The Runaway Bride: A Doctor With Nobody to Stop Him
The Runaway Bride drops a shouting bride into the TARDIS, unleashes the Empress of the Racnoss, and shows us a grieving Doctor nobody is left to restrain.
The Runaway Bride drops a shouting bride into the TARDIS, unleashes the Empress of the Racnoss, and shows us a grieving Doctor nobody is left to restrain.
Doomsday pits Daleks against Cybermen over London and ends on a Norwegian beach, delivering the most devastating farewell Doctor Who has ever filmed.
Army of Ghosts pays off a season of hints as Torchwood opens a breach, ghosts fill the world, and Doctor Who springs a jaw-dropping double cliffhanger.
Fear Her sends the Doctor and Rose to the 2012 London Olympics, where a lonely girl’s drawings are making children vanish. A gentle, uneven episode.
Doctor Who’s naffest monster, the Abzorbaloff, can’t quite sink a surprisingly moving episode about fandom, found family, and Jackie Tyler’s loneliness.
The Satan Pit sends the Doctor into the abyss to face the Beast itself, in a Doctor Who two-parter finale about faith, reason, and believing in Rose.
The Impossible Planet strands the Doctor and Rose on a base by a black hole, where the Ood turn deadly and something ancient stirs in the dark.
The Idiot’s Lantern sends the Doctor and Rose into 1953 Coronation London, where the Wire feeds on TV viewers by stealing their faces.
The Age of Steel reveals the Cybermen’s true horror and gives Mickey Smith his hero moment in an emotionally sharp Doctor Who finale.
Rise of the Cybermen strands the Doctor on a parallel Earth where Rose’s dad is alive and John Lumic is building an army of steel men from the living.
The Girl in the Fireplace sends the Tenth Doctor through time windows into 18th-century France, clockwork monsters and a love story that breaks your heart.
Sarah Jane Smith walks back into the Doctor’s life in School Reunion, and it’s the most emotional hour Doctor Who has given me since it came back.
Tooth and Claw drops the Tenth Doctor and Rose into 1879 Scotland with a werewolf, Queen Victoria, and the birth of a very familiar institute.
New Earth kicks off Series 2 with cat-nuns, a plague farm, and the return of Cassandra as the Tenth Doctor and Rose take their first real trip together.
David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor sleeps through most of his own debut in The Christmas Invasion, while the Sycorax menace Earth and a satsuma decides its fate.
My own Season 1 celebration: Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor, the Slitheen, Dalek, and a finale I was not ready for.
The Ninth Doctor refuses to fire the delta wave, Rose becomes the Bad Wolf, and Doctor Who says goodbye to Eccleston in The Parting of the Ways.
Boom Town looks like a filler episode, but the dinner scene between the Doctor and Margaret Blaine is one of Series 1’s best moral gut-punches.
A gas-masked child roams Blitz-era London asking “Are you my mummy?” in Doctor Who’s The Empty Child, the scariest hour yet.
Rose saves her dad in “Father’s Day” and nearly unravels time itself – one of Doctor Who’s most personal, gut-punch hours.
The Long Game takes the Doctor and Rose to Satellite Five, where the news beamed down to Earth is being controlled by something living in the ceiling.