10
Series 6
During Series 5, fans were
thrilled by the fact that a future version of the Doctor from The Big Bang waltzes up in Flesh and Stone, eight episodes earlier,
without ceremony, just dropped in. Actually, they shouted an awful lot about
how clever and brassy a move it was (ignoring the fact that the dialogue
doesn’t really work, The Big Bang
being written a good while later). But Steven Moffat got the message:
timey-wimey was the order of the day and so Series 6 was based around one giant
astronaut-shaped loop… and it doesn’t really work. It’s far less than the sum
of its parts, its reach extending far further than its capacity. The Impossible Astronaut, Day of the Moon,
The Rebel Flesh, The Almost People, A Good Man Goes to War, Let’s Kill Hitler,
parts of Closing Time and finally The Wedding of River Song all form an
important part of the overall story of the season, which to be frank, isn’t all
that engaging: the Doctor definitely WILL NOT be killed on that beach; we just
have to work out how he gets out of it. Which we don’t need to because the
solution is spoilered instantly when the Teselecta turns up in the Previously On Doctor Who montage at the
beginning of the finale. None of these episodes can be enjoyed in isolation and
once their secrets are revealed, there’s nothing much left to thrill at.
Stand-alone stories include The Curse of
the Black Spot and Night Terrors
(both very poor), the overwrought and overwritten Girl Who Waited and the massively over-rated Doctor’s Wife. Series 6’s biggest offence however, is in its casual
take on the kidnapping of a baby. Amy and Rory are not shown to give much of a
toss. When Night Terrors comes along,
they’ve happily forgotten about the loss of their daughter and are having fun
with boy George instead. Why they hell they aren’t making demands of the Doctor
who has singularly failed to explain why he hasn’t found Melody is beyond me.
The Theft of River Song story simply doesn’t ring true. It’s adolescent and
ill-considered. The season does have its moments, of course. Day of the Moon’s pre-titles sequence is
majestic. Closing Time is
understatedly wonderful and The God
Complex is amazingly well shot. Which goes to show that even when Doctor
Who is overstretching itself, it can still pack a punch.
9
Series 9
When Steven Moffat announced that
the show was going to two-parters, many (myself included) were delighted.
Finally, the traditional 4-part structure of yesteryear could make a return!
There was the tantalising thought that stories could be edited down to
25-minute instalments and sit happily alongside the classic series. However,
what was never considered was that the sluggish pace of some of these stories
and the flatness of their direction meant that they wouldn’t hold a torch to
the best of the classic series. Steven Moffat opens the season with his version
of Genesis of the Daleks, which is
boring, drab and lacking in energy, despite some terrific scenes between Julian
Bleach and Peter Capaldi. Under the Lake
and Before the Flood are perhaps more
like what fans had in mind (exciting, traditional bases-under-siege), but then
we’re into The Girl Who Died/The Woman
Who Lived and The Zygon
Invasion/Inversion which sap all the breeziness and froth from the series
and make it arduous to get through. Even Face
the Raven drags in the middle. Things obviously pick up with Heaven Sent, although after a series of
slow, introverted stories, it’s perhaps not the best time to tell this tale of
one man’s solitary grief. The spark, the vim, the very essence of the show
isn’t there during much of Series 9 and it was a blessed relief to find it back
with abundance in Series 10. Even the titles in Series 9 are flat and
uninviting. Honestly, The Girl Who Died
and The Woman Who Lived?! And who
exactly are the Magician’s Apprentice and the Witch’s Familiar? What could be a
tantalising fan mystery is met with a disaffected shrug of the shoulders simply
because the story it chooses to tell just isn’t very good.
8
Series 4
Series 4 climaxed with Journey’s End, officially the Number One
Most Watched Programme of the Week. Well, there’s no accounting for taste. The
public tuned in for Time-Flight too.
