Goodbye, Fifteenth Doctor. Hope to see you soon, Doctor Who

A clumsy finale should not overshadow a cleverly written season and a fantastic protagonist

Recency bias being what it is, viewers of this season of Doctor Who (season 2 or 15 or 41, depending on how much of a completist you want to be) will probably keep a stronger impression of the subpar conception and execution of its finale than of the much better ideas explored through the preceding episodes. This is unfortunate at a time when the show's future is still an open question. There's the upcoming miniseries The War Between the Land and the Sea, but how BBC and Disney executives will end up weighing the worth of the franchise is anyone's guess.

The first half of the finale, "Wish World," is actually a strong start, which if anything worsens the disappointment to follow. In this episode, the Rani locates the most powerful of the gods, the one who grants wishes, and pairs him with a disgruntled conspiracy theorist who embodies all the annoying traits of the manosphere. Together they transform Earth into a cisheteronormative dystopia so transparently fragile that mere disbelief destabilizes the foundations of its reality.

This is an interesting way of exploring the incongruity of contemporary fascism: it is so contrary to human nature that it needs a continuous, exhausting pretense to stay barely functional. Of course, the Doctor (particularly this Doctor) loses no time in rebelling against such a bland and boring life, and that's precisely what the Rani is counting on: the Doctor's disbelief has the power to completely break down reality, and beneath the cracks is the hidden dimension from where she hopes to rescue Omega, the banished founder of Time Lord society. This reveal leads to "The Reality War" and the quick unraveling of what up to that point was a promising plot.

The Rani and Omega are so underutilized in this two-parter that they could easily have been replaced by new characters without changing anything about the plot. It's not like these two had a lot of runtime in classic Doctor Who, but their weight in terms of lore deserved a more expanded treatment in their reintroduction. Instead, we get a rehash of "The End of Time" from 2010, when the Master almost helped the Time Lords return to our universe, only for the Doctor to slam the door in their faces. Replace "Master" with "Rani" and "Time Lords" with "Omega" and you get the idea. Once that problem is dispatched, there's still a lot of episode left, and it's dedicated to what actually mattered all along: the fate of Poppy, the little daughter of this season's companion Belinda.

We first met Poppy in "Wish World" as a putative child of the Doctor and Belinda, and the dilemma at the end of "The Reality War" is that restoring the baseline reality might delete Poppy from existence. After a barrage of technobabble, the Doctor saves both reality and Poppy, at the cost of one of his lives, and then learns that Poppy isn't actually related to him. This is a notable difference between the style of current showrunner Russell T Davies and that of his predecessor Steven Moffat: whereas Moffat relied too often on giving supporting characters a cosmic destiny, Davies is more comfortable with letting them be ordinary people. Even when companion Rose Tyler became the Bad Wolf, or companion Donna Noble became the DoctorDonna, they immediately had to be depowered for their own protection.

Also, the resolution of Poppy's story follows a thematic line that has been present since Davies's return to Doctor Who: stories about lost children. Episodes like "The Church on Ruby Road" and "Space Babies" were the most obvious examples, but if you look closely, all through these two seasons with the Fifteenth Doctor there have been various iterations of a child separated from their parents or vice versa. Davies has taken the thread left by the Chibnall era, which redefined the character of the Doctor as a lost child, and extended it to a point where it could connect with one of Davies's own signature moves: giving the Doctor a cosmically small but personally meaningful reason to sacrifice his life. In 2005's "The Parting of the Ways," after the Daleks have already been defeated, his Ninth Doctor still chooses to die to save Rose. In 2010's "The End of Time," after the Time Lords have already been defeated, his Tenth Doctor still chooses to die to save Wilfred. Likewise, in "The Reality War," after Omega has already been defeated, his Fifteenth Doctor still chooses to die to save Poppy.

Despite this neat bow with which Davies ties up the seam between Chibnall's work and his own, the execution of the season finale is too chaotic to be satisfying. The Time Hotel from "Joy to the World" makes an entrance as a deus ex machina, only to quickly be swept to the side for the rest of the episode with no more function than dropping an obvious tease for future plots; Rose Noble literally appears out of thin air as a didactic device and does nothing else; Susan Foreman's random appearance in "Wish World" is left hanging in the air; and Belinda is put in a box for most of the final battle. In fact, the way Belinda's arc concludes comes off as too underwhelming for the symbolic importance it should have. During the entire season, she provided an interesting counterpoint to the usual Doctor/companion dynamic, in that she very emphatically did not want to explore the universe. Her vehement urge to return home raised the question: what could be so important in your normal life that you'd throw away a trip through time and space? The finale answers: she has a child, and that's more important to her than billions of galaxies. It's for that child's sake that she can't wait to leave the TARDIS. It's for that child's sake that the Doctor gives his life. It's a potent statement to close the season with. And yet, the final scene in Belinda's home, once the proper reality has been restored, presents us with a muted version of Belinda, without the energy and the spark that distinguished her character. She is more interesting to watch in all the episodes preceding the finale, which deserve a rewatching as great pieces of science fiction in their own right.

