Lists – Page 14 – The Strong Style Smark

Ranking Every Former NXT Champion Since Their Main Roster Debut (Part 2)

Splitting this list into thirds has achieved something pretty interesting, because part 1’s reflection on NXT’s former champions was quite a depressing one, filled with wrestlers who sadly weren’t used to their full potential, or have hardly been used at all yet, this part is filled with those who have done ok for themselves, or have yet to reach their full potential, and part 3 can be a nice celebration. This week, we get to look at the NXT Alumni that have ended up doing a lot better for themselves since moving to the main roster…mostly.

Enough faffing about, let’s carry on with the rankings.

10 – Drew Mcintyre

Days as NXT Champion: 91
Called Up On: Raw 4/16/18
Best Match Since Callup: w/ Dolph Ziggler vs Seth Rollins & Dean Ambrose at Hell in a Cell 2018
Championships Since Callup: 1x Tag Team Championship

Drew’s a slightly weird one in the context of this list.

Drew Mcintyre would sign with WWE for the first time in 2007 and debuted on Smackdown in 2009. During this time he would be dubbed “The Chosen One” after being handpicked by Vince McMahon as a future star, so it was very strange when come 2013 he was in eternal jobber faction 3MB and losing singles matches to a midget dressed as a bull.

He was released from WWE in June 2014 and would spend the next few years touring the independent scene, with long term appearances in ICW and Evolve. Drew’s physique would wildly change in this time too, he would become a lot more muscular than he was at the end of his first WWE run, dye his hair jet black, grow a grizzled looking beard and become a very angry Scotsman. This new look and vastly improved wrestling style would lead him to re-signing with WWE in early 2017, as a part of NXT. On the same night, his NXT Championship run ended he suffered an injury that would put him out of action for several months.

Come the 2018 Superstar Shakeup, Mcintyre was fully healed up and debuted on Raw to confusingly align himself with a heel Dolph Ziggler. He would spend most of this alliance looking strong as Ziggler’s muscle, helping Ziggler win singles matches with constant interference, and being a constant thorn in the side of Seth Rollins. While still at Ziggler’s side, the pair would win the Raw Tag Team Championships from The B-Team and go on to have one of the best matches of 2018 at the Hell in a Cell PPV.

The alliance would eventually dissolve following several losses to The Shield and Mcintyre would flounder for a bit. He lost singles matches to both Ziggler and Finn Balor while Balor was on his way to a match with Brock Lesnar which hurt him a bit, and yet MORE losses to The Shield also weren’t helpful. However going into Wrestlemania he was poised as Roman Reigns’ big return singles opponent, which even though he lost, is a good position to be in.

As much as Mcintyre has quite done anything special just yet, he’s right on the brink of being a megastar, and I imagine if I were to revisit this list in 3-5 years time, he will be top three, as I’ll be very surprised if he doesn’t capture his first world championship at some point during the next 12 months.

9 – Paige

Days as NXT Women’s Champion: 273
Called Up On: 4/7/14
Best Match Since Callup: vs AJ Lee at Summerslam 2014
Championships Since Callup: 2x Divas Championship

Paige is a unique case in this list because you have to consider some factors that don’t apply to anyone else.

Paige came into WWE about a year and a half before all the women’s revolution kicked off in WWE, so she spent the first stint of her career fighting pressed up against the thickest glass ceiling in WWE history. This means that when looking at her accomplishments, you have to compare it to what the women’s wrestling scene was like at the time, not what it is now.

When you look at it from that perspective Paige is probably the greatest of the era, she debuted on Raw the night after Wrestlemania 30, and would immediately win the Divas Championship from AJ that night. Paige would then go on to have lots of short and forgettable matches for the title against the likes of Tamina, Alicia Fox and Cameron, which was, unfortunately, par for the course at the time. It wouldn’t be without it’s redeeming features, however, as she would have some pretty good matches against Naomi and AJ Lee over the next few months, culminating in a surprisingly good Triple Threat match against AJ Lee and Nikki Bella.

Paige wouldn’t do much of anything for the next 8 months or so, being a heel who lost more and more credibility by the week, she began to fade back into just being “another woman”, which is a very sad indictment of how WWE thought of women’s wrestling at the time.

This would continue until the summer of 2015, where Paige become the catalyst for the women’s revolution and the on-screen flag bearer for the “Give Divas a Chance” hashtag, even if Stephanie McMahon would steal her thunder at every opportunity. Paige would team up with the newly debuted Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch to form the faction “Submission Sorority”, named after the trio’s skill in submission based wrestling.

…what do you mean that’s the name of a porn series?

After being renamed “Team PCB” – because creative names aren’t WWE’s forte – the Paige, Charlotte and Becky Experience would be the trio to lead the charge against the Bella Twins, with Paige standing as an ally for Charlotte as she unseated Nikki Bella as Divas Champion. Following this, she would turn heel and try to take the title from Charlotte in a feud that is sadly only remembered for Paige’s uncomfortable comment about Charlotte’s dead brother, Reid.

After doing a whole lot of nothing for the next year or so, Paige would sadly suffer an injury to her neck that would take her out of action for over a year, and unfortunately, things don’t get much better from here. She returned to Raw in September of 2017, where she would form the “Absolution” faction alongside Mandy Rose and Sonya Deville, but wouldn’t be able to compete for very long, as a second neck injury in December would eventually force her to tragically retire from in-ring competition the night after Wrestlemania 34.

Paige would spend the rest of 2018 as the on-screen General Manager for Smackdown, and ended up being one of the best General Managers in recent memory, before being ousted from the role in late December when the McMahon family declared the audience to be the authority and subsequently ignored our every wish. Paige would most recently show up on Smackdown live once again, this time as a manager for the team of Kairi Sane and Asuka, so she’s not going away any time soon.

While Paige’s career was sadly cut short, she was able to do a surprising amount with what little time she had. If it wasn’t for her, the women’s revolution could’ve gone very differently; we’ve just had the first ever all-women Wrestlemania main event, and it’s entirely possible that it wouldn’t have happened without Paige. Even in retirement, she’s made the most of a bad situation, becoming one of the few management characters to not be insufferably annoying and is still keeping us entertained to this day.

8 – Bayley

Days as NXT Women’s Champion: 223
Called Up On: Battleground 2016
Best Match Since Callup: vs Charlotte Flair on Raw 2/13/17
Championships Since Callup: 1x Raw Women’s Championship, 1x Smackdown Women’s Championship, 1x Women’s Tag Team Championship

When people talk about NXT callups not being handled well on main roster, Bayley is almost always one of the main wrestlers brought to the discussion. That argument certainly has some merit to it, but when you step back and look at things as a whole, it’s really not as bad as it seems.

Upon being brought up to Raw, Bayley was immediately thrown into the mix with Sasha and Charlotte for the Raw Women’s Championship, having an excellent showing in a Triple Threat Match at Night of Champions 2016. She would then move to a more underwhelming feud with Charlotte’s then lackey, Dana Brooke before being on the victorious side of the Elimination Tag Match at Survivor Series. This took a little while to boil over before she would have her first one on one match for the title at Royal Rumble, where she, unfortunately, lose to Charlotte.

The losing ways wouldn’t last long as two weeks later Bayley would defeat Charlotte (with a tiny assist from Sasha Banks) to win her first singles championship on the main roster, following a retention against Charlotte at Fastlane, Bayley would find herself carrying the title into Wrestlemania. Things got even better when she also found herself walking out of Wrestlemania as champion, putting away Charlotte, Sasha and Nia Jax in a fatal 4-way match. In a little over half a year, Bayley had become a staple of the Raw Women’s division and was standing extremely strong as it’s champion; WWE management would have to do something REALLY bad to undo all of that goodwill.

…oh for the love of-

Unfortunately, we know all too well what happened next. Former Smackdown Women’s Champion Alexa Bliss would be transferred to Raw in the superstar shakeup and immediately get the chance to challenge Bayley for the Raw Women’s Championship at Payback. Bayley would, unfortunately, lose the title in this match, but it wasn’t in awful fashion, so it wouldn’t do her any harm, but it wasn’t over. The feud would continue, building towards the Extreme Rules PPV and all of the shit would hit the biggest fan you’ve ever seen.

Alexa Bliss hosted the now infamous “Bayley: This is Your Life” segment, which is still one of the worst Raw segments in recent memory, up there with “The Old Day” and Sami meeting Bobby Lashley’s “sisters”. We still weren’t done though, as the match between the pair at Extreme Rules would be a Kendo Stick on a Pole match, which is an awful stipulation as it is, but things would be made a lot worse when Bayley refused to hit Alexa with the Kendo Stick because…she was either scared or an idiot and lost the match because of it. Either way, it completely destroyed all the goodwill and credibility Bayley had built up over the past 10 months, crowds would either boo her or not react at all when she came out for a long time following that match because – and I can’t stress this enough – she was scared of a stick.

The next two years were filled with absolutely nothing of any value for Bayley. Outside of a decent showing in the 2017 Elimination Chamber match for the Raw Women’s Championship, she would have no standout moments and spent most of 2018 having an on again off again feud with Sasha Banks that ended up going nowhere.

Eventually, things would start to turn around for Bayley though, as in February 2019, her and Sasha Banks would become the first ever Women’s Tag Team Champions in a great match and a very emotional moment. They would, unfortunately, lose those titles to The IIconics at Wrestlemania, but Bayley has bounced back tremendously, with a move to Smackdown immediately placing her toe to toe with Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch, most recently winning the Money in the Bank contract and cashing it in on the same night to win the Smackdown Women’s Championship. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that 2019 will be a great year for Bayley.

7 – Asuka

Days as NXT Women’s Champion: 522
Called Up On: TLC 2017
Best Match Since Callup: vs Charlotte Flair vs Becky Lynch at TLC 2018
Championships Since Callup: 1x Smackdown Women’s Championship

Asuka is a case where people often moan at length about how she’s been incorrectly used or “ruined” since coming up to main roster, and while she has performed below expectations, it certainly hasn’t been awful for her.

Coming out of NXT, she had an undefeated streak of unrivalled proportions, going 186-0 during her time under the brand of black and gold. Her debut, on the main roster, would be heavily anticipated on TV, with video packages every week hyping her up, and several women having to compete just for a chance to face her in her debut at TLC 2017, Asuka was presented as an extremely big deal in the lead up to her debut.

