10 Doctor Who Episodes More Important Than You Realised
From new technology to cultural records, Doctor Who has way more important episodes than you think.
The big, important Doctor Who episodes are easy to pick out. An Unearthly Child introduced Doctor Who for the very first time in 1963, and Rose relaunched it for a new audience in 2005. These are huge, important milestones in the 60-year history of the show.
And then there are the big lore episodes like The Deadly Assassin, which establishes much of the Gallifreyan mythology that still defines Doctor Who today. Interestingly, The Deadly Assassin is also considered by some to be the first cultural work to use the word "Matrix" to refer to a virtual reality, years before it was popularised by William Gibson's novel Neuromancer.
"Important" Doctor Who episodes, therefore, can have a wider impact than how they shape the lore of the show. As the longest-running science-fiction show of all time, Doctor Who has become a fascinating time capsule of changes in television production, and the wider cultural shifts in society between 1963 and 2024.
It's possible to give unassuming episodes of Doctor Who a new level of importance by framing them in the context of the time in which they were broadcast. Or, in the case of one story, how a repeat viewing changed the course of the show's future.
10. The Next Doctor
Building on the response to David Tennant's announcement that he was leaving Doctor Who, The Next Doctor was a tremendous bit of misdirection from Russell T Davies.
David Morrissey was not David Tennant's replacement, but was instead Jackson Lake, a man who believed he was the Doctor after an accident with an infostamp.
Which brings us to the importance of The Next Doctor in the history of Doctor Who. Because, while we'd seen sketches of previous incarnations in John Smith's journal of impossible things in Human Nature, we'd never seen any actual footage.
And so it was that, upon activating the infostamp, footage of the first eight classic Doctors (plus Eccleston and Tennant) appeared on TV on Christmas Day 2008. While we'd had it confirmed time and time again that NuWho was a continuation, it was thrilling to have the lineage displayed for all to see.
The Next Doctor was the last episode of Doctor Who to be filmed in standard-definition. From The Planet of the Dead onward, it was shot in HD, and now, years later, UHD.
To fit alongside the other 2009 specials, The Next Doctor was the first Doctor Who episode to be upscaled to high-definition, another feather in its cap of importance.