Finally, the return of Billie Piper in the last shot of the finale feels like a desperate choice, on the same level as David Tennant's return two years ago. Don't get me wrong; she's a great actress. But bringing her back at this precise moment gives off the vibe of a calculated tactic to wish the show into continued existence. It's hard to tell whether this idea came from Davies or from Disney; Davies has a known tendency to repeat himself, and Disney has a known tendency to be self-sabotagingly risk-averse. The worst thing that can happen to a show about an alien who can cheat death via endless reinvention is to get stuck replaying its greatest hits.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: The Infinite Miles

Meeting your idol can turn out better than expected 

I wonder if the urge to write time travel fiction somehow proceeded from the very act of remembering. Human languages have tenses for the past conditional and moods for the past subjunctive; we have always been able to imagine how things could have gone differently. We all have regrets, and they are painful; the resolution ‘to live life with no regrets’ would not be so common if it weren’t. Today, on the topic of time travel, we shall be discussing Hannah Fergesen’s (who uses they/them pronouns) novel The Infinite Miles, published by Blackstone Publishing in 2023.

The blurbs on this book keep comparing it to Doctor Who; as someone who has never watched Doctor Who, I am not in a position to properly judge that claim (yes, I am going to turn in my nerd card now). What it does have is time travel galore, and a memorably shaped mode of time travel, in this case a spaceship that can assume the form of any vehicle that is germane to its surroundings, such as a car on Earth or a broken-down spaceship on a lawless world where better ships are likely to be stolen (and that isn’t even the most clever of them). But Fergesen goes further than that; they wrote their story to get really, really meta, in a way that feels like a very nerdy twenty-first century take on Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

Your main character is Harper Starling, a college dropout who, not long before the events of the novel, had a nasty falling out with her oldest friend Peggy. Harper and Peggy bonded over their love of the widely acclaimed science fiction television show Infinite Odyssey, of which they have come to memorize large parts. Harper leaves a promising course of study at Columbia out of the pain that ensued from the breakup, and now lives in misery in a small apartment in New York, until she sees Peggy again. Peggy appears possessed by … something, and Harper doesn’t know what to do. She has to flee, Peggy in hot pursuit, until she stumbles into a series of events that lead her to be thrown back in time to the New York of 1971, not long before Infinite Odyssey premiered on television.

You can tell Fergesen put a lot of research into this book; there’s a way that they immerse you in the grimy reality of New York of 1971 that really gets under your skin, something like if Martin Scorsese was a regular attendee of a science fiction convention. They are attentive to smells and sounds and the differences in the way that people interact with each other, not all of them for the best. You are thrust into this world, with all its differences ripping you out of the twenty-first century, but it’s familiar enough you’re never too lost (it helps, of course, that the seventies are, as of writing, still in living memory). Time travel works don’t often treat the period in the later decades of the twentieth century as a destination for adventures, which gives the whole thing a somewhat jarring undertone that really works. It’s familiar enough to lull you into a false sense of security.

There’s a strong metatextual element here; there is a part of this book set at the world’s first Star Trek fan convention. Much of the book revolves around Harper and Peggy’s love of Infinite Odyssey, what it has meant to each of them, and to both of them collectively, and what they have on some level imposed onto it. This is about what it means to be a creator, and to be a fan, and what the interaction between those two categories mean. But, for everyone except the most shut-in, the media we consume frames how we interact with others, and everything in the plot puts their friendship to the test.

Fergesen is willing to play with the various manifestations of time travel a lot, and to great effect. There is a time when Harper meets the same character at two different times in the past, but two different instances of their travel, which is something that feels logical given the tropes of time travel but I can’t recall ever actually being used. More broadly, there is a willingness to interrogate just how much damage the careless use of time travel can do, be it to the timeline more broadly, or to actual individuals, including oneself. Time travel intersects with immortality in this novel, and it can warp one’s psyche in ways that can be very harmful to everybody.

Another strand of this novel is the idea of escaping. We have all wanted to escape our lives, if only briefly. We have all experienced pain that has brought us to that point. The Infinite Miles asks how possible that truly is, and if it is truly desirable to begin with. Whether you are Harper trying to escape into a television show, or a boy in rural Iowa wanting to go beyond the suffocating atmosphere of his family. In different ways, both characters get to see that, and then they see the consequences of it. Sometimes this is deeply painful, but other times it is awe-inspiring; not wanting to spoil much, but the best scene of this nature is set in a museum. Blended with the very modern concerns is Fergesen’s good grasp on the ingredients of that good old sense of wonder, especially when the novel starts to become a space opera, of sorts (no singing, unfortunately, but the libretto is pretty big).

The Infinite Miles is a book that, by the end, earns the sobriquet of ‘beautiful.’ It is not just the high adventure or the loving paean to being a nerd, but the human factor underlying it. Everyone who reads this will have some sort of loss, some sort of regret, that this novel will tug on. Fergesen takes the universal and clothes it in the garb of science fiction conventions and long hours spent binge-watching genre shows, and the end result is something I found to be very moving. I recommend this book very highly.

Also, the title’s a pun.