Series 4 marked the apotheosis of David Tennant’s time as the Doctor and was
perhaps the best publicly received of all Russell T Davies’s series, perhaps of
every series ever. It’s broad, populist
and fun, there can be no doubt. There are also moments of excellence such as Turn Left and The Unicorn and the Wasp. Forest
of the Dead too is avant-garde and hugely ambitious. Midnight is a brilliant last-minute addition to the stories on
offer this year. But many of the remaining tales suffer. The Doctor’s Daughter is perhaps the 21st century low. Planet of the Ood has a stack of
problems. There’s a cynical feeling that Partners
in Crime and The Fires of Pompeii
are a re-tread of a successful formula which is already out of date. Whilst The Stolen Earth is thrilling in its
returning elements, reckless pace, epic scale and nation-changing cliff-hanger,
Journey’s End truly disappoints to
the point of embarrassment, with Freema Agyeman’s Martha smiling at the camera as she pilots the TARDIS the final twist of the knife. What’s more, there is one big problem at the
heart of this season which is truly lauded elsewhere in fandom: Catherine Tate.
Sorry, but she’s just not all that good an actress and her and David Tennant
make for the least dynamic TARDIS crew since the series’ return. At the climax
of Turn Left she’s unbearably
screaming her way through scenes. Yes, she can deliver the goods when it comes
to the comedy, her mime through the window in Partners in Crime the highlight of the episode but ultimately she’s
a very average performer and after the love story with Rose and the unrequited
love story with Martha, her narrative journey simply isn’t as interesting. Thank God she brought Bernard Cribbins with her, who is delightful in every scene. Series 4 does have its very high points for sure, but there’s a lot of
middling conveyor-built Who here too.
7
Series 7
Definitely a game of two halves
is Series 7. The first half, despite its weird title sequences and uneven
tonality, is easily the best. The first three scripts really do feel like
Doctor Who films, fulfilling this series’ agenda to tell a movie every week.
Those opening stories sing and it feels like Doctor Who has got its mojo back. The Power of Three is off-beat but
stumbles (for various behind the scenes reasons) at the final hurdle, and The Angels Take Manhattan suffers as an
ending for Amy and Rory because it’s not quite sure of its time travelling
rules and the emotional pay-off is muddied by the technobabble. Rather than cry
with our heroes, we’re busy working out what just happened. But 3 out of 5
sure-fire hits ain’t bad. There’s a lot to like in the second half of the
series, with Clara stepping aboard the TARDIS but not all that much to love.
The new, sparkly titles with their very solid TARDIS and Matt Smith’s face in
the stars are beautiful though! The Bells
of Saint John and The Name of the
Doctor make for terrific examples of season openers and finales, but
in-between, there are half-finished ideas and not-quite-working scripts put
through the production machine too early. Journey
to the Centre of the TARDIS is a mess, The
Rings of Akhaten is repetitive and Nightmare
in Silver isn’t sure what story it wants to tell. The Crimson Horror is a stand-out episode although it’s so atypical
that by this point in the season it feels like a more regular episode of good
Doctor Who would be preferable. Still, the stories have great variety and
there’s always something new to look at every week with Series 7. It feels
fresher and more dynamic than Series 6 and truly manages to illustrate the
breadth of the Doctor Who universe. It also pleasingly starts with a giant
Dalek and finishes with a giant TARDIS.
6
Series 5
Matt Smith’s first season proved,
it proof were needed, that Doctor Who could survive and indeed be brilliant
without David Tennant or Russell T Davies. The
Eleventh Hour will forever be the episode to beat in terms of a Doctor’s
inaugural adventure. The whole series looks beautiful, its colour palette bold
and crisp. It has moments of great beauty, the final ten minutes of Vincent and the Doctor providing
something truly special and The Lodger understatedly
charming throughout. The Time of Angels and
Flesh and Stone represent
traditional, action-thriller Doctor Who and doesn’t stop for breath. It’s terrifically
well shot to boot. Yes, the series has its shortfalls, the fat Daleks among
them. The Beast Below and Victory of the Daleks are doubly
disappointing after the great monolith that is The Eleventh Hour. The Hungry
Earth and Cold Blood feel compromised
and unspectacular due to budgetary issues and to have two low-cost episodes (Amy’s Choice and The Lodger) in the one season, even episodes as good as these two
gems, feels uneven. However, we end with The
Pandorica Opens (utterly compelling) and The Big Bang, the most original series finale up to that point. It
must be mentioned too in any discussion of Series 5 just how magnificent Matt
Smith is. Given enormous pressure, he puts in the most creative, charming,
mercurial and unpredictable of all his performances. I love this gentler, more
innocent take on his Doctor and I wish he’d stuck around for the next two
years. This is easily his best performance. Despite a few mis-steps, Series 5
showed the world that Doctor Who was here to stay. Forever.
