Doctor Who Series 11: Ranking Every Episode From Worst To Best

Doctor Who’s first series under Chris Chibnall has not quite been able to match the runaway commercial success of Russell T Davies’ revival in 2005. Not yet, at least, and to be fair it took both Davies and Moffat a season or more to really get it right.

The draw of the first female Doctor was enough to bring in extra viewers for the first episode of 2018, but given that the gender of the Doctor is (and indeed should be) largely an irrelevance to most of the stories, it was never going to be enough to carry the series through these increasingly competitive times.

Audience figures stayed healthy despite the inevitable drop, but the stories themselves did little to make those who hadn’t seen them feel like they had missed out. Chibnall, for all the talk about reimagining the series for a new generation, played it surprisingly safe for the most part. The absence of two-parters and the lack of a clear series arc also took away any need to watch them in order, and as close to original transmission as possible. It does, of course, mean that we can judge each episode on its own merits.

The only real conundrum about the series’ weakest episode was why it took the Doctor so long to work out how to save the ship from the Pting. Perhaps it was with this in mind that the rather lame and underexplored idea that the Doctor had suffered a head trauma was thrown into the mix.

We were first introduced to the Doctor and her companions while they were scavenging a waste disposal moon. We never found out what it was the Doctor wanted for the TARDIS and it quickly became an irrelevance. The odd thing is that the Pting, which fed on energy and had an insatiable appetite, could have provided a partial solution to the environmental waste problem. Given that Chibnall was picking up on a thread from the previous week’s Arachnids in the UK, it ought to have been more intrinsic to the plot. Instead of the Pting being jettisoned into space, the last shot of the creature could have shown it in a new habitat with new food source, bringing the episode back full circle to the moon.

Pacing and editing have been recurring issues in series 11 and this episode was the worst offender. It doesn’t quite hang together and the viewer is repeatedly taken out of the moment. There is some good character building, particularly with Eve, but the comedic elements do little to break the tension and instead feel out of place. These are characters we want to care about, but the script barely allows us that luxury.