--

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Fergesen, Hannah The Infinite Miles [Blackstone, 2023]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

The Life and Times of the Fourteenth Doctor

The 60th anniversary episodes celebrate the show's history, but also change all the rules

Russell T Davies is back at the head of Doctor Who. When his return was first announced, in mid-2021, practically no one had seen it coming. He'd been responsible for resurrecting the show from oblivion in 2005 and turning it into a worldwide phenomenon by 2009, and after two successors at the helm, the prevailing view was that he had more than rendered his services. He had already built a lasting name for himself as the rescuer and reinventor of a pillar of science fiction TV. It would have seemed out of the question to ask more of him. And yet, that's what happened. Doctor Who under Chris Chibnall's guidance was in crisis. For all the progress and diversity he introduced to the show, Chibnall did severe damage to it with his bad writing habits. He demonstrated he has no sense of tension, or ensemble dynamics, or narrative pacing, or moral stakes. Someone in the BBC must have feared that cancellation was imminent, which explains the nuclear option of asking Davies to come to the rescue one more time.

Also back is David Tennant, and Catherine Tate, and the inelegantly unresolved plot thread of the ticking bomb in the DoctorDonna's brain. This is a big bet from Davies: The Star Beast, the first episode he wrote for the once-again-10th-but-somehow-also-14th Doctor is about going back and fixing a rather questionable choice the character made all the way back in a 2008 episode. The Star Beast takes its time to explain the situation to new viewers, but the full emotional impact of its resolution requires that you have previously watched, and still remember, the 2008 season finale Journey's End. In summary: the 10th Doctor's companion Donna Noble absorbes regeneration energy from a newborn clone of the Doctor, giving her all the knowledge of a Time Lord. However, that awesome mental power is too much for a human brain, so the Doctor uses his telepathic talents to erase Donna's memory and save her life. For years, that moment has been loudly criticized by the fans—and by the show itself, as seen in the 2015 season finale Hell Bent, written by Steven Moffat, where the 12th Doctor's companion Clara Oswald protests that he doesn't have the right to choose what she will and won't remember. Fast-forward to this year's The Star Beast, with the newly regenerated 14th Doctor coincidentally stumbling into the one thing he knows he must not do: cross paths with Donna and risk her remembering her adventures with him. Why revisit this plot point? Why now?

Bringing Tennant back was a potentially dangerous choice. In these times of chronic nostalgitis, it could easily have sent the wrong message to switch from the most diverse era of the show to the cherished glory days of early New Who. Fortunately, Tennant returned for just three episodes before ceding the stage to Ncuti Gatwa's 15th Doctor. Unfortunately, the manner in which Davies handled this particular regeneration is a bit too reverent to the older Doctor and a bit too disputable about the newer one. The same trolls who dismissed the first non-male Doctor now have an easy excuse to dismiss the first non-white Doctor because Tennant's incarnation is still around. Perhaps anticipating that response, the now more artistically mature Davies has gone out of his way to firmly position queerness at the center of The Star Beast. What ultimately saves the day is the fact that Donna had a child (thus sharing the burden of Time Lord knowledge), that that child turned out to be nonbinary (thus symbolically transcending the incompatibility between human and Gallifreyan biology) and that neither of them is afflicted by the traditionally male attachment for power (thus being able to willingly renounce the regeneration energy). The cherry on top of this cake is the unabashed unsubtlety of this episode's villain, a genocidal tyrant who pretends to be persecuted for his white skin. Just in case it wasn't clear what problem Davies is writing about.

Watching The Star Beast reveals an important theme that, in hindsight, was always present in the first Davies era: an obsession with duality and the dangers of rigidly opposed categories. This is related to the better-known theme that it's a terrible burden to be the Doctor, but it's even worse for someone else to take his place. In those years one could easily appreciate the mastery that Davies has over the art of season-long foreshadowing. The 2005 season builds up quickly escalating threats to companion Rose Tyler until the 9th Doctor has to sacrifice his life to save her from having absorbed too much power from the Time Vortex. The 2006 season is full of stories about loneliness and grief, culminating in the 10th Doctor's prophesied separation from Rose. The 2007 season redefines the Master as an equal to the Doctor, the only being in the universe who can understand him, and accordingly frames the death of this mastermind villain as a tragedy. Finally, the 2008 season turns Donna into an imperfect copy of the Doctor, one that cannot be allowed to exist. The unifying thread in the first Davies era is the Doctor's curse of uniqueness. There's an unbreakable wall between the Doctor and everyone else. That is the fatal binary that The Star Beast shatters joyfully.

Curiously, the following episode, the delightfully horrifying Wild Blue Yonder, reaffirms the idea that there are untold dangers in producing a copy of the Doctor. Davies had already hinted at this problem in the fantastic 2008 episode Midnight, and here again we have a shapeless alien entity from beyond the rules of reality attempting to steal the Doctor's identity. The same familiar idea is emphasized here: as hard as it is to be the Doctor, it's worse for someone else to try to become him. Which leads us to the grand finale in The Giggle, where the 14th Doctor's death results in a "bi-generation" that leaves us with two living Doctors. This is an old trick from Davies: the only other regeneration story he wrote, from 9th to 10th, also includes convoluted circumstances that lead to the creation of a clone of the Doctor. And, just like in Journey's End, the remedy to the Doctor's curse, the only way to dissolve the division between him and everyone else, is to divide the Doctor himself and let one member of the resulting pair settle down and embrace domestic bliss. It's a bad idea for someone else to become the Doctor, so the solution is for the Doctor to become someone else.