5
Series 10
Steven Moffat’s last hurrah and
quite unexpectedly he starts all over again, with the story of a mysterious
university professor who’s been on campus more than 70 years. To be honest, the
story of the mysterious professor never really ends, rather it gets forgotten
about. But after the sometimes stultifying Series 9, this is so fresh and full
of new-found energy and purpose, it’s easy to disregard that fact. And when the
series ends with World Enough and Time and
The Doctor Falls, it feels churlish and
a little foolish to criticise it for not being more about a mysterious
professor in a university. Like Series 7, there’s enough stand-alone content
here to feel the vast breadth of the series across its episodes. The future is
represented as both the utopia of Smile
and the dystopia of Oxygen within
three episodes. There’s Scottish folklore and Victorians on Mars, the Thames
winter frost fair and even Sydney Opera House. In Bill Potts, we have the
perfect, wide-eyed (relative) innocent to run through the cosmos with. This is
a fun, free-wheeling ride of a series and even if it doesn’t stick quite to the
narrative rules of how a season arc ought
to progress, it’s all the better for it.
4
Series 3
Easily the best of Russell T
Davies’s “story arcs,” the Harold Saxon narrative is weaved with supreme
dexterity throughout the series. It provides cliff-hangers to The Lazarus Experiment and 42, becoming an integral part of the
overall tale in a way that mentions of Torchwood or vanishing bees simply
don’t. The huge cleverness at the heart of the series is the fact that Martha
must not recognise the Master as the Prime Minister she’d known from as early
as Smith and Jones, so Russell T
Davies invents a new Master on Malcassairo – the ever-divine Derek Jacobi – and
ties his story into the otherwise
unrelated Human Nature via the fob
watch. There are so many links in this narrative chain, that the episodes
become utterly co-dependent but prove massively enjoyable in their own right
(and can thus be watched individually) in a way that Series 6 couldn’t manage
later. Last of the Time Lords may be
a leap too far for some and to be honest a Gollum Doctor doesn’t sit right with
me, but the series makes up for it in those last few minutes of Utopia, in Blink, in Gridlock, in
Martha Jones’s mature self-realisation, in Captain Jack’s bravado return, in
the Lazarus monster, in the Judoon. There is so much greatness in Series 3, the
fact that its finale falls short of expectation, in the end, doesn’t really
matter.
3
Series 2
Funny how this series has begun
to sink slightly in fan estimation, when it consists of such strong material
and was so adoringly received at the time. The run from Tooth and Claw to The Girl in
the Fireplace is probably the finest consecutive triplet since the show
returned. The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit form an out-and-out
masterpiece. Doomsday is a vividly
exciting gut-punch of a finale. The story of the parallel worlds is written
across the season beautifully, the loose ends from The Age of Steel tied up by the series’ conclusion. Love & Monsters in its off-beat
confidence is a massively underappreciated gem. There are lows of course: The Idiot’s Lantern, Fear Her and (aside from its stonking
cliff-hanger) Army of Ghosts are all
rather drab affairs. But the highs more than make up for these blips. The Rise of the Cybermen climax is
quintessential, edge-of-the-seat Doctor Who, and it’s not even the best the
show has to offer. Ultimately, it’s the heart-breaking conclusion to Rose’s
story (which should never have been rekindled in Series 4) which lingers in the
memory far longer than the closing credits. This is the Doctor Who which people
will talk about in generations to come: “Remember the One with the Werewolf and
Queen Victoria. Remember the One with the Devil Inside the Planet. Remember the
One on the Beach.” “Yes,” they’ll reply. Because they definitely will.
2
Series 1
No one could have predicted it.
No one would have dared to predict it. Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner, Phil
Collinson and certainly Mal Young didn’t even come close to predicting it.
