The God Complex: Praise Him
A hotel with a room for everyone’s worst fear turns out to be feeding on something else entirely, and the Doctor has to break Amy’s faith in him to save her.
A hotel with a room for everyone’s worst fear turns out to be feeding on something else entirely, and the Doctor has to break Amy’s faith in him to save her.
Amy is stranded in a faster time stream and survives alone for thirty-six years, and Rory is made to choose which version of his wife gets to live.
Night Terrors answers a child’s cry for help and finds a cupboard full of monsters, in a small, warm horror story about a father learning what his son is.
Let’s Kill Hitler shoves Hitler in a cupboard, regenerates Amy’s childhood friend into River Song, and explains why she can’t regenerate in the library.
A Good Man Goes to War has the Doctor take an asteroid without firing a shot, lose anyway, and learn who River Song is. The reveal lands perfectly.
The Almost People gives the Doctor a duplicate of himself, asks whether a copy is a person, and ends on the most brutal cliffhanger of the Matt Smith era.
The Doctor’s Wife puts the TARDIS in a woman’s body and lets her talk back, and the show finally tells the love story it has been telling since 1963.
The Curse of the Black Spot strands the Doctor on a becalmed pirate ship where a singing woman in the reflections takes anyone who cuts a finger.
Day of the Moon beats a monster nobody can remember by hiding a message in the Apollo 11 broadcast, and gives River Song her cruellest scene yet.
The Impossible Astronaut opens Series 6 by killing the Doctor in the first fifteen minutes and introducing a monster you forget the moment you look away.
A Christmas Carol turns Dickens into time travel, letting the Doctor rewrite a cruel man’s childhood while a starliner falls out of the sky above him.
The Lodger strands the Doctor in a Colchester house share with a terrible flatmate act, a football match, and something upstairs that shouldn’t exist.
Vincent and the Doctor takes Van Gogh to see his own exhibition, and then refuses to let that fix anything. The finest hour Series 5 has produced.
Amy’s Choice traps the Doctor, Amy and Rory between two realities and forces them to work out which one to die in, guided by a very nasty little man.
The Vampires of Venice drags Rory along to 1580 to save his engagement, and finds a house full of girls with fangs who turn out not to be vampires at all.
Flesh and Stone ends the Weeping Angels two-parter with a blind walk through a forest of statues and a crack in the universe that eats people whole.
The End of Time Part Two answers four knocks, reveals why the Doctor ended the Time War, and gives the Tenth Doctor the least noble death imaginable.
The End of Time Part One brings the Master back wrong, gives Wilfred Mott the best scene of the era, and ends by opening a door onto the Time War itself.
The Waters of Mars traps the Doctor on a doomed Mars base where everyone must die, and watches him decide that the laws of time no longer apply to him.
Planet of the Dead is a sunny heist on a bus, until a passenger tells the Doctor his song is ending and puts a number on it.
The Next Doctor drops the Doctor into 1851 London to meet a man claiming to be him, in a Christmas special about grief, identity and a very large Cyberman.