There's more symbolism, though, to read in The Giggle. Binary oppositions can also be understood as enmities, which makes it fitting that the villain of this episode is the embodiment of competition. The problems inherent to any system of mutually exclusive winners and losers give Davies an opportunity to flex his social critique muscles. To write a villain whose big plan is to turn the medium of television into a vehicle to unleash the worst traits of humanity is perhaps too on the nose, but it's also brilliant. As if borrowing a page from Kantian ethics, the episode demonstrates the undesirability of viewing the world in terms of winners and losers by showing what happens when everyone adopts that mindset. After such a profound statement, the Doctors' victory over the Toymaker in a simple game of catch may look too simple, even anticlimactic, but what matters in that scene is the symbolic content: competition is defeated by cooperation. Of course, as you must have noticed just now, that victory is in itself a binary event. The Doctors win; the Toymaker loses. But did the Toymaker really lose? As long as someone is a winner, the insidious influence of play still lingers.

So the show must go on: the 14th Doctor, still fresh from the unprocessed trauma of the Flux, is taking some time to reflect and heal, while the 15th flies off to keep saving the universe. It's no longer either/or. Regeneration doesn't have to be a binary event. Although we still don't know how many seasons will feature Gatwa in the role, for now Doctor Who is very much back in form.

Nerd Coefficient:

The Star Beast: 7/10.

Wild Blue Yonder: 8/10.

The Giggle: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

An Adventure in Space and Timesaving: How To Speed-Run 60 Years Of Doctor Who In 30(ish) Stories!

Today, in the lead-up to the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special, we're excited to run a guest post from Joseph Brant covering just what to watch from the show's extensive archives to be all caught up for this event. Joseph is a writer and editor who has worked on everything from toy fiction and game narrative, to esoteric mythology and pop culture titles. He also has an extensive collection of transforming robots and Sonic Screwdrivers. Find him on Twitter at @The_Macula or on Bluesky as @Macula.bsky.social.

Now that the entirety of Doctor Who has been made available on the BBC iplayer, and internationally, across Disney Plus, Max, and Britbox (Until Disney pull everything together) the rather daunting array of Doctors, time periods, and classic monsters unfurls like the infinite expanses of space and time. If you are coming to the series as a fan of “Modern Who” (from Christopher Ecclestone onwards), or even completely fresh to the world of rogue Timelords, reversed polarities and robot dogs, how do you get the most out of access to all this content?

I mean the obvious answer is to watch all of it! It’s not quite as daunting as it first appears. Yes, it is 60 years’ worth of content, but the BBC did a poor job of preserving a lot of the early stories, and whilst some, like The Faceless Ones and The Power of The Daleks have been recreated as animations, others have just been lost forever to the bins behind broadcasting house. There were also two very long hiatuses for the series. The first between the end of Sylvester McCoy’s run as the Doctor, which finished in 1989, and the one-off TV movie in 1996, which saw Paul McGann in the title role. An outing so spectacular, that nobody felt able to make another episode for almost 10 years.

So yes. There is a lot, and whilst there will be Whovians across the planet who will tell you every second has its own merits, if you were to sit down, and play the whole lot back to back, without sleep, food or bathroom breaks, you’d still not be able to watch it in its entirety before the first of the three 60th anniversary episodes airs on November 25th.  So, what I have here, is a quintessential watchlist, to take you from the Doctors’ first appearance to the last regeneration and give you a taste of how the series has developed over its long history.

My rules were simple:

• There must be content from every Doctor.
• Every regeneration gets a free pass, but I won’t necessarily be covering the appearance and departure of every assistant. 
• I won’t otherwise include the animated episodes because at the time of writing I am not sure if they’ll be included. (editor's note: all animated episodes have since been uploaded to iPlayer with the exception of "The Abominable Snowmen")
• I’ll try to keep our personal tastes out of it… which is of course impossible, but you need to hold up these pretences.

An Unearthly Child

First aired on 23rd November 1963. This silly little kids’ history series was completely overshadowed by the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy, and it was only by the producers insistence of a repeat that the British public really got to know the crotchety William Hartnell. A fugitive timelord, hiding out in a scrapyard with his granddaughter, evading responsibility, justice, or library fines. It’s never made entirely clear.

Seemingly on a whim, or just to show off, The Doctor, his granddaughter, and her two secondary school teachers are whizzed back to ancient Earth, where they meet a Neanderthal tribe, and somehow avoid rewriting all human history ala the Sound of Thunder. We see the Tardis for the first time, with its dimension warping interior, get the ‘Cleverer than Everyone’ Doctor running a tight line between trying to help, and trying to stay distant, and of course, quizzical companions asking all the right questions so we can have the plot explained to us. That first episode also ends with the looming shadow of a Neanderthal, ready to bring a rock down on our heroes’ heads, letting us know that this show is not here to mess around.

There is still actually some concern whether this very important episode will be in the package, with the current rights holder (Anthony Coburn’s son) arguing that the deal he was offered being ‘a pittance’, but also, quite publicly decrying the casting of female and black actors as The Doctor. If this is not sorted out (Editor: it wasn't), I'll point out that the DVD of these episodes is still knocking around on Ebay for about a fiver.

