See previous post covering the Sarah Jane books, also Class, the three Companions novels, Missing Adventures, Past Doctor Adventures, and the Sixth, Thirteenth, Fifth, Eighth and Twelfth Doctor books.

Seventh Doctor novelisations and New Adventures

The top Seventh Doctor book on Goodreads is the second in the series of 74 New Adventures published by Virgin during the Wilderness Years, starting with Seven and Ace and expanding to include other companions, notably Bernice Summerfield. Timewyrm: Exodus shows veteran Terrance Dicks on especially good form, taking the Doctor and Ace to a Hitler Won timeline in the early 1950s. You can get it here.

The top New Adventure on Goodreads is Paul Cornell’s Human Nature, still the only novel on which a TV adventure for a later Doctor was based. You can get it here.

My own favourite of the New Adventures is the Sherlock Holmes / Cthulhu mashup All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane. You can get it here.

The top Seventh Doctor novelisation on both LibraryThing and Goodreads is Ben Aaronovitch’s adaptation of his TV story Remembrance of the Daleks. You can get it here. My own favourite is Doctor Who: Dragonfire, by Ian Briggs, which you can get here.

Third Doctor

The top Third Doctor book on LibraryThing is Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of Day of the Daleks, definitely one of his better books, in which freedom fighters from the future attempt to infiltrate the present day to cause a strategic assassination. The book was one that I pored over as a kid, and inevitably when I watched the original TV story I was disappointed. You can get it here.

My favourite Third Doctor novelisation is Malcolm Hulke’s treatment of his own script for Jo Grant’s last story, The Green Death, which you can get here.

The top Third Doctor novel on Goodreads is from the BBC’s Past Doctor Adventures, Last of the Gadarene by Mark Gatiss (one of the few people who has both appeared in the show and written for it). It’s a story set in the UNIT era with aliens infiltrating a village fete. You can get it here.

Second Doctor

The top Second Doctor novel on Goodreads is a 2012 book by renowned hard sf author Stephen Baxter, probably the most prominent writer to top any of these individual categories for sole authorship of a novel (but see below for short fiction and joint authorship). The Wheel of Ice takes the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe to a human colony in the outer solar system, a classic Troughton-era base under siege, with added marital discord and stroppy teenagers. There are ancient, weird aliens, and a mystery stretching across millions of years, which entirely convince the reader that this is a Stephen Baxter novel. There are also various pleasing references both to Who continuity and to Baxter’s other work, none of them crucial to enjoying the book, which is also probably my favourite Second Doctor book. You can get it here.

(Though I must point out that “The Wearing of the Green” is not a Jacobite tune. Wrong island, and more than half a century out.)

The top Second Doctor book on LibraryThing is the first Troughton-era novelisation published, Doctor Who and the Cybermen, adapting the TV story The Moonbase. I don’t rate it as highly as The Wheel of Ice, but you can get it here.

50th anniversary e-shorts

I have been tweaking these individual categories for each Doctor to look at novels only, because in most cases the numbers are hugely distorted by the short stories published individually and electronically by Puffin in 2013 for the 50th anniversary, many of which are more popular than any of the novels featuring those Doctors. At the top of that list, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, is the one that came out the week of the anniversary itself, ten years ago this month – Nothing O’Clock by Neil Gaiman, which takes the Eleventh Doctor and Amy to a creepy house with shades of Coraline and Sandman. I like it a lot too, and you can get it here.

The other one I particularly liked in this sequence was Michael Scott’s Second Doctor story The Nameless City, which nicely salutes the Cthulhu mythos. You can get it here, and you can get a collection of all of the stories (now increased to 13) here.

War Doctor

There is one novel featuring the War Doctor, as played by John Hurt; it is Engines of War by George Mann. I didn’t find it much to my own taste, but you can get it here. The Big Finish War Doctor series is much better.

First Doctor

The first and (IMHO) the best of all the old Target novelisations is also top of both the LibraryThing and Goodreads charts: originally published in 1964 as Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, now generally just known as Doctor Who and the Daleks, the novelisation of the second broadcast Doctor Who TV story, and the one which made the show such a success; later also made into a cinema film starring Peter Cushing.

David Whitaker, who adapted the book from Terry Nation’s script, rewrote it as if it was the very first of the Doctor’s adventures, told entirely from the point of view of Ian Chesterton, a teacher who becomes the Doctor’s companion along with granddaughter Susan and her tutor Barbara. There’s lots of lovely extra detail given to the story of the Daleks and Thals on Skaro, and the Daleks themselves are more interesting than they have often been since. It’s a firm favourite of mine, and you can get it here.