Asuka would eventually make her debut in a match against Emma, where she would win handily, and these winning ways would carry on for quite a while. People had concerns that she wasn’t being used to her full potential, but those fears were laid to rest when the first ever Women’s Royal Rumble match rolled around and Asuka came out of it the winner. She would soon let the world know that she was ready to challenge Charlotte Flair at Wrestlemania 34.

The match itself was great, one of the best of the night, and when it was said and done, Charlotte Flair was standing tall as the winner, Asuka’s undefeated streak shattered. This decision split the fanbase at large, I personally think Asuka should’ve won however given that it was Charlotte that did it, I’m ok with it because honestly, who else could have? In addition to this, undefeated streaks can end up being more of a curse than a blessing if they go on too long because they will always have to end, just ask Rusev.

Asuka could’ve quite easily recovered if that was the only major loss she suffered in the spring of 2018, however, that wasn’t to be as Carmella would cash in her Money in the Bank briefcase the next night on Smackdown to take the title from Charlotte, and Asuka was lined up as her first challenger. Asuka would lose the first encounter thanks to James Ellsworth showing up in Asuka’s entrance gear, then she’d lose the second encounter thanks to more James Ellsworth shenanigans and it was just plain awful.

Asuka would sink down into doing a whole lot of nothing for most of the rest of 2018 until December brought about her revival. With a small assist from Ronda Rousey, Asuka would win her first championship since coming to the main roster, pulling the Smackdown Women’s Championship down from atop a ladder after Rousey had laid out both Becky and Charlotte. Asuka would successfully defend her title against Becky Lynch at the Royal Rumble in a very strong showing for her, and things were looking good going into Wrestlemania season.

Unfortunately it wasn’t to last, since there were no viable opponents for Asuka on Smackdown going into Wrestlemania because WWE put all their eggs into the Ronda, Becky & Charlotte basket and forgot they had TWO women’s titles to deal with, so in the laziest move of all time, Asuka would lose her Smackdown Women’s Championship to Charlotte two weeks out from Wrestlemania clean as a whistle, and wouldn’t get a rematch.

Asuka has had a lot of ups and downs during her time on the WWE main roster, and ultimately I’d say she comes out of it looking about average, she has now teamed up with the newly debuted Kairi Sane and they seem to be going after The IIconics for the Women’s Tag Team Championships, however there really is no telling what the future holds for Asuka right now.

6 – Big E Langston

Days as NXT Champion: 153
Called Up On: Raw 12/17/12
Best Match Since Callup: w/Xavier Woods vs The Usos at Hell in a Cell 2017
Championships Since Callup: 1x Intercontinental Championship, 5x Tag Team Championship

Big E was always earmarked for stardom in WWE, although I’m not quite sure this was how anyone imagined it would happen.

Big E (then with the surname “Langston”) debuted in the dying breaths of 2012, and was instantly paired up with Dolph Ziggler to be his muscle…now I’ve definitely heard that one somewhere before. As a team, they challenged for the Tag Team Championships at Wrestlemania 29, though they would be unsuccessful, and the following night Ziggler cashed in his Money in the Bank contract to become World Heavyweight Champion.

Big E’s partnership with Ziggler would come to an end in the summer of 2013, and they would feud until Summerslam, where Ziggler & Kaitlyn would come out victorious in a match against Big E & AJ Lee. After fighting on and off with The Shield for a few months, Big E would take on Curtis Axel for the Intercontinental Championship on Raw in November and win the championship. This run wouldn’t really be the launching platform he’d hoped for, since following solid defences against Jack Swagger and Damien Sandow, Big E would lose the title to Bad News Barrett in spring of 2014 and hasn’t seen singles gold since.

After a few months of doing nothing, WWE would start hinting at an alliance between Big E, Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods, although after about a month of this, nothing came of it and they reverted back to singles competitors. It would then be picked up again in November of 2014 when vignettes started airing for what looked like a Gospel Church style group featuring the three men.

The trio debuted to the mildest of receptions, with them clapping, smiling and preaching the power of positivity, it was boring and no-one cared. However, things would take a sudden turn for the better after Wrestlemania 31, as the group would turn heel, now using the “power of positivity” as an ironic cover for the fact that they would constantly cheat and insult every audience they were put in front.

What followed next was The New Days becoming one of the greatest tag teams/factions in the history of WWE. The comedic chops of the group – Woods and Big E in particular – would be allowed to shine through every time they were allowed to speak, these antics eventually lead to the faction becoming the longest reigning Tag Team Champions in WWE history, defending the belts under the Freebird rule.

Following a face turn in 2016, The New Day would become one of the most beloved acts in all of WWE, a popularity they’ve retained to this day thanks to both their talents on the microphone and Kofi’s recent surge in popularity and WWE Championship win. While Big E’s greatest moments would come as part of a faction, none of those moments would’ve been possible with someone other than Big E in his role. No other trio could’ve done what they did and all three of them were equally important in making it happen, and their popularity isn’t going away anytime soon.

So that’s part 2! Let me know what you think of the list so far in the comments below or on Twitter @10ryawoo and make sure to come back on Monday for part 3.

Ranking Every Former NXT Champion Since Their Main Roster Debut (Part 1)

Oh, it’s time for us all to get sad again…

Ranking NXT Champions is something that has been done to death across the internet, and I really don’t think there’s a great deal I could add to that discussion until NXT’s lineage get significantly longer than it currently is, however, as much as almost every singles champion in NXT has a brilliant reign as champion, this doesn’t always translate to main roster success. Be it through bad writing, injuries, or management just never getting behind them, some former NXT champions completely flopped on the grander stages.

These rankings are going to include every former NXT Men’s and NXT Women’s Champions that have debuted on the main roster as of May 2019, with the sole exception being Kari Sane, since she’s only been on the main roster for a month, so it’s far too early to make any judgements. I’m also not counting Ciampa & Gargano’s “debuts” in February this year because Ciampa’s injury put an end to that a couple of weeks in. Also, this is going to be a three-parter because it ended up being way longer than I had anticipated.

18 – Bo Dallas

Days as NXT Champion: 260
Called Up On: Raw 7/4/14
Best Match Since Callup: w/ Curtis Axel vs The Revival at Summerslam 2018
Championships Since Callup: 1x Tag Team Championship

I can’t say this one surprises me…

Don’t get me wrong, I thought Bo Dallas was a great character as NXT Champion, but as good as it was, it was the kind of character that could only ever really work on a small scale. Sure, in a crowd of under 1000 people, most of whom are pretty hardcore wrestling fans, they’ll play along with the weird shit you’re trying to get over because it’s fun, but in front of over 10,000 people, most of whom have never heard of you, it’s going to happen.

Bo started off well enough with a winning streak that lasted for a little while, however, it was almost exclusively against people at the bottom of the totem pole and before having his winning streak ended by R-Truth of all people. There still seemed like there was some hope for Bo when he got a series of flukey wins over Mark Henry, but one squash match and an injury later, it became clear Bo was never going to get very high on the main roster.

After floundering for a few years, he saw a small measure of success as one of The Miz’s henchman alongside Curtis Axel when Miz moved to Raw in the 2017 brand split with a stranglehold over the Intercontinental Championship. This would never lead to singles success as their unceremonious breakup happened when Miz was drafted back to Smackdown in 2018 without Bo & Curtis, however, they would launch themselves to some success following this, shockingly claiming the Raw Tag Team Championships from Matt Hardy & Bo’s older brother Bray Wyatt at Extreme Rules 2018.

While this was great for the pair, now known as “The B-Team”, it wouldn’t create any longterm success, as once they lost their titles to the Authors of Pain, they would be gone from TV for most of the year. The most recent appearance on the B-Team was on Smackdown a few weeks ago, losing to Roman Reigns, despite having a 2-on-1 advantage and a special guest enforcer biased in their favour, so that should tell you all you need to know about how Bo’s done on main roster.

17 – Bobby Roode

Days as NXT Champion: 202
Called Up On: Smackdown 8/22/17
Best Match Since Callup: vs Ricochet on Raw 4/22/19
Championships Since Callup: 1x United States Championship, 1x Tag Team Championship

It seemed so easy…

When it comes to NXT Champions, there were few who did better character work than Bobby Roode. From the moment he entered the brand of black and yellow, he set out his mission statement and everything he did during his time as champion was in service of that mission. He was the best heel that NXT would ever have until Tommaso Ciampa came about, so please explain to me why, upon his main roster debut, he was a smiling, “just happy to be there” babyface?

It boggles the mind that this was the approach they took when Bobby Roode debuted on the main roster. I get that people were always going to cheer him on his debut, and having him pop the crowds and stuff for his debut match is fine, but afterwards, you need to turn him back into the character that allows him to soar. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen and it left Roode as a character with seemingly no direction, that no-one really wanted to get behind.

It didn’t help that his debut feud was with a heel Dolph Ziggler, who is one of the most boring characters of the modern era, and only ever beat him via roll-up. Roode would eventually win the United States Championship by defeating Jinder Mahal for the vacant belt after Ziggler vacated it for precisely no reason whatsoever. Any potential this win had for Roode was quickly dashed as Roode would have a couple of ok defences of the title before dropping it to Randy Orton in unceremonious fashion.

This would get him a match on the Wrestlemania main card for the title, but he was significantly overshadowed by the white-hot popularity of Rusev, and would eventually lose the match to Jinder Mahal. This lead to a good few months of Roode doing next to nothing on TV, before teaming up with Chad Gable for no apparent reason. This team would stop and start a lot during their time, and while they did win the Raw Tag Team Championships, this was during a time of very low prestige for the titles, where pretty much every team on Raw would win them at some point.

Now he’s split from Gable again, shaved his moustache and demanding we all call him “Robert Roode” who sounds like an uncle of a friend you don’t know all that well, things could potentially be looking up for him, but based on what he’s been doing so far on main roster, I’m not getting my hopes up.

16 – Ember Moon

Days as NXT Women’s Champion: 139
Called Up On: Raw 4/9/18
Best Match Since Callup: Women’s Money in the Bank 2018
Championships Since Callup: None

Ember Moon is one of a few strange cases that we have to tackle at this point in the list because she hasn’t really been on main roster long enough to do anything of note at this point. Admittedly there are plenty of entries later on this list that contradict that statement, but when it comes to the women’s division unless your name is Charlotte Flair, it can take a while for someone to rise to prominence.

