New Who at Twenty: The Doctor Who Revival’s Best Episodes
In its best seasons, Doctor Who probed hard-hitting moral questions and delivered fascinating sci-fi concepts, heroic stories, and captivating characters.
Author’s note: This review includes spoilers.
The original series of Doctor Who was designed to teach children and adolescents about history and science through stories set alternately in the past and the future. It followed the titular alien Doctor—who has the ability to “regenerate” into a new form when mortally injured—and his companions on their adventures through time and space.1 It grew into the longest continuously running science-fiction TV series of all time, airing from 1963 to 1989. Although it later deviated from its educational mission to focus more on action, it continued to grapple with sophisticated ideas in both science and morality, promoting the values of exploration, curiosity, science, and respect for life and liberty. By its conclusion, it had become an icon of both science fiction and British culture.
Following an unsuccessful pilot for a new series in 1996, Doctor Who seemed to have had its day. But that changed in 2005 when Russell T. Davies launched a new, faster-paced version of the show with a bigger budget and improved visual effects. In its early seasons, this revival explored a wealth of historical periods and futuristic ideas, from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius to the last days of the solar system, and it featured more complex character drama than the original had. It also put a new, darker spin on the Doctor’s backstory by making him the last of his kind following an intergalactic war between his people—the Time Lords—and the xenophobic half-robot Daleks.
For many years, the revival enjoyed high ratings, but lately it has deteriorated in quality. Recent seasons have swapped the show’s optimistic, adventurous tone for a shallow focus on transitory social issues with weak writing and forgettable characters, and the show’s viewership has dropped as a result. Given the poor state of Doctor Who today, recent episodes are unlikely to entice new viewers. However, you may find that some of the episodes highlighted below offer more value and serve as better places to jump in.
“The Impossible Planet”/“The Satan Pit”
Following a rough start—including the sudden departure of the lead actor after only one season—the Doctor Who revival steadily improved in quality with the casting of David Tennant. The second season wasn’t as strong as what was to come, but it nonetheless contained some interesting, suspenseful, and even heart-wrenching stories. Chief among these is the two-part “The Impossible Planet”/“The Satan Pit,” in which the Doctor and his traveling companion, Rose, land on a planet somehow orbiting closer to a black hole than is physically possible, and they find a group of explorers from Earth trapped there. While the Doctor works to find out how this “impossible planet” exists and help the explorers escape, a powerful evil entity lurking deep within the planet’s interior begins to invade the minds of the people trapped on the surface.
As well as being a suspenseful mystery, this story is also a notable example of Doctor Who celebrating the values of exploration and bravery. After finding the explorers on this impossible planet, the Doctor is astonished, exclaiming, “Why did you come here? I’ll tell you why: Because it was there. Brilliant! . . . Human beings. You are amazing!”2
“Blink”
The show hit its stride in the third season, Tennant now settled into the role of the Doctor. The season boasts a number of standout episodes, including a visit to a puzzling dystopia in “Gridlock”; a novel spin on 1930s New York in the two-part “Daleks in Manhattan”/“Evolution of the Daleks”; and a truly disturbing vampiric mystery in “Human Nature”/“The Family of Blood.”
But the third season’s most memorable episode is undoubtedly “Blink.” Written by Stephen Moffat—known for penning many of Doctor Who’s most frightening episodes—“Blink” introduces the Weeping Angels, a race of statue-like winged creatures that can only move when they’re not being observed. But when they aren’t being watched, they can move across a room in the blink of an eye. They grasp their victims and send them to the past, devouring the “potential energy” of the lives those people would have lived. Faced with the threat of the Angels and armed only with a warning from the Doctor, a small group of people must escape and outwit the Angels to survive. “Blink” is a heart-stopping thriller that introduces one of the scariest, most original “monsters” of the series.
“Silence in the Library”/“Forest of the Dead”
Moffat’s contribution to the fourth season introduced another of his terrifyingly unique villains: the Vashta Nerada, a dark cloud of deadly microscopic organisms that looks like a shadow when it attaches to its victim. When a group of space-suited explorers visits an abandoned library on a dead planet, they are initially unaware of the threat, but before long they learn that anyone who has a second shadow doesn’t have long to live. Joined by the Doctor, they are quickly thrown into a race against time as the Vashta Nerada disguises itself in the space suits of its devoured victims and uses them to hunt the remaining explorers.
This story also introduces the character of River Song, a fellow time traveler whom the Doctor has never met but who claims to be his wife. This sets off one of the oddest relationship arcs ever seen in fiction: For reasons that only later become clear, each time they meet, the Doctor (as one would expect) knows her a little better, but she knows him a little less than she had before.
“The End of Time”
Following the end of the fourth season, Tennant rounded out his tenure as the Doctor with a series of specials, culminating in the two-part feature-length “The End of Time.” Since the first season, the revived Doctor Who had presented the Doctor as the only survivor of the time war between his people and the Daleks, but “The End of Time” reveals that his people, in fact, survived the war by hiding their entire planet. However, they are no longer the civilized race the Doctor once knew; they have been corrupted by the war into tyrants ready to wipe out all other life in the universe.
This epic conclusion to Tennant’s tenure shows the Doctor wrestling with his identity, struggling to say good-bye to his dearest friends, and ultimately facing the demise of his current form—one that he has grown to love.
