Doctor Who As Long Form

 I loved Flux. Chris Chibnall and his team promised the biggest story ever last year and – remarkably – their promotion was absolutely on point because Flux was massive. We journeyed from Halloween 2021 to the creation-spanning flux event, via the Crimean War, the 1960s and even the space between universes. We met Ood, Sontarans, Angels, Daleks and Cybermen, all in the one story which, on the whole, boasted an exhilarating sense of cohesion and confidence, only stumbling at its clunky climax, perhaps failing as a result of having a little too much to do. But the ride is indeed a thrill and it begs the question: is long-form Doctor Who the future? Indeed, is long-form Doctor Who better?

We might look back at the show’s past and sideways into its own varied universes to answer this poser. Because arguably, Doctor Who has spent much of its time operating in long-form. We can see a direct throughline from An Unearthly Child to the end of The Time Meddler, which acts as coda to the Ian and Barbara romance, opening up new possibilities for the show to move ever onward, and ending with its own bespoke closing titles which accentuate the end of one story and the start of another: the Doctor and his new companions looking out to pastures new through a universe of stars. Those early tales didn’t even have their own titles. Instead, each episode ran into the next and with only a few weeks off for the summer holiday, early Doctor Who had the staying power of a soap opera, its ending never really a consideration for the viewers. Tellingly though, the story of Ian and Barbara – the longest run of episodes in the show’s history to boast the story of companions is as blisteringly effective as no doubt it was in the 60s. As Hartnell and O’Brien walk away from the time-space visualiser, their sadness is palpable. After 77 episodes, the viewers must have felt equally destitute.

Ironically, the following year, the series offers up its first explicit epic in The Daleks’ Master Plan, the 12-part masterpiece so big it got its own prequel. Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner present a pulpy, comic strip adventure with a hard edge, not unlike the later Flux. Its scope is similar: several alien planets, spaceship travel, a range of villains and creatures and varied tones and registers. Perhaps Master Plan employs a more innocent, linear story-telling form but boasts several dramatic narrative punches including the violent and felt deaths of key characters. There are many four-parters which feel more sluggish than the Hartnell epic, and the vinyl release makes for perfect comfort-listening over the Christmas period. Flux meanwhile is purposefully disjointed and boundless, even de-constructing its own form by having the Hartnell-era closing titles of Episode 4 interrupted by guest characters from the previous episode updating us on their progress and Next Time trailers which boast surprises that leave the viewer aching for more. Perhaps given the success of Doctor Who’s two largest stories, there’s an argument to suggest we should get these megathons as a matter of routine.

The moody Master Plan and the following doom-laden Massacre is interrupted by a mini-season from Big Finish Productions: the Oliver Harper trilogy which consists of three stories by Simon Guerrier – The Perpetual Bond, The Cold Equations and The First Wave. Despite being what is probably extremely niche, even amongst Big Finish followers, this set of terrific tales ought to be heard by many. Threads of science, philosophy and finance run through a unique trilogy with an atmosphere all of its own. Richard Fox and Lauren Yason provide an unsettling and beautiful soundtrack and Guerrier’s final scene is haunting and ethereal, cementing this run as pivotal to the journey of the First Doctor and prizing itself into the even longer story around it forever. Guerrier’s similarly atmospheric Sara Kingdom trilogy (Home Truths, The Drowned World and The Guardian of the Solar System) tells another long story up there with some of the best Doctor Who ever written.

Other televisual season-long arcs include The Key to Time and The Trial of a Time Lord, both criminally under-rated. The Key to Time is discrete in the fact that it features no returning elements at all from previous stories and even introduces new companions and new (old) friends and acquaintances of the Doctor. The season feels fresh, limitless and full of optimism, each of the stories breezy, larkish and fun. The Trial, despite its concept clearly not quite knowing what it wants to do with itself, boasts stark, memorable scenes such as the death of Peri and the machinations of the Valeyard inside the Matrix, as well as a stellar cast of season-long regulars, not least the great Michael Jayston. Whilst these seasons may not represent Doctor Who at its absolute prime, there’s something to be said about their wide-reaching ambitions and the overpowering feeling that this is stirringly epic stuff.

At around this time, the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip begins to come into its own, the Sixth Doctor adventure Voyager in particular offering majestic imagery certain to print itself indelibly on the minds of younger readers. Arguably, however, it’s in the strips of The Eighth Doctor that the magazine stops seeing itself as lesser than the series from which it was spawned and forges ahead with its own identity building a distinct continuity for itself. Alan Barnes’s Endgame begins the story of Paul McGann’s cartoon incarnation with bravado and romance, a reinspired joi de vivre evident from the off, that first panel of Eight stepping out of his TARDIS into Stockbridge heralding a new era of bonhomie and fun. Boldly, the centrepiece of this ecstatic era is the 10-part The Glorious Dead, a story which reinvents the Master and tells tales in a way only a comic can, panels decorated with shredded newspaper clippings in spiralling vortexes. This to the Eighth Doctor and his Master is what The Sea Devils is for the Third and Delgado or Last of the Time Lords is for the Tenth and Simm – era-defining.

DWM tells huge stories for later Doctors too. The Child of Time thread running through several of the Eleventh Doctor strips is mysterious and gripping. The return visits to the planet of Cornucopia create a lovely narrative thread between the adventures of the Eleventh and Twelfth. Best of all though is the story of the Tenth Doctor and Majenta Price, presented in all its totemic glory in the DWM Graphic Novel, The Crimson Hand. Giving the Doctor a comic-only companion after having stuck so firmly to the world of the TV series since 2005 allows the strip to flourish again as it did under the Eighth Doctor and what the TV show loses in the Specials year of 2009, we gain in DWM. Arguably, the strip has never enjoyed a better uninterrupted run, before or since, than the stories from Hotel Historia to The Crimson Hand.

Elsewhere in the Whoniverse, we’ve got the Twelfth Doctor book trilogy The Glamour Chronicles which mirrored the longer tales of that year’s TV series; the media-spanning labyrinthine headfuck that was Time Lord Victorious; and the 50^th anniversary BBC Audio series Destiny of the Doctor which allowed each Doctor and era their time in the spotlight – every story presenting an authentic representation of the respective era from which it sings. Big Finish’s take on the Hartnell epic in their own equally thrilling Syndicate Master Plan is just one example of their season-long successes, the others including the massively lauded adventures of the Eighth Doctor and Charley which climaxed in the characteristically massive Neverland via the poll-topping The Chimes of Midnight, spring-boarding from the grand and gorgeous Storm Warning (also from Alan Barnes, whose palpable affinity with Paul McGann’s Doctor seems undeniably inherent). The company’s 20^th anniversary 6-hour tale The Legacy of Time was a success on every level, each story offering its own thrills and hoorahs – after 20 years, that’s really something.

Longer TV stories always seem to fare well in the polls: The War Games was voted the best story of the 1960s in DWM’s latest fan survey in 2014 and Season 7’s clutch of 7-parters is widely regarded as a huge success. What all the best of these novel-size stories do is offer a narrative which is as thrilling in its constituent parts as it is marvellous from a holistic perspective. You can pick any episode of The Daleks’ Master Plan and find an enjoyable 25-minutes (yes, even The Feast of Steven) but viewed in all its 12-part glory, it represents a hugely satisfying body of work. Similarly, the gripping edge-of-the-seat horror of Village of the Angels on its own is as admirable as the wild ambitions and twists of Flux in its entirety. But longer series of stories which may not have been as well received at the time seem to meet with greater acclaim over time. Russell T Davies’s epic three-parter - Utopia, The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords (charting at 55 in the DWM poll) – now feels mythic. Similarly, his at-the-time-bloated-seeming The End of Time now feels like its tone meeting moniker: The Best. More recent finales seem also to do well in the polls: World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls is hailed as a modern classic on fan forums and always fares well in online polls. Stand-out episodes of the series such as Heaven Sent, A Christmas Carol and Voyage of the Damned (boo to the miserable nay-sayers) are improved by dint of their increased running time. If there were an episode that could feel like a bona-fide Doctor Who Movie it’s Voyage of the Damned, although Deep Breath and of course, the official number one, The Day of the Doctor, are equally totemic, and of course, enjoyed cinema screenings.

When Doctor Who returned to the screen in 2005, many criticisms were made of the 45-minute format, fans feeling that stories of this brevity simply didn’t work as well as longer ones. I was not in this camp: Father’s Day and Tooth and Claw are two of the most perfectly formed Doctor Who stories in the arsenal, each making a virtue of their runtime. But maybe there is something in Doctor Who as a long-running series? The Top 20 stories in that 2014 poll run as follows:

The Seeds of Doom – 6 parter
The Power of the Daleks – 6 parter
Inferno – 7 parter
The Eleventh Hour – Feature length episode
The Web of Fear – 6 parter
Dalek
Terror of the Zygons
Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways – 2 parter
The War Games – 10 parter
The Robots of Death
Remembrance of the Daleks
Human Nature/The Family of Blood – 2 parter
Pyramids of Mars
The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances – 2 parter
The Talons of Weng-Chiang – 6 parter
City of Death
The Caves of Androzani
Genesis of the Daleks – 6 parter
Blink
The Day of the Doctor – Feature length episode

Only eight of the twenty stories above have running times which could be deemed as standard for the show in their respective contemporary periods. Several of the stories in those eight - Dalek, Terror of the Zygons, The Robots of Death, Remembrance of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, City of Death, The Caves of Androzani and Blink - can’t even be said to be typical of the format. Blink, most obviously, tells a very different “short story” style narrative; Androzani is a theatrical Jacobean tragedy and neither Pyramids nor arguably City of Death boast masterclasses in how to structure a well put-together tale. Tellingly, at the other end of the scale, only five stories run longer than usual: The Space Pirates, The Dominators, The Time Monster and The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe and The Sensorites. The King’s Demons, also in the bottom 20 is actually shorter than usual and Meglos sports unusually slight episodes, perhaps suggesting more obviously that longer is better?

Perhaps as a fandom we do want our stories to feel bigger, more epic, more universal, in keeping with the breadth and imagination of the show itself. The Daleks’ Master Plan, as I have argued before, is perhaps the story that best typifies the programme as a whole: planets, history, space, Daleks, Time Lords, starships, contemporary Earth, fun, danger, comedy and tragedy, all vying for attention across its five hours, the very distillation of Doctor Who. When the show returns in 2023, rumour has it that RTD will produce three feature-length specials. Judging by fandom’s bent towards the epic, we could be in for a treat. Hell, we all know we’re going to be spoilt by the boss. Steven Moffat’s The Day of the Doctor topped the polls in the 50^th anniversary. Will RTD manage to top it come the 60^th? With longer stories, I’d put money on it.

JH

Flux

It could have been the series of compromises. It could have been shot with actors standing two metres apart in front of green screens with CG monsters. In Chapter Three there is a bit of that, but despite the limited cast, Flux is as epic in terms of geography, plotting and intent as Doctor Who has ever been. This is the show rising from the ashes of a pandemic, bolder than ever before. The pre-publicity was, for once, the honest truth: Flux is the biggest story Doctor Who has ever told. It’s a Daleks’ Master Plan for the new generation, a War Games, a Trial of a Time Lord but here written not as a pulpy comic book Boy’s Own serial, nor as Terrance Dicks would assert “an effort to make sure we didn’t have to broadcast the test card on Saturday,” or in an unwieldy fit of behind-the-scenes mania with a script editor storming out at the final throes; this is Doctor Who imagined as an epic.  It’s not the sort of shape one would think likely to befit the anthological nature of Doctor Who but, for one series only, it truly works. Flux is a majestic success, one which proves breath-taking in its scope and ambition, a six-hour television novel to be admired holistically after the event and to be thrilled at episodically, week by week, its cliff-hangers each and every time tugging us forcefully back into the game.

