10 Doctor Who Stories With WORSE Endings Than Flux
8. The Two Doctors (1985)
The Second Doctor has been plucked out of his own time-stream and subjected to terrible genetic experiments. The Sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie track down his previous self to Spain for a rescue mission.
The final part of The Two Doctors is an excellent example of why multi-Doctor stories are best left for special occasions. The Second and Sixth Doctors finally meet, but barely get any time together. When they do, they bicker in a hollow retread of the sparkling banter between Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee. It's nowhere near as fun either. This is a nasty story that features fatal stabbings, poisonings, shootings, explosions and a young attractive woman being salivated over by a ruddy-faced old man. If The Five Doctors was a big party, the Two Doctors is what happens when everyone's had too much to drink.
For a show about time travel, Doctor Who is often frustratingly linear, and we're subjected to a lot of dialogue about the potential harms to future incarnations by the Second Doctor's genetic modification rather than properly seeing it. Then finally, everything is solved with an explosion and the Doctor suffocating one of the bad guys with a chloroform hankie, before deciding to go vegetarian.
For a story that started out as a massive threat to the Doctor's past and future, the climax feels grubby and small-scale.