How Many Tens in Eternity? Reviewing (Almost) Every NuWho Episode

Hi all,

A year ago, my sister and I took the plunge in rewatching NuWho from Rose to Twice Upon a Time. We've both grown up with the show and watched almost every episode the day it came out, and even in my sister's case, she watched it before she could even remember watching it. I, however, am the youngest possible age to remember Nine's cold stare and warm manner, the bloom of Series 1's overexposed capture, and Rose's triumphant and theophanic return as the Bad Wolf. It means a lot to us, then.

I thought about how I would view each episode of Doctor Who and put together a list of every episode from Rose to Twice Upon A Time in some vague order. Since my sister, a much bigger Who fan than me, seemed to enjoy it, and I got passing compliments from other passing fans, it seemed like a good idea to share it here. And since they're relatively long reviews for Reddit, I'll post one or two in each post. It'll be a journey, to be sure. Hope you enjoy! I'll only cry a little if you don't.

Here's the preamble: all opinions are my own, apart from the ones that I found on the ground that probably belonged to a stranger.

**\*

The stretch of the British television series Doctor Who across the twelve years since its revival in 2005 is perhaps one of the most interesting, unique and defining sagas of its kind. It both epotimises its island-home as the only future and past worth exploring, rather than waste time moralising it (even if it tries its best to moralise everything else), as well as what its culture deems as heroic, as monstrous, as worthwhile. It could only happen here, it seems, and the proof is in the slices and the peels. Ten series, beginning with Russel T. Davies’ Rose and ending with Steven Moffatt’s Twice Upon a Time. They’re worth more than the sum of their parts, as the saying goes.

The stretch is hardly the beginning or the end of Doctor Who, and certainly not of any of its creators’ careers, but it is a stretch of television that holds me like none other – and there is perhaps no series of television since the Sopranos, or Friends, that deserves as much time spent to it, as it has spent time on us. Despite what the ensuing entries may entail, there is hardly anything worth throwing out, even the wholesomely, eye-wateringly, bad. This is not a comprehensive list of the saga, and it is kinder than my own happenstance teatime comments, but it is a great deal more thorough than what others would dedicate to it. I take solace in that fact as a critic is a loathsome creature – something to be slain rather than idolised. 

Imagine, then, a house on fire, and within the house the screaming, smouldering soon-to-be-ruins of every official print of Doctor Who (circa 2005-2017). Imagine Chibnall’s nabbed his copies, and the post-Chibnall ones never got prints, or are simply stored inside the nano-chip implanted in David Tennant’s brain for safe-keeping. Imagine you run through the house, because you know you have an incredibly important job to do, and you find those copies, but you can only carry so many. Of course, you’ll carry more than you ought to - you’re a Doctor Who fan, who would rather singe their brand-new anorak than lose the original chair-hand cut of Pyramids of Mars.

 But there must be a method to the madness. Imagine you’ve already survived, as the Doctor said, when he threw himself from a window and started emitting the sound a WW2 German Stuka Dive Bomber (knowing the character, there’s probably a Big Finish audio special about how the Doctor had surgical implants to make the sound when the wind passes through them at just the right frequency, like some sweaty towers of Delirium, and in this instance the story doubtlessly manages to make several people cry as the Doctor reminisces on the occasion as they plug him into the speakers), ahem, anyway, enter the danger room. How did you carry the prints to safety, and in which order? Each time you re-enter the burning wreck, it’s more and more likely the episodes you’ve left are lost – for good. It’s quite a lot of pressure.

Maybe not as much pressure as was needed back in the ‘60s, when the BBC purged copies by using them as kindling, or coasters and cricket balls, or whatever, back when the prints were the only way to preserve the copy. But let’s not get complacent because of digitalisation: maybe, one day, the internet will be wiped by an especially powerful EMP (copyright me, before Ncuti Gatwa appears to prevent the same disaster in a few years’ time) or aliens will enslave us all and delete everything off the web. While we’d all be celebrating Twitter’s merciful end, those prints would be the best way to preserve that story. 

So, you’d be laughing if you saved the best first, but weeping if you saved them in alphabetical order (sorry, but World Enough and Time is long gone, and probably Rose too) and the effort to save them in chronological order stings when you realise that River Song’s story is only half-complete (and that goes in any chronological order, too). Maybe there’s no winning after all, and you’ll end up a toasty skeleton clutching Kill the Moon because you really liked the last scene (so was it really worth it?) or maybe you’ll play it safe and watch Love and Monsters go up in flames from the safety of the cold, and only then will you realise that all of your memes of the slab-that-could-talk will age terribly when no one has a clue what you were on about. But, then again, when Peter Kay is arrested for war crimes in twelve years time, the BBC will thank you for doing their dirty work, so there’s always an upside. 