Torchwood

There are 19 original Torchwood novels, and most of them are pretty good. Top of the charts for both LibraryThing and Goodreads is the first in the sequence, Another Life by Peter Anghelides. There is lots of good Torchwood stuff, a body-hopping alien, a spaceship which endangers Cardiff, a former lover of one of the team (Owen in this case), all against a gloomy backdrop of awful weather littered with variously dead bodies. I like it too and you can get it here.

Having said that, my personal favourite of the Torchwood books is the much later First Born by James Goss, who I find one of the best Whoniverse writers currently working. It’s a kind of prequel to Miracle Day, with Gwen and Rhys in hiding, and weird children being weird. You can get it here.

Eleventh Doctor

The top Eleventh Doctor novel on Goodreads is Touched by an Angel, by Jonathan Morris. It is a story of car crashes and mixed-up timelines with the addition of the Weeping Angels, who both create the possibility of temporal paradox and hope to feed off it. Morris does a beautiful job of conveying the history of the relationship between the car crash victim and her husband which is central to the narrative, and the Angels also come across superbly. It also has the Doctor, Rory and Amy. You can get it here.

The top Eleventh Doctor book on LibraryThing is The Silent Stars Go By, by Dan Abnett, which is also my favourite of the original novels, a Christmassy story of a generations-long terraforming plan. You can get it here. But I like Steven Moffat’s novelisation of the 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, even more; you can get it here.

Ninth Doctor

The third highest rated Doctor Who book on LibraryThing, and fourth highest on Goodreads, and top Ninth Doctor book on both systems, is Gareth Roberts’ Only Human, which I think benefited from being one of three released in September 2005, when people were starting to get thirsty for new Who material.

It is largely set in Bromley, where the Doctor and Rose get involved with Neanderthals, local homo sapiens, and humans who have travelled there from the far future, all under threat from ambitious monsters and monstrous ambition. Meanwhile, in the early 21st century, Jack Harkness is helping a displaced Neanderthal settle into contemporary Bromley. There is a certain amount of playing the situation for laughs, but also a bit of exploration of what it is that makes us human. You can get it here.

It’s my own favourite Ninth Doctor novel too, and it’s a shame that the author himself has turned out to be an intolerant bigot.

Fourth Doctor

The top Fourth Doctor book by ownership, and second highest of all Doctor Who books, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, is another by Gareth Roberts, his 2012 novelisation of the unshown Fourth Doctor TV story Shada from Douglas’ Adams script featuroing the Doctor, Romana, K9 and Cambridge and an ancient Time Lord secret.

I enjoyed it; I wrote at the time that Roberts had teased out threads of narrative left him by Adams, thickened them up and knitted them into a warm colourful and much longer scarf of story. The means and motivation of Skagra and Salyavin are fully explained. In addition, we have the extra romantic depth we had always hoped must be there between Clare and Chris, nicely contrasted with the relationship between the Doctor and Romana. You can get it here.

I must add that I enjoyed even more the novelisation of another Douglas Adams script, The Pirate Planet, this time by James Goss (who is one of my favourite Who writers anyway) which you can get here; and I retain affection for Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation of Genesis of the Daleks, which you can get here, and which is the top traditional novelisation on Goodreads; and his Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, the top traditional novelisation on LibraryThing, which you can get here.

Tenth Doctor: The Winner

The top Doctor Who book by ownership, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, is Jacqueline Rayner’s The Stone Rose. It was the very first Tenth Doctor novel to be published, in April 2006 just before the start of Series 2, and was then republished in 2015 which will have given it an extra boost.

It features the Tenth Doctor and Rose with Micky and Jackie, sorting out the mystery of a statue of Rose dating from Roman times in the British Museum. Solving the mystery takes a certain amount of timewarping, mostly during the reign of Hadrian, and dealing with an advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. You can get it here.

My own favourite Tenth Doctor novel is Beautiful Chaos, by Gary Russell, with the Doctor, Donna, Wilf and an old enemy in contemporary London. You can get it here.