Ember also wasn’t helped by an unfortunate injury that befell her at the end of January, taking her out of action for a number of months. All of this means it’s pretty hard to rank her any higher than this. It’s not like she’s been ruined and made to look like a fool, but that’s mostly because she hasn’t really done anything yet. I’m sure (and I hope) that will change in the years to come, but as of right now, there’s nothing really to shout about.

15 – Aleister Black

Days as NXT Champion: 108
Called Up On: Raw 2/18/19
Best Match Since Callup: w/ Ricochet vs The Usos vs The Bar vs Shinsuke Nakamura & Rusev at Wrestlemania 35
Championships Since Callup: None

Much like Ember Moon, Aleister Black suffers from the problem of not having been around on main roster long enough to have made that big of a splash. However, I would argue that he’s managed to make a much bigger impact since moving to main roster than Ember Moon has, in less than half the time, thanks to being paired with Ricochet.

Black & Ricochet being paired up almost immediately upon their debuts turned out to be a blessing in disguise, it stopped these two from getting lost in the shuffle over the course of the past few months and kept a constant spotlight on them. While Black & Ricochet wouldn’t claim any titles as a pair they went on a tear, defeating almost every tag team on both Raw and Smackdown as the weeks progressed.

Not only this, but they had some excellent, and pretty high profile matches, such as the Triple Threat Tag match at Fastlane, where their talents were front and center for the whole match, and one of the better matches on the Wrestlemania 35 card in the 4 Way for the Smackdown Tag Titles; where once again, the pairing were allowed to shine the whole way through.

Now the pair have been split up, we’re yet to see what level of success Aleister Black has as a singles star on Smackdown since he’s only been cutting promos from a dark and smokey room so far. This could go nowhere, but it shows that the writing team are at least trying to invest in the character enough to keep him relevant for the time being, which is generally a good sign.

14 – Andrade “Cien” Almas

Days as NXT Championship: 139
Called Up On: Smackdown 4/17/18
Best Match Since Callup: vs Daniel Bryan 9/4/18
Championships Since Callup: None

The man now known simply as “Andrade”, Almas is a pretty weird case when comparing him to others on the list. He hasn’t had a great deal of success in terms of wins and losses, and he has spent a lot of time absent from TV, however, he always seems to be in the general consciousness of Smackdown ever since he first showed up.

Although he would almost always come out on the losing end, Andrade has had many brilliant matches against brilliant opponents, and slowly but surely building up his star power. Matches against men like AJ Styles, Daniel Bryan and Rey Mysterio have been slowly cementing Andrade as a mainstay of the Smackdown live roster, and a couple of high profile wins against Rey Mysterio and Intercontinental Champion Finn Balor as of late have positioned him for some potentially great things to come.

He arguably hasn’t made as big as a splash as Black in his time on the main roster, but he seems to be in a much more overall solid position in the current hierarchy of WWE, which is arguably better in the long term. That said, he hasn’t done all that much yet, so I can’t really put him any higher than I have.

13 – Adrian Neville

Days as NXT Champion: 286
Called Up On: Raw 3/30/15
Best Match Since Callup: vs Seth Rollins on Raw 8/3/15
Championships Since Callup: 2x Cruiserweight Championship

Neville is one that I found quite tricky to place when everything is taken into account.

Neville was brought up to the main roster with a lot of hype behind him. He was short but shredded beyond belief and he was able to move with a speed and fluidity that we’d never seen in WWE before and it was absolutely mind-blowing. When he debuted in 2015, WWE seemed to flip flop between treating like total trash and their next top star. On the one hand, he was slumming by losing to King Barrett of all people, but then suddenly the next week he would go and have an amazing match with WWE Champion Seth Rollins and was able to pin him for the three, only for it not to count due to a technicality.

In addition to this, for the longest time, he had one of the most protected finishers in the company in the Red Arrow, not even John Cena kicked out of it, with big match John being dead to rights after a Red Arrow, only for Rusev to break up the pin. This kind of back and forth would happen a whole bunch over through 2015 and 2016 until eventually, Neville would go down with an injury that took him out of action in late 2016, which would take him out of action until early the next year.

When Neville came back, he had a renewed fire seemingly lit under him. Now a heel, Neville had traded in his young fresh-faced look for a grizzled beard and a snarling expression that sent shivers through my spine, spitting vile at everyone in the Cruiserweight Division. Neville would do everything he could to bring the quickly floundering Cruiserweight Division to prominence in WWE, and he had a pretty entertaining run as Cruiserweight Championship, during which Austin Aries threw a strop and walked out of the company, which was nice.

Unfortunately, we now have to address the elephant in the room.

Neville would eventually lose his Cruiserweight Championship, to the world-renowned piece of human shit Enzo Amore, and upon finding out he would be taking another loss to the man one night on Raw, he walked out of WWE, never to return. Given that Sasha Banks is still undecided on her future in WWE, as of the time of writing, Neville is the only person on this list to no longer be with WWE, which does drag him down a bit in terms of these rankings.

Sure he’s crushing it on the independent scene and is probably about to tear the house down against Hangman Page at AEW’s Double or Nothing later this month, but in terms of his run on main roster WWE, it’s a major thumbs down.

12 – Samoa Joe

Days as NXT Champion: 134
Called Up On: 1/30/17
Best Match Since Callup: vs AJ Styles at Summerslam 2018
Championships Since Callup: 2x United States Championship

I had trouble placing Samoa Joe on this list, because when you think about his 2 and a half years on the main roster generally it seems like he should be higher up, but when you look into the details, there isn’t really that much great stuff to be had.

His debut was a good start, with him coming to Triple H’s aid when then the King of Kings was feuding with Seth Rollins in the build-up to Wrestlemania 33. Unfortunately, Joe’s shocking sneak attack wouldn’t come without its problems, as a wonky takedown of the soon-to-be Kingslayer would reinjure Rollins’ problematic knee and throw his Wrestlemania clash with Triple H up in the air. Luckily Rollins would recover in time for that match, and injuring Rollins opened up some great story opportunities for Joe going forward as an absolute monster.

Joe would continue with this momentum the next week by defeating Roman Reigns thanks to an assist from Braun Strowman, and would subsequently destroy Sami Zayn at the Fastlane PPV. Unfortunately, the next few months weren’t great for Joe, with him being left completely off of the Wrestlemania 33 card, and then having a pretty underwhelming match with Seth Rollins at Payback the next month, where he would come out on the losing end.

The next year or so was full of ups and down for the Samoan Submission Machine. For every awesome match with Brock Lesnar, there was a boring match with Roman Reigns, and for every dominant performance at Summerslam, there was a 5-second loss to Drew Mcintyre at Survivor Series. Then came the summer of 2018, and Joe’s WWE Championship feud with AJ Styles.

The feud started off great. Joe is one of the best promo guys in the company right now and whenever he was given mic time he would make the most of it; turning to AJ’s daughter and claiming that “I’ll be your new daddy” is something none of us will forget in a hurry. Unfortunately, the pair would only have one match that was anything worth shouting about before shoddy finishes and way too many matches would leave us all wishing the feud would just end.

Luckily Joe looks to be on the up and up again now, with a United States Championship win and a dominant defence of said title at Wrestlemania 35, but it wouldn’t surprise me if yet another down is just beyond the horizon.

11 – Shinsuke Nakamura

Days as NXT Champion: 147
Called Up On: Smackdown 4/4/17
Best Match Since Callup: vs AJ Styles at Wrestlemania 34
Championships Since Callup: 1x United States Championship

That’ll teach us to get our hopes up.

Nakamura sits alongside Roode as one of the biggest examples of an NXT Alumni to be “ruined” by main roster writing and booking, and while it’s true that Nakamura’s time on the main roster hasn’t exactly been what we’d hoped for, it’s certainly not without its merits.

How Nakamura was handled during his first couple of months can be argued as both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, they treated his debut match as a huge deal, and saving it for a PPV was a great way to build up some mystique around him. Unfortunately, that match was against a heel Dolph Ziggler and I’m already falling asleep with boredom. His second match was then against Baron Corbin, and now I think I might’ve slipped into a coma.

Then he was launched pretty quickly into a big Summerslam feud for the WWE Championship. Great right? Well, technically yes it is a good thing, but it was against none other than Jinder Mahal, who made racist comments about eastern Asian people…yikes. It would get worse, since not only would Nakamura lose to Jinder, twice, but they would be matches so very boring I can’t remember a single detail about them thinking back to it right now, but I imagine the Singh Brothers got involved on multiple occasions.

Still, there was hope on the horizon, as Shinsuke Nakamura would win the 2018 Royal Rumble, in what ended up being one of the best Royal Rumble matches in the history of the gimmick and an epic clash with AJ Styles was on the horizon for Wrestlemania 34. There’s no way they could mess this up right?

…right?

As to whether or not they messed the Mania match itself up is really a matter of perspective. It was a brilliant match, however, it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the pair’s encounter at New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Wrestle Kingdom 13 event from the previous year, so many fans came away disappointed. In addition to this, Nakamura didn’t win, which seemed like an odd decision, however, he did turn heel which seemed like a great move and a genius way to keep Nakamura’s momentum going in defeat.

Unfortunately (I’m saying that a lot in this list…), the feud would continue with most of the matches being pretty disappointing. We got a match at the Greatest Royal Rumble event that would end in a disqualification, a match at Backlash that would end in a double KO thanks to simultaneous dick kicks and finally a pretty good Last Man Standing match at Money in the Bank. Nakamura would once again come out on the losing end at Money in the Bank and he quickly sank back down the card, obliterating Jeff Hardy to take his United States Championship before completely disappearing off of TV for seemingly no reason.

Through no fault of his own, the United States Championship would fall to the least prestigious point it’s been in for year while over Nakamura’s shoulder, thanks to a severe lack of title defenses and almost no appearances on PPV, save for an excellent match against Intercontinental Champion Seth Rollins at Survivor Series; although that wasn’t a title defence and Nakamura didn’t win, so make of that what you will. Most recently Nakamura has teamed up with Rusev and the pair were the afterthought in the 4 way for the Smackdown Tag Team titles at Wrestlemania 35.

Honestly, you could argue Nakamura should be lower down on this list, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but personally, I think his highest moments were some of the best in recent memory, and while it doesn’t erase all of the bad, it certainly pulls him up more than you’d think.

So that’s part 1! Let me know what you think of the list so far in the comments below or on Twitter @10ryawoo and make sure to come back on Saturday for part 2.

