Doctor Who: Every Sonic Screwdriver Ranked Worst To Best

December 2023 was a big month for Doctor Who fans. The show’s 60th anniversary specials came to a close, with the return of the Toymaker, Mel, and Trinity Wells, plus the introduction of bi-generation.

If that wasn’t enough, the BBC then unveiled the Fifteenth Doctor’s sonic screwdriver – a pair of curved discs with a multitude of light-up sections, plus a slide-out analyser and pop-out emitter.

It’s the most radical redesign so far, by quite a margin. But it’s also a really cool prop, with some very neat touches like the Rwandan proverb engraved onto the central disc – not to mention all the colour variants we've seen so far.

And depressing though it might be to say, it does sort of feel like a sonic for our times, in the sense that you hold it like a mobile phone or a TV remote.

However it still feels weird to refer to it as a screwdriver. We’ve already had a sonic lance, cane, and trowel, plus the sonic sunglasses – so couldn’t this have been its own thing too?

As things stand, Fifteen's sonic is certainly very nifty, but it's also undeniably an outlier, and is frankly a bit too weird (perhaps even a little ugly) to be up there in the big leagues.