Doctor Who came back in 2005 to absolute rapture. It was beloved by everyone in
an instant and every narrative decision made on that first series was perfect.
No Time Lords, Daleks enter half-way through, no Cybermen, no Master, the
TARDIS translation circuits, Rose’s footprint in the snow, no alien planets, no
“sci-fi” CG effect for the sonic screwdriver. It comes down to the tiny details
like that. This is as user-friendly as Doctor Who has ever been. It looks (and
often sounds a lot) like Shameless.
There is a richness to the scope and colour of the stories (from 1869, through
1984 to 200,100) but a directness of purpose: this is the story of Rose and her
encounter with the Doctor, her Lone Ranger. This is a story about the human
race in all its forms and its past, present and future brilliance. It’s about
steak and chips as much as it’s about the Game Station. Yes, there are some
production blunders (the Slitheen costumes, some naff CGI, Noel Clarke) but the
show has such a strong idea of what it wants to be that even if the costumiers
or the FX boys or even Chris Eccleston (who simultaneously blazes and bombs)
don’t, it’s still got Success running
through it like rock. This was the return of a legend and the legend, for once,
was the truth.
1
Series 8
Uncelebrated, even unremarked upon,
Series 8, for my money, is the most mature and well-written Doctor Who series
of all time. The dynamics aboard the TARDIS for once feel like real drama. Just
watch the end of Kill the Moon: that
interplay between Clara Oswald and the Doctor is perhaps the most real moment –
or as real as Doctor Who can possibly be – of drama between any time travellers
of the past 55 years. It’s striking how much more genuine Clara seems this year
compared to the series before and even the series after. She’s a teacher with a
life on Earth which has a fractious, damaging relationship with her life beyond
it. The deception at play between her and Danny is at times nail-biting. The
great tragedy of the series’ ongoing story is of course that Clara really does love
Danny. But she also really loves the adventures. And she simply cannot decide
which is more important to her because often in life, we just can’t. The
decision is made for Clara when Danny is unexpectedly killed, although even in
death he has his own demon to face: the Afghan boy from his army days. Clara
does get a chance to say goodbye in the graveyard, a long scene brimming with
sadness. But for once in Doctor Who this is not a romantic sadness, or a sci-fi
sadness, this is close to despair. As Kate Stewart flies from the presidential
plane, the Doctor’s cries signal his own desperation too and his later speech
about having “a friend once” is replete with anguish. The finale is doom-laden
and tragic and ends with a great gulf of emptiness, not knowing quite what our
heroes will do next. Last Christmas forms
a vital part of the season (unlike most other Christmas Specials and broadcast only
a few weeks later), acting as coda, wrapping up those dangling emotional threads,
grieving for Danny and for Gallifrey, bringing the Doctor and Clara back
together again. The series also puts out some solid gold stand-alone tales: Mummy on the Orient Express, Into the Dalek, Deep Breath, the massively under-rated and hysterically funny Robot of Sherwood and Time Heist to name but a few. Only In the
Forest of the Night lets the series down and that because its very concept
is ill-conceived. Yes, trees invade London but where are all the people? It
simply doesn’t convince. Still, amongst such dramatic giants, the story feels
insignificant and doesn’t detract from a season of such incredible quality. There
are some blistering directorial debuts too: Ben Wheatley’s direction on Deep Breath and Into the Dalek is truly cinematic, both using vividly different
colour palettes and painting vividly different worlds. He even manages to shoot
the Daleks differently. Rachel Talalay provides a superbly shot finale
cementing her reputation as the Capaldi Director from here on in. And Peter Capaldi
is completely, astonishingly good as the Doctor. Jenna Coleman is completely, astonishingly
good as Clara and the cliff-hanger on the steps of Saint Paul’s is as exciting
and vital as Doctor Who can ever hope to be. The series may dabble with darker
ideas and be a little less family-friendly than others, but for one year only,
it didn’t matter. Because Series 8 remains stunning. It is as beautiful a body of work as any HBO series. The Half-Face Man says, "We will find the Promised Land." On this evidence, I think Doctor Who already has.
JH
