8 Doctor Who Episodes Ruined By Their Endings

6. Closing Time

Doctor Who Closing Time
BBC Studios

British export James Corden is that rare celebrity guest star who returned to Doctor Who for a second time.

His first episode was Series 5's The Lodger - a fun comedy caper that was intended as a bit of light relief before all the universe-destroying in the finale. Then, his second episode was Series 6's Closing Time, which also served as a breezy adventure, letting audiences have a laugh and a giggle before the much darker final story.

As a result, Closing Time is an entertaining yet unremarkable episode that finds comedy in thrusting the Doctor into a fish-out-of-water domestic setting, with a Cyberman plot thrown in to give the Time Lord an enemy to defeat.

It's all very serviceable and the story works well enough, right up until a cringey and quite frankly ridiculous climax in which the Cybermen are defeated via the power of love. Sigh. This happens when Corden's character, Craig, hears his baby son crying out for him, which somehow sends an "emotional influx" into all of the Cybermen, blowing them up. It doesn't make sense, and the melodrama is unbearable.

"Love conquers all" endings are rarely satisfying. But the fact that the Cybermen are one of the most iconic and powerful foes in Doctor Who history makes Closing Time's ending ten times worse than any other example of this trope in the show.

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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!