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It may seem unfathomable now, but for a 15-year period from December 1989 to March 2005 there were–save for 1996’s made-for-American TV movie–no new Doctor Who shows on television. A staple of British TV from its 1963 debut until its cancellation 26 years later, the fugitive Time Lord’s escapades as he and his companions traversed time and space to explore the universe and defend humanity had been a global sensation.
Tomorrow Ncuti Gatwa returns for his second season at the controls of the TARDIS as the Fifteenth Doctor (No, I’m not starting a lengthy explanation here of the Doctor’s regenerations; please feel free to Google the subject). On a related note, last month marked the 20th anniversary of the revived series’ premiere. Under executive producer Russell T. Davies and his successors, the modern Who has thrilled new generations of fans while maintaining elements–some better than others–from the 1963-89 original series.
To mark these dual occasions, the following is my highly personal, and thus highly subjective, list of top moments from Doctor Who Mark II:
“Rose” – Naturally, I had to start with the on-screen debut of Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor. As London shopgirl Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) is attacked by store mannequins that have seemingly come alive, the Doctor appears, sonic screwdriver in hand, to save Rose from her plastic pursuers…by blowing up the store. As the duo’s paths continue to intersect, neophyte viewers and veteran Whovians watch as the first tantalizing bits of the Doctor’s past–and what happened to him and the Time Lords during the show’s hiatus–are revealed.
“Dalek” – The Doctor’s oldest and most popular foes, the metal-clad mutants known as the Daleks, make their first appearance in this Season One episode. Well, one Dalek–now a dying “exhibit” in an amoral tech mogul’s (insert your favorite billionaire here) alien museum–appears, much to Eccleston’s dismay. When the Dalek is revived after absorbing some of Rose’s DNA, the Doctor must stop it from exterminating everyone in the complex and then decide if he has the right to finally rid the universe of the merciless mechanoids.
“The Empty Child” – When a visit to WWII London during the Blitz leads to Rose dangling precariously from a barrage balloon, she is rescued not by the Doctor, but by Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), a cocksure RAF officer who seems to know a little more about aliens and time travel than he should. After his debut here, the dashing and pansexual Captain Jack would go on to be a recurring ally for more than one Doctor and eventually star in the spinoff series Torchwood.
“School Reunion” – While new Who had offered several links to its predecessor, no one from the “old days” had been seen in the revival. That is, until this heartfelt Season Two tale. While investigating strange doings at an elite British school, the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) runs into Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), a journalist who had traveled with Doctors Three (Jon Pertwee) and Four (Tom Baker) back in the 1970s. The question of what happens when the Doctor’s companions return to their “normal” lives is explored in this bittersweet episode that also featured the return of the Time Lord’s robot dog, K9.
“Army of Ghosts” – Right up there with Doctor Who on my list of favorite British TV shows is the long-running soaper EastEnders. While they have very little in common, the two series have been linked more than once. One of the best moments was in this Season Two story where mysterious spectral beings are popping up across the world. As Tennant’s Doctor and Rose watch TV, Albert Square’s own Peggy Mitchell (Barbara Windsor) is shown behind the counter of the Queen Victoria pub, telling a ghost she’s convinced is former landlord Dennis Watts to vacate the premises.
“Gridlock” – Think the traffic in your town is bad? It has nothing on the decades-long jams motorists in the subterranean byways of New New York deal with, and which the Doctor (Tennant) and companion Dr. Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) must try to escape from. This Season Three tale offers a wonderful guest turn by Irish funnyman Ardal O’Hanlon–known to many as Father Dougal on the Britcom Father Ted, as car-driving catman Thomas Kincade Brannigan, trying to navigate his way with his human wife and their litter of kittens.
“Blink” – The episode everyone shows to their friends who have no interest in Doctor Who, this suspense-packed Season Three adventure is key for two things. First is the introduction of the Weeping Angels, a predatory alien race that sends its victims back in time so they can absorb chronal energy and who have a unique defense mechanism (which I won’t spoil here). Second, of course, is the video-aided “dialogue” between the episode’s protagonist, Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan), and Tennant’s Doctor in which he explains that time, rather than being a straight line, is closer to being “a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey…stuff.”
“Partners in Crime” – How do alien babies generated from humans’ excess bodyfat come out looking so…well, cute? The Doctor (Tennant) is reunited with old acquaintance Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) in this Season Four opener, as they independently investigate a company’s new weight-loss drug and find it’s linked to a deadly extraterrestrial scheme. Along with the strangely adorable Adipose infants, the episode also features the debut of Donna’s stargazing grandfather Wilfred Mott, played by actor Bernard Cribbins. Four decades earlier, Cribbins was himself a passenger on the TARDIS–alongside movie Doctor Peter Cushing–in the 1966 film Daleks–Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.
