What's the worst episde of Doctor Who, classic series and reboot

[Gingerbread Demon]

I have to expand on why I chose those and I won't go into a huge diatribe about that because I feel people in the past have said most of what I have already said, and often in a much better way.

For me Kill The Moon because I found it a bit hamfisted in its way of telling a story about abortion. Clara put it to a vote of the people of Earth and they did vote, then she totally ignores that vote that they made and does what she wants anyway because she's bloody Clara the special companion who is never wrong /s

Oh yeah now I got my groove on, Clara perhaps is one of the things I didn't like about New Who in that they made her into something bigger than just your usual companion of the Doctor they almost made her into a "chosen one" and then she became zombie Clara with her own fricking TARDIS which thought might lead to a spin off series but meh it is what it is. No other companion that I can remember got a gift like a TARDIS.

Back to Kill The Moon I just didn't like it OK. Moon is an Egg that hatches a space dragon that lays another Moon the same mass as the old Moon. What about all that stuff we left on the Moon like the landers and laser reflectors, does the new Moon have those items too?? Of course not. If it's a new Moon all that junk is gone for good, maybe it will fall to Earth, ouch!!!

As for the Happiness Patrol it's a story I've never liked, and I've tried to watch it again and again but it just never gelled with me and I can't like any of it. I just found it a chore to watch.

Honorable mention to "Sleep No More" for eye booger monsters and yeah well I can't say much more then that. As far as I am concerned they are all still in the sleep machine and every episode after this was a fever dream.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I haven't seen all of Doctor Who yet so there may be episodes even worse than these, but my bottom three of the modern era are Kill the Moon, Sleep no More and In the Forest of the Night. I get that Steven Moffat was taking a more 'fairy tale' approach to Doctor Who, and when it worked it really worked, but these three episodes strained my suspension of disbelief until it snapped and the stories just collapsed. It wasn't just one thing either, they were an assault on my ability to stay invested and take it seriously.

I've seen some really dull and irritating stories from the classic series, like The Gunfighters and The Edge of Destruction, but The Web Planet is on another level to all of them. The serial's on another level to television in its entirety; I'm not sure I've ever seen anything so tedious and embarrassing. It's like a school play dragged out for six whole episodes, full of people in bug costumes hopping around.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Ah, man. The Happiness Patrol is actually pretty great!

As for my pick, unironically it might really be The Timeless Children. Pointless revisionist lore coupled with some terrible plotting, and a unique showcase of the Doctor basically being mansplained (!) for an hour and ending up being totally useless to the plot's very resolution. Add to that the very worst showcase of the Master, and we have an abysmal experience of epic proportions.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I thought Sascha did an excellent Master.

13 can be a very dark doctor though, she just off handidly kills a TARDIS.....

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

The Timeless Child was actually one of my favourite episodes of series 12, though that was despite everything that was going on with the Doctor. I am really not on board with what Chris Chibnall's done to the Doctor's origins, especially as it's only been a few years since the Twelfth Doctor's finale was all about him meeting the very first Doctor and seeing how far he's come.

And 13 killing a Tardis made my eyes go wide when it happened. The way it happens without any comment or regret made it seem like it didn't even occur to Chibnall that each Tardis is alive.

 

[Timewalker]

I have to expand on why I chose those and I won't go into a huge diatribe about that because I feel people in the past have said most of what I have already said, and often in a much better way.

For me Kill The Moon because I found it a bit hamfisted in its way of telling a story about abortion. Clara put it to a vote of the people of Earth and they did vote, then she totally ignores that vote that they made and does what she wants anyway because she's bloody Clara the special companion who is never wrong /s

Oh yeah now I got my groove on, Clara perhaps is one of the things I didn't like about New Who in that they made her into something bigger than just your usual companion of the Doctor they almost made her into a "chosen one" and then she became zombie Clara with her own fricking TARDIS which thought might lead to a spin off series but meh it is what it is. No other companion that I can remember got a gift like a TARDIS.

Back to Kill The Moon I just didn't like it OK. Moon is an Egg that hatches a space dragon that lays another Moon the same mass as the old Moon. What about all that stuff we left on the Moon like the landers and laser reflectors, does the new Moon have those items too?? Of course not. If it's a new Moon all that junk is gone for good, maybe it will fall to Earth, ouch!!!

As for the Happiness Patrol it's a story I've never liked, and I've tried to watch it again and again but it just never gelled with me and I can't like any of it. I just found it a chore to watch.

Honorable mention to "Sleep No More" for eye booger monsters and yeah well I can't say much more then that. As far as I am concerned they are all still in the sleep machine and every episode after this was a fever dream.

Amazing. The Moon story is the one I thought of immediately. I ended up in an argument on another forum, as one of the admins there informed me that his friend had written that episode (as if that should change my mind). I told him that his friend had written one of the crappiest Doctor Who stories EVER, apparently geared toward the scientifically-illiterate segment of fandom.

But then that's how a lot of the Capaldi stories turned out. It's unfortunate, since I actually did like Capaldi as the Doctor. I just hated everything else about the show during his tenure.

And yeah, Clara was top of the list. She's the Companion Who Ate The Franchise, being shoehorned into Classic Who scenes she never belonged in, and she couldn't even manage to die when she was supposed to.

