The Worst Episodes Of Doctor Who Ever Made

Over the past couple of months, I’ve dived through the entire catalog of Doctor Who since its 2005 revival and picked out the best episodes for each incarnation of the Doctor. It’s been a lot of fun highlighting the best of what each era of the show brought to the table, but it means I’ve had to sit through our fair share of bad episodes too.

No matter how good a writer is, no one ever bats a thousand, and since it’s been almost 20 years since the show came back on the air, there have been some terrible episodes I’ve had to suffer through. Here is our ranking of the worst Doctor Who episodes of all time.

The Name of the Doctor

This episode was in an awkward position. While it is technically the Series 7 finale, it also had to serve as the setup for the 50th Anniversary special, which was still six months away at the time. The result was an episode that didn’t really know what to do with itself, forcing all the characters to run around doing nothing of much interest until it was time for the climax.

The payoff to the “Impossible Girl” storyline fell a bit flat, relying a bit too heavily on the audience’s investment in a character that hadn’t been properly developed yet, despite half a series of build-ups. The cliffhanger is fantastic, but one good moment does not overrule such an aimless plot.

Sleep No More

This is a big disappointment of an episode because the core idea behind it is a cool premise. Doctor Who straying into the found-footage genre is something that was bound to happen at one point, but unfortunately, it didn’t do much with the format. Instead of crafting an episode around the style, it was just a normal Doctor Who episode that was filmed in a weird way.

On top of that, the plot wasn’t very good. It tried to do the typical Who idea of turning something mundane – the dust you get in your eye while you sleep – into a scary concept, but it fell flat almost immediately. Plus, there is simply no resolution, the episode just ends in the middle with the bad guy seemingly winning.

Arachnids in the UK

Chris Chibnall had his moments as showrunner of Doctor Who, as showcased in our roundup of Jodie Whittaker’s best Doctor Who episodes, but it’s also no coincidence that a fair few episodes on this list will bear his name as writer.

This episode is most remembered for being the one with the Donald Trump parody character that had all the subtlety of the Titanic bursting through the TARDIS wall. The joke got old almost immediately but the episode kept playing it on repeat, and it didn’t help that the actual plot was a complete by-the-numbers snoozefest.

Fear Her

There’s nothing especially terrible about Fear Her, the whole thing is just a bit dull. It comes up with a scary concept with the idea of people being trapped in a kid’s drawings but never does anything cool with it. The best part of the episode was a Flash game on the old BBC website where you’d play as the Doctor in the drawing realm – nothing even close to that cool was in the episode.

The Tsuranga Conundrum

This episode asked the question, “What if the episode Midnight was done in the worst way possible?” I didn’t ever want that question answered, but I sure did get it.

Putting aside the usual cringe-worthy humor from this era and the MPreg stuff that I just don’t have the energy to get into, the whole episode is just badly written from start to finish. The idea that the Doctor would be so careless with their companion’s safety is ridiculous, and the whole concept of the Pting just didn’t work. The episode couldn’t decide whether it was supposed to be cute or scary, and it made the whole thing fall flat.

The Timeless Children

There is still discussion raging among Who fans about The Timeless Children, although almost all of it is debating why it’s bad, which says all you need to know, really.

The whole idea of revealing the Doctor had this hidden past isn’t terrible on paper, but it was terribly executed. Aside from totally upending the canon that had stood for over 50 years at this point, establishing the Doctor as some mystical entity from another universe that’s actually immortal and the basis of the entire Time Lord race completely undermines the whole point of their character.

On top of that, it doesn’t actually matter at all in the context of the show. It doesn’t alter the characters as they are now in any way, and there weren’t even any major consequences for the Doctor discovering it all.

That’s why it’s truly terrible – it all amounted to nothing.

Love & Monsters

Now the wave of mid-2000s nostalgia has hit, there are some among the Doctor Who fanbase that likes to claim that this episode was “good, actually,” but I do wonder how many of those people have actually watched it lately.

