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.
A ghost story at Lake Geneva in 1816 turns into the arrival of a half-converted Cyberman, in the best-directed and best-monstered hour of the era.
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.
The fam meet Nikola Tesla at Niagara Falls and find a scavenger queen wearing stolen technology, in a warm historical with a thin monster at the centre.
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 cabin in Norway hides a mirror world that offers back the dead, in the strangest and most divisive episode of Series 11, and the one Graham needed.
The fam land in Pendle during a witch hunt, and the Doctor discovers how little her authority counts now, in an episode with a great idea and a mud monster.
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.