8 Doctor Who Episodes Ruined By Their Endings
Love & Monsters was a decent episode - right up until the Abzorbaloff ruined the whole thing.
Doctor Who episodes have to cram a lot of things into a brief 45-minute runtime.
They have to introduce a complicated sci-fi or fantasy concept, bring in a large group of supporting characters (and, more often than not, find inventive ways to kill them off), create an interesting and memorable villain, give the companions something useful to do, and, most importantly, find a way for the Doctor to fix everything that doesn't feel too easy.
And just to make things even more complicated, the BBC gives the showrunners a budget of about five quid.
To put it another way, creating Doctor Who is a highly difficult task, so it should be considered a small miracle when we get an episode that's merely okay - but at the same time, this doesn't mean we should forgive an episode's weak points.
One weak point that many NuWho stories have in common is an underwhelming ending, which can ruin a potentially great episode, or make a bad one even worse. Either way, it's painful to see a story fall flat on its face at the finish line...
8. Can You Hear Me?
Series 12's Can You Hear Me? introduced a pair of villains who rank among the most powerful in Doctor Who lore.
Eternals who've been kicking around for millennia, Zellin and Rakaya are basically gods, and to them, humans are nothing more than ants beneath their feet. Their powers are immense: they can move throughout time and space, teleport inside the TARDIS, induce nightmares in their victims, and destroy planets for a bit of fun.
Basically, they're unbelievably strong and nearly impossible to defeat, which the episode makes clear on numerous occasions - but for some reason, they didn't get the ending that their skillset would seem to warrant.
In a noticeably rushed conclusion, the Doctor dispatches not just one of them, but both of them in 90 seconds flat, without the two villains putting up much of a fight. Perhaps realising that Zellin and Rakaya were too powerful, it feels like the writers nerfed them in order to wrap the story up on time, sucking all the energy out of what should have been an epic final showdown.
The episode was all twisty and trippy up until this point too, one of the more unique episodes of the Whittaker era - so it's a shame that it fumbled the ending.