Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor's Stories Ranked From Worst To Best

3. Survival

It's often sadly reflected by Doctor Who fans that, after the BBC had tried and tried, the show was finally taken off the air just as it had got itself into a sustained run of strong stories. The very last story of the classic series is one of the best of these. A story aptly - and ironically - entitled Survival. Sixteen years before Russell T Davies famously brought Doctor Who back down into the everyday world with the revived series, Survival got there first as the TARDIS finally takes Ace back to her hometown of Perivale where her friends are being kidnapped and taken to another world. A world where they are either hunted by the indigenous cheetah people or transformed into the creatures themselves. Take your pick. While Sophie Aldred is, as always, great as Ace and fans get one last stand-off between the Doctor and Anthony Ainley's purring Master, the story is strongest in its exploration of its themes. It's so strange that what was to become the original run's last bow is all about 'the survival of the fittest'. It's like the show is making a metafictional comment on its own failure. Yet if the story itself is accepting that the show had come to the end of its run, then the Doctor's final soliloquy reminds us how Doctor Who can go anywhere and be any kind of story, always mixing its imagination with an eccentric charm. Doctor Who - the show that survives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_1LKxS-iR0