The Daleks

Running straight on from An Unearthly Child (I promise, this is NOT a list of all the episodes ever), is The Daleks. Possibly the most recognisable characters most from the show, even more so than the titular Doctor. This is the story that introduces the hate-driven fascist little pepper pots with their menacing laser blasters, and slightly less menacing kitchen-sink plunger arms. The story sees The Doctor and his companions landing on a petrified planet, where they make their way to a great metal city, inhabited by robotic creatures with a gooey centre, who are planning to enact the final stages of their war with the planet’s other inhabitants, The Thals. Directed by Christopher Barry, and written by Terry Nation, this really is Doctor Who at full pace right from the start. Allegorising the Nazi exterminations in the least subtle of ways, whilst The Doctor still seeks the most peaceful solution, what sticks with you is how perfect the Daleks are right off the bat. The voices, the movement, the shape is all pretty much intact from here to the very latest Dalek episodes. In fact, this story was considered so perfect an encapsulation of the characters, that it was later reworked into the script of the first Doctor Who movie, starring Peter Cushing and Bernard Cribbins (more on him later).

The Tenth Planet

Here we meet our first sticky spot with regard to missing episodes. The last story to feature William Hartnell as the regular Doctor, it is also the first to feature The Doctor’s other major enemy, The Cybermen. This story has the Doctor and associates stuck in the Antarctic, in the futuristic year of 1986, studying a mysterious Tenth Planet, which we discover is the home of the heavily augmented race of Cybermen, who plan to drain the energy of Earth to prolong the life of their own dying planet. Unlike the Daleks, the Cybermen have evolved through their appearances in Doctor Who, and this first iteration of bodystockings, camera parts, and space accordion doesn’t quite scream “Inhuman Terror”. The “Base Under Siege” storyline would be one DW would return to time and again, but this was the story around which the cookie cutter was formed! 

The showrunners had long realised that Hartnell’s failing health was as much a risk to the show, as the show was becoming a risk to him, and the first regeneration was a masterstroke of genius born of necessity. The effect itself may have been simple (bleaching out the white balance and coming back with the new actor in an identical pose), but it was a defining moment for the series, both preserving the format for way longer than any actor’s natural lifespan, but also saving the show from fits of artistic temperament, ill health, or any other barriers usually caused by lead actors. I don’t know whether we will get to see the “stills and scans” reproduction of the final episode, or the Area 51 animation, but without doubt, an iconic moment for the Doctor.

The War Games

It seems a bit cruel to fast forward through Patrick Troughton’s run so quickly. As the “funny little space hobo”, his tenure as the Doctor brought so much to the series. The first use of a sonic screwdriver, the ‘Cassandra Effect’ of being spot on with regards alien invasions, or impending doom, whilst also being completely disbelieved until a Cyberman had his hands around the naysayer’s throat. Again though, so much of these stellar series was binned, recorded over, or otherwise destroyed by a space-saving BBC. The War Games is one of the few stories to survive in its entirety, and what an entirety! 

An impressive 10-episode story which probably took the entire backlog of BBC Costume’s war fatigues, to create a training ground where an alien race have been helping themselves to Earth’s finest soldiers, in order to cherry pick an elite fighting force to take over the Galaxy. This rather epic production sees the Doctor overwhelmed for the first time, especially when he realises that he is being pitted against another renegade Time Lord. This feels like a mixture of an epic finale, and a reigning in of the series, as the Doctor must put out a call to those forces which he has spent six seasons desperately avoiding, his own people. The longer series allowed some proper screen time with Jamie, the Highland warrior, and Zoe, an astrophysicist from the 21st Century, and the first of a line of forward thinking female companions, though this series would ultimately see them both returned to their own places in space and time, whilst the Doctor gets one of the most unique regeneration scenes in all of Who, and lays down the lore that fans would argue about for decades.

Terror Of The Autons

Wait a minute! That’s a whole first series of John Pertwee missed out! What happened to Spearhead From Space? Whilst Pertwee’s first outing as the Doctor is a fun jaunt, including his stealing of a new set of clothing from a pompous surgeon general, and Bessie, the first of two ‘Whomobiles’ our newly earthbound Doctor is forced to adopt rather than the trusty Tardis, that first series always felt like a kludgy mess as they tried to find a balance between suave, smart and sciency. Desperate to tap into James Bond Chic but trying not to look like a rehash of Adam Adamant, which shared a lot of the shows’ DNA. Terror of the Autons brings back the terrifying villains of Spearhead in Space, with the living plastic Nestene Consciousness. Here, not just limited to living shop dummies, but also killer toys. More importantly though, this story also introduces another renegade Time Lord, The Master. 

Breaking up the pattern of “aliens get the upper hand till the Doctor shows off how clever he is”, the Master acts almost as the Anti-Doctor, able to match wits and better the Doctor at his own game. Played here by the brilliant Roger Delgardo, this foil to the Doctor really sat well with Pertwee’s secret agent vibe. He would return throughout the Third Doctor’s run, providing a sort of overarching story, but here it’s just fun to watch him chewing up the scenery.

The Curse Of Peladon/The Monster Of Peladon
A bit of a cheat, listing two stories at once, but this was the first time that Doctor Who, a show about time travel, really strayed into the whole Wibbly-Wobbly-Timey-Wimey thing, having the Doctor time-jump 50 years on from hist first attempts to save a planet, and discover that his fixes may need running repairs. In the same way that so many fans love Star Wars’ Cantina scene, for its mixture of alien life forms, this is classic Who’s attempt at showing the diversity of alien life, bringing in Martian Ice Warriors, disembodied heads, and the rather peculiar looking Alpha Centauri, from Alpha Centauri. The first of these stories takes obvious influence from Britain’s attempts to join the EEC (back when Brexit sounded like a breakfast cereal), and the second, from the Miners’ Strike, which interrupted so much of the broadcast of Curse. Still, we didn’t hear anything then about Doctor Who being too political.

