Doctor Who Series 10: Ranking Every Episode From Worst To Best
7. The Pilot
"Look, I know you know lots of stuff about, well, basically everything. But, do you know any sci-fi?" - Bill
The series 10 opener quite literally brought Doctor Who (or is it the Doctor?) back down to Earth and it was a delight watching the Twelfth Doctor swap his TARDIS chalkboard for a university lecture hall. But the move was also a symbol of where Doctor Who needed to go as a show in order to recover lost momentum. Even with two runaround Christmas specials in between, the emotional intensity of the series 9 climax was still fresh in the memory of many fans. There was general agreement that Doctor Who needed to be stripped back to basics - it had stopped being fun, for both the Doctor and the audience.
By tying up the River Song story in The Husbands of River Song and then showing the fallout for the Doctor in The Return of Doctor Mysterio, the emotional impact of Clara’s death had just been replaced with that of another loss for the Doctor. The Pilot succeeded where those specials failed by bringing us a revitalised Doctor, who though still mindful of those he’d lost (the photographs of Susan and River, Clara’s song) was no longer defined by them.
Necessarily light on plot in order to focus on introducing new companion Bill, The Pilot was very much in the mould of Rose and The Eleventh Hour. But to offset the danger of it being remembered as the first course to the meatier episodes to come, The Pilot contained a memorable cameo from the Daleks with the Doctor and co landing in the midst of the Dalek/Movellan War.