10 Most Overrated Doctor Who Episodes

It’s time to lambast an episode that’s sat on a pedestal for far, far too long. A lot of fans consider every single Moffat script in the RTD era a straight 10/10, but lumbering this one in with The Empty Child, Blink, and the library two-parter is a major disservice to the other three.

First things first: throughout this story, Ten is a bit of an arse. Slap-bang in the middle of his romance arc with Rose, he drops her for the first woman who offers him a cheeky ‘dance’, leaving Rose and Mickey on a creepy spaceship covered in human organs while he parties and gets hammered in pre-revolutionary France. Later on, he full-on abandons them without a second thought by trapping himself in the past with Reinette.

This feels like it should have major, major repercussions for his burgeoning connection with Rose, but despite her intense jealousy of Sarah Jane just one week prior, Rose is now totally chill with the Doctor dropping her like a sack of potatoes. It feels like a major missed opportunity – their relationship could've benefitted from a bit of straining, given how Rose sees him as completely flawless.

Elsewhere, while the main plot is highly entertaining with some great location shooting and costume work (plus the brilliantly creepy Clockwork Droids), the B-plot with Rose and Mickey drags the episode down every single time it comes back around, and you can tell that Moffat had no idea what to do with the companions in such a Doctor-centric story.

The Girl in the Fireplace absolutely has merit, and it’s still one of the best episodes of Series 2 – though that speaks more to the amount of mediocre episodes in that series. But Moffat has written a lot better than this.