10 Doctor Who Endings That Get Worse The More You Think About Them

Doctor Who episodes have to cram a lot of things into a brief 45-minute runtime.

They have to introduce a complicated sci-fi or fantasy concept, bring in a large group of supporting characters (and, more often than not, find inventive ways to kill them off), create an interesting and memorable villain, give the companions something useful to do, and, most importantly, find a way for the Doctor to fix everything that doesn't feel too easy.

And just to make things even more complicated, the BBC gives the showrunners a budget of about five quid.

To put it another way, creating Doctor Who is a highly difficult task, so it should be considered a small miracle when we get an episode that's merely okay - but at the same time, this doesn't mean we should forgive an episode's weak points. 

One weak point that many NuWho stories have in common is an underwhelming ending, which can ruin a potentially great episode, or make a bad one even worse. Either way, it's painful to see a story fall flat on its face at the finish line...

After we see the Doctor do musical-battle with Maestro and silence the god of music, we’re then “treated” (if that’s the right word) to a big song and dance number featuring the cast of the episode.

It’s a nice idea and all, and the production itself is slick, but… why?

It’s not like we had any other musical numbers throughout this episode, nor in Doctor Who itself. There’s zero setup for it, and it just sort of… happens. As a result this all-singing, all-dancing burst of song feels very very jarring, and very very weird.

An explanation for why this happened can be found in a cut line of dialogue in which the Doctor explains to Ruby that, “Music is flooding back in, and everything's gonna be strange for 10 minutes,” and while that solves that part of the problem, the bigger problem remains that this was an incredibly divisive ending, and even those that did like it still thought it was a bit bizarre.

In hindsight we now know that like all the fourth wall breaks, this was one of many random moments in RTD2 that would go unexplained, and looking back we can probably now quite rightly say that this was only thrown in there “for the content”, rather than it being right for the story.