8 Doctor Who Episodes Ruined By Their Endings

7. The Next Doctor

Doctor Who The Next Doctor Cyber-King
BBC Studios

It might not seem possible for a show as crazy as Doctor Who to go too over-the-top, but sometimes, it does.

2008 Christmas special The Next Doctor is a brilliant episode for most of its runtime, with the unusual connection between the Tenth Doctor and Jackson Lake leading to several funny, heart-warming, and emotional moments, supported by two excellent performances from David Tennant and David Morrissey.

It's a character-focused and surprisingly intimate tale of a man who is struggling with his identity, and even the villain plot - featuring the Cybermen - is quite low-key, and doesn't distract from that heavy emotional core.

Annoyingly though, the episode completely jumps the shark in its final third, in which an enormous, Iron Giant-style Cyberman stomps around Victorian London, firing off missiles and blowing everything to bits.

Sure, it's mindlessly entertaining, but following on from the rest of the episode, you can't help but feel like a more grounded finale would work much better. This Cyber-King represents a jarring shift in scale - figuratively and literally - and it feels inconsistent with the personal character drama at the core of the episode.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!