Truth be told, I was about through with Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who after Revolution of the Daleks which felt rife with his worst writerly traits. I was not, like the trolls of fan forums, ready to stop watching, but there was a feeling that I’d seen him play all his tricks, that I’d still be squirming at his dialogue and clunking plotting when Series 13 came along despite whatever stories he might come up with. True, there were several instances of wincing during Flux (“your as yet unborn child” anyone?) but for the most part, this felt like a writer at the peak of his powers, suddenly finding himself riding solo, rediscovering his penchant for humour and big ideas. This was the writer who brought us the chutzpah of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and the pace and heart of Fragments and Exit Wounds. The most disappointing aspect of Chibnall’s Doctor Who has been its reluctance to Go Big. Here, that can never be a criticism aimed his way.

The era’s second most disappointing aspect has been its extremely tepid regular characters. The Fam never truly worked, with three quarters of them miscast. Luckily, for Flux, we kept the best one: Mandip Gill. Jodie Whittaker, however, delivers – undeniably – her best performance here. There are still moments of slipshodness, a lack of focus, of poor textual negotiation and flat gags, but for the most part, Whittaker is finally present. In her stance against General Skaak, she cuts a heroic figure, rocking that foggy, Sebastopolian landscape. In her flight from the Angels through the cellar, she leads that gang with distinguished adroitness. In her quiet rising to Tecteun, she feels – for the first time – dangerous: here, unusually, Jodie underplays. The fantastic, earthy John Bishop as Dan Lewis completes a winning trio of TARDIS travellers, his quirky naturalism a pleasing contrast to the more veteran, unearthly regulars. Funny how the slight re-alignment of a leading cast can make for a considerably more winning dynamic.

The Halloween Apocalypse is a bravura opening, spanning so many locations without feeling the need to tie any strands together. Chibnall tells us we’re in this for the long game by the sheer size of his story-telling. Moments of smallness, however, make this instalment fizz. Dan’s reaction to both the TARDIS and his shrunken house are hilarious, his reaction to Karvanista storming his front room genuinely funny. This is a seam of humour that has been missing from Doctor Who for some time. Amongst all the wild concepts here, there’s room for Chibnall to be funny again. This is perhaps illustrated by the very funny, very exciting pre-titles sequence, which sets out the stall: this is massive stuff but by no means are we going to get reverential. As Jodie would say, “What a relief!”

The introduction of Swarm is a deeply unsettling and mythic scene, which thrills in its strangeness and sense of history. Sam Spruell is one of the joys of this season, giving a frighteningly camp, dangerous and dynamic voice to yet another strong Chibnall villain. I love how Chibnall’s baddies are simply bastards: Tzim-Sha, Daniel Barton, The Master, Ashad – they’re not the sort of people you can psycho-analyse. Indeed, the Doctor tried that with Ashad over the video-comms and he agreed that, yes, he was a mad bugger, thank you very much. Here, Swarm’s motives are equally linear: he wants to reign in hell. Obviously. Azure, his twisted sister, is perhaps even more disquieting, Rochenda Sandall playing her as a sensual, insatiable terror. Her final confrontation with the Doctor in The Vanquishers is her defining moment. Quite what she’s doing here in the Arctic Circle married to the boy from The Demon Headmaster remains a mystery though.

The City of Liverpool is one of the silent stars of this series and in particular, the first two Chapters. Director Jamie Magnus Stone shoots the urban landscape beautifully, those gorgeous drone shots of the museum allowing the environment to sing. The Liver Building and Anfield set-about by Sontaran ships are iconic images, as is the breath-taking explosive finish at the Albert Docks. Later, director Azhur Saleem returns to paint yet more beautiful portraits of the Metropolitan Cathedral and St George’s Hall. And beneath the city, the snaking tunnels of Joseph Williamson connect all these locations together, satisfyingly forming the crucible for the season finale, the epicentre of all of time and space. Only in this mad programme…

Whilst The Halloween Apocalypse delights in illustrating the newfound size of Doctor Who (whilst happily retaining its domesticity) War of the Sontarans is the robust, archetypal action story. It repositions the Sontarans as enemies worthy of the Doctor’s steel. And by the time we reach The Vanquishers, the Sontarans have arguably reclaimed their title of Doctor Who’s Third Big Bad. Their costumes are fantastic, eschewing that rubbery RTD blue for the Classic combat silver and – after years of watching Strax – their plan seems as ambitious as their predecessors who, lest we forget, once invaded Gallifrey.

The Crimean scenes are breath-taking, the scale of this real-life historical epic feeling unhindered by the TV screen. Battle scenes dazzle, making their way rightly into those early trailers (incidentally, way more exciting than the Chibnall era has managed thus far – no complaints on the fantastic marketing this year!) and the episode’s gunpowdered twofold climax is the best Doctor Who has ever looked. As strong as Whittaker’s Doctor is in the aforementioned battlefield confrontation, she flounders when asked to explain some plotting with a blackboard and pointer. She’s simply not terribly Doctor-ish. Unless she has a very obvious narrative drive throughout a scene, she’s all energy and no focus. Look how terrific she proves she could be though in the closing seconds of this episode, terrified for Yaz, in my favourite of the cliff-hangers served throughout Flux. It feels old-skool and new at the same time. The scream of the music howling in over Swarm clicking his fingers whilst Jodie looks on desperately. That’s Doctor Who editing of the highest calibre, a moment where every element of production comes together in an edge-of-the-seat moment of spine-tingling excitement.

Once, Upon Time is perhaps the weakest instalment of the series but is by no means unenjoyable. It’s essentially a Heroes-style Six Months Ago episode but told through a needlessly convoluted time-bending device. This is perhaps the only time in the show when COVID-casting becomes sometimes glaringly apparent, most obviously in the scene where Vinder’s real-life line manager is played by an extra, a fluctuating Mandip Gill given all the lines. There are also quite a few Green Death worthy CSO backgrounds against which our regulars strut their out-of-character stuff. Whilst there’s a definite frisson in spotting Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor in the mirror, as if we’re watching a forbidden text, the episode ends up feeling rather hollow, as though we’ve ended proceedings in the same place we left them, but with Yaz and Vinder in slightly less jeopardy. That said, there’s a definite satisfaction in seeing the jigsaw pieces begin to align. We are now fully equipped to head into the second half of the maelstrom.

Village of the Angels has already been hailed as an instant classic on the fan forums, and it’s easy to see why. This pushes all of Doctor Who’s most intrinsic buttons. The church echoes The Daemons and there is an elemental folklore feel to Village which suits the show down to the ground. It’s also as relentless an episode as you’re ever likely to find. The Angels just keep on coming, using every trick in their Time of Angels book. By the time they’re chasing the Doctor, Jericho and Clair through the tunnels, hands poking from the walls, they’ve been at the door for half an hour and show no signs of stopping. In fact, this proves to be the story where the Angels win. When Whittaker ultimately transforms into a Lonely Assassin herself, we’re out of breath such is the white-knuckle ride. And then, to top it all off, the Hartnell era titles are interrupted by Bel and Vinder, whose story has been delicately playing out away from the main action. There’s a sense that this show can now do anything and it’s a viscerally felt change.

Survivors of the Flux or A Brief History of UNIT feels different again, pushing boundaries backwards as well as forwards in time. The Grand Serpent is another suitably macabre Chibnall villain, perfectly pitched by Craig Parkinson. His motives remain a delightful mystery and when quizzed by the Doctor the following week, he’s not giving anything away. Robert Bathurst gives his usual charming out-of-his-depth-but-elevated-to-a-senior-leader performance and it’s a genuine shock when he meets his horrible demise. To see Kate Stewart again is a joy and to see her in a new era cements her reputation as a worthy successor to her father. Jemma Redgrave is perhaps stronger than ever here.

And then we reach The Vanquishers, which, truth be told, feels a bit like a party balloon slowly deflating, as Chibnall places his toys a bit too neatly, one by one, back in the box. None of his ongoing narrative threads feels as if they’re concluded with any noteworthy grace. The final defeat of the Flux via a Passenger is neat but it’s too easy. Where do the TARDIS crew find him? How do they get him there? How do they eject him from the TARDIS? Why doesn’t he eat them all? Swarm and Azure are disposed of by Time flicking his fingers at them and they seem fairly pleased. Their ambition to reign in hell was presumably just a bit shallow. Joseph Williamson, enigmatically brought to thundering life by Steve Oram is simply told, “That’s it, your plot’s over and done with,” at which, mad as box of frogs, he walks off uncharacteristically into oblivion. After all Bel and Vinder’s universe-spanning agony to find one another, they simply meet and have a hug in the TARDIS. Where’s the moment they glimpse one another again? Where’s the dashing across battlefields towards one another? Elsewhere, this has been a beating heart of the series but here ends on a drab, almost unimportant note. When the Grand Serpent is left to stew in eternity, we’re treated to one reaction shot of Parkinson which bleeds into a crossfade – it feels too brief and he deserves better. The Diane and Dan romance is astonishingly badly handled too: she’s been through a lot, sure, but she comes up with the Passenger solution, proving herself adept at this type of thing, after which it all seems a bit much and without even a “I know you weren’t actually late, Dan” she snubs him and he goes home, sadly. At least we think he goes home, wherever his tiny house is. Jodie’s missing memories amount to the black and white house we’ve already seen a few times; we’re no further forward. Even Karvanista doesn’t get his moment of vengeance and quite why the TARDIS is so knackered I’m still not entirely sure.

What does work in the finale is the imagery: the Lupari ships in formation is an awesome sight, in the truest sense of the word. Dalek, Cyber and Sontaran ships arriving en masse is wondrous. There has been a real sumptuousness about the visuals throughout Flux with DNEG’s CGI becoming a defining feature in this tremendous looking series. The worlds-spanning establishing shots have been a gold standard from The Halloween Apocalypse, but that cheap and nasty, orange typeface I could have done without.

There is a satisfying tidiness in the closing instalment, each plot strand tied up in neat narrative bow, but there’s an even greater feeling that nothing particularly dramatic, nothing particularly human has happened. It could well sully how inarguably strong the rest of the show has been but the remainder glows so brightly, it’s hard to take too much offence at Chibnall stumbling at the final hurdle. He had after all kept so many plates spinning for so long, it was perhaps inevitable that at some stage, he’d drop them.

This reviewer could keep waxing lyrical about the wonders of Flux as a whole though. I haven’t mentioned Kevin McNally’s finely cured Professor Eustacius Jericho, Craig Els’s extremely well-pitched (often hilarious) dog man, the tiny detail of the servants of the Grand Serpent sporting a snake tattoo, Bel’s pre-titles sequence with its surprise flying Dalek squad and a fiercely beautiful look to camera, the lovely Brigadier cameo, the revelation of who the Doctor’s previous companions were, Angelic wings in a mirror, the very brio of a threefold Doctor and that final terrifically well-played scene with the watch – nail-biting.

The closest comparison I have to Flux is Steven Moffat’s ludicrously wonderful novelisation of The Day of the Doctor with its River Song, Silence and Brigadier cameos added alongside its Daleks, Zygons and Time Lords. It’s as if this wants to be the next ultimate Doctor Who story. The Biggest Baddest Baddies are here doing what they do best, UNIT is here being brilliant, there’s an Ood, there’s a fobwatch, there’s even a nod to the Master and it’s a story which puts the nature of the Doctor at its very heart. Against the odds, a 60^th anniversary series is going to need to fight damned hard to make an impact when Flux has running through it the very DNA of Doctor Who. This is everything a fan could want. What a fabulous cast of characters. What a series. Truly, thank you, Chris Chibnall. With Flux, you captured my heart.

As an entity in and of itself, the six-part epic earns a 9/10 from me.

JH

Revolution of the Daleks

Chris Chibnall isn’t going to win any awards for being particularly revolutionary with this New Year’s 70-minute special. All the ingredients are there for a classic story, full of Doctor Who staples: the Daleks out of their shells; the inevitable production line; their blinkered human allies hoist by their own hubris; Captain Jack doing the heavy duty action heroics; the departing scenes of not one but two companions. So what’s wrong with it? Why is it so unaffecting? Why doesn’t it make the heart pound and break by turns?

