10 Doctor Who Episodes You Completely Forgot Existed

Doctor Who is in a position that few other TV shows are, in that it can reinvent itself from week to week, spanning a multitude of genres and settings in just a single season. There's no way to truly know whether you're sitting down to watch a murder mystery with a six foot insect, a caped crusader doing battle against brain snatching mega-corporation, or a buddy-cop romcom featuring the Cybermen.

The jury is still out on what is more pleasing: the sheer level of variety on offer, or the fact that all of those are all real episodes.

Whilst its entirely open-ended premise and seemingly infinite world of possibilities are big factors in the longevity of the show, this stark contrast between episodes has also led to some inconsistent quality in the past. For every acclaimed episode such as Blink or Heaven Sent, there's a notorious dud like Fear Her or an Orphan 55...

For this list however, we're taking a look at the limbo between these two ends of the spectrum, at the ready salted crisps of Doctor Who, if you like. None of these episodes are widely hated, or loved, they are simply just... there. Either due to forgettable supporting casts, flat emotional beats, or meandering plots, these 10 episodes had audiences forgetting about them before the next time trailers had even finished rolling.

Sandwiched between two of the most memorable episodes of Series 1, RTD's The Long Game was perhaps one of the first duds of the modern era of the show. In this episode, the Doctor faces off against a shouty ceiling jelly whilst Todd from Corrie installs a state-of-the-art clicky brain hole and tries to download the entire history of the human race.

The concept is interesting enough, and Simon Pegg is fun (if a little underutilised) as The Editor, but the episode falls a little flat and ends up feeling like a diversion from The Doctor and Rose's adventures. As we'd discover later in the series, the main purpose of this episode was to establish the setting of Satellite Five and lay the groundwork for the far superior Bad Wolf / The Parting Of The Ways, and boy does it show.

To the episode's credit, it did try to do something a little different by introducing a companion that failed to pass initiation, falling at the first hurdle. Adam Mitchell is a good foil to Rose, establishing early in the series that she is special in her own right, and that not just anybody can travel with the Doctor. Unfortunately, some rather wooden acting from Bruno Langley combined with a lazy B plot undermines all this a little.