Doctor Who: Ranking The Christmas Specials

This is a polarising one...

I'm going to say it. It's time to take off the nostalgia goggles - The End of Time is not that good. The episode in which we said goodbye to perhaps the most popular incarnation of our favourite Time Lord is, in my view, one of his worst stories, with Parts 1 and 2 suffering for very different reasons.

We'll start with Part 1, which is straight up weird. The Master, who can now fly and shoot lasers out of his hands, comes up with a plot to turn everyone in the world into a clone of himself because... ego? It's a new low - the Master had a more sensible plan in The Curse of Fatal Death, a comic relief pisstake.

The Master, when he's not pretending to be a superhero villain, also now fills his time by aggressively eating food and talking to himself like some sort of edgy, rubbish Gollum with bleached hair. NuWho's characterisation of the Master as more of an unhinged character can be hit and miss, and this is the biggest miss of them all.

Then there's Part 2, which thankfully does away with the weird Master plot fairly sharpish in favour of Ten being a whiny boy. Now, this is in character for this incarnation, and at the time, it really approached regeneration from a different, more emotional angle.

The fact RTD took this approach is not the problem: it's more so that Ten doesn't really get over his wobble, and is dragged kicking and screaming into his regeneration, going out on a literal whimper. A Doctor who was often characterised as a swashbuckling hero deserved a far more triumphant send off. RTD is unfortunately a bit too self-indulgent in the closing scenes, tugging at the heartstrings a little too hard and forgetting that he is handing off the show to a new showrunner and lead actor in a time where there was genuine discussion around the show's cancellation. Way to ease the audience into a new era, Russell...

You may ask why, if I feel so strongly, this isn't right at the bottom of the list. The answer is Bernard Cribbins.