Robot
Technically Pertwee’s last outing as the Big D till The Five Doctors. This began what many consider to be a golden age of Doctor Who, the Tom Baker Years. Robot itself is a definite follow-on from the Third Doctor adventures, with the freshly regenerated Doctor, still in a state of confusion, helping UNIT out against an earthbound threat. Yup, it’s the Fascists again. Here, using an unstoppable robot to steal parts of a doomsday machine, hold the world to ransom, etc, etc, before realising he has remembered how to pilot the Tardis, and heading off into space, with Sarah Jane Smith, and UNIT officer Harry Sullivan in tow, for a ‘Best of Doctor Who Villains’ tour, meeting the Cybermen, Daleks, and Sontarans all in short order). It’s a real treat to see how a standing cast of characters react to the absolute lunatic left turn of Tom Baker’s Doctor, letting the oddity settle in before we get a new direction for the series. This also sees Terrance Dicks back in the writer’s chair after a five-year sabbatical. A fan favourite, and a definite indicator of the more “spacey” direction the series would take.

Destiny Of the Daleks

Tom Baker had the most years in the Tardis of the Classic Who Era, and it would be easy enough to fill this list with his exploits. Disclosure time. This is not only my favourite Doctor, and favourite story, but the one that first introduced me to this franchise, which it did with such force, I find it hard to believe that any other story could have as big a hook for a new fan as this.

Destiny Of the Daleks is such a perfect storm of Doctor Who tropes and sigils. We obviously have the pearly toothed Tom Baker, tinkering in the opening scenes with K9, the robotic dog he picked up during The Invisible Enemy. We have the previously introduced Time Lord (Lady) Romana burning through regenerations like trying on outfits, until we have Lalla Ward, an actress who had turned up in the previous episode but had such chemistry with Tom that they went on to feature in 11 more stories, and a very stormy marriage.

We have the filming in a disused quarry just outside Reading (the home from home for Doctor Who, due to BBC’s budget limitations), and of course, we have the Daleks. Breaking through trembling sheets of black plexiglass and terrifying the viewers, whilst the Doctor is quick to point out their rubbish rope climbing ability and enters battles of wits with robots armed only with a packet of Jelly Babies. It’s raucous, dark, and humorous in ways that could only be provided by the stand-in showrunner, Douglas Adams. Still riding high on the success of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams is quick to drop easter eggs and references throughout the story, none of which ever really detract from the impending danger.

Logopolis

Not everything on this list is “good”. Some of it really is there to show you the ever-shifting pattern of the show. Logopolis is quite a technical slog, starting with the Doctor ignoring a call to aid by the Time Lords, and instead focussing on a running repair to the Tardis. It ends up involving The Master, Time Loops, and plucking a helpless airline stewardess out of the timestream, all to get that particular cast onto a planet, to stabilise the McGuffin of the week into something The Master can use to hold the whole Galaxy to ransom. This is the fullest the Tardis has been since the early days of Hartnell and paves the way for the ‘Scooby Gang’ mentality that dogged Jodie Whitaker’s tenure. I mean obviously, this is the start of Nyssa/Tegan, and has one of the most peculiar, visceral regenerations, but I almost feel like including it as evidence that not all of Dr Who is great, and sometimes we just have to accept the shoe-leather.

Earthshock

A series that wholly divides fans but is included for two reasons. The first being the evolution of the Cybermen. By this point, the suits seem far sleeker, with big shoulder pads, Perspex chest plates, deep Darth Vader voices, and all in all, lending themselves far more to action figure production. The awakening of the Cyber Army is a great scene, and the inclusion of the Cyber Leader builds up all that yummy lore. The second reason for its inclusion is… and this is spoilers… the death of a companion. It’s the first time we really hear about fixed events in spacetime, and the limitations of the Doctor. Where we’ve seen the Doctor use up one of his many lives, for the greater good, it’s never really hit us the way, especially when we see the Doctor powerless to help, and his other travelling companions realise that not everything can be fixed by the Doctor.

The Caves of Androzani

Sometimes, one of Doctor Who’s saving graces, is its ability to dip into other genres. From action adventure and murder mystery to gothic horror, Androzani is probably the closest we get to a Whovian Phantom of the Opera. Whilst on the surface, we have a civil war over a Dune-inspired life prolonging substance, the Mysterious Jek, one of the only ‘one-time villains’ I mention here, skulks in his underground lair, masked and lusting after the Doctor’s assistant. It’s a darker tone, and honestly, that could be said of all of Davidson’s adventures, that it’s summer dappled adventure with some dark, dark shadows. We do also see a good proportion of self-sacrifice and basic heroisms from the Fifth Doctor, as well as a wonderfully back-planned explanation for why he’s got a stick of celery pinned to his coat. 

The Two Doctors

Yes, the two doctors. Not the five doctors, not the three, but the two.