Workmanlike is a word I feel I’ve used a lot to describe Chibnall’s writing (as well as clunky) but by workmanlike I mean you can distinctly see the writing at work. You can see how the plotting has been spreadsheeted, the “character moments” positioned, the fates of characters foregrounded because his approach is so cliched and hackneyed. Goodness, he even uses the sentence, “You’re meddling in things you don’t understand.” At his worst, Russell T Davies’s writing could sometimes feel like a string of fantastic events and character beats held together by an often very thin thread. Chibnall’s fantastic events aren’t particularly fantastic, his character beats aren’t particularly hard hitting and his threads are bare.

We start with a flashback to the 2019 New Year’s Day episode. It’s odd. As if the production team are asking viewers to remember that staggeringly amazing special from a few years ago. But it’s badly gauged. It leads into a scene in which a dead Dalek is transported in the back of a van. Surely, the moment we’re waiting for is the twitch of an eyestalk or a blinking light? Instead, it stays dead and we have a clunking poisoning scene which relies on the killer knowing exactly which mobile tea unit the victim is destined to visit. Far better surely to have the reveal of the Daleks in the riot scene, where they can be spotlighted in all their newly armoured glory and open with an exciting prison break?

Unfortunately, the prison break is not in any way heroic or clever. We don’t see the Doctor even planning an escape. Instead, our heroine pines away in her cell mournfully reciting Harry Potter. Talk about a teenage fan girl. This is exactly what Jodie’s Doctor feels like generally: someone trying so hard to be the quirky, eccentric hero she worships and getting it so astronomically wrong. It’s as if even Chibnall has noticed. He keeps his leading lady away from the screen for very long sections of the programme and in last season’s finale had her fall asleep while the Master read her an audiobook. I honestly wonder how this casting came about. When The Woman Who Fell to Earth aired, I was delighted to be feeling positive about a female Doctor, the gender of our lead suddenly seemed surprisingly irrelevant but I have never been thrilled by any decisions made by Whittaker herself and here she reminds us in every single scene why she is such a poor choice for this role. Her dialogue, however off-beat it may be, never strikes me as real. She cannot handle the meter, the jargon or even the tone. I look at her and wonder if she has any idea at all as to what her dialogue actually means. “So it looks like a Dalek but it can’t be a Dalek unless it is a Dalek,” she garbles, trampling over all possible meaning that line could have had. She doesn’t know which words to stress, how the gag works, how to play that line. It’s incredibly infuriating to see one of the biggest leading roles on television handed to someone who does not understand dialogue which is in any way heightened.

Captain Jack is a welcome note of cheap campery. At least he would be if he were given anything to do that was cheap or camp. Honestly, he doesn’t even flirt with anyone except Graham and that’s a repeated gag from Fugitive of the Judoon. I can’t think of a character less suited to giving emotional advice to the current companions than Captain Jack but that’s what he seems to be here for. His big scene with Yaz is the best of the episode but it really isn’t what Jack is about. He gets to fire a gun once and look delighted to be immortal but he’s frankly wasted. And he doesn’t even get a goodbye scene! Instead, he leaves in a clearly dubbed phone-call, as if he were an afterthought. It’s as ham-fisted as Chibnall at his most typical.  

Even Chris Noth seems to be camping it up more than Barrowman. His performance here is far broader than the star-quality he delivered in Arachnids in the UK. Despite having the best lines, he overplays them and they occasionally fall flat. Harriet Walter is dignified, making the most of the little she has to do and is exterminated too soon.

By the time we reach Clifton Suspension Bridge, the tension is all but depleted and it’s a struggle to care. To use the spare TARDIS (which perhaps we should have been introduced to in the pre-titles sequence rather than the Dalek) to solve the problem like the Daleks seems over-simple given the episode’s runtime and the protracted goodbye scenes, whilst refreshingly free from the overwrought or the fantastic, don’t feel in any way earned.

Perhaps with a different TARDIS crew, the next series might feel breezier, fresher but the over-riding feeling that Revolution of the Daleks leaves us with is one of tiredness. For over two years, we’ve seen a badly cast quartet of actors tackling lines which more experienced, more talented, cleverer actors might have managed to deliver. They are routinely upstaged by guest stars and have seemed ill-formed and badly managed as characters. The problems with much of the Chibnall/Whittaker era are in evidence here and writ large: good ideas badly handled, tense scenes devoid of tension, a lack of finesse in plotting and dialogue and a leading cast who completely fail to engage. Luckily, we have the best one staying on: and it’s Mandip Gill.

3/10

JH

All of Doctor Who from the Start

Some of you may know I like to “do voices.” Since I was a child, my brothers and I would always act out stories, films or TV series. My speciality was of course, Doctor Who. It’s a matter of personal pride that my brother Jim, who has very little interest in our show, can spout “This woman can rot in one of Saladin’s prison cells until her hair turns white before I’ll trade with the man that killed my friends!” at a second’s notice. The younger brothers, the twins, will often look across the room in a moment of silence and drop the “Bitey!” bomb. This is something Elizabeth Sladen’s husband, Brian Miller, playing the tramp in Deep Breath says off-handedly but which caused untold amusement in our house. When I was growing up in the 90s, I wasn’t quite sure that other people as weird as this existed until I went to a fan event at the Blackpool Exhibition and heard a fellow fan trying to find his friends in the dark corridors, calling casually “Robot, rooo-bot!” in the style of Chub. Yes! Other people did that too. In recent years, William Hartnell’s drying up at the close of The Space Museum Part One was something Andy (Twin Brother B) and I re-enacted far too many times than is good for a person when we lived together. “And it’s so shimple!” “How simple, Doctor?” Yes, so shimple!”

During lockdown, with extra time on my hands and an iPad at the ready, I embarked on a mission to re-create All of Doctor Who from the Start! In the last three days, I’ve managed to film and edit together Seasons One and Two available at the links below. The videos are hopefully short and sweet: Season One is four minutes long! As I create more, I’ll add the appropriate links to this article. I’m hoping to do the lot, new series too! If you have a favourite era, I very much hope that I do it justice and that some of the lines you’ve always laughed at, mimicked or remembered fondly get a look-in. This is made with deep love and fondness. I hope, in these troubling teams, you can feel a bit of that too.

Season One

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=814Jg6mjeOc

Season Two

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGdjxFadKvg&t=57s

Season Three

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7XlOCVHEh0

Season Four

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxRHcfcsmeM&feature=youtu.be

Season Five

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFuy0yddl-4&feature=youtu.be

Season Six

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCwDaIdwjYo&feature=youtu.be

Season Seven

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKF6dQgwsS8

Season Eight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3faCf6B_cLI

Season Nine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zX-7ReHTs4&feature=youtu.be

Season Ten

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py2bUqF6GgU&feature=youtu.be

Season Eleven

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGTFVAU9dcY&feature=youtu.be

Season Twelve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUVDbtNU-1Q&feature=youtu.be

Season Thirteen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQqPnou3dmo&feature=youtu.be

Season Fourteen

https://youtu.be/uJfUi4vdE6A

Season Fifteen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpIcQRhDTs0&feature=youtu.be

Season Sixteen

https://youtu.be/mHI4HUFNDsI

Season Seventeen

https://youtu.be/fXrXEnwgrfc

#DoctorWhoLockdown - The Whittaker Years

There has been something of a reaction to the Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker era, to say the least. Several fans I know have dismissed the gamut entirely, refusing to watch. Others are seeing it as simply “a bad patch” or a “a deviation.” Of course, there is a large contingent of fandom who are embracing the new approach brought by a fresh production team and wallowing in an exciting new age. I am somewhere in the middle, he said cowardly. Whilst Series 11 acted as something of a palette cleanser after the hugely ambitious, complex and (by the end) deservedly indulgent Steven Moffat years (Ice Warriors, Mondasian Cybermen and the First Doctor for the finish!), Series 12 seemed like a chance to dive back into the wide universe of Doctor Who, returns from the likes of The Master, Captain Jack and the Judoon leading to a Cyber showdown of epic proportions. Both series had their strengths: a simpler approach felt like a sensible direction and there are some lovely stories in Series 11. The climactic Series 12 Cyberman trilogy is perhaps as strong and exciting as this new iteration has ever been and the massive thriller Spyfall at the centre of the era is a fantastic, stylish movie-sized cannonball, smashing its way into Doctor Who with fierce brio. Far all that, I’m not sure what Chris Chibnall’s long game is. The first half of Series 11 seemed well-paced in terms of character work, revelations about our four-strong TARDIS team slowly being positioned as if we were being led somewhere. Unfortunately, in the second half, a status quo had been established and the propulsion vanished, the show becoming a fix of the week anthology series. There was no growth. Even in the finale, Graham tells the Doctor he is going to kill Tim Shaw. The Doctor asks him not to and he changes his mind. There’s little drama between our characters, and certainly no politics. In Series 12, we’re on a continuity bursting mission but I’m not sure what it’s in aid of. Chibnall has inserted into the programme a new mythos which tells us that everything we knew was a lie. But we didn’t know anything to begin with. He is rocking a boat we didn’t know we were sailing in. Yes, it’s gripping and robustly told but I’m not quite sure it had a strong enough foundation to exist. Above all else though, we have our first female Time Lord and sadly, I don’t think Jodie Whittaker’s performance is particularly strong. In fact, it is at times so demonstrably poor that I truthfully wonder how she made it through her apparent gruelling auditions. She is delivering the only Doctor Who performance I can’t find joy in and that makes me deeply sad. Her biggest fault is her struggle to convey meaning through text. The words she stresses in any given sentence are often wrong. She labours the casual technobabble as if she’s never watched a sci-fi film, as if we need things spelling out. (I suspect she simply hasn’t got the idiom.) Worst of all, she lets great gags fall flat. Having said that, there aren’t any stories I particularly take against here and in this ranking, from least to most favourite, you’ll find some corking characters, locations and concepts: Ashad the Cybermen; Desolation; Daniel Barton; quicksilver; Zellin; the Dregs; the P’Ting; Sacha Dhawan’s Master; Siobhan Finneran’s Becka Savage; Chris Noth’s Robertson; Goran Visnjic’s Tesla; Demons of the Punjab; the Kerblam! men; the Ux; the Skithra; and the end of the Cyber Wars. This is as rich an era as any Doctor Who showrunner has ever conceived. And it’s not over yet!

19. IT TAKES YOU AWAY

When I dared to go online to gauge the reaction to Ed Hime’s unusual Nordic Noir psy-fi thriller, I was astonished to find so much love being heaped on this unfocused, often dull tale. Any negative reaction seemed to be reserved for the frog, with which I had no issue! No, I’m just not sure Ed Hime knows what this story is about. There is simply too much going on for any of it to work well. We start with a tense, house-in-the-woods episode which seems like it’s going to be taut and nerve-wracking. But it isn’t given long enough to develop before we’re off into a netherworld with Kevin Eldon. The Antizone, apart from its worryingly realistic moths, doesn’t pose enough of a threat to warrant its existence. Its simply somewhere for Ryan to be held while his grandad-notgrandad has a more emotional adventure with his grandma. Why isn’t Ryan involved in this? Why has Hime not been asked to tease out the breadth of the TARDIS characters more fully, take them to the edge? Instead, we’re messing about with light-up balloons. At the finish, mentally ill Erik who has abandoned his daughter Hanne and convinced her there are monsters outside her home, is reunited happily with her and left to continue his abuse. Perhaps, this would have been far stronger without the Antizone material, one half of the story on one side of the mirror, the second half on the other, the structure mirroring the form. That way, a story that wants to be about character really could be.

