Doctor Who: 24 Doctors Ranked From Worst To Best

14. The War Doctor

When ex-Doctor Christopher Eccelston declined to return for the 50th special, writer Steven Moffat was left with a problem of how to make his script work. While many of us would have loved for him to replace Doctor Nine with Paul McGann's Eighth, the showman in Moffat led to him casting a completely new Doctor played by an established name. It led to one of the show's more audacious cliffhangers, when Clara and the Eleventh Doctor meet the War Doctor in his timeline. This is an incarnation that the Doctor refuses to acknowledge, the one who used the Moment and destroyed Gallifrey. The War Doctor has led to great head scratching as to how to number our Doctors and it gave Moffat a chance to have a proxy Hartnell in the special, commenting on the modern excesses of the show and its younger Doctors. John Hurt is a fine actor and gives a solid performance but it's fairly obvious he hasn't much of a clue what is going on and is rather too doddery for the part. He is also, by some years, the oldest actor to play the Doctor - not Hartnell or Capaldi as the media keeps saying!