Every Episode of Doctor Who Series 2 (2006) Ranked

Series 2 is an interesting one because it’s got episodes from all ends of the spectrum. While Series 1 didn’t have any episodes I hated, series 2 has a whole bunch of them, but it isn’t short of the usual brilliance either.

David Tennant naturally had a very different feeling to Ecclestone as The Doctor, and while I personally preferred Ecclestone, it’s undeniable that Tennant’s performance in this season drew a lot of new eyes to the show and is remembered very fondly by the audience at large because of this season.

Make sure you check out my rankings of series 1 first, but for the rest of you let’s take a look at my rankings of Series 2.

11 – Love & Monsters (Episode 10)

No prizes for guessing this one would be last.

When I was rewatching this I tried to go into it open-minded and to look through it and draw out all of the good in amongst the piles of awful, but there wasn’t really much to be found.

I’m gonna go through what I liked first, which is pretty much just the story with Jackie. Doctor Who has often tried to touch on what happens to those that get left behind, but it never normally gets enough time to breathe in order to be worthwhile. This episode lets us see that though, we were able to see Jackie without interference from The Doctor or Rose for once.

That loneliness is clear and the idea that she’s desperate just for someone to talk to is apparent, but we also get to see Jackie stand up for herself for pretty much the only time, and were able to see exactly what it is Jackie goes through day-to-day and that’s important to ground the character when she’s part of the adventure later on in the series.

Now to the crap…

There’s a lot to go through so I’m not going into too much detail; first the Absorbaloff. To quickly address the elephant in the room, I know that it was designed by a child in a contest, but that doesn’t make it any less bad. I don’t hate the idea of a monster that absorbs people, it could be quite scary if it’s done right, but this was not done right at all. The design is so unintimidating to the point where it’s comical, which didn’t help when they cast Peter Kay to play him, which isn’t an inherently bad decision, but he wasn’t helped by his supporting cast.

Which brings us to all of the humans in LINDA, who are all one note, boring and not particularly well acted. I found the man who played Elton to be extremely annoying, which I get was the point in some places, but it persisted even when the episode was trying to be serious. All I could think of whenever he was talking was how much I wanted to punch him in the face, and this guy is supposed to be your hero. It didn’t help that they were all idiots as well, who couldn’t seem to see what was right in front of their faces the entire time.

More importantly, with Elton, he doesn’t do ANYTHING. He just happens to be there while the world goes on around him. He stumbled upon The Doctor twice and doesn’t do anything either time, he only got in with Jackie because she engaged him, and The Doctor only showed up at the end to save him because of Jackie. I don’t have any reason to root for the guy because he’s done absolutely nothing of his own, he’s completely inconsequential to his own story.

There’s a whole bunch of more minor things that annoy me about this episode, like the vlog style of storytelling and that joke at the end of the episode, but I’ve gone on about this episode long enough, and I want to get to something better.

10 – Fear Her (Episode 11)

Fear Her is bad in a different way to Love & Monsters, because Love & Monsters was doomed from the premise alone, I can’t really see a way that any of the themes could’ve worked with different writing, however Fear Her touches on some really good ideas and has some themes that could make for an interesting story on their own, but they all seemed to get drowned out and forced to take a back foot to a lot of less good ideas the whole way through.

First off there’s Chloe and I’m not going to spend ages ragging on a child actress, but I really didn’t like the performance of Chloe in this episode and it really took away a lot of the emotional weight of the episode for me. The character is more interesting, because the episode touches on the fact that she used to have an abusive father in the house, which is quite a delicate topic and this episode really doesn’t treat it with the care it deserves (which is weird considering this was the second time in series 2 they’d tried this. they bungled it the first time too, but we’ll get to that.)

Granted the character is possessed for a large chunk of the episode, she doesn’t seem to act like a child in that situation would act. Maybe it was in the writing and just didn’t come across in the performance, but for the most part she just seemed to act like any other child would, she just seemed a bit angry was all.

Looking at the monster, I think the idea of people being trapped in drawings, and drawings coming to life is something that can be a pretty scary threat, but like with Love & Monsters, the execution didn’t really work. I liked the motivations of the monster, that it was just a child who was lost and lovely, and I even liked removing The Doctor from the picture about halfway through, but it didn’t do enough with any of these ideas.

9 – The Idiot’s Lantern (Episode 7)

The Idiot’s Lantern is an interesting one because while I don’t explicitly hate it, it does falter at multiple points.

The first and most notable of which is The Wire. The idea of a monster that lives in the TV and slowly eats your brain is something that I was never that keen on, and while the imagery of a person without a face is shocking the first couple of times you see it, it’s certainly nothing terrifying. Using the style of an old continuity announcer was a good way to present it, with a kind and smiling face that suddenly goes evil is pretty good, unfortunately, the actress they got to play The Wire could not do the evil side very well at all.

When she’s in continuity announcer mode, she’s very good in her role, and can even pull off the subtly sinister tone she sometimes spoke in very well. However, once the illusion broke and she had to start talking like a villain it completely fell apart for me. She would just constantly yell the most obnoxiously awful manner, and every time I heard her yell “huuuungrryyyyy” or “feeeeed meeee”, I just wanted to plug my ears because it was so annoying to listen to.

Outside of that, we have a secondary antagonist in the form of the controlling and manipulative father, who is perhaps one of the worst written characters ever in modern Doctor Who. For a start, he’s so over the top when it comes to his performance, to the point where it comes off more as comical than serious, and while the moment that the wife decides to kick him out is satisfying, it’s undercut not too long later by the interaction with the son.

The idea that the son has to go and help out his abusive and toxic father because “he’s your father” is something I really don’t like the message of. I understand that Doctor Who often tries to send out the message that everyone’s redeemable, and Rose grew up fatherless, but when a family member is as abusive and controlling as that father was presented to be, then you should be allowed to cut them the fuck out of your life. It pushes the idea that you have to always stick with your family no matter how horrible they are to you, which is something I fundamentally disagree with.

Ignoring the politics of it all though, what you’ve got is a fairly basic story where the mystery reveals itself way too soon, the monster is awful and none of the secondary characters have anything interesting about them. Not very interesting.

8 – New Earth (Episode 1)

New Earth was something fairly unique for the series, since we’d already got the new Doctor stuff out of the way in the Xmas special, and we didn’t have any new companions to worry about, Episode 1 of Series 2 didn’t need to focus on establishing any new characters and instead was able to give us a regular Doctor Who adventure.

In terms of the adventure itself it was fairly good, we had a whole bunch of mystery and weirdness that only Doctor Who can pull off in the right way, so there was plenty of fun to be had the whole way through. We even got a returning villain in the form of Cassandra, so people tuning back into the series after series 1 had plenty to enjoy.

The main thing that pulls me out of the episode though, is sadly David Tennant’s performance. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still great, but he clearly hadn’t quite found his voice as The Doctor yet and it still felt like he was settling into the role. Thankfully this is the only episode in the series where I feel like this, but that doesn’t help New Earth since it arguably stands out more for that fact.

The Cassandra story also felt very secondary to everything else that was going on, and during the middle act of the episode, it felt entirely filler. I can understand why you’d want some form of recurring villain from Series 1 to tide over viewers, but for one thing, there were plenty better than Cassandra to chose from and for another, it really should’ve been the main focus of the episode instead of a side plot that admittedly pays off nicely at the end, but it could’ve been a lot more.

And that’s really all I have to say about New Earth, it’s fine, but doesn’t hold up compared to most other episodes of the series.

7 – The Christmas Invasion (2005 Xmas Special)

This is why I find Tennant’s performance in New Earth weird because although he didn’t do a whole lot in this episode, he seems to fit the role just as well as he would in his best episodes. Maybe he was more motivated by it being his first outing, but whatever, on to the episode.

The Christmas Invasion had a pretty big job, since, for those who had never watched the show before, the idea of a regeneration is brand new to them, so this episode had to convince an audience who had just spent a year falling in love with Christopher Ecclestone, that this new guy was just as good. It did a pretty good job if you ask me.

As with most of early revived Who, the show does a great job of taking the audience through it by presenting the process entirely through Rose’s eyes. We see her have to come to terms with the idea that this brand new man is still the same person she’d been falling in love with all this time. Not only that, but taking him out of action for most of the episode was also a brilliant idea, because it meant that we spent the whole episode longing for The Doctor to leap into action, so it meant that when he finally did we were extremely excited to see him, even if he was a brand new man.

Once again, this alien threat is very solidly OK in this episode. Davies’ Xmas specials were always written to be pretty simple light-hearted adventures for the stuffed British public of a Christmas evening. I actually quite liked the visual design of the Sycorax and it’s one of those villains that I wish we got to see again some time after this episode, but oh well.

Regardless of that, The Christmas Invasion does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and shows us that this brand new Doctor is still the fun-loving, intelligent hero that he was before, and got us ready for the new series.

6 – Tooth and Claw (Episode 2)

Now here’s the 10th Doctor we all know and love!

In the same way that New Earth was only as low as it was for Tennant’s lacklustre performance, Tooth and Claw is as high as it is because Tennant is just wonderful the whole way through.

Tennant’s trademark energy of The Doctor is one full display in this episode, to the point where he almost overshadows everything else in the thing. Watching him prance about the screen, yelling, whispering and generally being a joy to watch captures pretty much everything I loved about Tennant’s Doctor. He had this ability to take a mediocre script and make it an absolute joy to watch, and Tooth and Claw is perhaps the best example of this.

Queen Victoria was an interesting choice for the historical figure in this one. It made sense for the setting and gave an easy motivation to why the villains are doing their thing, but there’s nothing really unique here to distinguish why it HAD to be Queen Victoria. You could take out Victoria entirely and replace her with pretty much any women of high status from the time period and it would’ve been pretty much the same episode.

Usually, the main charm of the historical figure episodes is that the entire story is tailored around them. If you look at The Shakespeare Code, The Unicorn & The Wasp or Vincent and The Doctor, the stories of their respective episodes would only ever work with that historical figure in particular. I just don’t get that feeling with this episode.

The Werewolf is actually a pretty threatening villain, and while it doesn’t exactly make your spine tingle, it does have moments where it blows you away with its pure power or viciousness.

Ultimately, while this episode does have some weak points, Tennant’s performance and the Werewolf itself combine to make what I think is a pretty fun adventure to watch.