18. ROSA

It won plaudits across the industry. It won the DWM poll. But to my mind, Rosa feels painfully contrived. It is as if the story cannot develop naturally because of this modern thing called “agency.” Rosa must retain her agency. The Doctor and her companions can never be seen to interfere or give her the idea to remain seated on the bus. Most of all, a white person cannot possibly be seen to give a person of colour the idea to revolt because that would rob a person of their agency. All quite rightly. But we’re then forced to ask ourselves: what are we doing here then? Is there an adventure to be had at all if our heroes can’t get involved? Actually, there isn’t. All they have to do is sit on the bus and not get up. Yes, that’s a fairly seismic thing to do and the moment is definitely felt, directed with integrity and passion. But for the rest of the time we’re fiddling about with a third-rate villain with muddy motivations trying our best not to get too involved. What this story needs is some bravery. The early encounter with the racist in the street who slaps Ryan is jolting as we’re in an area rarely explored head-on by Doctor Who. But then we get a chat between Ryan and Yaz behind some bins about the word Paki. Surely, we need to see the extent of what Rosa is fighting for more profoundly. Put our heroes in more serious danger than being arrested for being in a hotel room. Let’s hear the word Nigger being spoken with as much venom as is acceptable and be caught sharp by its realism. If you’re going to shy away from sci-fi and tackle a real world issue, let’s be real world about it.

17. FUGITIVE OF THE JUDOON

Fans love surprises. Presumably that’s why Fugitive of the Judoon was met with such rapture on initial transmission. I was air punching with the best of ‘em when John Barrowman leapt back onto our screens. And then when the TARDIS was found beneath the gravestone, I was admittedly rapt. This felt too big for a kickabout adventure in the middle of the season. But when I sat back to think about the episode a little later, I wondered what it was all about. A Human Nature sequel? That’s bold. But nothing is explained to the viewer. I’m not sure how the millions of viewers who didn’t remember the intricate plot of Human Nature felt about the lighthouse fire escape’s glowing energies. Most dis-spiritingly of all though, having failed to cast a decent actor as his leading lady once, Chris Chibnall goes and does it again, introducing the wooden Jo Martin as a badly costumed incarnation. Like Whittaker, she hasn’t got a handle on how to deliver the lines. It’s as if two soap opera stars who’ve never seen a science fiction film before have been offered important roles and arrogantly thought they’d give it a shot, dammit. They aren’t good enough. John Barrowman has nothing to do except remind us of how much better the show was cast fifteen years ago and the final showdown between the two Doctors is witless and without energy. My final bugbear: both Doctors use the word “dumb.” It’s a horrible Americanism, never before used by a Doctor and frankly, offensive to those who can’t speak. Can we say stupid in future? Please don’t let our Doctors lack grace.

16. PRAXEUS

We start interestingly enough: a worldwide mystery, our TARDIS team already separated and on mission. The Praxeus disease itself is thrillingly gruesome and the idea of the birds swirling before they attack is troubling. But the fact is our time travellers are not sufficiently different enough for the four story strands to feel driven by them. Yaz, Ryan and Graham are simply the Doctor’s yes men. Separating them should highlight the differences in approach. Instead it only pinpoints how badly developed they have been, how very little character they have and how they don’t feel like leads in their own show. This is the tale of the gay astronaut and his ex-cop lover, not the TARDIS crew. Of course, it can’t be about them every week, but we at least need them to be pro-active, assertive, fun to be around, individual. They all four of them feel like shadows rather than people, here most obviously. Lift one character from one narrative strand and plonk them into another and nothing would change. Praxeus looks great apart from the puppet bird which lingers in shot like a tiny Myrka but it hasn’t got any real people in it aside from during its best scene: the one in which Warren Brown and Bradley Walsh sit side by side on the beach and simply talk. That’s what this series is missing. Its characters do not truly talk.

15. THE BATTLE OF RANSKOOR AV KOLOS

The season finale that wasn’t really a season finale because a few weeks later it was time for Resolution! What you take away from Battle is the all-pervasive sense that this has been a small fry series. Even the last, almost to-camera speech from Jodie is flat, unmemorable and uninspiring. It’s a shame because positioned elsewhere in the series, The Aftermath of the Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos could be considered fairly solid stuff. Mark Addy, always good value, is terrific as Paltraki although he is given so little to do and vanishes from the plot somewhere along the way. Segun Akinola’s weird score drives its way oppressively through the steamy, industrial locations, giving the finale an atmosphere all of its own. Samuel Oatley’s exceptional performance as Tzim-Sha marks him out as a worthy opponent, Chris Chibnall writing the Big Bad as despicably horrible and vain. Evil villains have been rare in the modern show and it’s lovely to get a baddie who is simply bad because. The opening sequence is pleasingly mythic, the effects work terrific. Ultimately though, it is the most uninteresting modern series finale and it’s not as clever as it should be. The devices the Doctor and Yaz have been wearing to protect their sanity when removed merely elicit a bit of a headache. The TARDIS is used to help save the day and Graham simply decides not to bother killing his nemesis, content to tread on his toes instead. It’s written as if there is so much at stake, but it doesn’t affect our characters the way it should. This feels like just another day.

14. THE WOMAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

First outings for Doctors are important. They set out the agenda for what’s to come. Perhaps in the classic series, Castrovalva and Time and the Rani fudge this job on account of being written by yesterday’s rather than tomorrow’s writers (however much I adore Castrovalva!). The Woman Who Fell to Earth is completely symptomatic of what we came to expect from Series 11. The pace is a little more languid than under Steven Moffat, the jokes are thinner on the ground and the tone more uneven. Sadly though, the episode introduces us to Jodie’s Doctor who fails spectacularly to even approach the magnetism of her immediate predecessors. Like Eccleston, she hasn’t got a softness of touch so her comedy, like his, falls flat. She feels like a tragic comedian not quite convinced that they’re funny enough, so the jokes lack that sense of determined direct drive. Much of her technical prose is unintelligible and what’s worse, she’s annoying when she should be charming. That’s what we’ve got to look forward to and her performance casts a shadow of this admittedly fairly well-written opener. In her final jump from the crane, however, we get a flavour not of Series 11, but of Series 12: a bolder, more action-packed and heroic series. And that alarming cliff-hanger, at the end of The Woman Who Fell to Earth, tells us firmly that the adventure is most certainly to be continued.

13. CAN YOU HEAR ME?

This week, let’s talk about mental health. The current show’s willingness to address current worldly concerns should not be a cause of criticism but Can You Hear Me?’s placing in the series means that this feels like the third lecture in five weeks and it’s draining. When someone repeatedly shouts at you, you eventually stick your fingers in your eyes. This is disappointing, as Can You Hear Me? offers the most subtle exploration of its themes and its message is put across far less earnestly. I’m not sure that the Doctor’s refusal to talk to Graham about his cancer scare is a great choice though. As the person who should be setting the example of the best way to behave, to shirk from responsibilities, however awkward they may be, in an episode of this nature, is wrong. That’s a side issue though because there is lots of fun to be had here. Zellin is extremely well played by Ian Gelder, sinister and skeletal, and the high concepts and varied locations bring a strange edge to this unusual fusion of ideas. The scene in which the child waits in bed for the bogeyman to arrive has to be one of the scariest in the show’s history and must surely exist deliberately to frighten the little ones! The very idea of someone’s fingers finding their way into your ears during sleep is upsetting enough for an adult. There’s some clunking dialogue though: the policewoman’s encounter with Yaz is cloying and the Doctor’s line, “This place has so many secrets to yield” along with her philosophising to no-one at all about the wonders of the Islamic Golden Age are excruciating. But Can You Hear Me? is so full of vitality, so conceptual, that it was always going to feel like a mixture of the absurdly good and the vaguely poor. It’s never less than a fascinating episode.

12. KERBLAM!

Much has been made online of the politics of Kerblam! Essentially, the big business wins. Perhaps surprisingly for the Chris Chibnall era though, the message here isn’t a political one; it’s humanitarian. Live and let live. Kerblam!’s ending doesn’t bother me at all. But perhaps it does make for shallower viewing? The story ends up as merely an action caper in an Amazon warehouse with some sinister robots. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. In fact, this probably feels as close to a classic series episode as we are ever likely to get. The trouble is we’ve come to expect more from our modern Doctor Who and Kerblam! ends up feeling empty. Because all it seems to want to do is tell a rollicking, scary caper, with a few twists and turns, it doesn’t really make the most of its sinister postmen. It is certainly watchable, but it leaves the viewer with nothing very much to say about it.

11. THE WITCHFINDERS

I watched this with my girls at 9 o’clock at night, just before they went to bed. It certainly left the younger feeling unsettled. The Witchfinders has a grim atmosphere, punctuated by Segun Akinola’s haunting score. Joy Wilkinson and Sallie Aprahamian certainly conjure the dark horror of witchcraft, the episode oozing with a malicious, oppressive atmosphere. There were obviously filming problems and it does feel as if not enough material was able to be shot on location. Where’s the hero shot of Jodie’s Doctor diving into the water? Why are there no underwater shots? The opening sequence in which the village desists in its revels and the populace walk in silence to the lake is missing vital shots and we end up being told that the villagers have stopped and are looking sombre instead of seeing them. There’s also a sense that the story is a little “top heavy,” its ending feeling rushed, as if there had to be an injection of sci-fi before the credits rolled. All that being said, the malevolent menace of The Witchfinders is memorable and affecting and Alan Cumming is a ferociously camp King James, alongside the classier Siobhan Finneran making for a terrifically troubling and contrasting double act.

10. ORPHAN 55

Like The Witchfinders, Orphan 55 has clearly had issues on location. The Dregs presumably didn’t show up in Tenerife as they are strangely absent from the car crash material and seem superimposed in other exterior shots. However, despite the scathing critical reception the episode received, there’s a great deal to enjoy here. Firstly, the furious pace means that Orphan 55 never stands still. Within ten minutes, the guests of the spa are being horribly killed. The revelations in the script are well-positioned and unfold at a pleasing rate. The all-pervasive air of cynicism is unusual in Doctor Who and makes for unsettling viewing. The Dregs themselves are a hideous creation and their origins upsetting. The mother-daughter plot doesn’t work: as well as it being sketchily written, there’s the obvious problem of colourblind casting causing believability issues. Is Bella Kane’s biological daughter or is this a more detailed history we are missing? As it stands, Bella seems more like an embittered foster-daughter and this muddies the waters somewhat. Still, none of the problems of character or filming seem to matter, so furious and manic is the pace of this thriller. And I could forgive the final earnest lecture if we hadn’t already had one fifteen minutes earlier. Despite its issues, Orphan 55 is a bull-headed thrill ride.

9. RESOLUTION

This is the finale Series 11 needed. It feels large and expensive: car chases, army set-pieces, a tangibly global scale. And then the Daleks return! Chris Chibnall does a grand job of re-establishing the perhaps forgotten terror of the Skarosian pepper pots, the monsters having become a little overfamiliar perhaps. They bring an up-to-now missing sense of mythos to the Whittaker era and give her Doctor a stand-off scene against the biggest of big bads. For a festive special, it curiously lacks a sense of celebration though. There’s nothing very uplifting about this story set during the comedown after the party the night before. But it at least feels purposeful, after five episodes which have seemed a little aimless. The action and plotting is robust, if a little hokey (Hello, microwave!). The centrepiece in which the Dalek wipes out the battalion is incredibly impressive and the power of the Daleks is most definitely restored.

8. THE GHOST MONUMENT

There is a great freshness about The Ghost Monument. If The Woman Who Fell to Earth told us about what we might expect from this series’ characters, the second instalment of the 2018 run would prove how huge Doctor Who could now look. The planet Desolation is a barren, expansive realm, bleached in sunlight. As we first reach this forbidding world, we’re witness to a spaceship crash the like of which we have never seen before. At the start of The Time of Angels, the Byzantium crashed during the title sequence. Here, we see Ryan and Graham terrified, running with all their strength, to escape the incoming vessel which looks solid and frightening as it approaches the sands. The domain of the Sniper Bots is also memorably sinister and there is strong support from a fine cast of guest actors. There is an element of characteristic Chibnall clunking: the cigar is set up so obviously as a device to be used later on and Shaun Dooley’s earthy Epzo is given a cynical monologue to exemplify how damaged he is. But on the whole, despite these niggles, and despite a monster made from dishrags which are most certainly not drashigs, The Ghost Monument is a visual treat and a breath-taking promise of what the new age has in store.