Conclusion

I hope that this has been interesting, and will encourage you to look out for more Doctor Who books by more writers. The late great Terrance Dicks has the most books by far on my lists, but I’ll always look out for more by James Goss, Steve Cole, Paul Cornell, Justin Richards and Jacqueline Rayner; and indeed most of the others. The core of Doctor Who will always be TV dramas, but books, audios, games and especially comics (not mentioned here) have a venerable history with the franchise as well. Go, and enjoy them.

As with yesterday’s post, I’m trying to derive some meaning from the Internet Movie Database’s user ratings of Doctor Who episodes. Here, for your edification and delight, are the top-rated episodes from each of the incarnations of the show. (Based on these statistics.)

The twentieth episode of the Australian K9 spinoff series, 2010’s Taphony and the Time Loop, has a better rating, at 5.7, than any of the other twenty-five K9 episodes, but that is still lower than any episodes of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors, or of any of the other spinoffs. I agree that it’s probably the best of the undistinguished run of the Aussie show, with an escaped Time Being in the shape of a cute girl (Taphony, played by Maia Mitchell) draining the essence of the regular cute girl character (Jorjie, played by Philippa Coulthard) and K-9 sorting it all out. It’s still not particularly good, though; I rewatched it last week for this post and I think it deserves a little better than 5.7. Maybe 5.8.

The metal mutt takes both of the bottom places in this list, in fact, with A Girl’s Best Friend, the only episode ever made of the unsuccessful 1981 spinoff K-9 and Company, scoring a lowly 6.1 with IMDB users. This brought back both Lis Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith and John Leeson as the voice of K9, but had a very silly plot involving pagan cultists in the English countryside – not natural Who territory, and a story that has been told much better before and since by others. Sarah Jane, of course, also went on to have her own much more successful spinoff.

The second and final episode of 1985’s Revelation of the Daleks is the top-rated Sixth Doctor story at 7.7 (and the first episode of the story is in second place at 7.6). I agree that this is the one story where the Six/Peri pairing comes together, partly because they’re not actually in the story all that much. If you can overlook the huge plot flaw of Davros feeding the entire galaxy with the corpses of a few rich people, it’s very well done, with various different factions of characters motivated for different reasons.

Village of the Angels, the fourth of the six-part Flux storyline, is the top-rated Thirteenth Doctor episode. I am among the many who found this series difficult to follow, but this was a good instalment, with many murky and dramatic goings-on in the Village, culminating with the Doctor herself being transformed into a Weeping Angel. IMDB users rate it at 7.8, which again seems a bit mean.

The top-rated episode of short-lived 2016 spinoff Class is its finale, The Lost, ranked at 8.1 and ending with a massive battle between the Coal Hill Academy kids who have been charged with the defence of Planet Earth and the alien Shadowkin. Alliances and friendships are forged and broken and several significant characters are (apparently) killed off. We are left with a massive cliff-hanger regarding the new nature of regular girl April, which presumably would have been resolved had the BBC commissioned a second series. It’s a shame that they didn’t. I couldn’t recommend watching this on its own, but there are only eight episodes altogether, so you might as well watch them all. I was myself rather disappointed by this episode; my own favourite of the eight is the third, Night Visiting.

The top-rated surviving First Doctor episode, broadcast the day after Christmas Day in 1964, saw the first ever departure of one of the regular characters in Flashpoint, rated 8.3 by IMDB users, the last of the six-part story that we now call The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, falls in love with a Scottish resistance fighter against the Daleks who bears an uncanny resemblance to David Tennant (six years before David Tennant was born), and is left behind on Earth to build a new life, Hartnell delivering one of his great set-piece speeches in farewell. Actually my own favourite episode of this story is the third, Day of Reckoning, which features a desperate scramble across a deserted London. But I won’t fight (much) with those who prefer this one.

The top-rated Seventh Doctor episode is the second of the opener to his second season, Remembrance of the Daleks, at 8.5. It took me a while to warm to this story, but I have come around to its good points. I still prefer the middle two stories from the final season of Old Who, Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric, but there are a couple of great set-pieces in this episode, with the Doctor retrieving the Hand of Omega from a London gravesite in 1963, and Ace menaced by Daleks.

The top-rated Third Doctor episode, also at 8.5, is the second last of his 1970 debut season, the sixth of the seven parts of Inferno. The story concerns a dangerous experiment to drill into the Earth’s crust; for several of the episodes, the Doctor is transported to a parallel Earth where his friends are all fascists and the experiment is further advanced. In the sixth episode, despite the Doctor’s efforts, the parallel Earth begins to disintegrate and he escapes back to our timeline. It’s dramatic doomed stuff, and I think I’m with the IMDB voters here.