5 – Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel
(Episodes 5 & 6)

I’m honestly surprised that this story landed as high as it did on the list because watching it at the time (and especially in the first part) it felt like a bit of a big spray of ideas, where a bit of everything got thrown at the wall all at once. That said, once the episode reels in its focus, it was very good at running with the ideas that stuck.

A parallel universe is something that is always a great premise for a sci-fi show because it lets the writers take a lot of liberties with the world we know, and opens everything up to a load of “what if” scenarios. I don’t think it was used to its full potential here, but it wasn’t necessarily the point of the episode when you take a look at the big picture.

It did, however, achieve some pretty important things: 1) Rose’s dad being alive, 2) It let us mess with London in a way that didn’t affect the real thing and most importantly 3) It gave Mickey the exact kind of character development he’d needed for so long.

Mickey had been a character that I’d always liked but was nothing special up until this point. He’d had his moments of course, but for the most part, he just came across as the jealous ex-boyfriend who was mostly comic relief. This episode gave him so much more character than we’d ever seen in him up to this point. We learn about his life, and exactly what it is he stands for, we get to watch everything click into place for him and work out what he wants to actually do with his life, it makes the moment at the end where he decides to stay quite heartbreaking, but also slightly triumphant since it was a character we have grown to know and love finally reaching his full potential.

This was also a very good reintroduction for the Cybermen, particularly the end of Rise of the Cybermen where they just wandered around killing everyone was great, and I remember being absolutely terrified by it as a kid. The second part could’ve done a bit more with that threat, and it never really felt like any of the characters were in any immediate danger except for when they got killed out of nowhere, but ultimately I think it worked for the story it was telling.

Funnily enough, I don’t think the Cybermen have been done anywhere near as well since this episode, it was an episode purely about showcasing what the Cybermen were about, and from that angle, I think it worked.

4 – The Army of Ghosts/Doomsday
(Episodes 12 & 13)

This is one of those rare instances in Doctor Who, where I very much prefer the first part to the second because I think The Army of Ghosts has a very good structure that Doomsday doesn’t capitalize on as well as it could have.

The Army of Ghosts is entirely about the mystery, while the episode is constantly presenting questions to the audience: Why are there ghosts? What are they really? What’s in the Sphere? Where can I watch the full Eastenders episode with the ghost in it? And while it gives you little bits throughout, it holds back on answering most of these questions for as long as it possibly can to maximize the impact it has at the end when all of these questions get their answers at once.

That final ten minutes when everything goes down is such a thrill ride, where you keep finding out shocking thing after shocking thing (it would’ve been a bit better if they didn’t show you a Cyberman earlier on in the episode, but oh well), and not only that but uses each shocking reveal to make the next one even more shocking. An army of Cybermen come through and invade Earth, so when the Sphere starts to go mental at the same time, you naturally assume some sort of Cyberking or something will be coming out of it, only for the camera to pan up and reveal the Daleks in what is such a brilliant cliffhanger.

My main problem with Doomsday is that, until the climax, it moves quite slowly. It takes it’s time presenting more mystery and questions, when really, once we’ve had our shocking reveals at the end of Army of Ghosts, the only real questions left should be: What do they want? and How do we stop them?, but instead so much time was dedicated to sitting around chatting, I just feel it should’ve been a lot more action-packed than it was.

That said, when it did pick up, it was very fun to watch indeed. The Daleks and the Cybermen going back on forth was pretty cool to see, even if it was a bit cheesy, but watching The Doctor caught in the middle of it all trying to make sense of what is going on and how to stop them.

Then we get Rose’s farewell, and while I’m not the biggest fan of Rose, I still find that the entire final sequence to be so emotionally charged and truly heartbreaking. In a way, the fact that Rose didn’t die kind of made it more heartbreaking because she was totally fine, living her life on a parallel world, but completely trapped and unable to ever see the love of her life again. I also want to give a special mention to the music here because “Doomsday” is perhaps my favourite track ever from Doctor Who and it adds so much to the scene.

It’s a finale where The Doctor takes the back foot for the most of it, but I think that somewhat adds to it, because it makes everything feel very chaotic, building to a big climax before crashing down into an upsetting goodbye.

3 – School Reunion (Episode 3)

Bringing back a classic companion was always going to be a difficult thing to achieve, the change in the style of writing from classic and new who risked potentially betraying the character in this new incarnation. I haven’t seen the largest amount of classic Sarah Jane, but I’ve seen enough to know what kind of a character she was.

So School Reunion comes along, and not only keeps the character consistent but adds much more to their story. We see through Sarah Jane what happens when The Doctor leaves his companions, which was something the ended up being pretty important for the new series since, at the time this episode was broadcast, we were yet to say goodbye to any long term companions.

It shows us the kind of life she led because of what The Doctor gave her, he changed the view of the world and now she’s investigating possible alien incursions all over the place, so naturally, she was going to run into The Doctor again eventually. It touched on the “Curse of the Time Lord” a point that would eventually come full circle in series 4, about how hard it is for The Doctor to spend his whole life losing people.

Not only this but when we look towards the villain of the episode, we have the brilliant actor Antony Head. The scene in the pool is such a tense scene watching these two wonderful actors just talking to each other, we still didn’t have the most fully formed idea of Tennant’s character just yet, and this was a great way to show how well he could play a serious Doctor.

Overall it led to an episode that managed to hit pretty much all the right notes at the right time as it progressed, and it allowed Sarah Jane to exists in the Doctor Who universe for a great spin-off show.

2 – The Girl in the Fireplace – (Episode 4)

The idea of The Doctor popping in and out of someone’s life, while someone else is forced to take the “slow road”, is something that Moffat would explore with companions at various points in later seasons, but this episode is unique in that aspect, as it tells the story entirely focused around a single person which we’re introduced to for the first time in this episode.

I find myself connecting with Renette a lot more than I do with most one-off characters because the episode doesn’t need to take time out to explain the character’s backstory to us, instead it shows us exactly who she is, how she thinks and what she wants. Not only that, but it doesn’t need to rely on flashbacks or dream sequences because it cleverly weaves her entire life into the story because realistically, she IS the story in this episode.

Focussing your entire episode around one character that we’ll only ever meet this once can be quite the risk because it means the entire episode hinges on how good the character is, but luckily it pays off here because Renette is brilliant. She saw everything to with this story (clockwork monsters and The Doctor) when she was a child and while she stored it in the back of her mind, she never let herself get obsessed by it, we can clearly see that she’s mentally strong enough to move on with her life, while accepting that every now and then The Doctor and monsters will appear in her life, and disappear just as fast.

Not only that, but when she’s confronted with the world that The Doctor lives in, she flat out rejects it, she’s strong enough to understand what’s being going on in her world, but she has her limits, and that little detail makes her feel so much more like a real person.

Then there’s the tragedy of the episode, where The Doctor constantly taking the fast road leads to him missing out and losing Renette to time. That moment when The Doctor realises he can go back, The Doctor asks for Renette to “wish him luck” and the absolute misery in her voice when she says “no” is so damn good because you just know that it’s the last time he’ll see her. It furthers the point that School Reunion made, but is able to show us instead of the tragedy of The Doctor’s life and how often he ends up losing people.

The mystery of the episode is also rather good, since it gives you just enough information to get you most of the way to understanding, but refuses to give you the final piece of the puzzle until the last second. For example, it’s clear pretty early on that what the monsters want from Renette clearly has something to do with her age, with the constant references to her “not being ready”, but it doesn’t let you know exactly why until we’re ready for the climax.

That side of the episode isn’t really what’s important – though it’s a nice bonus – because this episode is so focused on Renette as a character and absolutely nails it and is able to tell a story that I don’t think Doctor Who has done quite like this before or since.

1 – The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
(Episodes 8 & 9)

Tension is something that I often think a lot of Doctor Who episodes lack. Sometimes that’s fine, in an episode that’s supposed to be about running all over the place trying to avoid monsters then it’s fine to have the focus be on the action, but every now and then an episode will take the idea of tension and use it to absolute perfection.

There are a lot of strings in this story that at first feel like they’re pulling episode in all sorts of different directions. There’s a planet circling a black hole but miraculously isn’t falling in; a slave race called the Ood who have one of the strangest introductions I’ve ever seen for a Doctor Who alien; the mystery of the crew drilling into the planet and what they’ll find there and an ancient language which seems to be possessing a guy. When you watch these episodes for the first time, it doesn’t really feel like any of these elements fit together very well, but this story is brilliant at slowly connecting the dots, at drawing these strings together in a way that makes sense, but isn’t predictable.

The story also goes to great lengths to make full use of the two episodes that it was given, there’s not a single scene in either of these two parts that is wasted, even in some of my favourite episodes there are scenes I’d quite happily cut, but everything is important in this two-parter. Not only that but each part has a very different feel. The Impossible Planet is slow and creeping, the mystery builds itself one scene at a time and doesn’t rush to give you any of the information, it’s a master of the tension I was referring to at the beginning, because the whole time it feels like things should be going wrong, but aside from one moment in the middle and right at the end, they never really do.

All that means is that when shit finally hits the fan, it feels huge and that’s what most of The Satan Pit is all about and yet it doesn’t lose that tension that the first episode built up. Most of the scenes are now action and chase scenes, but the way they designed the Ood as monsters means that the tension still runs high the whole time and it makes for such adrenaline fuelled viewing. Even watching it now, when I know what’s going to happen I still get caught up in the action of the moment as the group are crawling through vents to get away from the Ood, or as Danny stands there are stares down the Ood locked outside the control room, or best of all in that beautiful moment when The Doctor decides to unclip from his harness and blindly drop into the pit.

What gets me most about this story, is that once it’s all said and done, with the monster defeated and as many people saved as possible, The Doctor still doesn’t know what this creature is. He stood before it, spoke with it and even destroyed its mind before casting it into a black hole, but when Rose asks him what it was, he still doesn’t know, and just has to comfort himself with the fact that, whatever it was, they beat it. It’s a mystery that never gets solved, and honestly, it’s something I never want to be solved, because that total lack of knowledge of what this creature was is a huge part of what makes it so terrifying.

So there you have it! Those are my thoughts on every episode in Doctor Who series 2! Let me know what you think in the comments below, or on Twitter @10ryawoo. Come back next month for my rankings for the episodes of series 3, and check this space next week for my coverage of WWE Stomping Grounds!