“Vincent and the Doctor”
Following “The End of Time,” Doctor Who was at full strength. In season five, Moffatt took over from Davies as show runner and oversaw a move toward longer-form storytelling. This, together with the risky casting of the then-relatively unknown Matt Smith as the Doctor, kept the show interesting and original and helped it retain its large audience despite Tennant’s departure. The season included several powerful stand-alone stories, but its most notable entry is “Vincent and the Doctor,” in which the Doctor and his new assistant, Amy, visit the troubled Vincent Van Gogh. The episode shows how Van Gogh struggled to build a career as an artist and suffered from depression during his lifetime. Then, it uses Doctor Who’s time-travel premise to give him the utterly heartrending opportunity to discover how much his art affected people during the following century in a scene virtually guaranteed to make you cry.
“A Good Man Goes to War”
For the sixth season, Moffatt experimented with a new format, essentially telling one continuous story across all thirteen episodes. The season is an integrated mystery plot about the Doctor’s apparent death in the opening episode, the nature of his relationship with River Song, and the intentions of the Silence: a race of aliens whom people forget as soon as they look away from them. The season also featured a more cinematic style than ever before; a large portion of location filming was done in the United States to take advantage of dramatic scenery unavailable in the United Kingdom.
Although the whole season should be watched as a unit, “A Good Man Goes to War” is worth highlighting because it challenges one of Doctor Who’s most entrenched premises: the Doctor’s hatred of violence. Although he does reluctantly use violence when necessary, the Doctor—an avowed lover of life in all its forms—always tries to find a nonviolent solution to any conflict or situation. But when Amy is kidnapped by an alien force, he goes on the warpath, joining Amy’s husband, Rory, to assemble an army and rescue her. Seeing such militarism from the usually nonviolent, life-loving Doctor lends enormous weight to the story. As River Song at one point narrates, “Demons run when a good man goes to war.”3
“Asylum of the Daleks”
For the seventh season, Moffatt doubled down on the cinematic style established in season six, treating each episode as a miniature movie complete with its own poster and epic cinematography to match. Many of these stories are worth highlighting, but the opening episode, “Asylum of the Daleks,” is especially interesting on several levels. The titular asylum, where the Doctor has been trapped, houses a group of Daleks so insane with anger and paranoia that even the Nazi-like Dalek leadership deems it necessary to imprison them on a faraway planet. What’s most interesting, however, is the introduction of Oswin, a woman apparently trapped in the asylum who is indiscernible from another woman the Doctor met in the previous story. As the Doctor works to rescue her and escape the asylum, he discovers a shocking secret about Oswin’s identity that has ramifications for the next several seasons.
“The Day of the Doctor”
Arguably the high point of the entire revived run of Doctor Who is its fiftieth anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor.” This feature-length episode brings back David Tennant alongside Matt Smith, reviving the original show’s tradition of bringing different incarnations of the Doctor together for anniversary episodes, enabling audiences to see their differences played out in contrast. More important, the story finally answers a question that has been hanging over the revived series since it began: What did the Doctor do during the time war?
In addressing this, “The Day of the Doctor” does something quite unexpected—it adds a new incarnation of the Doctor into the show’s history: the War Doctor. This incarnation, played by John Hurt, had to commit such acts of destruction during the war that the Doctor subsequently erased him from his memory. “The Day of the Doctor” sees the three versions of our hero jointly face this reality as the time war is suddenly reignited. Despite the dark setting, this decidedly upbeat story ably concludes many of the show’s most interesting storylines and celebrates its half-century anniversary in fitting style.
“The Magician’s Apprentice”/“The Witch’s Familiar”
When Smith left Doctor Who after the fiftieth anniversary, the show gained a highly acclaimed lead actor: Peter Capaldi. Unfortunately, despite Capaldi bringing a new level of gravitas to the role, the writing began to deteriorate during his tenure, and few of these stories stand out like those starring Smith and Tennant. A welcome exception, however, is the two-part season nine opener, “The Magician’s Apprentice”/“The Witch’s Familiar.” It pits the Doctor against Davros, the deranged creator of the genocidal Daleks. Unlike previous Davros stories, which mostly portrayed him as a through-and-through villain, this story shows Davros in a far more vulnerable light. We see him both as a child in a time of planetwide war and as a struggling old man reflecting on his lifetime of destruction. The Doctor’s powerful sense of compassion leads him to sympathize even with his mortal enemy—a mistake that Davros is poised to take advantage of.
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Capaldi left Doctor Who after its tenth season, by which point the show had already lost much of its characteristic charm and its traditional values of heroism, adventure, and thoughtfulness. The casting of Jodie Whitaker as the first female Doctor was marred by a marked move toward stories that propagandized for the writers’ political and social ideas. Although Whitaker’s final series—a self-contained five-part arc titled “Flux,” followed by two specials—delivered a momentary reprieve with some fairly interesting stories, the quality of the show dropped even further following her departure. The sixtieth anniversary specials featuring Tennant’s return and the subsequent series starring Ncuti Gatwa are virtually unwatchable.
In this bleak period for Doctor Who, during which the show’s quality and its ratings seem to be in a race to the bottom, the revived show’s golden era provides a welcome escape to a better time. Between its third and seventh seasons, the Doctor Who revival delivered episode after episode of fascinating sci-fi concepts, heroic stories, captivating characters, and hard-hitting moral questions. Hopefully, one day, the show can recapture that spirit, but until then, we’ll have those classic episodes.