“The Eleventh Hour” – Stepping into to the role of the Time Lord following David Tennant’s four-year tenure was going to be an intimidating challenge for any actor. Luckily, Matt Smith was up to the task. The first episode of Season Five finds the regenerated Eleventh Doctor decking himself out in a new outfit before having a rooftop staredown with aliens who threatened to blow up Earth over an escaped prisoner. As images of his predecessors flash by, Smith steps out of them, simply declares “Hello. I’m the Doctor,” and warns the interlopers that the planet is under his protection.
“Vincent and the Doctor” – One of the long-standing rules in the Whoniverse is that certain events are fixed in the time-space continuum and cannot be altered. It’s not for occasional want of trying on the Doctor’s part, of course. One moving example of this came in this Season Five story. After sharing an adventure in 1880s France with Vincent Van Gogh (Tony Curran), Smith’s Doctor and companion Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) bring the painter to 21st-century Paris’s Musée d’Orsay to show him how the world will come to hold his work in high esteem.
An Adventure in Space and Time – Okay, this 2013 drama about the creation of Doctor Who and the original series’ first three years with William Hartnell (David Bradley) in the lead isn’t an episode of the new series. I still had to include it for the scene where Hartnell, who’s about to leave the show due to health problems, turns on the TARDIS console for the last time and sees something that lets him know the show will endure.
“The Night of the Doctor” – While many classic Who watchers were less than delighted with the 1996 American-made TV movie, most were pleased with Paul McGann’s performance as the Eighth Doctor. This 2013 “mini-episode,” made to air before the show’s 50th anniversary special, brought back McGann to explain how the Doctor became involved in the devastating Time War between the Daleks and the Time Lords, as well as how the Eighth Doctor regenerated into not a doctor, but “a warrior.”
“The Day of the Doctor” – Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the original series’ debut, this 2013 epic brought Smith’s and Tennant’s incarnations together–along with “War Doctor” John Hurt, retconned in when Eccleston declined to appear–to give the Doctor a chance at saving his people from being destroyed in the Time War against the Daleks. The moment that meant the most to me, though, came near the end, as Smith sits in a British museum and contemplates settling down to become a curator. Who should appear but the museum’s actual curator (no, I’m not spoiling it here), whose cryptic conversation with the Doctor sends him on a new quest.
“Last Christmas” – The 2014 Yuletide special found Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor and companion Clara (Jenna Coleman) battling “Dream Crabs” that have infested a research base at the North Pole. It also had a great supporting turn by Nick Frost as none other than Santa Claus. But it was Faye Marsay’s performance as Shona McCullough, a polar base worker who does a charmingly dorky dance to Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” to keep from thinking about the crab monsters, that won me over. Fun Fact #1: Coleman had been thinking about leaving after this episode, and showrunner Steven Moffat considered making Shona the next companion. Fun Fact #2: Shona is seen with a Christmas to-do list that includes “Thrones marathon.” In 2015 Marsay would join Game of Thrones as The Waif. Fun Fact #3: This was the sixth time Slade’s holiday tune was used on the show.
“Twice Upon a Time” – It seemed like an impossible crossover, but Capaldi’s Doctor got the chance to interact with the First Doctor–played by An Adventure in Space and Time’s Bradley–in the 2017 Christmas special. With both iterations fighting the need to regenerate, the Time Lords must work together to help a WWI British soldier who is “unstuck” in frozen time while coming to terms with their respective destinies. The highlight of the two Doctors’ interaction comes when Bradley looks Capaldi over and laments, “I assumed that I’d…get younger,” to which Capaldi replies “I am younger!”
“The Haunting of Villa Diodati” – As the first depicted female Doctor, Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth incarnation met with fan skepticism well before her first official episode, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” premiered in 2018. Personally, Whittaker to me had the quirkiness and optimism the role required, but–much like Capaldi–she wasn’t always well-served by the storylines the creative teams featured. One of her better outings came in this Season 12 tale. The Doctor and her companions find themselves at the Swiss mansion where, during the summer of 1816, teenage author Mary Shelley was inspired by a challenge to compose the novel “Frankenstein.” Fittingly, Whittaker must deal with her own Frankenstein-like adversary, one of the part-human, part-robotic Cybermen.
“The Power of the Doctor” – The Thirteenth Doctor’s swan song, this 2022 special was a celebratory fusing of vintage and contemporary Who characters and themes. From the villainy of Daleks, Cybermen, and a certain rebel Time Lord to the sequence where Whittaker’s Doctor meets a group of her former selves–with cameos by Bradley, McGann (who doesn’t “do robes”), Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy–who encourage her to fight on, it’s a wonderful collection of callbacks. There’s even a “companion support group” meeting whose members go back to the Hartnell years (William Russell as Ian Chesterton, making his first series appearance in 57 years). The topper is a typically cheery Whittaker saying “Tag, you’re it!” to her about-to-emerge successor as she regenerates into…
Do you agree with my selections? Do you have a different favorite episode or scene from Doctor Who you’d like to share? There’s no time like the present to tell us all about it in the comments below.