7. SPYFALL

Chris Chibnall returns to Series 12 ballsier and bolder. Part One of Spyfall boasts three huge set-pieces, each larger than the one before. The now-experienced still-new production team really know how to make this programme. The Kasaavin are an unsettling and elusive foe, Lenny Henry makes for an excellent, quiet villain and Sacha Dhawan’s duplicitous O is a magnificent star performance. As the cliff-hanger heralds the coming of the new Master, we know that however that plane reaches the ground, Doctor Who has well and truly landed again. The second half isn’t quite as strong: a hotchpotch of historical time zones building to a denouement which doesn’t wholly satisfy. Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan, like Rosa Parks last year, are written around so as not to damage their integrity. (This is a curious feature of the Chibnall era – it’s never seemed to bother a writer before.) But all the elements for a cracking Doctor Who yarn remain and by its conclusion, we’re still not sure who the Kasaavin are, and we long for the day that the mother-killing Daniel Barton will be paid out. There’s got to be a sequel coming, Chris!

6. NIKOLA TESLA’S NIGHT OF TERROR

Now this is an assured and accomplished piece of work. We start with a pan down from the Niagara Falls and end with a giant scorpion chase through the streets of old New York. But the greatness of Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror is that it never feels showy or contrived. It tells its story naturally and charmingly gives equal weight to the celebrity historical status of both Tesla and Edison. Goran Visnjic’s Tesla is a real quality turn and our hearts are with him throughout. He gives perhaps the strongest performance of the Whittaker era and Robert Glenister isn’t far behind him either. The Queen of the Skithra’s costume doesn’t quite chime with the tail she has in only a select number of shots but Anjli Mohindra gifts us with a splendidly villainous reading. This is a strong, rounded, wholesome script, well-directed, thematically cohesive and with proper chills. That final chase is spectacular, well scored and breath-taking. And it is fun! It allows its historical celebrities to just have a bit of a lark with the Doctor without the po-faced reverence with which other stories of the era treat their heroes.

5. THE TSURANGA CONUNDRUM

I don’t get the hate. I loved The Tsuranga Conundrum. It was another tale which seemed to use the TARDIS team well, unpeeling the layers a little more. The scene between Ryan and Yaz is quiet and moving. The P’Ting is an inventive creation, cute but frighteningly ravenous. The design work is beautiful, like the Ark in Space we always imagined. As we approach the episode’s climax, Chris Chibnall brings his story strands together with aplomb: the Ciceros piloting the ship, Yoss giving birth, the P’Ting flying through the starfield. The last few minutes of Tsuranga really sing, proving that Chibnall’s best work is often when dealing with large casts of characters all with one shared mission. He did the same with Broadchurch and even Cyberwoman (of which I am also an “out” fan!). The only issue with Tsuranga is the scene involving a wooden Jodie Whittaker doing “poorly” acting in which she shares the screen with the similarly wooden Brett Goldstein as Astos. If there were ever a case of two actors exploring a medium to which they are not well-suited, it is here.

3. ASECENSION OF THE CYBERMEN / THE TIMELESS CHILDREN

I love Ascension of the Cybermen. It is the sort of retro sci-fi thriller that perhaps Doctor Who has missed for a number of years. It’s simply an action-packed runaround which puts our heroes in real jeopardy. The lovely opening starts with the Flat Team Fam breezing in with gadgets to save the day, only to have their gadgets destroyed within minutes and cause them to flee with the last of humanity. It’s a rare occasion in the Chibnall era of expectations being turned on their heads and it certainly pulls the rug from beneath the viewer. From now on, we’re no longer safe. By the time we reach the dead Cybermen floating in space, I am completely sold. Segun Akinola’s industrial score, coupled with the gun-metal visuals and non-stop, ever progressive peril make for a perfect hokum storm. The cliff-hanger is admittedly a little weak and predictable but the second episode is its own very different beast. Essentially, the earthly members of the fam fight the Cybermen, hiding inside their metal suits and doing the things we love Doctor Who to do. In the meantime, the Doctor falls asleep when the Master reads her an audiobook. It shouldn’t work at all, but The Timeless Children is resolutely gripping. I don’t care that history is seemingly overwritten, and then – just to prove it isn’t – we flashback to The Brain of Morbius with a blast of the theme tune helping us realise this whole show is one beautiful, interweaving tapestry. It’s a moment of uplifting euphoria.

3. THE HAUNTING OF VILLA DIODATI

The Chibnall era rarely dabbles in the poetic. Its wisest ambition is probably to go for schlock, which the previous two-parter in this list affects majestically. Here, new writer Maxine Alderton authors a tale of poets and thematically writes with far more grace and poetry than her Series 12 stablemates. Even when Ashad describes the fate of his children, the violence is viscerally felt so rich and evocative is the language used. Like Mary Shelley, Alderton tells a story of brutal spare part surgery with elegance and harrowingly beautiful articulation. Wisely, this is Shelley’s strongest influence on The Haunting of Villa Diodati. This is not the story of how she came to conceive Frankenstein. It is the story of the whole literary ensemble, in one night of terror, on the cusp of something terrible. The arrival of Ashad and his ensuing scenes, particularly with Mary’s baby, are amongst the most frightening Doctor Who has ever produced and even the geography of the villa is used to misdirect its guests. This is sublime, terrifying Doctor Who.

2. ARACHNIDS IN THE UK

It may surprise readers to see this spidery flick so high up in the Jodie Whittaker era but to my mind, this is the best use of this TARDIS crew to date. Graham is in mourning, still seeing the ghost of Grace; we’re introduced to Yaz’s fun family and Ryan gets to play Stormzy and be the cool guy. This would seem to be a winning set up. Unfortunately, the remainder of the series doesn’t live up to the promise of this most charming and well-used family unit. The spiders are absolutely terrifying. This arachnophobe’s skin was crawling. Chris Noth’s Trump-like Robertson is an evil bastard and just the sort of big bad villain the Chibnall era is good at delivering. (See Tzim-Sha, Ashad, Daniel Barton, Queen Skithra, the Master, Zellin – it’s full of them!) Noth adds a sparkle of American class though, delivering a robust and powerful performance. His line about his number two, Kevin, being eaten is laugh out loud funny. And that’s probably why I hold Arachnids in such high esteem. Like Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, it is fun, punchy, using its gang brilliantly, and having a good old, frightening laugh about the world. It’s pulpy adventure of the highest order.

1. DEMONS OF THE PUNJAB

A slice of modern history we should all know much more about. I teach children from Bangladesh and Pakistan and it was a source of personal dissatisfaction that I didn’t know more about the Partition. Here, the troubles of India are told through one family and are all the more poignant and personal for it. Like Vincent and the Doctor, the lead up to the brave, deeply moving climax is rather languid. Vinay Patel allows us to live in this world awhile, get to know its people, before the oncoming horror – on horseback – is unleashed. The final scenes are agonising to witness. Shane Zaza’s Prem puts in a haunting performance and his last moments with his brother are replete with regret and loss. There can’t be another Doctor Who story quite like this one. It has such a particular story to tell. If Jodie’s wedding speech falls a bit flat, and the opportunity to see a bit more of Yaz is wasted, it doesn’t matter. Because as those horses come pounding through the dust, their riders armed with rifles, Doctor Who transcends itself, producing a show of ecstatic frisson, of hard-hitting real-world horror. The Partition of India is here in our living rooms and if we didn’t know much about it beforehand, Chris Chibnall and Vinay Patel ensure that we can never, ever forget it.

JH

Addendum

Writing up these Doctor rankings has been a labour of love and one that has certainly made lockdown feel worthwhile. When else would I have found the time to be so encyclopaedic about this amazing history? If you’ve been reading these articles, can I extend my complete thanks? It has been lovely to be able to share my thoughts and have people interested in my scribblings, particularly in a time when we need to feel connected, perhaps more than ever. I have discovered things too. I have discovered that the good stories hugely outnumber the bad, that there are very few eras I take against, almost no stories that I loathe, and that the greatest stories of Doctor Who represent not just fine science fiction, but the best television of all time. From the first to the last Doctors, I granted top places to The Daleks’ Master Plan, The Web of Fear, The Green Death, The Deadly Assassin, Kinda, Revelation of the Daleks, Ghost Light, Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways, The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone, Dark Water / Death in Heaven and Demons of the Punjab. Now there is a list of television programmes that any TV Historian would find hard to better. Look at the scope, the ambition, the heart on display and take pride that throughout all its forms, our favourite show can reach such magnificent heights. If all we have to do right now is watch Doctor Who, then we are blessed.  

#DoctorWhoLockdown - The Capaldi Years

Hand on heart, I adore the Peter Capaldi era. I think it’s the stage at which modern Doctor Who blossoms, grows up even. I know that may be an unpopular view, but I don’t think the show has ever been this good. It is Doctor Who being made for men in their 30s rather than the whole family though and its scheduling reflects that. Even at its weakest, the scintillating Capaldi mesmerises and bedazzles with his strange, aloof, dynamite portrayal. He is the best actor to have taken on the part. Tom Baker may be the most Doctorish by nature, but here is an actor embodying the part from the inside out, taking himself on a journey through the outer cosmos but through his inner spaces as well. He is magnificent and in Series 8, Steven Moffat writes what I think is the apotheosis of his time on the show. That run from Deep Breath to Death in Heaven is glorious, full of fireworks between its leading trio and real human drama beating its way through each strange tale. The sad story of Danny Pink is not the warm and happy ending we usually expect from Doctor Who and we are left devastated at the series’ conclusion. There are a few languid two-parters in the middle of the Capaldi years but we’re soon back on form. Clara’s departure and the arrival of Bill Potts bring with them abundant ammunition for drama, for new stories, and even in his last year at the Doctor Who helm, Steven Moffat is experimenting with form – a mid-series trilogy of monkish devilment takes on the scope of a finale right at the heart of the series. The eventual finale itself only ups the ante and we finish the Capaldi years with some of the most sublime Doctor Who ever written. Throughout, one gets a sense that whilst Moffat always had a writerly brain, here he gives the show his heart too and there is a keen sense that during the four years of adventures they are being genuinely felt by all involved, not least by Peter Capaldi, allowing himself to embody his childhood hero, living and breathing time and space. I doubt very much whether Doctor Who will ever be this magnificent again.

Here are DoctorWhoVews’s rankings of the Capaldi years, from least to most favourite. Enjoy!

35. IN THE FOREST OF THE NIGHT

So it’s the end of the year, the budget’s running out and then Frank Cottrell-Boyce rings and asks to write a show about London being taken over by trees. You can imagine the conversation: “I… think we’ve got enough money left, Frank, yeah. It should be doable.” In honesty, the biggest issue with In the Forest of the Night is not its almost complete lack of jeopardy or absence of a narrative motor, its wistful pacing or even its sickly final scene; it’s that a small Welsh forest never remotely convinces as London. Where on Earth are all the people? A couple of strategically placed traffic lights and a spare road sign prop do not a capital city make. There are no buildings here, no walls, no screaming. We are simply in a forest. Still, there’s some great dialogue and Capaldi is always worth watching, especially when tasked with playing awkward. And you can see what Cottrell-Boyce is aiming for: he wants this to be a Red Riding Hood tale of the dark fairy-tale ilk but it’s a lovely sunny day and the wolves are more scared of the baby tiger. Ultimately, it’s all a bit misguided.

