The Reality War: A Finale That Wishes Itself Out of Every Corner
The Reality War discards the Rani, invents a daughter, rewrites Belinda’s whole series, and regenerates the Doctor into a face it refuses to explain.
The Reality War discards the Rani, invents a daughter, rewrites Belinda’s whole series, and regenerates the Doctor into a face it refuses to explain.
Wish World rewrites reality into a sunlit suburb where the Doctor has a wife and a daughter and no memory. Strong premise, and it’s all setup again.
Lucky Day brings Ruby back and turns a conspiracy streamer into the villain. Angrier and sharper than this era usually manages, and it bites.
Empire of Death kills the entire universe, then undoes it and drags Sutekh behind the TARDIS on a rope. The Ruby Sunday mystery deflates completely.
The Legend of Ruby Sunday spends an hour setting up its finale and ends on a genuinely great reveal. Getting there is a lot of people watching a monitor.
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.
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.
It’s probably easy to explain our slight ambivalence to Episode 7: The Zygon Invasion with the knowledge that the Zygons are our least favourite of the Doctor’s intergalactic enemies. Not…
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.
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.
Planet of the Dead sends a London bus through a wormhole to a devoured world, and ends with a prophecy that finally puts a shape on the Doctor’s fate.
The Poison Sky ends the Sontaran two-parter with a choking Earth, a UNIT counter-attack that fails, and a spoilt genius finally doing one decent thing.
The Sontaran Stratagem brings Martha Jones back with UNIT, turns 400 million satnavs into a weapon, and unleashes the Sontarans on modern Earth.