10 Most Overrated Doctor Who Episodes

This is perhaps our first truly controversial pick, and despite The Fires of Pompeii being part of the stellar fourth series, this is another one of those episodes that’s remembered for the last ten minutes – which, granted, are fantastic, in a horribly traumatic sort of way.

But the rest of the episode is lacking. The villains aren’t particularly strong: you have the underdeveloped and nearly impossible to understand Sibylline Priestess, and then the Pyroviles, who crumble the moment they come into contact with water – which undercuts their threat significantly. The main antagonist, Lucius Petrus Dextrus, is painfully hammy – and not the good kind of hammy, the kind of hammy that makes you want to slap him in the face really hard.

The plot itself meanders around Donna telling people Vesuvius is about to ruin their day and everyone else responding with a resounding ‘Nah mate’. This element of the plot, while vital in introducing Donna to the rules of time travel, starts to grate the third time you hear the same conversation.

The family themselves are fun enough characters and Capaldi is naturally a delight, but the insistence on using modern day slang (plus the running joke of comparing Quintus to a 21st century teenager) take you out of a plot that would've benefitted from a more serious tone. It’s about one of the most cataclysmic natural disasters in history, it’s not difficult to read the room on how this story should feel.

The Fires of Pompeii is solid, but it’s on the lower end of the Series 4 scale. To be fair, it's up against some fierce competition.