Every Main Series Assassin’s Creed Game Ranked

I have an extremely weird relationship with the Assassin’s Creed franchise. It was one of the first games I played on a console not made by Nintendo, and in many ways was my introduction into the world of AAA gaming. This means that I have a strange affinity for the franchise, despite huge swathes of it being examples of everything I hate about modern AAA games.

It’s a franchise that I find myself looking on from a mostly negative viewpoint nowadays for various reasons that I’ll get into, but there is still lots of good stuff in there and sometimes I need to remind myself of that because ultimately it is still a franchise that I like. So, when I decided that I wanted to talk about my weird relationship with Assassin’s Creed, I thought that the best way to do it would to be to rank all of the main series games, capturing what I love and what I hate about this modern juggernaut of gaming.

As I say, this is just going to be the main series of Assassin’s Creed titles, “main series” meaning: the big release that Ubisoft promotes to death almost every year. I’m also not counting Rogue since, as much as you could consider it a part of the main series, it was pretty clearly an afterthought to Unity and didn’t bring anything new to the table following Black Flag.

With that caveat out of the way, let’s get into the rankings.

10 – Assassin’s Creed Unity
(2014)

So there’s a whole lot to unpack here.

Firstly, you can’t talk about Unity without mentioning how completely and totally broken it was on its release. You’ve all seen the image of the characters without faces a thousand times in the years since and it’s arguably deserved, there are very few AAA games on the scale of the Assassin’s Creed franchise that have ever launched that broken, and it took them a lot longer than it should’ve to fix the thing.

However they did eventually fix it, so taking it’s launch aside, what are we left with?

Essentially, you know the standard and fairly generic formula that you think of when someone mentions Assassin’s Creed? It’s just that, with very little layered on top of it. The fact that they were trying to develop two games at once no doubt played some role in this, but there was little to no innovation what so ever in this game. There were plenty of side-quests but they were all the exact same set of activities we’ve been doing over and over since the dawn of the open world game, so I had absolutely no desire to do them.

The story is barely worth mentioning, every character felt like the most paint by numbers version of their archetype, with the protagonist Arno (whose name I had to look up because I didn’t care enough about him to remember) being the most watered down protagonist in the whole series. I had no reason to care about him or anything he was doing because he had no discernable personality for me to grip on to.

That was really my main gripe with Unity. As much as it looked visually impressive for the time (Assassin’s Creed games almost always do), the entire world just felt completely void of character, the colour palette felt drained and muted, which would’ve been fine if that was part of the narrative but it wasn’t. There was plenty to explore and do, but I had no want to do any of it because the world just felt boring, and I don’t play games to be bored.

9 – Assassin’s Creed III
(2012)

Speaking of boring…

For many years leading up to this, the Assassin’s Creed franchise was very much straddling the line of being a so-called “feature creep”, wherein every game they would pile new stuff on in the hope some of it worked but refused to throw any of the old stuff out that didn’t, and this game is arguably the height of that.

With the exception of the awful tower defence mini-game from Revelations, I can’t think of a single feature that this game threw out, it only tried to pile more stuff on, most of which didn’t work. Once again, I found the open world was pretty boring to explore, a couple of the towns had a decent variety to them, but there were huge swathes of nothingness between it all. This was during the phase of open-world design where all that mattered was how big your open world was, and not how much stuff there is to do in it and this game really suffered as a result.

The narrative had some nice beats to it, playing as the bad guys for the first few hours without it telling you was a great little twist and it actually did a fairly compelling job of telling the story of the War of American Independence, unfortunately, I found all of the good guy characters to be horrendously dull people so once again I just didn’t really invest much in them. Meanwhile, the bad guys ended up being quite charismatic and entertaining whenever they were on screen, which was kind of the downside of making me play as them for so long.

Ultimately, when I list the things I dislike about Assassin’s Creed, almost every single one of the features in AC3, it was the first time when I started to feel tired with the series and quite honestly if it wasn’t for Black Flag’s refocusing in the next game, I doubt I would’ve pushed forward with the franchise.

8 – Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
(2015)

Ah, the weird middle step-child of the franchise.

Syndicate was in a very awkward position when it released because it was in the in-between phase of the franchise, where Ubisoft was trying to move away from the standard gameplay formula they’d been using for years but hadn’t quite decided on exactly what they wanted going forward. It meant Syndicate felt like a weird mashing of gameplay styles that didn’t really gel very well at all.

For example, it introduced a levelling system for armour, weapons etc. but it didn’t feel fully formed enough to work as an actual RPG style system. It meant we were left with a system that didn’t seem to fit the standard Assassin’s Creed gameplay style since if you knew what you were doing, you could still take out enemies much of a much higher level than you without too much trouble, so the entire thing felt a little bit pointless.

That said, the side of gameplay that was the standard formula was done fairly well, with based and strongholds being fun to sneak around and take out, it was able to capture that feeling of controlled chaos that I loved from the Farcry games. There was also the personal aspect of being set in London – which is where I grew up – meaning that I actually knew the rough layout of the city and had quite a lot of fun clambering victorian versions of landmarks I already knew quite well.

The main problem I had with Syndicate was it’s writing, most specifically the protagonists, Jacob & Evie Frye, who I despise with all my heart. First, you have Evie, who is the most bog-standard, generic version of a strong female protagonist there possibly is; she takes no shit from the men, has a very serious perspective on things and snore, snore, snore. Then you have Jacob aka world’s most punchable human. He’s so obnoxious and seems to have the compulsive need to make a Whacky Quip™ during every single scene regardless of whether it’s narratively appropriate or not. I disagreed with him at almost every single opportunity, to the point where I would avoid playing as him as much as possible because he was actively detracting from my enjoyment of the game.

All of this left Syndicate in a very odd position looking back at the franchise as a whole because it doesn’t properly fit into either category when it comes to phases in the franchise since it’s this weird stitched together mess at both.

7 – Assassin’s Creed Revelations
(2011)

We go from a game packed with way too much “new” to a game with not nearly enough.

As we’ll get into a little later on, I really liked the game that preceded this one, Brotherhood, a lot, so on paper, it would seem like that a game which is essentially the same thing but in a different open world would be something I’d love right? Well, sort of.

I do tend to cut Revelations some slack because it is ultimately a version of the formula that I like quite a lot from Revelations, however, it fails in a few key aspects. The first of which, as I mentioned above is the lack of new features. Obviously, since it was a formula that I liked, I didn’t want them to burn the book and build it again from the ground up, but some cool new additions that would change certain aspects of how I played the game would be great fun and for the most part that didn’t happen.

First of all, we got the hookblade, which is the iconic Assassin’s Hidden Blade, but with a hook on the end, so you can use ziplines and…climb slightly faster? Granted it was fun to rocket down ziplines, but the novelty of that only goes so far and the increased climbing speed really only came into effect when there was a jump just a tiny bit too high for Ezio to make on his own. Then there was the bomb crafting, which was completely pointless because no-one used anything other than the smoke bombs which had already been in the franchise for two games by that point. Finally, there was the building up of the Assassin’s Guild. On the one hand, it was quite fun to do actual missions with these people you’ve been levelling up and getting to teach them how to be really good at stabbing Templars, but it also gave us the worst feature in the history of the franchise with the terrible tower defence game that’s only redeeming quality was the music that played during it.

Do you see the common thread between all three of these features? It’s that we’ve never seen them again in the franchise. They were, for all intents and purposes, failed features that no-one liked enough to ever be returned into future instalments.

That’s why I rank Revelations so low, because as much as it’s a perfectly fine edition of the formula I enjoy, but there was a severe lack of major innovation, and the few areas where it did innovate ended up being complete failures, and I can’t praise a game that failed to innovate so hard.

6 – Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
(2018)

Ah yes, the game packed to the brim with a void of stuff.

Odyssey marks the only game in the series that I haven’t completed, partly because it’s the most recent, but mostly because I was 40 hours in, and had barely discovered a quarter of the map.

All of Odyssey’s systems are great, the combat is really enjoyable with huge amounts of variety in how you can tackle a situation. There’s a decent amount of variety in the side quests, and several of them have a pretty good story to go with them as well. The game is also stunningly beautiful, with vast swathes of terrain to run and climb all over, bringing ancient Greece to life in a great way to the point where I enjoyed most of the time I spent in it.

My main problem with Odyssey is that there is just way too much stuff crammed inside it. The open world is huge, which is fine but there’s not as much to do in it as I’d like, and while there is a great variety of locations and tasks, there’s not a large enough variety for the size of the world. This meant that after 40 hours, doing fairly similar tasks over and over I had absolutely no desire to keep playing, not because I wasn’t enjoying the game, but because I felt like there was nothing new for me to see and I’d got all the enjoyment out of it that I could, which isn’t great considering I wasn’t even halfway through yet.

It’s frustrating, because all the hallmarks for a great RPG are there, with a levelling system that feels natural and scales up at a good pace for what the game moves at; a variety of weapons and combat situations to mean that every enemy encounter is a challenge, to the point where stealth isn’t just an option, but a necessary part of gaining much-needed advantages and boat battles that are just as fun as they always have been. The problem is that the world-building just isn’t there.

It might be able to get away with this flaw if the story and lore behind everything were compelling enough, but it’s hard to build up a lore-rich world when your setting is a time period before the order which the entire franchise is named after even existed.

Odyssey is a fun game to play, but I found that there was a hard limit to the amount of fun that can be got out of it, and I really hope the next Assassin’s Creed game is more refined and focused than this one because a decrease in scale is desperately needed.

5 – Assassin’s Creed
(2007)

If you’ve ever read any of my rankings before, you know I’m the first person to stand up and say that the first entry into a franchise was crap, so it’s time to buck the trend because I quite like the original Assassin’s Creed.

It was far from perfect, but it felt like quite a focused game, the three main cities all felt distinct in both their design and feel and while the world that transported you between them, was almost entirely empty, it wasn’t so big as to be a constant annoyance. There’s also something to be said for the simplicity in the mechanics in the original, with just four different weapons and the parkouring was yet to be overcomplicated with several pointless mechanics.

It also followed a rhythm that made sure it never felt too samey, despite the fact you would end up doing some fairly similar tasks over and over. Every new assassination target would require you explore a new portion of one of either Damascus, Acre or Jerusalem, and it also did a pretty good job of varying the order that it sent you to each of these cities, so I never felt like I was retreading old ground with each new assassination target.