Multidoctor episodes are rather a mixed bag, offering up plenty of fan service for long time devotees, but also a lot of set vignettes, with little holding them together. Also, the numbering can be misleading. The Three Doctors was predominantly Patrick Troughton and John Pertwee mucking about, whilst William Hartnell was wheeled out to make a few cutting remarks, and The Five Doctors took a handful of shots from Shada to excuse Tom Baker’s absence, and yet he was included in the count. The Two Doctors is a wonderfully balanced story, pitching the harried, supercilious Colin Baker against the rather laid back Troughton, and then having the genius move of swapping their assistants. It’s a wonderful retrospective of the changes in the series, and definitely the best multidoctor story of classic Who.

Revelation of The Daleks

It wasn’t going to be long before we went back to Daleks was it. And whilst this was the only story where Six met the pernicious pepper pots, it is sheer nightmare fuel. Set in an intergalactic funeral home, we discover the Daleks latest plan for world domination is to convert human corpses into Dalek mutants, and wage a war of numbers across the entire universe. It stars Alexi Sayle as a DJ brought in specifically to sooth the dead, adding a sense of gallows humour, and an unforgettable scene where the Doctor sees the face of his current incarnation on his gravestone. The highlight though, is the infamous Glass Dalek, with an unnervingly visceral scene which still holds up as one of the scariest moments in Doctor Who in the last 40 years.

Time And The Rani

Whilst much has been made of The Master, The Rani is another one of those renegade Time Lords who seem to show up recurrently. We begin the story with the dazed and confused Seventh Doctor, tricked into helping The Rani, who has disguised herself as his companion, planning to collect some of the greatest brains in the universe to create a time manipulator. It’s a relatively light story, again, bridging the gap between Colin Baker’s Doctor and the new one, in a very traditional Whovian tale, before it all gets a little bit darker.

Remembrance of the Daleks

Whilst there is a lot to be said about both Paradise Towers and Silver Nemesis in providing a snapshot of this era of Doctor Who, with its big, anti-establishment ideas, and tiny, show-killing budgets, Remembrance of The Daleks is a fantastic mix of fresh ideas and nods to the show’s long history. Taking place predominantly at Coal Hill School (where the first Doctor Who story opened), this story opened the 25th Anniversary season of the show with a bang. Quite literally, as we see different factions of Daleks blasting away at each other, and Ace McShane, The Doctor’s newest assistant, taking out these alien tanks with augmented baseball bats and home-brewed explosives. Brilliant. There are of course human sympathisers to the Dalek cause (yet another bunch of Fascists),  and a new Heavy-Weapons Dalek to contend with, and most terrifyingly of all, as if to spite Tom Baker’s earlier taunting, Daleks that can go up the stairs!

Doctor Who: The Movie

Want to see the 8th Doctor? This is it. He does get a nice Shakespearian regeneration speech in Night Of The Doctor, and if you want to dig into audio stories, there’s a huge number staring Paul McGann’s iteration. But for stuff to watch? That’s yer lot.

And at this point, we’ve covered all of classic Doctor Who. An era when the series went from Playground Favourite to Nerd’s Delight, to Cornerstone of Britishness, and mildly embarrassing monster of the week thing that you could happily reference in your own comedy.

It wasn’t till 2005 that we got our beloved Doctor back in any real sense with…

Rose

The initiation of Modern Doctor Who with a relatively demurely dressed man in a killer leather jacket introducing himself with the simple word “Run!” was a fantastic, minimal way to bring all the urgency and terror of Classic Who to the new audience, without all the silliness of walking shop manikins… oh, actually, this one did start with Autons, didn’t it? 

Bringing a new element to the storytelling, each series now has overarcing stories threaded through the individual episodes, though you could still dive in to see this manic, damaged Doctor slowly being healed by his interactions with this human companion. 

The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances

Another cheat? A little, but not so much, as this is a two-parter. The Doctor and Rose in blitzed London whilst a creepy child with a gasmask for a face is roaming the bombed-out landscape, infecting others with the curse by touch. Oh, and a time traveling conman who would turn into a recurring character. We showed this to a non-Doctor Who fan for the first time, who responded “and they let kids watch this? Damn. No wonder your country is so fucked up”. He’s not wrong.

The Parting Of The Ways

Again, a two-parter with Bad Wolf, and a coming together of all the little hints speckled through the series. It is however, in its solo form, a big bombastic love letter to cleverness and to humans doing things for themselves, which sort of expands to the central point by the next series. We get a good farewell to Chris Ecclestone’s new Doctor, and the first generation of new regenerations. Big firework displays of gold and sparkle, and the beginning of the Tenant Era.

Blink

Whilst there are A LOT of David Tenant episodes to trawl through, and more to come, it’s odd that the one that I think most people are immediately drawn to was written as a story for 9. There are a few recurring monsters from New Who, such as The Ood, and the skin-stealing Slitheen, but none have really come close to the Weeping Angels.  One reason I may like this episode so much is the cleverness of the to-ing and fro-ing of pre-recorded conversations, more than the silliness of the temporal energy stealing statues, but Blink is a prime example of New Who’s human-led episodes, which I understand is to give the main cast a bit of recuperation time through filming, but ultimately, puts far more power into our hands, which can only be a mixed blessing.

