Doctor Who: Every Tenth Doctor Episode Ranked From Worst To Best

31. The Idiot's Lantern

Doctor Who The End of Time
BBC Studios

The idea that TVs are literally sucking in audiences and leaving them without a face or personality feels like it could've come straight from Black Mirror. However, the potential for some light-hearted satire is wasted in this episode, and the end product ends up being very unsatisfying.

With its rock-n-roll 1950s setting, this should've been a fun and lively episode of Doctor Who. Instead, we get a bunch of people sat in living rooms watching TV, and an anticlimactic final scene where the Doctor climbs up Alexandra Palace's mast, complete with some noticeably bad CGI.

This is the only story Mark Gatiss wrote for David Tennant, so it's a shame that it's a yawnfest of half-baked '50s references in search of a plot.

Contributor

An avid cinephile, love Trainspotting (the film, not the hobby), like watching bad films ironically (The Room, Cats) and hate my over-reliance on brackets (they’re handy for a quick aside though).