For me, though, I’d have to create a system. Systems are how we defeated the Nazis, and how Freddo’s keep their low price, and how your social media feed has made you more and more disappointed in the human race the past five years through something called ‘Cambridge Analytica’ (turns out deleting your browser history is actually impossible, sorry Moffat). They work is what I mean. But I didn’t say it had to be a good system, or a particularly profound one, though. The system is that I would save the episodes I think are worth the most: simple, right? It just so happens it would look like the upcoming list. And this list, like a shuffled deck of fifty-two playing cards, does not lack for originality. 142 entries (and some change, but we’ll get to that later) is more than enough to create a list wholly unique, as each Whovian (or Whoniversian, as our future overlords will undoubtedly patent us) may sequester themselves inside their cloister (sans bells) to find their own truth on the matter. ‘To each their own,’ I’d have on my gravestone and only if it hid the secret entrance to my own elaborate time-rift tomb. To be clear: every episode is someone’s favourite episode. Every Christmas is last Christmas.

This list is episode by episode, and not story by story. That difference will become clear once the list begins to unfold, and it’s a difference that is vital for understanding how television, and therefore Doctor Who, is meant to be watched. The art of the ‘binge’ is admirable, but it will always be fringe. Yes, binge is fringe, I said it. Television is rotated around the hour, and only the Christmas episodes ever try to break that mould (mostly due to the average Briton’s perception of time scientifically slowing by about twenty percent from a fecundity of stuffing and turkey). It’s a system that works, so whenever someone ranks a series at a time, or a serial, or a story, it comes with the caveat: the real question always is ‘what hour did you enjoy the most?’

 And even if the episode is less than an hour, it will almost always take that time to watch: finding the time, getting everyone together, preparing food, or whatever your ritual may be, factors into it. A movie has the honour of being judged by the dark box it traps you inside for its duration; television is home. Television continues when you go and grab a drink from the kitchen or check the curtains for a shuffle outside. So, this list honours that struggle by ranking hours of people’s time in front of the television, from the hour I would least like to save for the future, to the hour I would most like to save. And so on. And so on. And so on. It’s a lot. I’m sorry (and the more I write, the more you will be, too).

142) Sleep No More

You've got something in your eye ...

The idea of this episode is more tantalising than its execution - it is Gatiss at his most tedious, Moffat’s Who’s obsession with subversive storytelling at its most cumbersome. But for all of its faults, it is still remarkable - far more than many other entries on this list - and what is most remarkable is how it feels. Television has never quite felt more like a drubbing than this. If you’ve never been hit across the head, this is it; a faint ringing in the ears, blood pushing in your cheeks, a distant feeling that you’ve turned down a wrong road or that your cells are about to multiply. It’s not white-hot rage, when you’re punched until you wheeze, it’s far more like Peter Capaldi’s trapped you in a dark room and Mr Sandman is playing behind some plastic glass. 

Gatiss’ Sleep No More makes me fearful. Fearful not for my sleeping hours, mind you, but for my waking moments where I have to coexist with the fact that an otherwise competent writer could have written something so likewise to a student project. Indeed, I would have applauded the effort if my classmates at film school went so far as to break the fourth wall throughout their entire piece (as I secretly write ‘must not repeat’ into my notepad for later) but there are safeguards in television production for a reason. A lot of the time, they are redundant, and asphyxiating; and for some reason, like a man-made disaster, the usual safeguards did not work. Could a miner have found a vein and cut nothing but stone and rubble away from it, and gone home to show his family? It boggles my mind. I have nothing against the man, of course, but people have become media-pariahs for far less. 

Main issues include: a pigeon-holed plot, terrifyingly dull character work, a nonsense monster threat, a pathetic attempt at escalating stakes, an escape-the-base plot that Ridley Scott had surpassed thirty years prior, and this show did far better eight years previously, and a theme-narrative integration as endearing as a cigarette advertisement. But credit where it’s due: the direction by Justin Molotnikov - which may be a pseudonym if I were him - while motivated and genre-conscious, fails to engender anything resembling a sense of immersion or association. There are, perhaps, Youtube LaserQuest camrips more suitable for television than this uncanny hour. 

The reason why this is below any other episode on this list, despite my insistence that the concept at the heart of the episode is, indeed, remarkable, is that I think it, more than any other episode, would be truly better off being deleted from the internet, even from the archives, forever. Sleep No More would perhaps be a better chatboard horror-story than an episode of a flagship BBC programme, something closer to the ‘lost Doctor Who episode’ for those familiar with the ‘lost SpongeBob episode’ creepypastas of 2000s’ internet infamy. The chilling reminder that the viewer ‘has something in their eye,’ is far more effective than the distant, circus-borne threat in the final cut. Imagine how people would see it in this world; the episode was deleted not because of its appalling failure to uphold the first tenet of television - don’t bore the audience to tears - but because it was too dangerous to get out! Imagine the rumours! The original writer mysteriously disappeared, they say, and the behind-the-scenes working conditions deteriorated massively as the production went overtime and over budget. People ate their own slippers, Peter Capaldi punched someone to sleep, and they all refused to talk about it - it’s forbidden knowledge. And they even say, you know, that the person who deleted the cut shortly took their own life - or moved to France, as was the other option. What can I say? People like their stories. And stories are where memories go when they’re forgotten. Or something.