The story isn’t overly interesting, but it does a good job of introducing you to the Assassin’s order and exactly what they stand for, using Altair’s complete disregard for all of their tenants to show you just why the Assassin’s should be considered the good guys; even if later games would end up betraying that sentiment.

The original Assassin’s Creed is a game that laid all the foundations required to launch a franchise from, while still having enough stuff there to be a great game in its own right, to the point where it still stands out in the franchise 11 years and 9 games down the line.

4 – Assassin’s Creed Origins
(2017)

From the first game released, to the first game in the timeline.

Origins was able to take what Syndicate was trying to do, and finally complete that transition to a new style of gameplay, to great effect as far as I’m concerned.

The RPG systems that were poorly implemented in Syndicate were used to their full potential here, and while it still pales in comparison to the mechanics of an RPG like the Elder Scrolls games, it works really well for what it’s trying to do. I criticized Odyssey for being really unfocused, and Origins was able to avoid spreading itself to thin for the most part to create a much more refined game that leads to an overall more fun experience than what we’d get in Odyssey.

As I’ve already mentioned, I love the combat style that this game introduced in Origins, it made every encounter a challenge, and more importantly a challenge that was enjoyable, rather than one that felt like a chore. The strikes and blocks felt meaty and the finishers felt brutal and I found myself really having a blast with every enemy encounter.

The story was a bit crap, with the whole thing getting very it’s own arse at the end, with Aya murdering Julius Ceasar, because of course, that was actually an Assassin and then going on to become the single most important person in the whole franchise by forming the Assassin’s order; which felt really unearned for a character that wasn’t that interesting and had only had about 3/4 of a game to get to know.

I also thought the world design still wasn’t amazing, the cities and landmarks were vibrant and beautiful as always, but the problem with the game being set in Egypt is that most of the map ended up being desert, which just isn’t very fun or interesting to be constantly running around. So it meant that although the game didn’t suffer from a sparsely populated world like Odyssey, it did suffer from a world that often wasn’t very fun to explore, since the answer to the question, “What’s over that hill?” was more often than not, “Sand.” Admittedly, that’s not the designer’s fault, because that’s what ancient Egypt was like, but surely something more interesting could be done with it?

All that said, I still had a lot of fun with Origins, and if this is the style the franchise is going to stick with going forward, I’d like to see future games made more like Origins, and less like Odyssey.

3 – Assassin’s Creed II
(2009)

This is what happens when a company decides to go all-in on a franchise.

The jump between the original Assassin’s Creed and it’s sequel is one of the biggest leaps in both scope and quality that I’ve ever seen. Following the original, a sequel seemed all but inevitable, and looking at it through modern eyes, it seemed like Assassin’s Creed II would be a fairly solid upgrade from the first, but nothing special; but the development team here went above and beyond to try and get this franchise permanently into the mainstream gaming consciousness, and it’s hard to argue they didn’t achieve that.

There was an insane amount of new stuff added in this game, with the stealth mechanics being expanded to make it a more fun way to play the game; there was a huge variety added to the weapons, and as much as the combat didn’t evolve much, it was fine-tuned to feel a lot smoother than it did before. The quality of the world design also went through the roof, renaissance Italy looked stunning for the time, and the colours that are absolutely everywhere as you run around the place make traversing the world such a joy.

Looking at the story, although it was nothing special, it was enjoyable enough to make me care about the characters more than I do in most Assassin’s Creed games, there’s a reason almost everyone says that Ezio is their favourite Assassin after all. You felt like the historical figures actually had a crafted place in the story, rather than just being there for the novelty of seeing them, and for most of the game, I didn’t immediately groan when a cutscene started to play.

However, there are still a few things that drag this game down for me. For one thing, the game is just an hour or so too long, especially with the DLC, which now is unremovable from the game. In the final 3 or 4 sequences, I found myself getting really frustrated and impatient about how slow the game wanted me to step through it. The story does all it can to build up and head right into the finale, but then it just randomly decides to throw another obstacle in the way and makes you run around the world pointlessly for an extra couple of hours and it meant I’m always in a bitter mood going into the final mission, because I’ve just had to trudge through a couple hours of crap.

Thankfully, that’s the only major problem I have with the game, and it doesn’t rear it’s ugly head for most of the game anyway, so I’m happy to overlook it and recognise how amazing the rest of this game is. You can make whatever you want of the current state of the franchise, but looking back at this game, you can’t say that it didn’t deserve the status it achieved.

2 – Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Remember that one time when Ubisoft just thought “fuck it” and made a pirate game for no reason? Good times.

Counting Black Flag in a list of best Assassin’s Creed games almost feels like cheating, because let’s face it, it’s an Assassin’s Creed game in name alone; that doesn’t mean it isn’t brilliant though.

I don’t think I’m alone when I say that my favourite part of Assassin’s Creed III was the sea battles. The team at Ubisoft clearly thought the same because the next game, Black Flag, was entirely about the sea battles. They stumbled upon a really fun style of gameplay and to their credit, they leaned all the way into it, to make an absolutely fantastic game.

Every battle you got into with the boats felt like an all-out war. The scale of it all combined, with the vibrant colours of the Caribbean, and the extremely well-designed soundscape made every single encounter feel like a chaotic and epic fight. Pile on top of that, extreme weather conditions, a big variety of weapons at your disposal, and the ability to board your opponent’s ships and cause a massive skirmish in quite a confined space, and you’ve got yourself a formula that never ceases to be fun to play.

The world was also extremely well designed, with the towns being bright and colourful, but not so big as to feel too big and also having enough variety in the environment so all of them felt distinct. The random islands and plantations were also great additions, with things constantly sidetracking you (in a good way) when you’re poncing about on the open seas.

Black Flag, has a fairly big open world, but by no means too big, and the game is very carefully designed to tour you through it at a very steady pace, so you never feel overwhelmed at the amount of stuff there is available to you. Speaking of stuff, unlike most of the other open worlds in this franchise, Black Flag’s world is very densely packed with a great variety of stuff to do, be it hunting down collectables, hunting animals for crafting, playing board games, throwing harpoons at sharks or firing on every British ship you see, there’s never a dull moment when traversing the world in this game; and even if you do get bored, you can just make your crew sing sea shanties to keep you entertained.

Once again, the story was perfectly fine. It doesn’t stand out to me as any kind of exceptional storytelling, but it also never did anything to piss me off or turn me against the characters which, in a game like the Assassin’s Creed series, is all I really want.

In a way, I’m quite glad this ended up being a one-off for the franchise because I honestly don’t see many ways in which this formula could’ve been improved, as the boat-based mechanics in subsequent games in the franchise have proven. Black Flag was a rare instance of a game I can honestly describe as unique in its gameplay and at the end of the day, it’s just an absolute blast to play.

1 – Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

It’s got a little bit of everything without having too much of anything.

I’ve talked a lot throughout this article about the “formula” of Assassin’s Creed, which is the general: Viewpoints, 5 different types of collectables and about 100 of each one, way too many weapons and vague stealth mechanics, (this would later become almost every Ubisoft game as well, but that’s a discussion for another day). I generally view this formula as a bad thing, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. While too much can be a bore, the right amount of small tasks dotted all over the open world can make for an extremely compelling game for a habitual completionist like me and Brotherhood is the closest thing I’ve found to a perfect version of that formula.

The open world is big enough to have plenty of variety to it, but not so expansive that it feels bloated and pointless. Traversal of the world feels fun and fluid, with parkour mechanics that Assassin’s Creed have always been good at, but it especially feels like the world was handcrafted to make running around Rome’s rooftops extra fun. Even when you wandered out into the outskirts of the city, the large plains felt like a breath of fresh air and galloping about the place on horseback was just as fun.

There was also an extremely large mission variety, not just in the main story, but with side missions too. Each of the three guilds had different styles of missions, which were solid enough to flesh out the relevant characters while staying pretty brief and not overstay their welcome. Leonardo’s missions are also great fun, playing with all the weird toys and you get to drive a tank, so I don’t have anything bad to say about that. However, best were the Lairs of Romulus which were a series of levels almost entirely based around fun parkouring challenges, with interesting scenery and a great variety in the mini-stories that surrounding them, they’re my favourite set of side quests in the whole franchise.

The visual design is also excellent, with every section of the colour palette being used in one place or another in the game. Ezio’s red and white outfit from Brotherhood is far and away from my favourite protagonist outfit, and every other character had colours and styles that seemed to perfectly match their personality. Speaking of characters and story, it’s still nothing overly special, but it’s definitely the best the franchise has done. Cesare is the best villain from this series as far as I’m concerned and Ezio is also the best protagonist by virtue of the fact that he’s the only one I don’t hate at least a little bit.

Brotherhood is simply where all of the features and styles that make the Assassin’s Creed formula what it is come together in just the right way. I firmly believe that if you took all that was good about Assassin’s Creed and refine it to a point, you’d end up with something that looked pretty similar to Brotherhood, and it’s the game that I will always go to when I need reminding of why I actually love this franchise deep down.

So there are my rankings of the Assassin’s Creed franchise! Disagree? Of course you do, so let me know how you would’ve ranked them either in the comments below or on Twitter @10ryawoo. If you enjoyed then make sure to come back this time next week for my Money in the Bank Predictions!

Every Episode of Doctor Who Series 1 (2005) Ranked

It is time for a mighty quest to begin.

I recently decided to go through every single episode of Doctor Who since 2005 (thanks to BBC IPlayer), and I decided I’m going to get some prime content out of this because I’ll take every opportunity available to talk about Doctor Who.

Once a month I’m going to be taking every episode in each series, and ranking them based on how much I enjoyed them, and then talk a little bit about why. This will conclude once I’ve done all 11 series, I will write a list where I rank the series themselves from worst to best.

Christmas specials will usually be attached to the series they come before, with a couple notable exceptions, those being: The 2009 specials will be counted in series 4, The Day of The Doctor & The Time of The Doctor will be counted in series 7, and finally Resolution will be counted in series 11, since there is no series 12 yet.

Lastly, as always, I will be counting multi-parters as a single entry.

So with the rules in place, let’s start with ranking all the episodes in series 1.

10 – The Long Game (Episode 7)

This is the thing with covering series one. Sure, this is the worst episode, but it’s also still great.

Not from a singular narrative perspective, of course, the whole thing with Satellite 5 and the Jagrafess is pretty cookie cutter and not very entertaining, but overall it takes it’s time out to make a point about companions. Given that this was the first series since the ’80s, it could quite easily have been assumed by the audience that The Doctor simply decided to travel with Rose because she was the first person he came across. This episode uses Adam to show the audience that not just anyone can do this.

