Revolution of the Daleks: Two Goodbyes and a Recycling Plant
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 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.
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.
Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor falls through a train roof with no TARDIS, no sonic and no memory, in a debut that gets the character right and the plot wrong.