The Doctor is the third antagonist encountered in Little Nightmares II. He is the main antagonist of The Hospital chapter.
Website Description
Perfection is important to The Doctor and he will not allow anything to interfere with his life's work. With his adoring patients clattering the halls, you may not hear The Doctor coming, not until it's too late. Only then will you learn to look up to him.
Appearance
The Doctor's size is much more bizarre than the previous antagonists Mono and Six have encountered. His physical features look akin to a bloated cadaver, with huge teeth visibly poking out from a swollen pair of gums and pale, distended flesh that appears to have been inflated. It also seems that since he has been on the ceilings for too long, his skin was dragged down by gravity. He seems to be middle-aged, as his hairline is receding and he has many wrinkles on his forehead and fingers; consequently, his eyes are receded into his sockets and look upon his prey upside-down. He is adorned in a dirty buttoned overcoat with black trousers and matching black shoes.
Personality
Like the other characters in the franchise, the Doctor does not talk and his personality is shown through his actions. He is shown to be involved and orderly in his work, taking his role as a doctor very seriously. According to the description of the site, it is said that the Doctor is a perfectionist and that is why he will become aggressive if he feels that all of his efforts to treat his Patients are threatened.
It is also shown that he takes care of his Patients and is keen to care for them and keep them alive, as evidenced by the Patient hidden behind a curtain that he tries to save him by all means. Additionally, the Doctor appears to stay hygienic, as he washes his hands after doing his activity (although the water tap is shown to be not connected to any water source). The Doctor also giggles occasionally while performing his duties.
Background
The Doctor operates on willing Patients who came to him out of boredom[1]. He replaced their fleshy parts with artificial porcelain. Even if the results weren't what they expected, the Patients would be unable to voice their complaints. To this day, the Doctor still continues to operate, getting rid of old parts and adding new ones as he moves throughout the Hospital on the ceiling.
Strategy
Despite his weight and size, the Doctor can crawl up the ceiling, using it in his attempts to catch up with Mono and Six. He usually stays on the ceiling but is capable of coming down. The Doctor is also able to lift obstacles which Mono uses to hide (for example, tables), allowing the Doctor to catch Mono easily.
Little Nightmares Comics
The Doctor appears in the third episode of Little Nightmares Comics, when he watches the Girl with Braids locked in a hospital room as she begins to dig the floor to make a tunnel with spoons (which, most likely, it was he who gave her).
After a while, the Doctor opens the cell door and frees the already desperate girl, and then attacks her as she tries to get out of the Hospital.
Little Nightmares II
Mono and Six first encounter the Doctor in a room next to the room with hung masks. The duo sneak past him when he is working with a patient, apparently trying out different heads for it. In the next room, the Doctor goes to the ward to examine several Patients. Mono and Six sneak under the beds of the Patients in order to avoid his gaze and reach one of the objects in the room that they can use to throw at a button to open a gate. After throwing the object at the switch, Mono and Six open the gate, alerting the Doctor. The duo quickly hide under a bed next to the gate as the Doctor approaches and looks around in confusion. He then leaves the room through a tunnel on top of a damaged shelf. While Mono and Six sneak through the ceiling, they see removed ceiling panels all around, showing the Doctor underneath as he crawls around the ceiling below them.
Later, Mono and Six encounter the Doctor once again in the morgue of the Hospital. While the Doctor is busy, Mono sneaks into the next room with the help of Six and deactivates the life support connected to an unconscious Patient. The Doctor hears the monitor of the struggling patient flatline and is left distracted momentarily as he checks the patient and reactivates the machinery. Meanwhile, Mono grabs a fuse on a cell, and uses it to open another gate. When they open the door, the Doctor becomes aware of their presence and a chase ensues. The Doctor relentlessly pursues the duo and chase leads to a crematory machine, where the Doctor corners Mono inside. Fortunately, Mono escapes through the vent of the machine and Six closes the furnace door, trapping the Doctor inside. Mono can either turn the crematory machine on, burning the Doctor alive as he screams and bangs on the door, or spare him by leaving him trapped inside.
Powers and Abilities
- Ceiling crawling: Unlike other antagonists, the Doctor moves by traversing the ceiling without minding obstacles on the floor. He also moves fast in spite of his size and weight.
- Mastery of prosthetics: The Doctor has the ability to replace any part of a Patient's body while still being able to keep them alive, even if the part that he replaces included a vital organ.
Theories
- Due to the number of Residents being absorbed through the T.V.'s, it's speculated that the Doctor's procedures originally involved residents who had yet to be fully corrupted by the Transmission as well as corpses from various locations around the Pale City. Any corpses the Doctor obtained would be prepared to be reanimated as new patients for the hospital by using the electric chair and life support machines to restore movement into their bodies.
- Due to the Doctors devotion to treating his patients, it's speculated that he doesn't obtain new bodies to treat on his own and is instead provided new bodies through the aid of residents like the Hunter. In exchange for some of the corpses the Hunter obtains in his traps, the Doctor provides any necessary materials to support the Hunter's taxidermy obsession, such as the prosthetics found in the attic of his cabin.
Trivia
- In The Residence DLC, one of the portraits on the wall depicts the Doctor (see gallery).
- The Doctor is so far the only major antagonist in the games with a determinant fate.
- Early concept art reveals that the Doctor's face was meant to be incredibly baggy and loose.
- In the announcement trailer, the Doctor doesn't make an appearance. Later on in the gameplay trailer, the Doctor is obscured by shadows, before being fully revealed in the Halloween trailer.
- According to promotional posters, the Doctor would have had to pursue Mono and Six in the hanging beds section of the hospital. In the actual gameplay, the Doctor does not appear until the very later parts of the Hospital chapter.
- The Doctor is the only major antagonist who does not appear on the box art.
- The appearance of holes on the ceilings of many rooms throughout the Hospital imply that the Doctor primarily travels by crawling upside-down. However, not all of the rooms have holes in the ceiling, suggesting the Doctor either does in fact walk on his feet at times or is no longer able to enter certain rooms on account of his bizarre anatomy.
- The Doctor's defeat appears somewhat similar to the Hunter and the Janitor from the first game. All three persistently chase the protagonists until they corner them, only to suffer a brutal fate.
- If Mono doesn't activate the furnace, the player will gain an achievement which states "It's crueller to let him live". This implies that rather than burning the Doctor to death, he may die from dehydration or starvation inside the furnace should Mono decide to leave him inside for good.