73 Yards: The Woman at the Edge of the Field Who Never Gets Closer
73 Yards strands Ruby in Wales with a figure always standing the same distance away, and gives her a whole life. Eerie, ambitious, and never explained.
73 Yards strands Ruby in Wales with a figure always standing the same distance away, and gives her a whole life. Eerie, ambitious, and never explained.
Boom strands the Doctor on a live landmine on a war world where the ammunition is sold by the same company that started the war. The best of the run.
The Devil’s Chord sends the Doctor to Abbey Road in 1963 to face a god who devours music. Jinkx Monsoon is magnificent. The Beatles material is not.
Space Babies opens the Gatwa era with talking infants running a space station and a bogeyman made of mucus. Gatwa is great. The episode is not.
The Church on Ruby Road launches Ncuti Gatwa with a goblin musical number and a plot built on coincidence. He’s excellent. The episode is thin.
The Giggle gives Neil Patrick Harris the best villain the show has had in years, then ends the Doctor’s story with a fudge nobody asked for.
Wild Blue Yonder strands the Doctor and Donna on an empty ship at the edge of the universe with something wearing their faces. Genuinely frightening.
The Star Beast reunites Tennant and Tate for the 60th anniversary, and they’re magnificent. The resolution to Donna’s metacrisis is the weak link.
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.