Legend of the Sea Devils: A Pirate Ship, a Monster, and Not Much Else
Legend of the Sea Devils brings back a classic monster for a pirate adventure that never settles on a plot. Handsome, weightless, and over very quickly.
Legend of the Sea Devils brings back a classic monster for a pirate adventure that never settles on a plot. Handsome, weightless, and over very quickly.
Eve of the Daleks traps the Doctor in a nine-minute time loop in a Manchester storage facility, and it’s the most fun this era has been in ages.
The Vanquishers has to resolve every thread Flux started and does it in under an hour. Three Doctors, four villains, and almost no room to land any of it.
Survivors of the Flux finally explains Division and the Doctor’s lost past, then buries the answer under three more subplots racing toward the finale.
Village of the Angels strands a Weeping Angel in a Devon village in 1967 and finally lets Flux be frightening. Easily the best chapter of the run.
Once, Upon Time scatters the Doctor and her friends through their own timestreams. There are strong ideas buried in here, but the hour is hard going.
War of the Sontarans drops the Doctor into the Crimean War and gives the Sontarans their best outing in years, even as Flux keeps splitting itself apart.
The Halloween Apocalypse opens Doctor Who Flux by throwing a dozen plots at the screen at once. Dan Lewis is a fine addition, but it never breathes.
The Doctor breaks out of prison to find Daleks being manufactured as British security drones, in a special that works best when it stops being a plot.
The Master explains the Timeless Child and rewrites the Doctor’s entire origin, in a finale that spends forty minutes on a retcon and forgets to be a story.
The Cyber-Wars are over and humanity has lost, in a bleak, well-mounted penultimate episode carrying a subplot that makes no sense until it ruins everything.
Two immortals harvest human nightmares in an episode with a superb monster idea, a strong horror opening, and an ending that mishandles what it raised.
A bacteria that feeds on microplastics spreads across three continents, in an episode so keen to deliver its point that it forgets to build a threat.
A Judoon squad lands in Gloucester hunting a fugitive, and the Doctor finds a version of herself she has no memory of ever being. The season’s best hour.
Spyfall Part Two strands the Doctor across three centuries, gives Sacha Dhawan the season’s best performance, and lets its own spy thriller evaporate.
A Dalek mutant buried under Sheffield builds itself a casing out of scrap, in a New Year special that finally remembers how to make a monster frightening.
Series 11 ends with Tim Shaw as a false god and Graham deciding whether to avenge Grace, in a finale with no scale, no stakes and no season to resolve.
A creature that eats energy gets loose on a medical transport, in the season’s flimsiest hour, redeemed slightly by a genuinely good monster design.
Giant spiders overrun a Sheffield hotel built on a landfill, in an episode that wants to be about corporate greed and forgets to be about spiders.
Rosa puts the fam in Montgomery in 1955 and asks them to protect a fixed point, in an episode whose historical drama is far better than its science fiction.
The Doctor and the fam get stranded on Desolation in a race across a dead planet, in a handsome, weightless episode that drops the season’s only real clue.