The Angels Take Manhattan sends Amy and Rory off with a chosen ending, a book from the future and the nastiest Weeping Angels idea yet.
The Power of Three drops a billion black cubes on Earth that do nothing for a year, wonderful about ordinary life and hopeless about its monster.
A Town Called Mercy hides a war criminal in a frontier town with a cyborg waiting outside the line, and the Doctor nearly throws a man to his death.
Dinosaurs on a Spaceship sends a Silurian ark at Earth with Rory’s dad aboard holding a trowel, and the Doctor does something genuinely cold.
Asylum of the Daleks: they kidnap the Doctor to save them, and a girl making souffles in a crashed ship is the most upsetting reveal in years.
The Wedding of River Song collapses all of history into one afternoon when River won’t fire, and then gets out of a fixed point through a loophole.
The God Complex puts the Doctor in a fake 1980s hotel with a room for every guest’s worst fear, and it’s more ruthless about him than I expected.
The Girl Who Waited strands Amy in a faster time stream for thirty-six years, and makes Rory 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 Flesh copy of himself, asks whether a copy is a person, and ends on the most brutal cliffhanger of the series so far.
The Rebel Flesh takes the Doctor to a factory in an old monastery, where the Flesh copies wake up after a storm and want lives of their own.
The Doctor’s Wife puts the TARDIS inside a woman called Idris and lets her talk back, and the show tells a love story it’s 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 with a shock at Lake Silencio, Nixon in 1969 and the Silence, 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 Big Bang opens brilliantly and ends with Amy’s wedding, but the time-travel escape in the middle left me a bit flat after The Pandorica Opens.
The Lodger strands the Doctor in a Colchester flat share with James Corden, a football match, and an 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.