The End Of Time

This has probably been the biggest and silliest of New Who’s series finales. Set in the modern day, it brings back The Master, in a huge, planet-affecting disaster, where the Doctor is forced to choose between Earth and his home world of Gallifrey. And nobody seems to remember afterwards! Classic Who tended to keep its Earth-based stories on the down low, with forgivable, forgettable events that UNIT could run round and hush up, but Modern Who seems to have thrown that out the window for the sake of spectacle. A bold move, but it does make you wonder if they’ll need to hit some sort of big reset button at some point, before the history books get too crowded with robots and aliens. This double-parter is worth watching if you want to see the mawkishness of the Doctor, taking a good 10 minutes to do a final round of goodbyes, before regenerating. It is also worth it for the inimitable Bernard Cribbins, playing the grandfather of the Doctor’s latest assistant, with a humour and depth you would not have expected. It will also get you prepared to tear up seeing his last ever performance as the character in the upcoming specials. 

The Eleventh Hour

It’s very rare that a Doctor’s first episode can be counted amongst their best, but Matt Smith hit the ground running. The Eleventh Hour still bears the traces of Sherlock, which had been developed in tandem with this series, and it has been posited that Matt Smith and Benedict Cumberbatch may have been swapped in their roles. Story wise, The Eleventh Hour is a detail laden tale of hero worship, responsibility, and perspective, and Smith plays 11 to a turn, encapsulating an ancient traveller writ young again, with all the cringe that entails.

The Power Of Three

It is often forgotten quite how quintessentially English Doctor Who is, without reliance on fast cars, big guns, or super gadgets. The Power of Three is a very quiet story, in which very little happens, until it suddenly does. It would be hard to imagine The Expanse or The Mandalorian having a fence painting scene. This story has an almost John Wyndham-esque feeling to it and shows how fantastically the programme can handle changes of pace.

The Day Of The Doctor

When Doctor Who reached 50, there was an air of excitement, and was, ostensibly, a three-Doctor story, featuring a previously unseen regeneration, played by John Hurt. It is epic, climactic, indulgent and through the trickery of clever editing, sound-alikes, and a few uncredited cameos, gives us a scene featuring twelve incarnations of the Time Lord, including our first official look at Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, in the form of a very intense stare, and some very intimidating eyebrows. Certainly not a starting place for your understanding of Doctor Who, but an excellent indicator of what we can expect as these 60th anniversary shows roll around.

The Time of The Doctor

Modern Doctor Who has had a tradition of producing Christmas specials. Nice big family pleasing affairs where the story does not always have a big knock-on effect in the overall universe, just in case you are stuck tending the Christmas pudding whilst it’s broadcast. So it was rather odd for Eleven’s run to be tied up so neatly in the Christmas special. Smith is allowed the most spectacular regeneration, as the rules of the show are rewritten. Again, interesting, rather than a necessity, but good to see those limited regenerations, like a ticking clock to the series’ conclusion, get trashed in a fantastic display of pyrotechnics, and the sudden emergence of 12.

Under The Lake / Before The Flood

For a show about time travel, the actual mechanism of cause an effect in the time stream is very rarely played with, But Under The Lake, and Before The Flood are a wonderful pair of intertwined stories which follow The Doctor and his companion as they go around the same adventure twice, carefully controlling their interactions. It’s comic and scary, and allows Capaldi to indulge in long, dramatic monologues, in which he excels. It’s tone is chilling, it’s logic barely followable, and its effect fantastic.

Twice Upon a Time

If you’ve followed this guide, the opening shots of this episode will have you pointing with recognition as you see the First Doctor standing outside the Antarctic base of The Tenth Planet. This is of course, not Hartnell, but David Bradley, who had played Hartnell in the docudrama An Adventure in Time And Space, and is ultimately, a wrapping-up of an era. We are given a rather uncomfortable view of how attitudes were at the time of the first regeneration, and how we have changed as a society. We are treated to almost a best-of intergalactic kindness montage, with the World War One Christmas Truce, a Pacifist Dalek, and ultimately, 12’s parting words. All, it seems to prepare us for the big change coming. The First Female Incarnation of The Doctor.

Fugitive of the Judoon

The new showrunner of Doctor Who, Chris Chibnal, was an interesting choice. He certainly brought a lot of ideas to the table and made the show something very different. Unfortunately different is not always synonymous with good. Whilst Jodie has always been given great support by the majority of fans, her run seemed mired in some very peculiar choices, such as the unnecessary fridging of characters, and whilst there was certainly an attempt at reintroducing the educational element of Doctor Who, its historic retellings were very sanitised, and seemed to stem from a very privileged position. One idea that did resonate though, came up in Fugitive of the Judoon, where we discovered that perhaps this little rundown didn’t cover All the Doctors after all, with another previously unseen incarnation, this time not even known to the Doctor herself. 

The Power Of The Doctor

Another anniversary special, this time to celebrate 100 years of the BBC, celebrates the human heroes who have followed the Doctor, as she finds herself trapped by the triple threat of The Master, the Cybermen, AND the Daleks. Featuring a swathe of assistants, acting to greater or lesser roles, as well as a handful of Classic Doctors, we get to see a lot of resolutions, as well as the humans doing most of the leg work, in a manner which had really been a hallmark of David Tenant’s run. I wonder if that’s what caused that particular regeneration!