I’m surprised to see a lost episode outpolling all of the surviving First Doctor episodes, but it’s a good one. My favourite Hartnell story is the thirteen-part epic that we now (mostly) call The Daleks’ Master Plan. Only three episodes survive, and they do not include the finale, Destruction of Time, in which the Doctor activates the Time Destructor in order to defeat the Daleks by aging them into oblivion, but loses his own companion Sarah Kingdom in the process. IMDB voters rank it at 8.5, which I think I can agree with. You’ll appreciate it more after experiencing the previous twelve parts of the story.

I think that the best single story of the Sarah Jane Adventures is Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane Smith? from the 2007 first series, in which she is replaced in her life history by the ambiguous Andrea, played by Jane Asher. IMDB users rate its two episodes third and fourth at 8.6, but rank two other episodes with visiting guest stars from the parent show just a bit higher at 8.7: in second place, the second part of 2010’s Death of the Doctor, with Matt Smith (and Katy Manning), and at the top, the second part of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, for which David Tennant did his last filming in his first run as the show’s regular star in 2009. Sarah has been yanked into a prison dimension through a fake wedding with a rotter played by Nigel Havers and the Doctor turns up to save her with her friends. Great stuff.

There’s a fairly strong fan consensus that the Fifth Doctor’s final story, The Caves of Androzani, is also his best, and IMDB voters also subscribe to that view; its four episodes hold four of the top five Fifth Doctor spots in the system (the other going to the last episode of Earthshock). And the best of the four, according to IMDB where it is rated 8.8, and also frankly in my own opinion, is the last, where desperate people fight over dwindling resources and lives are brutally and dramatically ended, including the Doctor’s own. Poor Peri doesn’t get much to say except at the end, but it’s her second appearance in this list.

While I’m not surprised that the Eighth Doctor’s unexpected 2013 return in Night of the Doctor rates higher then The Movie, I am surprised that it rates as high as 9.0 on IMDB. It’s less than seven minutes long, and I feel that fannish enthusiasm at the time of the fiftieth anniversary has not yet been tempered by sober reflection.

In general I’ve been concentrating on the top-rated single episodes for each case, but for the Ninth Doctor’s 2005 series, the top two episodes, rated 9.0, are a two-part story, The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, which also incidentally won the Hugo Award that year. This is the one introducing Captain Jack Harkness, set in WW2 London, famously featuring the gasmask zombie child asking “Are you my mummy?” My own favourite Ninth Doctor story is Dalek, but I’m clearly not with the majority. The second part, The Doctor Dances, is a hair above the first part on IMDB.

My own favourite Second Doctor episode is the completely bonkers opening to The Mind Robber, but IMDB voters disagree. Their top-ranked episode of the black-and-white era is also the very last: the tenth episode of epic 1969 story The War Games, rated 9.1. Having invoked his own people, the Time Lords, to defeat an alien mastermind’s evil plans, the Doctor himself is put on trial for interference in cosmic affairs, and sentenced to exile on Earth, his companions sent home with their memories wiped. The final shots, as he howls in protest at the Time Lords changing his face, are among the bleakest of the whole of Doctor Who (cf above mentions of The Daleks’ Master Plan and Earthshock).

My favourite story of Old Who is the Fourth Doctor’s The Deadly Assassin, from 1976. But I find it difficult to argue with the verdict of IMDB users that the best single episode of Old Who, rated 9.1, is the sixth and final part of 1975’s Genesis of the Daleks, in which their crazed creator Davros loses control of the malevolent pepperpots. (It’s their fifth appearance on this list.) There are many beautiful moments here, including Davros’s large button marked “TOTAL DESTRUCT” which lurks like Chekhov’s gun.

The spinoff shows have had a mixed success rate here, but Children of Earth, the third series of Torchwood (co-starring Peter Capaldi as a harassed senior British government official), is in a league of its own, its five episodes ranked between 8.7 and 9.2, all of them higher than any First, Third, Sixth, Seventh or Thirteenth Doctor stories. The top-ranked episode is the fourth, which features the growing evidence of Jack’s involvement with the alien threat to the world’s children, and famously ends with the demise of the much-loved Ianto, and I think I’d support that choice, though maybe not put it as high as 9.2.

