Cybermen in the illustrations on the Cadet Sweets cards.

Aside from a seemingly minor appearance in the 1995 comic strip Land of the Blind, the Voord wouldn't reappear until 2014's Domain of the Voord, part of Big Finish's range of Early Adventures. Produced to feel like a First Doctor serial, Domain of the Voord sees the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan encounter the Voord sometime after having defeated them on Marinus. Despite its faithfulness to early 1960s Doctor Who, the audio drama significantly develops the Voord as characters, answering the question of what is under their helmets and recasting them as more of an ideological or even religious group than a species. Like the Cybermen or Star Trek's Borg, they reject the concept of individuality and seek to initiate others to their way of being. This development makes the Voord much more interesting villains and allows the story to imagine an alternative history of Doctor Who in which they could have become recurring antagonists.

Unfortunately, none of this progress is evident in Beachhead, the first part of the Doom Coalition 2 boxset. In this story, the Eighth Doctor, Liv and Helen encounter the Voord in the West Country village of Stegmoor. Aside from a joke about the plural of Voord and the introduction of a mystery concerning the destruction of their homeworld, there is little reason why it is the Voord, rather than say the Kraals, who appear in the story, as they come across as generic villains. Beachhead doesn't even use the gloriously deep and menacing voices pioneered in Domain of the Voord; instead, they sound muffled, as though they have trouble making themselves heard through their helmets.

Since making their debut as Doctor Who's second alien threat, the Voord have been presented in as many different ways as they have made appearances. Their lack of definition in The Keys of Marinus created a space for other writers to fill, allowing them to be reimagined in a range of different, even contradictory ways.

While this has clearly been an attractive proposition, the same can no doubt be said for a number of other Doctor Who monsters who haven't made numerous appearances in other media. There are also more obscure adversaries, such as the Fungoids, who almost nobody remembers. What makes the Voord so attractive to writers is that they are just the right level of obscure, forgotten enough that bringing them back feels surprising, but remembered enough for their return to feel significant. In fact, it sometimes feels as though the Voord have become famous for being forgotten. Despite this, they remain unknown to the vast majority of people who watch Doctor Who, with the comic strips and audio dramas marketed as niche products and consumed largely by committed fans.

To misquote David Cameron, the Voord were the future once, going toe-to-toe with the Daleks, before vanishing from the public's imagination. Since then, they have become the past, an almost mythical symbol of Doctor Who's earliest days. They are a blank on an old map, a mystery that can never be definitively uncovered. Few may now remember the Voord, but, for those who do, remembering them is an active process. To remember the Voord is to reinvent the Voord. They may be one of Doctor Who's most obscure monsters, but by refusing to ever be fully forgotten, they have shown themselves to have a significance that far exceeds their single fleeting TV appearance.