The Time of the Doctor: Raggedy Man, Goodnight
The Doctor spends nine hundred years defending a town called Christmas, runs out of regenerations, and Matt Smith gets one of the great goodbyes.
The Doctor spends nine hundred years defending a town called Christmas, runs out of regenerations, and Matt Smith gets one of the great goodbyes.
Three Doctors, a weapon with a conscience, and an anniversary special that reaches back into the show’s darkest decision and quietly undoes it.
The Doctor is dragged to his own grave on Trenzalore, Clara’s impossible existence is finally explained, and a stranger is standing at the end of his own timeline.
Neil Gaiman rebuilds the Cybermen as something genuinely frightening, gives Matt Smith a chess game against himself, and buries both under a derelict theme park.
A model village in Victorian Yorkshire is dipping people in prehistoric venom, and Diana Rigg is having the time of her life running it.
A salvage crew drags the TARDIS aboard and the show finally explores its own ship, then undoes every consequence with a magic reset button in the last minute.
A ghost hunt in 1974 turns out to be a rescue, and the monster in the pocket universe turns out to be looking for someone. The season’s best-shot episode.
A Soviet submarine thaws an Ice Warrior out of the Arctic ice in 1983, and Doctor Who produces the tightest, tensest bottle episode it has managed in years.
Clara’s first proper trip is an alien market, a girl who must sing to keep a god asleep, and a resolution built entirely out of a life that never got lived.
People are being uploaded out of their own heads through the Wi-Fi, and the Doctor finally meets the modern Clara — the third version of a woman he has twice buried.
The Doctor has retired to a cloud above Victorian London to sulk, and a barmaid who is also a governess drags him back out and then dies in front of him.
The Weeping Angels farm New York for time energy, Rory finds himself dying of old age in a room upstairs, and the Ponds get the ending they choose together.
A billion small black cubes arrive on Earth and do nothing for a year, in an episode that is wonderful about ordinary life and hopeless about its own monster.
A war criminal is hiding in a frontier town, a cyborg is waiting outside the line, and the Doctor very nearly throws a man to his death over it.
A Silurian ark full of dinosaurs is heading for Earth, Rory’s dad ends up aboard with a trowel, and the Doctor does something genuinely cold to a trader.
The Daleks kidnap the Doctor to save them, and a girl making souffles in a crashed ship turns out to be the most upsetting reveal the show has done in years.
River refuses to kill the Doctor and time collapses into a single afternoon, in a finale with superb imagery, a beautiful tribute, and an escape hatch.
The Doctor spends his last free days babysitting with Craig Owens, in a warm, funny episode with a farewell running under every scene and a lazy resolution.
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.