We’re getting near the end here. I totally agree with the final three verdicts by IMDB voters. Their top-ranked Eleventh Doctor story, at 9.3, is Vincent and the Doctor, with its intense portrayal of artistic genius and mental illness, leavened by an alien incursion. I was surprised that the 2010 season closer, The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, won the Hugo that year; the verdict of history, I think, is with Vincent.

The top-rated Thirteenth Doctor episode, 2015’s Heaven Sent at 9.6, is again my favourite from the era, with the Doctor, newly bereaved of Clara, trapped in a mysterious castle where he must recapitulate a cycle of death and renewal, over and over. I think it’s tremendous, though very different from the norm.

And finally, my favourite Doctor Who episode of all time, and also well clear at the top of IMDB’s rankings, is the Hugo-winning 2007 Tenth Doctor story Blink, which introduced the Weeping Angels and communicated much of its plot through DVD Easter eggs. I loved it on first broadcast and I still love it now. IMDB voters give it a massive 9.8 out of 10. It also won the Hugo Award. Although it barely has the Doctor and Martha in it, I think you could safely show it to someone who had never seen Doctor Who before, and who wondered if they would like the show; it would be a valid litmus test.

Steven Moffat wrote four of the above (Night of the Doctor, The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, Heaven Sent and Blink) and Terry Nation is credited with two (Genesis of the Daleks and Flashpoint, though there are varying reports of the real extent of his input). Graeme Harper, David Moloney and Douglas Camfield are each credited with directing two of them (Harper: Revelation of the Daleks and The Caves of Androzani; Moloney: The War Games and Genesis of the Daleks; Camfield: Destruction of Time and Inferno, though in fact he was too ill to direct episode 6 of the latter).

I am a little surprised that the greatest Old Who writer Robert Holmes appears in both the “best” and “worst” lists, for The Caves of Androzani and The Space Pirates respectively. As previously noted, I think The Space Pirates is underrated. Director Andrew Morgan did only two Doctor Who stories, but one of them is on each list, Remembrance of the Daleks here and Time and the Rani yesterday.

To round off the post, the average ratings for each Doctor and spinoff show:

10th Doctor: 8.04 (highest 9.8, lowest 5.9)
9th Doctor 7.93 (highest 9.0, lowest 6.9)
11th Doctor: 7.81 (highest 9.3, lowest 6.7)
12th Doctor: 7.80 (highest 9.6, lowest 5.8)
Torchwood 7.72 (highest 9.2, lowest 6.2)
8th Doctor 7.65 (higher 9.0, lower 6.3)
Sarah Jane Adventures 7.56 (highest 8.7, lowest 6.7)
4th Doctor 7.55 (highest 9.1, lowest 5.8)
3rd Doctor 7.47 (highest 8.5, lowest 6.4)
Class 7.46 (highest 8.1, lowest 6.9)
2nd Doctor 7.36 (highest 9.1, lowest 4.9)
5th Doctor 7.12 (highest 8.8, lowest 5.9)
1st Doctor 7.05 (highest 8.5, lowest 5.6)
7th Doctor 6.94 (highest 8.5, lowest 5.3)
6th Doctor 6.72 (highest 7.7, lowest 5.3)
13th Doctor 6.25 (highest 7.8, lowest 4.2)
K9 and Company 6.1
[Australian] K9 4.87 (highest 5.7, lowest 4.1)

If you have been, thank you for reading this.

I’m perhaps a little more obsessed than I should be with extracting meaning from the Internet Movie Database. Thinking about the question of what to show (and what not to show) a friend who doesn’t know much about Doctor Who, I wondered if the user rankings for individual episodes might shed any light? Well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t.

This is in no way meant to be competition for the ruthless ongoing vote run by @Heraldofcreatio on Twitter, in which The People vote on paired Doctor Who stories to decide which is better and which worse. But I encourage those of you on Twitter to participate.

So, which are the worst-rated episodes for each Doctor and Whoniverse spinoff series, as voted by IMDB users? I have compiled the numbers.

The Doctor with the highest rated worst episode, if you see what I mean, is Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor, who graced our screens in 2005. Aliens of London, the one with the spaceship crashing into Big Ben and farting monsters, scores 6.9 from IMDB users. It actually includes the first scene ever filmed for New Who, where Eccleston’s Doctor, and Naoko Mori as Dr Sato (later to return in Torchwood), inspect the alien pig.