Telling a story about someone seeking out the Doctor is a cool idea, and it definitely hits a few high points in this story, but that’s a very small part of this strange episode. The group coming together is sweet, but it doesn’t go anywhere satisfying and immediately gets undercut by Peter Kay guest starring and a monster quite literally designed by a child who won a Blue Peter contest.

It sets up a cool first half but then throws it away in the second and then tops it all off with the most unnecessary sex joke of all time.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

The episode title really tells you all you need to know. This was an episode made exclusively for 6-year-olds, and even then, they might have their intelligence insulted by this one. Not to once again throw Chris Chibnall in it, but his brand of humor just isn’t funny. There is unironically a joke in this episode where Rory’s dad mentions his balls and then pulls two golf balls out of his pocket.

Do I really need to go on?

Hell Bent

Heaven Sent is far and away one of the best episodes of Doctor Who ever made, and it sets up an awesome cliffhanger for Hell Bent to run with. Hell Bent is then a disaster from start to finish, undercutting the tone of Heaven Sent and destroying its message of coming to terms with grief. It almost feels like the original plan was for the series to run straight from Face the Raven to Hell Bent, but Moffat suddenly came up with the idea for Heaven Sent and threw it in the middle.

As an episode in a bubble, it’s fine at best. The Doctor returning to Gallifrey should’ve felt like a bigger deal, and the fact that the Time Lord threat is almost non-existent after their being built-up since 2005 as one of the deadliest foes in all the universe was a big disappointment.

Orphan 55

A lot of people who hate this episode often claim that it’s “far too preachy” about climate change, but the truth is it’s no more preachy than the show has ever been – it’s just that Oprhan 55 is so badly written it’s not at all a subtle message.

All of the characters in this episode are cringeworthy to watch – and I include the Doctor and their companions in that – with the side characters especially being some of the most unlikable and annoying ever written for the show. The plot is a whole lot of nothing, as we’ve seen plenty of stories of where the Doctor has to get people out of a nice place that’s suddenly become dangerous.

The ‘twist’ is barely even worth talking about, and while the message of “climate change = bad” is a good thing, having the Doctor almost look directly down the lens and say it was not the way to go.

In the Forest of the Night

A forest suddenly growing all over London is a fine concept, but the show doesn’t do much worthwhile with it. We spend almost the entire thing lumped with some terrible child actors that seem to drag the adults down with them – it doesn’t help that the Doctor is also written like a child for a lot of this.

It does plenty of stupid things – like claim that a cushion of pure oxygen would burn up a solar flare rather than roast the entire planet in seconds – but all of that is secondary to the one scene that truly upsets me.

The Doctor believes that there is no way to save the Earth, and he proposes to take Clara, Danny, and all the kids in their class somewhere new so that the human race doesn’t die out – this is absolutely something that the Doctor would do, staying true to the mantra of “always save someone”.

However, Clara says no. Clara tells the Doctor to let the children die. Why, you ask? There surely must be a good reason for Clara to propose such a horrific option, yes? Nope, the reason Clara gives is that the kids would miss their parents if they survived – and the Doctor agrees.

It is a complete betrayal of not only both of the characters but the whole message and philosophy of Doctor Who as a show – yet somehow it’s only the second worst episode of all time.

Flux

The idea of having six whole episodes to tell one story is a novel one for Doctor Who, which usually focuses on self-contained adventures, but I was cautiously optimistic that this could be the shot in the arm the show needed for something good in Chibnall’s third series as showrunner.

I was wrong. Very wrong.

What we actually got were four completely incoherent and confusing episodes, one Sontaran episode that was fine, and one Weeping Angel episode that was very good but connected to the overarching plot in a terrible way at the end.

In particular, episodes three and five are the worst of the bunch as they are pointlessly hard to follow. There are so many disparate plot threads, and rather than giving any one of them time to breathe, these episodes erratically jump between them with little rhyme or reason creating a confusing mess of a story that would still be awful even if it did have more time to develop.

The new characters were boring, the Sontaran sub-plot is pointless, the whole idea of the Flux constantly contradicts itself, and the main villains of the whole thing have nonsensical motivations which are never properly explained, and then they just get warped away in a moment that made no sense and it never followed up on.