34. THE MAGICIAN’S APPRENTICE / THE WITCH’S FAMILIAR

As mentioned above, I think Series 8 represents the very apex of Steven Moffat’s time on the show. This Series 9 opening two-parter was a big comedown. As a matter of irritation, there are some great moments: fireworks fly between Davros and the Doctor, and the scene in which the withered despot opens his eyes is imbued with profound sadness. I have no objections to the tank scene so unfavourably greeted by the fans: what else would you choose to do if you knew you were about to die? I love both pre-titles hooks – one mythic, the other cheeky. In the publicity run up to Series 8, Capaldi stated that one of the differences between his stories and those of his predecessor was that the scenes would be longer. Deep Breath is testament to that: the extremely long restaurant scene one of the best and most nail-biting of the entire series. Here, the scenes are long but they’re achingly long. They feel tedious and languid, lacking energy and motor. Steven Moffat has written an opening akin to the start of The Stolen Earth, darting from planet to planet, but we get lingering establishing shots and drawn out line readings which seem to be trying to make this feel important, sapping the story of its energy. The Magician’s Apprentice feels like a story without a sense of its own pace, tedious scenes left to hang around too long. The Daleks have an empire at their command and… sit around in their control room before the Doctor defeats them with their own literal shit. There’s a sense that this wants to be an all-important mythology story: the Doctor is dying, his confession is written in a dial, Missy has returned to tell Clara as much, Davros has sworn to kill his nemesis, the Dalek Supreme is back. Ultimately though, the whole affair is simply boring.

33. THE LIE OF THE LAND

The end of the Monk trilogy and really not half bad. The opening has a disconcerting and definite allure. The conclusion with Bill’s mum is the stuff of season finales and the infiltration of the pyramid is as tense as any action thriller. There’s also a unique feel to The Lie of the Land, that of a true dystopian Earth, where governments broadcast from harboured and protected ships and people are taken away for holding onto the truth. There is one serious issue at the centre of Toby Whithouse’s script though: the faux regeneration scene. The Doctor and Nardole lure Bill to the ship and push her to the point where she wants to actively commit murder. She fires at the Doctor who pretends to regenerate and then… everyone in the room points and laughs at her. To be frank, it’s unforgiveable behaviour on the part of our hero and explained away so weakly, so glibly. So he needed to be sure? OK. Or was this simply trailer bait? Whatever, it seems cynical and wretched. And a real shame because it does spoil what is an otherwise accomplished and assured piece of work.

32. SMILE

Here, Frank Cottrell-Boyce suffers the opposite problem he did on In The Forest of the Night. Smile looks a million dollars. The overseas filming and the city in the cornfields is as beautiful an alien world as Doctor Who has ever imagined. This is the city we saw in our minds when reading In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks. The problem is Cottrell-Boyce has a great idea for a story here, but it simply remains an idea, a concept, not particularly well dramatized. It’s lovely to see the Doctor and Bill as the stars of the show for a good chunk of the running time but it means that Ralf Little’s Steadfast must be the most underdeveloped guest character of the entire new series run. And Mina Anwar fares even less well as Goodthing. Smile feels like a sci-fi story written by somebody who doesn’t write sci-fi stories, who doesn’t understand that “have you tried switching it on and off again?” does not hold as a satisfying ending, however many magic haddock it’s served with. Smile might be the very epitome of The Emperor’s New Clothes story: don’t be fooled by how beautiful it looks but enjoy the scenery.

31. THE EATERS OF LIGHT

It’s worth pointing out that every story from hereon in is in its own way deeply treasurable and I adore them all. Ranking them is like choosing one’s favourite children and a fun but difficult pursuit. Rona Munro brings with her the characteristic poetry of her glorious stage work as well as some surprising sexual politics. There is the definite air of folklore about this Scottish play but there’s something in its production which doesn’t quite tally. Charles Palmer’s blue, grey colour palette ends up disguising the richness of the text rather than mirroring it. Despite the story’s darkness, what we need here is colourful imagery to match its lyricism. The dimension inside the cairn is washed out looking and cloudy and the musicians heading off to protect us in its inky depths isn’t the visual triumph the script and music paint it as. I can imagine a version of The Eaters of Light which looks as magnificent as it sounds. Its relatively dull pictures do its words something of a disservice.

30. THE WOMAN WHO LIVED

For some time, it looks like this strange episode is going to be a two-hander. It’s lit against candlelight and the sorrowful story of Lady Me is captivating. The omission of the deleted scene in which the Doctor spies on Ashildr during the plague is a real shame and I wonder if it wasn’t felt that the episode needed to move along to the alien lion just that bit faster. As it stands, the lion plot is a bit of an undercooked turkey. The concluding “They will kill me,” line turns off the narrative in an instant rather than solving a problem cleverly. But those scenes between Peter Capaldi and Maisie Williams are majestic. They sing with real heart and profundity and make the bolted-on sci-fi aesthetic seem even less necessary. I wish Catherine Tregenna had written the two-hander this story seems to want to be. It might have been a more memorable if peculiar outing.

29. SLEEP NO MORE

Mark Gatiss’s promised “instant classic” - as Steven Moffat would have it – proved to be fandom’s new Fear Her. I’m not quite sure I understand why. The unique filming techniques involved and its lack of discernible music make for compelling viewing. The inclusion of the Mr Sandman song proves to be a real moment of terror and conceptually the monsters work rather well. There is an obviously missing “really big” sandman at the climax and I’m not sure the logic of the piece really makes any sense at all. But this is a found-footage horror flick for Halloween and that means that the thrill of the piece is in its moment by moment vitality rather than its internal cohesion. Perhaps though the casting of the show’s first transgender actor as a grunt was a bit stupid.

28. THE CARETAKER

Gareth Roberts attempts his third riff on The Lodger, this time with less certainty. The idea of plonking the Doctor down somewhere innocuous and seeing him sink or swim is a terrific idea but by the time The Caretaker comes along, Peter Capaldi is a crazed, aloof incarnation and far from bringing out the Doctor’s innate charm, this episode ends up with him feeling even more distant and unidentifiable than ever. The PE gag is great fun and I certainly don’t see the racist connotations that DWM cited. Indeed, it brings out the unwelcome jealousy of the Doctor, making him all the more interesting. The Skovox Blitzer is a nifty little robot and as always in this season, the three regulars come off amazingly well. But it feels rather like Roberts is yesterday’s man. For better or worse, the programme is leaving this sort of loveable fluff behind; Capaldi’s Doctor just doesn’t fit here. It feels like Roberts is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Strangely, only The Caretaker and Robot of Sherwood seem like relics of another season, but whereas Sherwood feels like an early way to highlight this new Doctor’s differences within a familiar setting, The Caretaker doesn’t quite sit right in this new iteration.

27. THE RETURN OF DOCTOR MYSTERIO

It’s a peculiar island of an episode, this Christmas Special. After a year off the air, Mysterio offers the viewer no real flavour of what the new age of Doctor Who will bring, aside from that final very moving speech by the table followed by Nardole’s unexpected revelation that the Doctor is still mourning the loss of his wife. Capaldi’s last snarling moment of ferocity in the console room is a reminder of the rage of this Doctor. But for the most part, Mysterio is content to be its own mini superhero movie. It feels as charming as those old films and works as a romantic comedy as well as you’d expect from the Coupling creator. The sequence with the dangling Doc by the child’s bedroom window is lovely stuff. But in the middle of all the wonderful drama of the Capaldi years, it feels slightly aimless, a pitstop between destinations, however successful it might be on its own terms.

26. EMPRESS OF MARS

Despite the fact that the caves don’t quite convince as the Martian landscape, Mark Gatiss’s final turn as Who writer yields a story which looks completely gorgeous. The red uniforms of the Brits set against the dark greens of the Ice Warriors is the stuff of remarkably visual television, the Warriors’ guns issuing an unforgettably lurid effect on their attackers. This is a Tomb of the Cybermen for the modern age, a deceptively simple-looking script of boys’ own peril. There’s a portrait of Pauline Collins for fans of the 00s and an appearance from Alpha Centauri for fans of the 70s. It does feel a little pastiche, a little homage-y but it’s played straight and with such charm and it’s only the greatness of the stories around Empress of Mars which makes for its undeservedly lowly placement here.

25. THE GIRL WHO DIED

“I am Odin!” the Doctor cries and then Odin appears in the clouds. That’s a ballsy moment. This Magnificent Seven story of the weaponizing of a group of countryfolk might feel like small fry for the Doctor and Clara, especially after space spiders, but it’s the small moments here that thrill: the Doctor’s oddly-delivered translation of the baby’s crying is weird and alarming; his meeting with Ashildr in her room is dangerous and charming; his realisation that he’s seen his own face before suddenly injects proceedings with that Capaldi lightning and we realise the small stuff here will have seismic consequences. For a story told on such a small scale, its ending packs an unexpectedly hefty punch.

24. FLATLINE

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t think Flatline’s outstanding reputation is quite deserved. Its characters are weak and some of the dialogue is cloying. But there is a great wealth of imagination on display here from new-boy writer Jamie Mathieson. How many excellent ideas does a first-time Who script need? This surely has too many: the policewoman eaten by the floor, the escape via hanging chair, the flattened train against the tunnel walls, the shrinking TARDIS, the Doctor’s hand, stealth mode, the 2-D door handle, the graffiti artist, the boneless themselves. The list goes on. This is a Doctor Who story which truly dives into its ideas and in the end, leaves us without any real understanding of its frightening and surreal adversary. Mathieson’s later scripts were more focussed but here, it feels like he got the commission and just thought, “What the hell? I’m going to go for it!” And it’s incredibly exciting for that.

23. THE ZYGON INVASION / THE ZYGON INVERSION

This might seem like an undeserving position for Peter Harness’s body snatchers story in which to find itself. The culminating Capaldi speech makes the entry price effectively priceless. There is nothing like seeing this most intense and raging actor pummelling through this powerful piece of persuasion. It is sensational television. The remainder, however, is fairly dreary. What’s more, it’s all been done better elsewhere. We have an exploding presidential plane, just like last year, but this time the crash is off-camera and the escape unseen. Where this cliff-hanger should be the peak of excitement in the first half of the story, instead it feels tepid and lacks energy. Bonnie raising her weapon towards the plane should be the scene immediately after our discovery that she’s a bad ‘un. Instead, we see Bonnie casually infiltrate UNIT in-between and the pace begins to sag. Invasion/Inversion feels a script that has been massively overworked. Harness has revealed that in an earlier draft we found out why Bonnie was called Bonnie. Here, without an explanation, it just sounds stupid. Why do the passers-by react with vacuous disinterest in the online video of the Zygon changing form? Why is Rebecca Front so unbelievably useless? What exactly is the Zygon plan? The antagonists have unclear motivations and the threats feel vague and nebulous. Thankfully, there are many other elements to enjoy: Clara’s dreaming is suitably disconcerting and the scenes between the Doctor and Osgood are sparky and fun. Ultimately though, the lasting impression of this story is that final, rarefied speech, the vitriol and kindness and passion it is imbued with bore through the TV screen and the words seer their way into our collective hearts. A rallying call for intelligent thought and human kindness, the best of us all.

22. FACE THE RAVEN

Sarah Dollard’s first script for the show is one of three distinct thirds. The first is the most fast-moving fifteen minutes of Series 9 – darting from flat, to city centre, to library, to TARDIS, to sky, to Trap Street at a rate of knots. The final third is a heartbreaker. The desperate Doctor, unable to do anything to prevent Clara’s death is devastated and understandably selfish. “What about me?” he asks painfully, before simply kissing her hand and allowing her to walk to her death. This is the silence before the storm because Capaldi – inimical as he has ever been – finishes this tale with a declaration of revenge. Sadly, the middle third of the raven story is a bit dull, the boring murder mystery plot unmemorable and lacking thorough examination. Clara’s incredible death scene is the rightful lasting impression of Face the Raven but I wonder if it isn’t because the rest of the episode is only lukewarm?