You may have missed Class, the 2016 spinoff about some kids at Coal Hill School who are charged by the Doctor with defending the Earth. (One of the kids is in fact an alien prince, and one of the teachers is his secret and reluctant bodyguard.) The worst-ranked episode, Brave-ish Heart, also at 6.9, is the second of a two-part story which sees two of the kids sucked into another dimension while the others fight off an invasion of carnivorous petals and an alien who has taken over the school’s board of governors. There’s nothing terribly wrong with it, but the unearthly dimension is a bit naff.

The worst-ranked episode of the Sarah Jane Adventures, at 6.7, is the second of the sadly truncated 2011 final season, the closing half of a two-parter named Sky, after the new regular character who it introduces. Sinead Michael, playing the new girl, was only twelve years old when the episode was filmed, making her the youngest actor ever to play a regular character in the Whoniverse. The story sees her transformed from a living planet-busting bomb to a human girl, and Sarah adopts her at the end. Again, nothing terribly wrong with it, but a slightly awkward introduction of a new character. (I should note also that I’m not counting the 2009 Comic Relief Special with Ronnie Corbett and more fart jokes, which scores only 6.1.)

I remember watching the worst-rated Eleventh Doctor story, The Curse of the Black Spot, after a full day at the BBC studios in Belfast where I had been covering the 2011 Northern Ireland Assembly election. IMDB users give it a rating of 6.7, but I rather enjoyed it, a tale of swashbuckling nonsense aboard a pirate ship that isn’t what it seems. I may have been tired and my critical faculties dulled. But I think there were a couple of worse Eleventh Doctor episodes. (IMDB also rates a factual minisode about the making of a different Eleventh Doctor story a hair below The Curse of the Black Spot, but I’m not including it here.)

On the other hand, I think that IMDB voters have it about right in their disdain for the third episode of the 1972 Third Doctor story, The Time Monster, rated at an average of 6.4. The story in general is a pretty silly tale of the Master attempting to Conquer The World by linking up with the mystic powers of ancient Atlantis, and this is the silliest episode of the six, culminating in Pertwee’s Doctor constructing an anti-timewarping device from a corkscrew, while he and the rest of the cast struggle to keep their faces straight.

There are only two televised Eighth Doctor stories, made 17 years apart, and they are very different kettles of fish. The lower-rated of the two, at 6.3, is The (1996) Movie, which saw Sylvester McCoy regenerate into Paul McGann and get involved with a plot to thwart another attempt by the Master to Conquer The World and incidentally steal the Doctor’s remaining lives and the TARDIS. I think it is enjoying a bit of a renaissance among fannish opinion at the moment, but its overall rating remains perhaps unfairly low.

The worst-rated episode of Torchwood is Cyberwoman, from the 2006 first series, at 6.2, in which it turns out that Torchwood crew member Ianto has been keeping his semi-cyberised girlfriend in the cellar without anyone noticing. She wakes up and goes on the rampage, and comes to a nasty end, clearing the way for Ianto’s subsequent romance with Jack. The episode is mainly memorable for Caroline Chikezie’s costume as the Cyberwoman. I must say that I personally enjoyed it, but many others didn’t.

(K-9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend, fits here at 6.1, but I’ll cover it tomorrow.)

The Tenth Doctor may be the favourite of the masses, but that doesn’t go for all of his stories. Fear Her is set around the opening of the 2012 Olympics, six years in the future when the story was shown in 2006, and rates 5.9 on IMDB; it features the Doctor being transformed into a child’s squiggly drawing, and just generally looks a bit low budget. However I feel it’s underrated here, and Nina Sosanya is especially good as the kid’s mother.

However, the worst-rated Fifth Doctor episode is one that I remember watching with crashing disappointment when it was first broadcast in 1982. Season 19 of Old Who, Peter Davison’s first, ended with a story called Time-Flight in which the Doctor’s old adversary, the Master, attempts to entrap him with a time-travelling Concorde aircraft. The plot made little sense and the director made little effort. At the end of the story, loyal and long-suffering companion Tegan is casually left behind (though retrieved in the first story of the next season). The fourth and final episode is rated 5.9.

For my money the worst Twelfth Doctor story is the ridiculous Kill the Moon in which it turns out that the large ball of rock orbiting the Earth is actually an alien dragon’s egg. IMDB users disagree. The worst rated Twelfth Doctor episode, at 5.8, is the 2015 story Sleep No More, which I couldn’t remember much about and rewatched for this post. The Doctor and Clara get involved with investigating the apparently abandoned Le Verrier space station; the story is told in documentary form, narrated by the guy who set the station up. It’s a different format but I found it effective enough, not especially memorable but not awful either.

