10 Doctor Who Episodes That Tragically Wasted Their Genius Premise

Doctor Who Beast Below Let's get something out the way. Doctor Who is good. Really, really good. To my mind, that's mostly down to the writers. Let me explain. Doctor Who's premise is something of a goldmine to any scriptwriter with an imagination €“ when you have a main character who can travel through time and space, the only limit to what he can do is what you can dream up. Hell, in the first three episodes of New Who, we went from 2005 London to the spaceship-set far-flung Earth-exploding future and then back to Victorian Cardiff. So what I'm saying is this €“ you can literally explore anything in Doctor Who, whether that's spaceships, the Universe's apocalypse or Ancient Rome, and that's a glorious thing. Yet with such a toybox for the writers to work with, it's only natural for a writer's ambition to outstretch their ability to write a good story. Really, that's often a shame, but it's something to be expected. It's just a fact that even for the professionals, it's often hard to translate your dream to the TV screen. Whether because the ideas weren't given more time to breathe, or that they weren't developed as much as they could've been, the occasional episode of Who just falls short of the series' own sky-high mark. So while the vast majority of the episodes are good €“ excellent, even €“ there are the occasional episodes that fall short, and this article is dedicated to them. As such, here's a chronological order of episodes which wasted their genius premise. A disclaimer: this article is concerning itself with New Who. I've watched Old Who and enjoyed it, but I can't claim anywhere near the same amount of knowledge about the old episodes than I can about the new episodes. So if that offends you in any way, I do apologise and implore you to stop reading. With that in mind, let's carry on.
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Durham University graduate and qualified sports journalist. Very good at sitting down and watching things. Can multi-task this with playing computer games. Football Manager addict who has taken Shrewsbury Town to the summit of the Premier League. You can follow me at @Ed_OwenUK, if you like ramblings about Newcastle United and A Place in the Sun. If you don't, I don't know what I can do for you.