10 Doctor Who Episodes We Were WAY Too Harsh On

Love & Monsters is probably the revival series’ first generally accepted “bad” episode. There were of course mixed reactions beforehand, with episodes like The Long Game, Boom Town, and The Idiot’s Lantern coming in for a fair amount of criticism, but Love & Monsters might just be the first time since Rose that the entire fandom came together and agreed: “this episode sucks.”

Recently though, Love & Monsters has undergone a bit of a reappraisal.

There are still some dodgy elements, like the Abzorbaloff’s design never quite working onscreen, or the extremely misguided and bizarre slab fetish joke. But other elements, like the relentlessly down-to-Earth approach (even by Russell T Davies' standards), and LINDA’s dynamic as a group have aged pretty well.

It could be argued that in a lot of ways, the episode was damned by being the first proper “Doctor-lite” episode in the show’s history. And while later episodes like Blink and Turn Left  would inarguably improve on this format, they also massively benefitted from Love & Monsters having set the precedent that not every episode is going to have the Doctor.

Watching it back knowing this rather than expecting a more traditional episode, it’s easier to appreciate the things it does right... as well as its missteps.