21. THIN ICE

Bill’s first trip into history, despite that huge and beautiful Thames set, feels sparse, simple and succinct. That’s not a bad thing. This is Doctor Who rebuilding itself again. This is the usual fare for a companion first travelling back in time, but Pearl Mackie’s superlative Bill Potts throws up some interesting questions we fans had probably become too familiar to ask. When Bill asks the Doctor if he has ever killed anyone, the relationship is firmly tested. As early as her third story, the companion is willing to call the Doctor out on the things he has begun to disassociate himself with. The TARDIS dynamics here are very different to those between the Doctor and Clara but no less interesting. Tellingly, the Doctor tells the truth to Bill. This new energy in the spaceship is shaking up the format and here, in an apparently simple historical romp, the excellent character work ignites the narrative, makes it fresh and exciting. The Doctor’s punching of Lord Sutcliffe is a triumphant wallop, the death of Spider and the Doctor’s flippant reaction to it is staggering. The minimalist use of the monster of the week, never seen completely, is exciting in its restraint. This is a vibrant, beautifully designed and rich tale, far more complex than its apparent simplicity belies.

20. UNDER THE LAKE / BEFORE THE FLOOD

If there’s any new series Doctor Who story which feels like a classic era one, it’s Toby Whithouse’s dark two-parter. Perhaps it’s too slow but it’s never less than interesting. The first half feels like an old base under siege, akin to The Robots of Death or The Web of Fear; the second half feels like The Curse of Fenric and Battlefield with its timey-wimey shenanigans and bleak location filming. Still, Whithouse proves that within the old-school formula there’s plenty of room for invention. The Doctor’s brazen, to-camera pre-titles of Before the Flood followed by the “rock version” of the theme tune is surprisingly new territory for a 52-year-old show. Sophie Stone’s Cass is an incredibly strong role for a deaf actress and the sequence in which she is chased by the axe-wielding ghost, unable to hear the scraping of the weapon across the floor is edge-of-the-seat stuff. The Fisher King is a gruesome creation and the Doctor’s cards an inventive one. It looks traditional but it’s full of incident and ideas and stands as the most satisfying two-parter of Series 9.

19. TIME HEIST

Doctor Who does Bank Job is a genre clash you’d have thought might happen more often than it does. Here, we have the ultimate sci-fi heist, Steve Thompson producing easily his best script for the series. It also looks like a megabucks action thriller, the bank itself marble and gleaming, the corridors bold and colourful. As clever as Thompson’s heist plotting is, the show’s monster is a movie idea in itself, the killing of its first victim a deeply affecting and horrid shock that takes the breath away. The scenes in which Clara tries to disguise her thoughts from the Teller are suspenseful and gripping. The guest cast are memorable and well-played, the cleverness of the teleporting and memory tech rewarding and ingenious. There can’t ever be a Doctor Who Bank Job show again: it wouldn’t better this one.

18. HELL BENT

There’s so much to talk about when it comes to Hell Bent, it’s probably worthy of an article in itself. So let’s just focus on that scene by the matrix, when the Time Lords reveal to Clara how long the Doctor spent in the Confession Dial in order that he might save her. He palms it off as “a duty of care” and looks away. And then something quite unusual happens. For the first time, he and Clara tell one another the truth. Whatever that may be, we aren’t made privy to it, the camera flying away from them, up through the cloisters and towers of the Panopticon. The Doctor and Clara have the most complicated, layered and dynamic relationship between any TARDIS pair. They are by turns aggressive towards one another, then secretive, evasive and loving. They are also liars, both keeping secrets from the other as a matter of course. Here, at last, they lay it out: exactly what they think of one another and we aren’t allowed to see it. How wonderful. How respectful. There’s so much more to enjoy in Hell Bent. The Doctor’s silence as he returns to his village, the tragedy of his memory loss and Clara’s happy ending – but there is a feeling throughout the whole story that Steven Moffat is writing with truthfulness and heart and sympathy. The more you watch Hell Bent, the more its intricate layers are revealed.

17. THE PILOT

Unlike other “First Nights” – your Roses or Eleventh Hours or Women Falling to Earths, this one feels different. Because the set-up being introduced is not quite the same as what we’re used to. Here, we’re not meeting a strange traveller from the void beyond the mind, who voyages from place to place righting wrongs and fighting evils. No, here we are meeting a university professor with a dark secret. It’s such a fresh approach to introducing the Doctor that its novelty still feels thrilling. Alongside that, we meet Pearl Mackie’s exceptional Bill Potts who lights up the screen with her wide-eyed charm and confident, idiosyncratic line deliveries. We also get to see the thrills and spills of TARDIS travel in our opening episode, visiting Australia and a future Dalek war. Best of all though, like all truly great Doctor Who, the scares are more affecting when they take place in the home and Bill’s unsettlement by the thing in her shower is a standout scene. The Pilot is packed full of refreshing incident and is breezily directed by Lawrence Gough, making for a perfect, memorable introduction to a new TARDIS team.

16. KNOCK KNOCK

Playwright and TV writer extraordinaire Mike Bartlett’s only foray into the Who world was met with a muted reception by fans but there’s so much here that’s the stuff of riveting, classic Who. David Suchet is the sort of villain-of-the-week the Capaldi era is arguably missing. His performance is delicate, steely and frightening, his final breakdown a worrying and moving moment. The wooden girl Eliza is frightening and although she recalls the Wooden King and Queen from The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe, she is still very much at home in this brown, panelled world. This is Doctor Who doing haunted house properly. It’s attempted it before in shows like Hide and even Day of the Moon but it’s never as scary or direct as here, the pre-titles illustrating the extent to which Bartlett is ready to push his spooky, creaking tale. This is essentially a short teen horror flick and it works frighteningly well, and also at the end reveals its beating heart. Terrific.

15. TWICE UPON A TIME

The regeneration story that shouldn’t have been, Twice Upon a Time is one last chance to spend some time with the mysterious, mercurial and magnetic Peter Capaldi after the Christmas Special was foist upon Steven Moffat at the eleventh hour. This is a love letter to his Doctor and feels like a show in which everybody knows the end is coming. There’s nothing here to even fight for, the mystery more a ponderous exploration. David Bradley disappoints with his staccato delivery and lack of subtlety but before we zoom off into voyages new, it’s nice to be reminded where this whole barmy journey began. Capaldi is the undoubted star of this aching poem though. When he thanks Bill and Nardole, we feel it. When he sips his last glug of tea before returning to the TARDIS, we feel it. All the way through that last majestic speech, we feel it. As he sees Clara for the last time, we feel it. One last walk with our hero before the end, Twice Upon a Time is not so much an adventure as a thought process, assessing what we’ve learned from the Doctor, where our hearts lies. It’s a quiet, rather beautiful last stand. I’m so glad it exists.

14. ROBOT OF SHERWOOD

Somewhat forgotten amongst all the big hitters of Series 8 surrounding it, Robot of Sherwood is the funniest Capaldi story of them all. The Doctor’s ranting alongside Robin Hood from the dungeons is hilarious, their cries of who to execute first proving senselessly amusing. We see Capaldi try out some early Venusian Aikido and stick his middle finger up before revealing his fighting spoon. This is Mark Gatiss’s most joyous story in the canon. It’s cheeky (Pat Troughton IS Robin Hood!), camp (anything Ben Miller does – and doesn’t he look remarkably like Anthony Ainley under that beard?), knowing (“an intriguing gallimaufry”) and heart-warming (fairy tales are real). Set against glorious sunshine and the greenest Sherwood Forest you could imagine, Robot of Sherwood is the feelgood hit of the summer.

13. HEAVEN SENT

I’m not quite as enamoured with Heaven Sent as a loud contingent of fandom seem to be, but it is definitely bold and does what it sets out to do with craftsman-like accomplishment. Perhaps it comes at the wrong time for the show. Series 9 had consisted of fairly slow two-parters and a monologue at the series’ apex feels as if Steven Moffat was actively wishing away that child audience. (Having said that, my class at school happened to watch this on iPlayer during a wet lunchtime the week of transmission and many were rapt.) Why shouldn’t Doctor Who present us with a dramatization of grief though? It was content to spend an episode almost without dialogue in The Deadly Assassin’s matrix and that is a storming piece of drama. It was content to confine itself to only a busload of passengers in Midnight and that too was a gripping success. Here, Capaldi’s hook-nosed prince of a Time Lord wanders his castle in solitude, thinking his way through a profound problem of the heart. It’s a joy to be with him to share the burden. Moffat recently tweeted that this might be the best performance given by an actor playing the Doctor in a single instalment. That’s a bit of hyperbole, however: Capaldi does even better elsewhere in his own era. He isn’t really given that much to do in Heaven Sent. This isn’t the Doctor at his most emotional or venomous; he’s simply wistful throughout. Nevertheless, Capaldi’s star status and peculiar, great talent in the hands of this very particular and intelligent Steven Moffat script means that we’ll stay with him all the way, for four billion years even.

12. OXYGEN

Jamie Mathieson’s sci-fi thriller does indeed thrill from its very opening. The astronauts, spinning rather beautifully through the black void, towards Chasm Forge, accompanied by a funereal voiceover from Peter Capaldi, feels like a shot from a movie. It brings Gravity to mind but wisely, this episode makes its set-pieces achievable. The scale here might be smaller but it’s more intimate than gravity and more frightening. The Forge itself is a hellish place, dangerous with the fatal atmosphere of space so bluntly described at the story’s opening beyond its fragile walls. This is a base under siege story to better all others. The desperate trip from one side of the station to the other, through the vacuum is idiosyncratically shot, as if we’re witness to movement, feelings, moments but no real sense of geography or understanding. It’s quite something. Pearl Mackie is extraordinary as the panicking Bill and it comes with the alarming full stop that the Doctor has been blinded. The climax – fighting the suits – doesn’t quite work. Had the monetary value of the oxygen supply been more a of a hang-up for the characters, it might just have got away with it. In the end, it feels like a slightly fudged and unclear message. But then, we have the real icing on the cake – the cliff-hanger. Capaldi’s coruscating voice scrapes through the viewers’ ears echoing long after the titles end.

11. INTO THE DALEK

Rusty stood on top of my wedding cake, a miniature Doctor and Clara before him. So close to my heart are these Capaldi stories that the top 20 here really are interchangeable. I’d happily sit and watch any of this Scottish Doctor’s encounters over and over again. His first episode with the Daleks is a storming action thriller directed with aplomb by Ben Wheatley. This is a filmic, large-scale, gung-ho explosion of a story. It has a tremendous guest cast of vivid characters, the relationship between Journey Blue and her uncle complicated and arresting. The Doctor’s final speech to camera is Capaldi telling us he’s arrived. He speaks directly to us, as he would in his last minutes on the show. “Put it inside you and live by it,” he tells us of beauty and hope and faith. His early, more severe, strait-laced take on the Time Lord is undercut by a beating passion and a felt confusion as to whether or not he is a good man. His early chat with Clara in the TARDIS feels real and traumatic (although Steven Moffat really doesn’t set up the reasons why the Doctor is suddenly so insecure very effectively). The deep blues and metallic look of Into the Dalek mark it out as visually distinct. In fact, the first three shows of this run do just that: Deep Breath is soaked in red and burgundy. Here, we have blues and silvers, Robot of Sherwood would employ greenery. It stands as testament to how each episode of this remarkable series boasts its own distinct identity. Into the Dalek is perhaps one of the ultimate Dalek stories, an exploration of their psyche as well as featuring some supremely well-shot footage of their mass exterminations. The opening scene of Journey’s rocket spiralling in its escape from the Mothership is heart-stopping stuff. Doctor Who really does manage Action Movie this week.

