Every Doctor Who Debut Story Ranked From Worst To Best

12. Time And The Rani

The nadir of Doctor Who stories whose only saving grace is some nifty special effects, this was the worst possible start for Sylvester McCoy. Despite being gifted with some classics, McCoy would never truly shake off the legacy of this abject first adventure.

All the ingredients are there to make it a debut to remember for all the right reasons, but they’ve been thrown into the mix in such a careless way that the result is one huge, over-baked mess. Long before the final line of dialogue, where the Doctor tells his companion, “I’ll grow on you Mel, I’ll grow on you,” many viewers had already seen enough and switched off.

We are supposed to believe that the Doctor is suffering from amnesia, but he knows exactly who he is, making the Rani’s deception, when she literally dresses up as his companion Mel, all the more ridiculous. At least in Deep Breath, when he mistakes Clara for Handles, and Strax for one of the seven dwarfs, it is clearly tied to his regeneration trauma, treated as an aside, and genuinely funny. Would the Rani need to be so ‘cleverly disguised’, if the Doctor could be so easily confused post-regeneration?

The most irritating feature of the Seventh Doctor, mercifully dropped after this story, is his propensity to muddle his words. It is such an overused trope that it quickly becomes tiresome, and once again it’s unclear whether this is a side-effect or a deliberate act of mischief. It certainly seems quite intentional when the Doctor says “where there’s a will, there’s a Tom, Dick and Harriet.”