Dumbest Villain plan in Who

The Rani's machinations, back in Time and the Rani have never made sense to me. Cause the TARDIS to chuck The Doctor off his exercise bike and bash his head, and while he recovers from post-regeneration amnesia, pretend to be Mel and use him to fix her laboratory next to a room with a giant talking brain and a nest of Tetraps who are fed on goo, so she can make use of an asteroid composed of 'strange matter' for her collection of geniuses and something called loyhargil. Have I got that right?

I’ve never fully understood why Millington releases Fenric. He just seems to have this bizarre conviction that Fenric will give him power, or something. 

Also, what is the Master actually trying to achieve in The King’s Demons by averting the signing of Magna Carta? 

Depending on how you define Villains

Both Sentient Stars in 42 and The Rings of Akertan

Charlie in Kerblam

Nero and the Doctor in the Romans

Regards

mark687

Technically that's not actually a dumb plan, if piloting a planet around to destroy everything else is actually your goal... and over a decade before the Death Star was even thought of! There are a heck of a lot more sillier Dalek plans out there. I could probably list ten of them, but the Daleks in Resurrection of the Daleks would win the 'Illogical Nonsense Award' if it was going to go to a Dalek story. However, step forward the Kraals from The Android Invasion to claim the award their overcomplicated illogical plan rightly deserves. For me, they are the dumbest villains.

I'm pretty sure the Ainley Master plans his schemes using a dartboard or a set of dice or some other random number generator. To quote the Joker, he just... does things.

Resurrection struggles a bit because there's at least two, possibly three plans going on at the same time:

• Plan A: They want Davros to develop a cure for the Movellan virus;
  
• Plan B: Assassinate the High Council with replicants of the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough, and possibly;
  
• Plan C: Replace leaders in significant positions of power to invade the Earth.
  
  

All these are good, solid Dalek strategems, but unfortunately they don't seem to have any direct relation to one another. A and B could easily be joined together. The Daleks want to frame the Movellans for an attack on Gallifrey. However, in order to incorporate the virus effectively into their duplicates, they require a vaccine-ready immunity. Otherwise undiscoverable on the body until it's released. If the attack goes as planned, the Supreme and his drones can come in to seize control of the planet.

Actually, it kind of makes me wonder if the Movellan virus hit somewhere like the Dalek hatcheries, so it manifests as errors in genetic coding during initial development of the Dalek. Something that would really get under their skin. You can't get new material because it isn't "pure". The Daleks would be forced to work with tainted stock.

"Remembrance of the Daleks" has no end of silly plans:

1) Get power by making your planet's sun more.. um... powerful, using a device that is used to explode stars.
2) Get power for you and your Aryan chums by teaming up with some blobs who aren't tall or blonde or anything.
3) Leave the universe's most terrible weapon unclaimed in the back room of a funeral directors'.
4) Keep the school budget down by locking all applicants for vacancies in the basement.


But the silliest plan ever must be from "Survival":

1) Escape an alien world that becomes ever more likely to explode by people leaving it, and which draws everybody left to it back, by getting people to leave it to attack the home town of somebody you've never met.

Wasn't it just easier to hypnotise a few people and then hire some aliens to attack UNIT, like in the old days?

The Sontarans in The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. Why choose a fully populated planet (that's more than prepared to fight back) to convert when you could convert literally any other planet in our solar system? Even if they didn't have the terraforming technology (which I find unlikely), they could still have manipulated Luke to create the tech and then stolen it from him. Beyond that, they were more than prepared for UNIT to take over the factory, which is something they couldn't have guaranteed was going to happen. If they hadn't, the Sontarans wouldn't have had any method of stopping the launch of the nuclear missiles. There just seem to be so many assumptions in their "stratagem" that relied on other people making the 'right decisions' for them that it's amazing that so much of it went off as planned. (Doesn't stop me from liking the story though )

It's been a little while since I've seen it, but I thought it was a different area of space with lots of human colonies that they were going to invade? They just happened to find the humans on Earth and they decided to do the experiments so they knew their enemies better. (I'm probably completely wrong. I might have just auto-corrected the plot in my head over the years)