1. Nightmare In Silver
It's the return of the Cybermen! The Doctor gets to battle himself! How can this possibly go wrong? Oh right, that's it by introducing some incredibly irritating children into the mix. In regard to what happened, I call it Terminator 2 syndrome. The writers were aware that if they wrote the kids to be adorable, but useless and naïve, people might upbraid them for writing stock characters. So they swung the pendulum hard in the other direction, turning Clara's wards into precocious, street-smart (groan) urchins we were supposed to root for because of their sass and pluck. Yet as we all know, this rarely works. Much like Ed Furlong in James Cameron's sequel, nobody liked these kids, and they hung over proceedings like a bad fart. This was supposed to be the Cybermen's grand return, their re-imagining, and we ended up focusing on these idiot children and their propensity for using the word 'actually' far too often and telling us that they loved their phones. It's a bad state of affairs when the prevailing thing you can remember about an episode is just how irritating these children were, and while it's common on Who for characters related to the companion to turn up incidentally early on before getting some characterisation in a later episode, I don't reckon I've seen a poorer introduction than these two. Yes, Jackie was grating, Mickey moped a lot (as men who've had their girlfriends stolen by ageless timegods are wont to do) and Martha's family were no great shakes, but still, this limbo'd under them with ease. It was absolutely, despicably dire, and a perfect way to ruin what could've been a great episode. So that's what I think. What do you think? Feel free to comment!