10. LISTEN

From the highly explosive to the lonely quietude. Listen is an intensely clever script, flitting from restaurant sitcom dialogue about “twenty-three wells” and “I might go straight for extras” to theses on the nature of fear. There is a vague sensation that this is three short, cheap set-piece scenes thrown together to form the series’ budget episode. But closer inspection reveals its layers. First time round, the vivid thrill of the thing under the blanket is indelibly printed on the brain. Second time, it’s the material at the end of the universe which stands out, particularly in its stillness and soundscape. As the doors open and the unknown is let in, the Doctor is being pulled from the room by the escaping pressure and hanging precariously from a handrail. But we don’t get the hero action music we might elsewhere: we get almost nothing in the way of a score. It’s quiet, synthy and ethereal. The weirdness of this typifies what an outré episode this is. It seems like small fry but it isn’t. It’s atypical, strange and profound. How nice, also, to see John Hurt again, returning to where all those fears began.

9. WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME / THE DOCTOR FALLS

This is an astonishing finale and sure to top fan polls for many years to come. I can’t deny its remarkable nature, its high-stakes ambitions and its obvious success but I do have one major issue with it: the handling of the Masters. Once together, Gomez and Simm are content to hang out on a dry-stone wall, joke about erections and apply eye-liner. They don’t have a plan, or indeed very much to do in their episode together which is a shame, especially as once Gomez smacks him with her umbrella on the rooftop, you’d imagine there would follow some tension between them that wasn’t sexual. Aside from that, however, there is a great wealth of enjoyment to be found in the bleak resolution of Series 10, not least those haunting, terrible scenes in the hospital. The most worrying moment for me is seeing the plastic-coated patients walking to their conversions, one intoning, “Die. Me. Die. Me.” It’s genuinely horrific and the sort of scare usually reserved for the likes of Black Mirror. The whole of World Enough and Time is audacious from the offset. Missy introducing herself as Doctor Who sets the breezy tone of the near-the-fan-knuckle comedy. We’re even witness to her delightful putdown, “Don’t be a bitch.” Another linguistic envelope being pushed. Then Bill gets shot and we’re plunged into a nightmare. There follows the most doom-laden and dreadful story of all of Doctor Who: the genesis of the Cybermen and the death of Bill Potts. Both events are profoundly affecting, desperate and inevitable. This is exactly the sort of tragedy you’d expect from a Doctor’s final story. Capaldi plays it that way, raging against the dying of the light as he sonic-booms Cybermen to death in the forest. That we were granted an extra hour in his ethereal company is our blessing and probably The Doctor Falls’s loss.

8. EXTREMIS

Another astonishingly clever and overlooked masterpiece from Steven Moffat. This list just cannot stop being brilliant. Extremis is a dark tale of the question of reality and in its ingenuity forces the reader to ask the same question of their own reality. How do we know that we are real? You can’t say that Moffat avoided the big questions during his time as showrunner. As well as a matter of philosophical interest, there’s also something of the James Bond film about Extremis. It might not have the spectacle and scale of Spyfall but it proves a more frightening and unsettling world tour. It feels like a huge departure to see our TARDIS team at CERN or the Pentagon and the locations give Extremis a flavour all of its own. The introduction of the Pope raises the stakes yet further because this Doctor Who story is about to transcend even religion. At the finish though, it comes down to that man Capaldi again. As the gruesome monk looms towards him in the Oval Office, he eulogises to himself in terror. This is a literal blind-scared Doctor and when the episode finishes, we are scared too. Something is coming, something very, very big and I think very, very bad…

7. LAST CHRISTMAS

After the depressing and tragic events of Death in Heaven, we might feel in need of a hopeful coda. Fittingly, Last Christmas acts as just that. Characteristically, it is in her dreams that Clara Oswald finally mourns her beloved Danny Pink. She has always struggled to articulate her troubles, happier to lie to herself and others. It is in her subconscious that she works out how to say goodbye, how to let go and how to admit to herself that she still wants to travel with her fairy tale hero, just as she admits to herself that Santa Claus is real. There may be one too many idiots’ guide explanations as to how the dreamscapes are working, but for the most part, this is an intriguing, sad, funny, nightmarish way to spend Christmas Day. It’s far darker and more horrific than any other festive special and Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman are divine. As the Doctor arrives at the door of Clara and Danny’s house, the pain of Clara’s grief comes knocking. He is here. Which means Danny can’t be. In that moment, the whole tragedy of Series 8 is manifest.

6. MUMMY ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

Here we have Peter Capaldi’s tour de force. The final third of the episode is him at his finest, driving the narrative with his dangerous, amoral and pragmatic approach to murder mystery. His advice to those about to die is seemingly without pity and when he asks Clara to lie to Maisie we feel for the school teacher. He has put her in the most unenviable and cruel position. It seems to confirm all her reasons for wanting to leave him, giving even more weight to the early scenes conveying the aching distance that has begun to separate our heroes. When the Doctor asks if he can talk about the planets, it becomes clear how very alien and faraway this relatively new Time Lord is: he is so very far from human but his sympathy and energy and huge heart drives him to rescue the passengers of the Orient Express. On the beach, Clara’s doubts about her awkward fellow traveller, himself still visibly moved by events, are allayed and they can continue their journeys together. This is classy, complicated and assured character work: the finest TARDIS team at their best.

5. KILL THE MOON

I don’t understand the objections to the “science” of Kill the Moon because it never purports to having any. It is a strange story existing in its own peculiar bubble: a story in which the moon really is an egg and from it hatches the most beautiful dragon. Why try to argue with such wondrous magic? Before that, though, we have a gripping, scary narrative, gloriously filmed and told with fire. The spiders are frightening and there pervades a tangible feeling of dread throughout the forty-five minutes. When the shuttle disappears down the crevasse, it becomes suddenly apparent that there is no easy way out. As the spiders emerge in their droves, the terror of the moon trip is made incarnate. The final TARDIS scene is a masterclass of acting prowess from both Capaldi and Coleman, the latter in particular providing a furious and enraged explosion of a performance. The Sixth Doctor and Peri used to bicker. I imagine scenes like the ones here were the intention because the dynamism between the regulars here is dynamite.

4. THE HUSBANDS OF RIVER SONG

It’s not often we would consider the Twelfth Doctor to be well-suited to a screwball romantic comedy but he fits so easily into this freewheeling anarchic world that it feels a shame he didn’t have more fun more often. The Husbands of River Song has the same energy as Voyage of the Damned and a stronger love story at its centre. Watching River refuse to notice the Doctor is a joke played to its absolute limits before the realisation is masterfully played out. The Twelfth Doctor rarely flirts but here he teases River, mocking her melodramatic outbursts by mimicking her in whispers. The final scene of the lovers together is full of complication: their last night together, the beauty of the towers, the sadness of the ending, the happiness that this isn’t really an ending at all. I love watching Capaldi here: see how he remains at a distance from River, standing in the background watching her watch the towers. This is an alien love, an enigmatic one. It’s impossible to read what Capaldi is playing but whatever it is, it’s clearly a deep feeling, one we probably could never hope to understand. This is how the Doctor does his love stories: in complex, unknowable ways which happen to include a man who can split his gooey head in two to hide a bank card. The Husbands of River Song is adorable.

3. DEEP BREATH

It’s the length of a short movie and is perfect fodder for the big screen. The differences between Deep Breath and the Matt Smith stories before it are stark, even more obvious when the Paternoster Gang are thrown into this very different world. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor is at once more dangerous and unpredictable than Matt’s loveable clown. Capaldi looks severe and even sinister. And here’s a thing: does he beat up the tramp? We end the scene with him barking orders at him: “Give me your coat! I need it!” Then when Clara asks him where he got it from, his first instinct is to lie. “I bought it from a shop.” Why lie? What did he do to the tramp? It goes unresolved. And by the end of the episode he has certainly either killed the Half-Face Man or talked him into his own death, both dreadful possibilities. That final confrontation in the restaurant above London, below a balloon made of skin, is Doctor Who at its best, the spiky intensity of the new Doctor raging against the matter-of-fact logic of his lamentable aggressor. The restaurant scene with Clara is one of the best written scenes in the history of the programme, full of quotable gags and disconcerting notes. “You don’t want to eat?” “Do you have a problem with the grey ones?” “Is there a children’s menu?” “There’s something else they’re not doing: breathing.” Deep Breath is a perfect introduction to a new Doctor but it takes a deep breath to throw oneself into this more dangerous Victoriana where droids steal people’s “good eyes” and our heroes impale their enemies on clock towers. Welcome to the greatest era of Doctor Who. If it’s not to your tastes, tough. The restaurant is closed.

2. THE PYRAMID AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Somehow, this nail-biting thriller was overlooked by fandom on transmission. Perhaps it’s because it feels like Part Two of a three-part narrative but to my mind, it is its own marvellous story. We only really need to know that the monks are bad to understand Pyramid. Daniel Nettheim directs from the off in dread mode, the slow-motion smashing beer bottle and the broken spectacles signalling something awful this way coming. This is a peculiarly earthly end of the world, one in which humanity kills itself far away from the Doctor’s involvement, a hungover scientist punching in a number with a misplaced decimal point. It’s worrying and real and gets under the skin if you think about it too much: Perter Harness has clearly been to some dark places in his consideration of how the world might realistically end. The last sequence in which the Doctor is trapped behind the door and is forced to admit he has been blinded is the stuff of the most intense season finale. Bill can do nothing but accept the monks’ invitation to save the Doctor and the Doctor himself disconcertingly resolute and accepting of his own death can do nothing. At the end of the world, the thing that comes between the Doctor and the monsters is a locked door and this time, he can’t get out. The Pyramid at the End of the World is so gripping precisely because it is so down to Earth.

DARK WATER / DEATH IN HEAVEN

I know it’s not for everyone. I was with a group of fans in Yorkshire watching Dark Water together. One fan shook his head at the conclusion and decried the episode as “totally tasteless.” My reaction: “So?” Doctor Who has tangentially been about death for a very long time and here it explores what comes after life head on. We start with Clara’s furious reaction to Danny’s ordinary death and the scene by the volcano sees the most explosive display of fireworks between our two leads, Capaldi’s Doctor ever more aggressive and strident. His later forgiveness, when has asks Clara, “Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?” is a stark and emotive reminder of  the kindness of this most troubled Time Lord. We are allowed some humour too: there’s the merciless Steve Jobs gag, the “breathe into a bag” gag and the “we’ve got a burner” gag, as well as my favourite: “Why? Was he an idiot?” But under all the jokes, Steven Moffat presents us with the worrying world of the Nethersphere. Danny Pink being presented with the Afghan boy he accidentally killed in service is as troubling and horrible as Doctor Who gets. The Cybermen in their glass tombs and parading down the steps of St Paul’s is classic series imaginary brought to vivid life for a new series of fans. The reveal of Missy’s identity is a masterstroke. The change of gender means we would never have guessed and Michelle Gomez is so utterly captivating that her sex doesn’t matter one jot. In the second episode, we witness the horrifying sight of Kate Stewart being pulled from a moving plane, flailing her limbs as she is swept into the night sky. The Doctor screams and a dreadful horror begins to hang in the air: the Master is winning. The death of Danny Pink and the long scenes in the graveyard are full of despair. The Doctor’s speech that “he had a friend once. We ran together when we were young. And I thought we were the same. But when we grow up we weren’t,” is the story of anyone’s childhood friendship. The Cyber Brig is a final literal salute to a character who has hung over the modern show from its sidelines and this acts as a moving and welcome goodbye. But there are moments of triumph too: the Doctor’s flight to the TARDIS is heart-poundingly exciting and his realisation that he is “an idiot” elicits this incarnation’s first genuine smile. But as the Doctor and Clara separate at the journey’s end, there is a sense of the mournful, the depressing. It’s an odd note to end a series on but is all the more unique and memorable for it. Sad is happy for deep people. This is Doctor Who written by Steven Moffat for himself. This is Doctor Who for adults. This is the most mature and harrowing season finale of them all and perhaps the greatest Doctor Who story ever told.

JH