Doctor Who: 10 Best Episodes Of The Last 10 Years
The episodes that have defined a decade.
It may seem hard to believe, but Doctor Who has been back on TV for 10 years. In those 10 years, it has exploded into a massive worldwide phenomenon and has a much wider fan base than anyone anticipated. People all over the world now see Doctor Who for what it is, a grand, epic adventure that takes its audience to the utmost limits of imagination and shows them some of the best parts of humanity.
Classic Doctor Who set the standard for what the revival had to be like, and audiences familiar with the old series were anxious to see how NuWho would measure up. From the very beginning with Rose, NuWho rose to the occasion, easily growing into a global success. The stories it told resonated with audiences everywhere and they took the show into their hearts and homes. After its ignoble cancellation in 1989, it was clear that Doctor Who was back to stay.
Over the last 10 years, the show has gradually morphed in style and tone. In that span of time, its fans have gone from Russell T Davies' more introspective, Earth-centered storylines to Steven Moffat's unique mixture of fairytale whimsy and heart-chilling horror. As differently as these two showrunners have handled Doctor Who, though, the show itself has a history of epic, soaring episodes that are easily the equals, or in some cases the superiors, of their classic series counterparts.
Let's take a look back at 10 of the best episodes that NuWho has to offer.
10. Asylum of the Daleks (2012)
The Series 7 premiere saw Amy and Rory reunite with the Doctor after taking a break from their TARDIS travels, but the reunion was not as joyous as one might imagine. It came at the hands (plungers?) of the Daleks, who had kidnapped all three of them with the purpose of forcing them to infiltrate the Dalek Asylum and deactivate its shields so it could be destroyed rather than running the risk of the criminally insane Daleks escaping and roaming the Universe. The Doctor and his friends had no choice but to comply with the wishes of the Daleks but were aided from the inside by Oswin Oswald, the only survivor of a ship that crashed on the Asylum planet.
Jenna Coleman's surprise appearance as Oswin was a definite highlight here, but one of the really stand out features of this episode was the insight into how the Daleks think and that some Daleks are considered insane even by the standards of their own species. Even more interesting, though, was the Dalek Prime Minister's statement that perhaps the reason the Daleks had never quite managed to kill the Doctor was that they found his hatred of them to be beautiful. Right when fans thought they already knew the Daleks, they learned something new about the way they view the Doctor.