Better to be storied in the mind than witnessed in the flesh, I say – that’s me doing it a favour. What I’m saying is: you’re welcome, world. 

141) Voyage of the Damned

“Bannakaffalatta … bomb! Bannakaffalatta … cyborg!” EXPLODES

Perhaps writing this list was a mistake, I think, as I come across its second entrant, and I begin to believe that playing truant with this may be a better use of my time than giving this story any more attention. Indeed, the foremost reason 2007’s Voyage of the Damned does not score lower is only because there is something fun, something learnable, about being the very worst of its kind. But this episode might deserve less than that: it should not even be seen as the best at being the worst, I think. Russell T. Davies’ third Christmas special wears its flaws on its cuff-linked sleeves, like a dating profile written by a nearly-illiterate social neanderthal. You could commend the bravery of the act, but that may be missing the point - Voyage of the Damned received a massive viewership number, higher than any other Christmas special than perhaps The Next Doctor, a proof of how much the social realist and pulpy serialisation that Russell’s team pioneered captivated the British public. This is almost certainly the most viewed episode of Doctor Who - did you just hear someone gulp? - but only if one counts on the night of its broadcast. Credit should be given to the consistent successes and joys of Series 3 previously, not necessarily for anything this special does. That’s what I do, anyway.

The only solace is that Voyage of the Damned is certainly not the most viewed episode in posterity: that is because rewatching Voyage of the Damned is like drinking milk past its use-by date, as despite one knowing better, and it being so boldly, openly, off, it may be all of our faults - my fault, your fault, the British people’s fault - that we let it get to this point. Couldn’t we have closed the fridge door? What did we think was going to happen? If television could curdle, it would look like this.

While the last entrant epitomises the neophytic navel-gazing that pervaded the Moffat era, look no further than Voyage of the Damned as Russel de jure.  Every character is both comical and pathetically unfunny; the setting is so simple to grasp so that a child mightn’t lose the thematic underpinning and yet so dull that you might expect this was a poorly-integrated child’s submission ala Love and Monster’s abzorbaloff; the pretty and the skinny are here to laugh at the old and the ugly and the odd in this completely cliché story; the stakes are treated so frivolously that perhaps the passengers from Midnight had the right of it when they wanted to throw the Doctor out of the airlock, and I can’t help but feel like the broader public are the greatest joke this story manages to pull off – how we weep for Kylie Minogue (and don’t pretend that’s not how you see the character) when she waxes on seeing the stars, how we cheer when the Doctor puffs out his chest for his heroic speeches, how we laugh when the entire point of a character’s survival is to play into our dashing hero’s polyglottic catchphrase, and how we ooh and aah as the Titanic narrowly misses Buckingham Palace. That’s ‘we’ as in ‘me,’ of course, because for a great deal of time, I too enjoyed this episode. Only on a rewatch, years later, with new eyes, did my opinion so radically change, like a jumped-up alumni that insisted, despite his peers’ protestations, that his school had a certain charm, and that the teachers just had ‘their own way,’ only to return to his stomping grounds to see how much things had changed - how much he had changed, he realised. 

We fall for this story because it wears the skin of one, not because it has anything to say or anything to do during its seventy minute action-a-thon. There is no failure of thematic integration (for what themes there are), or execution, or budget or time constraints to pin the blame this time, as many episodes so far down this list may receive that courtesy. Voyage of the Damned is competently directed by Euros Lyn, competently performed by Kylie and David and darling cameo Bernard Cribbins, and competently written insofar as to achieve its aims. Not to get too philosophical, but what is worse? To stumble on the good path, or to never try walking it in the first place? Oh dear, I think I’ve found the end of my temper. There it goes! Let’s reel it back, before it slips from me forever into the deep deep blue. 

Everything Doctor Who should be can be found in what this episode lacks. The show is soulful and moral and inquisitive and compassionate. It is a national treasure and yet keenly aware of its own iconography – it is for the young and the young at heart, the outcast and the minority. It fails often, but it always aspires to be better, in the somewhere, somewhen. 

This is the only episode between Rose and Twice Upon A Time that we did not finish on our most recent watchthrough. My recommendation: enjoy what you enjoy, but remember to download this episode, as if I had my way, the fire may have actually been targeted arson - just don't snitch, won't you? If you have seventy minutes spare after finishing Last of the Timelords, this writer’s unironic recommendation: watch Time Crash and its confidential extra six times. Or seven, if six doesn’t feel like enough: I won’t judge.