It's implied at the end of "Warrior's Gate" that Romana II gets her own TARDIS, but that's a completely different situation. For one thing, she's a Time Lady, and a TARDIS is something she knows how to operate. K-9 tells her that the blueprints for building a TARDIS are in his database, so we're left with the impression that Romana and K-9 build one of their own and use it to help free the Tharils. That's a far cry from some whiny souffle-obsessed human who motor-mumbles her way through conversations and treats the opportunity of a lifetime (time travel with the Doctor) as something she schedules around her teaching job, not as something extraordinary and life-changing. She's extremely selfish, unlikeable, and should have stayed dead.

I haven't watched any of Jodie Whitaker's stories, so I don't know how bad her stuff is. I've just come to assume nuWho gets worse with every new regeneration. The last time I genuinely enjoyed a Doctor Who story was when Tennant played the Doctor.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

For me any episode from the Chibnall era as he stopped my watching the show completely during his run.

 

[Lonemagpie]

Classic Who- Time And The Rani, Nu Who- Fear Her or Closing Time

 

[Mr. Adventure]

As for my pick, unironically it might really be The Timeless Children. Pointless revisionist lore coupled with some terrible plotting, and a unique showcase of the Doctor basically being mansplained (!) for an hour and ending up being totally useless to the plot's very resolution. Add to that the very worst showcase of the Master, and we have an abysmal experience of epic proportions.

I've tried twice to watch that episode and didn't get to the finish line both times.

 

[Timewalker]

It's unfortunate that most of the Sylvester McCoy stories aren't very good. McCoy himself is a pleasant, friendly person (I met him at a fan event when he was on a cross-USA tour of the PBS stations to promote his taking over from Colin Baker), but the writing for most of his stories was awful. And he had the worst companions in the entire Classic Who era.

 

[VDCNI]

Original, maybe The Time Monster or one of the other longer Pertwee's like The Mutants of The Daemons.

Modern, too many options during the 11th and 12th doctor eras but maybe Let's Kill Hitler.

 

[DigificWriter]

Classic: The Time Warrior
Modern: Love and Monsters

Nothing about The Time Warrior works once you've seen the Sontarans in other stories, and Love and Monsters should never have been made because audiences watch Doctor Who for the Doctor and his Companion(s), not random people whom literally nobody cares about.

 

[The Wormhole]

Forest of the Night. That was just TERRIBLE.

Love and Monsters should never have been made because audiences watch Doctor Who for the Doctor and his Companion(s), not random people whom literally nobody cares about.

And yet, another episode done in this format, Blink, is one of the most popular of the modern day episodes.

 

[Qonundrum]

Classic: The Feast of Steven is cringe. I know of a lot of bad or mixed bag stories, but TFoS is pure boot scrapings.

New: Kill the Moon and Forest of the Night just fly in the face... but as atrocious as those are, any episode that attacks or mocks the audience is the winner. "Love and Monsters" gets my vote. I don't always agree with Chibnall's decisions (and loved others), but I can appreciate some of the reasons (mainly to get rid of the regeneration limitation) with the timeless fluff that it still can't compete against the titles I'd mentioned. Chibnall using a better script writer (and he's won BAFTAs for his scripts in other shows so how is he doing Doctor Who so poorly?! ) instead of puking exposition to the remaining <4 million who still turn in overnight/weekly. But those will go up when the new showrunner's shows get aired and the ratings will go back down again.

 

[DigificWriter]

And yet, another episode done in this format, Blink, is one of the most popular of the modern day episodes.

Popularity is not an indicator of quality, because Blink is not nearly as good as people think it is.

It's also the absolute worst episode to try and introduce the franchise to someone with.

 

[Qonundrum]

13 killing a Tardis made my eyes go wide when it happened. The way it happens without any comment or regret made it seem like it didn't even occur to Chibnall that each Tardis is alive.

In NuWHO they took fantasy to a new level to anthropomorphize for soppy tearjerk moments only. (Note: Tanith Lee had fantasy elements in sci-fi so much better, so it's not the concept but the execution by far that matters...) Classic WHO took the time to spell out how the TARDIS still thinks and acts as a machine and despite having an allusion, is not alive in any actual sense. It's like the NuWHO writers prior to Chibnall didn't have it occur to them or forgot the Hartnell and Pertwee eras existed (or all the others that not only didn't go overboard, they didn't go there for plot ideas...) Even Davison's era, e.g. "Castrovalva", is far more consistent regarding the TARDIS. But Chibnall probably cares for the lore far more and had the Doctor treat it as a machine again, and I found that to be respectable. Or how every showrunner upends or bypasses canonical continuity when it suits them, something Classic WHO did fairly often too.

After all, who the heck puts in a self destruct mechanism into a living being? And you probably don't want something as advanced as a TARDIS to be taken over...



---
On edit: All this begs a fun question - should the show ever be rebooted by someone who isn't a longtime fan, when will this be a someone who's not seen it before get hired and then sit through enough episodes to get a feel? And which eras? Nicholas Meyer sat through all of TOS. 67 hour's worth. And came up with something modern and expanded yet felt true to the original. To compare, Doctor Who has just a few more hours accumulated to its tally... That's going to be a fun one to sit through...

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

I could never fully hate Love and Monsters. Mostly because it doesn't really fall apart until that very end. Up until that frickin monster comes up, its actually pretty decent, showings fans of the Doctor actually getting to enjoy each other's company.

 

[DigificWriter]

^ The Absorbaloff isn't the reason Love and Monsters is piss-poor. The episode is bad because of the premise and the fact that there is absolutely no reason for audiences to care about he characters.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

That's horseshit. The protagonist aside (a rare case of RTD missing the mark with a self-pitying narrator device), the other characters were fine enough.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Don't forget girlfriend is now a slab of concrete. eek