The worst-rated Fourth Doctor episode is another that I watched on first broadcast with feelings of disappointment and almost of betrayal. After the glory years of Robert Holmes as script editor, the arrival of his successor coincided with a funding crunch, and the 1978 story Underworld, though ambitiously riffing off both Greek mythology and Time Lord lore, ends up being remarkable for its cheap-looking special effects, and I agree with IMDB voters that the third episode, also rated 5.8, is probably the least impressive of an unimpressive quartet.

The worst rated surviving episode from the Second Doctor era, at 5.7, is rated ahead of several lost episodes from the black and white era, but I am listing it anyway. It’s from 1969, the second episode of The Space Pirates, an ambitious attempt at space opera written by Robert Holmes, the greatest of Old Who script writers. I tend to think that this (and the whole story) would be in better regard if more of it had survived, though I’ll admit that it probably didn’t quite hit the mark even in 1969. Again there’s a notable female costume, this time Lisa Daniely’s hairdo as mining magnate Madeleine.

The lowest-rated surviving episode of the black-and-white era is from 1964, when individual stories did not have specific names, but each episode had its own individual title; it’s The Centre, the sixth and final part of the First Doctor story that we now call The Web Planet. As with The Space Pirates, it’s an ambitious story which doesn’t quite meet the mark of today’s production values, this time with insectoid alien races and a disembodied intelligence duelling for control of the planet Vortis. I don’t think it is so very terrible myself, and would give it more than 5.6.

The lowest-rated Sixth Doctor episode will come as little surprise. Colin Baker’s 1984 debut story, The Twin Dilemma, features bizarre characterisation for the show’s central character, very poor acting from a couple of the guest performers, and unambitious (to put it politely) direction. A friend of mine who lives in Spain told me that her new English neighbour proudly informed her that his dad had written the worst Doctor Who story ever; it was this one. Fans can debate which of the four episodes is worst; myself I’d have said the first, but IMDB users say the last, with a rating of 5.3.

To my surprise, that’s not the lowest-rated surviving episode of Old Who; it is pipped by another closing episode from a debuting Doctor’s first story, the fourth episode of Time and the Rani starting Sylvester McCoy in 1987. This story was adapted by authors Pip and Jane Baker from a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and involves a crazy conspiracy by rebel Time Lord the Rani to harvest the brains of geniuses from Earth’s history. After some initial confusion the actor and Ace defeat her and herd the curiously docile geniuses into the TARDIS to go home.

The lowest-rated episode of Old Who is a lost episode, the sixth and final instalment of 1969’s The Space Pirates, as referred to above. I think this must reflect general lack of knowledge of the story more than anything. There is quite a good reconstruction available on Dailymotion, and it seems to me that The Dominators, from earlier in that season, is a far weaker story in every regard. (And The Twin Dilemma is weaker still.)

The worst-rated episode of Doctor Who proper is the 2020 Thirteenth Doctor story Orphan 55, at a dismal 4.2. I confess that as with Sleep No More, although I watched it on first broadcast, I had completely forgotten what it was about and rewatched it for this post. The Doctor and fam end up at a resort which turns out to be constructed on the ruins of Earth and also under alien attack. There are a couple of doomed romances and lots of bangs. Whitaker, as always, does her best to inject energy into it; the Doctor preaches a sermon about climate change at the end. It does a lot of the things that other episodes do, but doesn’t do them any better than any of the others. I agree that it’s not all that good, but myself I’d still rank it above The Twin Dilemma, and indeed Kill the Moon.

The worst rated episode from the televised Whoniverse is one you have probably forgotten even if you ever saw it. Mind Snap, the twenty-second episode of the twenty-six in the Australian spinoff series about the Doctor’s robot dog, K9, is a cheap and lazy filler 2010 episode in which K9 loses his memory and needs to be reminded of his true self by re-experiencing clips from the previous twenty-one episodes. The IMDB rating of 4.1 is harsh, but I agree with the voters’ verdict in giving this one the wooden spoon. Bob Baker, who co-authored both this and Underworld, is the only writer with two different stories on this list. (Robert Holmes has two episodes from the same story, so it doesn’t really count.)

More cheerfully, I’ll be celebrating the best-rated episodes of each Doctor and spinoff show tomorrow. (Including K9 and Company, in case you were wondering.)