10 Worst Doctor Who Episodes According To YOU
We’ve covered your Doctor Who favourites, now it’s time to look at your not-so favourites…
A few months ago, we put together a list of the top Doctor Who episodes according to fans. So now, let's flip that on its head and examine the bottom of the barrel in the modern era of the show.
The fine folks at Doctor Who Magazine released a poll last year to coincide with the 60th anniversary, where every single episode was ranked from best to worst by readers, one Doctor at a time.
We’ll be using those results for this list, which means, for once, we can rank bad episodes guilt free! We are but the messengers today.
Here’s how it’s going to work. We’ll take the bottom two episodes from each modern Doctor (minus Fourteen and Fifteen, who were not included in the poll), and talk about their second-worst episode in the first half of the list, and their worst episode in the second half of the list.
We’ve ranked these in Doctor order too, so that means a Thirteenth Doctor episode will be number one by default. However, we doubt many will disagree with its placement (spoilers!).
10. Aliens Of London/World War Three
The first two-parter of the revived series could easily have dodged the bullet, and of all the episodes in this list, it probably has the most merit conceptually.
Intended as a commentary on the Iraq war, this story has a bit of bite to it, in a good way, even if it is a little on the nose with its political allegories at times.
But for every scathing criticism of false-flag operations, there’s a fart joke, and all notion of taking the message seriously wafts away into the wind like… well. Y'know.
The Slitheen Family is a really interesting villain in theory – intergalactic mobsters trying to commit insurance fraud at a planetary level. Great idea! But they're let down by some wonky effects, which leads to a huge discrepancy in their mobility, dependent on whether CGI or practical effects are being used from scene-to-scene. They also suffer from some baffling and childish writing which genuinely devotes half their screen time to fat jokes and flatulence.
It’s a shame, because with some minor tweaks, the Slitheen could've been the classic foes RTD clearly wanted them to be.
It's still a decent story overall, but with the Ninth Doctor having such a short run, it's easy to see why this would be regarded as one of his bottom two stories.