Adam is a bumbling idiot, who goes around making stupid decisions and having mind-altering surgery without considering the consequences. Sure he’s an unlikable idiot, but that’s the point, you need him to show us exactly why Rose is so good as a companion for The Doctor. We never really see companions get thrown out of the TARDIS like that, but when it happens to Adam, you feel like he deserves it and the line from The Doctor “I only take the best” does wonders to serve Rose as a character.

Most of the episode may just be set up for the finale, so I can’t rank it that highly, but it does serve a pretty important purpose for the first series of Doctor Who.

9 – The Unquiet Dead (Episode 3)

I didn’t expect this one to be quite this low.

This is quite the testament to just how good the rest of series 1 is that this ended up this low down because I think there’s a lot to like here. It was the first instance in modern Who of us meeting a historical figure, so it had to essentially set a template for future series, and I think it did a pretty good job of it.

It set the template for what the monster should be – something relevant to the historical figure, in this case, ghosts – it also set the template for what the goal of the episode should be about. As much as there are monsters and adventure, the ultimate goal of the episode is for The Doctor and his companion to in some way change that historical figure’s view of the world, or inspire them to make one of their most notable works.

This also had the twist of Dickens being extremely sceptical of the world around him, and for the longest time refuses to believe that these ghosts can exist. This point leads to something I wish we saw at least a little more of in future episodes like this, which is The Doctor putting his foot down, taking a second out from showering the person in praise and sternly tell them how it is.

Many of the future episodes consist of nothing but The Doctor swooning over whatever figure they’ve got for the week and it ends up hampering what I mentioned the goal should be.

Ultimately, this episode set the template it needed to for these kinds of episodes and is arguably the best example of that template in the Russel T. Davies era.

8 – Rose (Episode 1)

Talk about an impossible task.

This episode is great for a pretty simple reason. It had 45 minutes to get an entirely new audience caught up and understanding of what Doctor Who is, and make it an exciting adventure to keep people coming back next week. And it did it.

It glosses over some things that would be expanded upon further in future episodes, but ultimately Rose is able to give us our 101 course in Doctor Who, give us some quick thrills and scares, then be home in time for tea. It took pretty much the perfect angle to do this as well, which is having us view the entire episode from the perspective of Rose.

This means that for one, we get to intimately know Rose’s character within the first ten minutes of the episode, we watch her throughout her day; see how she responds to a situation she’s not used to, and also see what her home life is like and gives us the impression that she wants to get out. It also means that the audience doesn’t feel like we’re missing out at any point, because we learn exactly what Rose does about The Doctor, at exactly the same time she does. We uncover this mystery of who The Doctor is together which both makes us connect to Rose and become more invested in finding out what The Doctor can do.

In 45 minutes, we got a ground level understanding of everything Doctor Who and it was at no point boring, which is why this is such an achievement.

7 – Aliens of London & World War Three
(Episodes 4 & 5)

So up until this point, Doctor Who had shown off a lot of what it was all about, with a sense of mystery and peril being ripe throughout the first three episodes, with a sprinkling of humour, but only enough to make the tone light enough.

With that light tone, it had never really gone full into comedy, it had kept quite a large sense of drama and danger throughout. What Aliens of London (and the first half of World War Three) does is show the much lighter side of Doctor Who. Sure there are monsters that live inside people’s skin, but they’re fat and fart a lot, which is childish yes, but funny nonetheless.

The Doctor also shows his comedic chops in this story, not to the point where he’s cracking jokes all over the place, but Ecclestone’s comedic timing is impeccable, and it can have even the smallest quip seem hilarious. I think after three episodes, that got fairly dark towards the climax, an episode like this was needed to remind us all that Doctor Who can be a fun experience too.

The Slitheen are also generally just a rather comedic villain, to the point where their big plan is simply for profit. They don’t want to take over or enslave the human race, they just want to make a quick buck and then move onto the next one; despicable sure, but ultimately pretty rubbish. That’s the thing with the Slitheen, from the perspective of a monster, they’re pretty rubbish, but when you look at the picture as a whole you realise they’re a perfect fit for the episodes that they appear in, and ultimately that is what a monster should be for.

6 – The End of the World (Episode 2)

Episode 2 had arguably a bigger task than episode 1 in Series 1. Not only did it have to keep everything that was in the first episode running strong, while developing the characters further, but it also had to give us everything alien in order to truly showcase the wonders you can experience when travelling with The Doctor.

The End of the World took a pretty good approach to this, by bombarding us with a whole bunch of aliens straight away to get everyone used to the idea of seeing strange stuff. Not only did it give us aliens though, but it also gave us Cassandra, a human who doesn’t even slightly look human. It meant that this episode introduced us to new things, while also managing to force us to take a look at what the human race could become.

Rose is a really good way of communicating all of this to the audience because she ends up reacting in the same way that I think most of us would in that scenario. She’s slightly overwhelmed by it all and it takes a chat with a simple maintenance worker in order to ground her thoughts and make her realise that these aliens aren’t so dissimilar from us, and the nice little point that the only other human is, in fact, the one that’s a freak.

That said, it doesn’t get too preachy about it. The episode could’ve quite easily lingered on the “humans are the real monsters” message, but instead, it took it’s time to focus on the action and the characters themselves. This episode works so well thanks to how it gives us all of the “alien” we can handle while ramping up the action and intensity from the first episode to show everyone exactly how exciting a Doctor Who adventure can be.

5 – Father’s Day (Episode 8)

Father’s Day is an episode that seems to divide opinion in the fanbase at large, but I think a lot of the people who don’t like it are looking at it from the wrong angle.

If you look at it like it’s a standard Doctor Who adventure, then yes it’s a bit disappointing and seemingly has a lot of missed opportunities, but I don’t think that’s what the episode is supposed to be about. It had the obvious point of the dangers of messing with time and exactly what can go wrong, but also the idea of just what grief can do to people, and how people who lost a parent before they were born/old enough to remember can do to someone.

Rose had always lived with the knowledge that her dad died and we saw her mum tell it to her as a child right at the start of the episode, and you get the impression that she’s always lived with curiosity. The idea that there’s this man that she can’t remember meeting, but still has such a strong emotional connection with her is the kind of thing that is clearly very confusing for her to have grown up with, and when she actually saw him for the first time it became very real all of a sudden.

The entire episode is essentially about Rose having to finally deal with her father’s death for real, and finally getting an opportunity to grieve for him, after growing up curious about him. We see when Rose is talking to Pete that she ends up creating this ideal world where her dad was always there for her and provided for her, and we see Pete come to that realisation that none of it’s true. He knows that he could never be the kind of dad that Rose says he was, and when he comes to the realisation of what he has to do, he’s finally able to do for Rose was he believes a dad should, which is protect her, at any cost.

It’s a heartbreaking episode right from the beginning because we know what’s going to have to happen, but it’s able to make statement after statement about just what growing up in the situation that Rose can do to someone, and it manages to do it without feeling like it’s trying to push an agenda about parenting, it’s just the characters acting like you’d expect those characters to act, which is always where the best drama comes from in my opinion.

4 – Boom Town (Episode 11)

I talked earlier about how the Siltheen is an inherently funny villain, and Boom Town seems to take that concept to its logical extreme.

This entire episode seems to be designed as a light-hearted adventure to bridge the gap between the rather dark tones of Episodes 9/10 & 12/13 and it fits perfectly into that slot. There are some jokes that don’t quite work, but for the most part, I thought this episode was a blast.

It’s got a little bit of an edge to it and tries to throw in a bunch of threats towards the end, but that’s not the focus of the episode at all. Margret Blane seems to fit her role perfectly, as the bumbling villain who’s just trying to get away, and if she can do some evil while she’s at it then that’s great. The main thing this episode does though is just let the characters loose and let them have fun interacting with each other.

There’s plenty of dynamics going on like Mickey and Jack which is the clash of men trying to alpha up and then the idea of what Mickey has to cope with while Rose away. The best example of this that I can think of in the episode is The Doctor having dinner with Margret in the restaurant. That entire scene is very comedic but sits with a rather dark undertone that only serves to make the humour even funnier.

This entire episode has that sense of fun to it that I love Doctor Who to have from time to time, especially between two darker stories like what we got in season one. It’s the perfect way to bridge the gap.

3 – Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways
(EpisodeS 12 & 13)

This is a story absolutely brimming with inventive ideas. Daleks aren’t anything new I know, but the way the threat was presented in Bad Wolf was pretty fresh for the time.

While the idea of the British game shows haven’t aged well since all three of the ones featured have since been cancelled, and it wouldn’t surprise me if people watching this episode in 10 years time had no idea what was going on, and if you’re American then you probably didn’t understand it when it aired.

That said, as a Brit who was around when all these shows were airing, I thought it was quite entertaining. The idea of the deadly game show is nothing new, but Davies gave it that British charm that made it feel like a fresh idea and was able to re-add the joy that had been sucked out of ideas like that over the years.

It once again presented us with Rose potentially dying yet again this series, and while usually, it’s pretty obvious that she’s not going to die, the way the story was written made you believe that perhaps it was possible that this was the end. It was the season finale, and Rose’s death would give The Doctor the fire he needed to take down the station for good.

The second part of the episode is running with high emotions, with the Daleks going around and killing everyone one by one was the best way to keep that level of a threat going that was established in Dalek earlier in the series. Then you’ve got some brilliant moments like The Doctor telling the Dalek’s exactly how he’s going to get Rose back, or the entire sequence where Rose is trying to get back to The Doctor.

This also defines The Doctor’s character post Time War, he was so desperate to end it that he was willing to potentially wipe out the human race just to finally be rid of them. When he’s finally confronted with that choice though, his declaration of “Coward, any day” making a bold statement that he will always do what’s right, even when he’s probably going to die because of it.

Rose suddenly appearing to save the day is something that does feel a little bit cheap on a rewatch, but it was built to and makes sense in terms of the story, so that makes it ok as far as I’m concerned. Ecclestone’s regeneration was exactly what it needed to be as well, and exactly what every subsequent regeneration has been as well, giving a big climactic speech where he says goodbye and then we get flung straight into the madness of the new Doctor.

2 – Dalek (Episode 6)

This was the first time that a lot of viewers of the show would have ever seen the Daleks, which means this was an episode that had a hell of a lot riding on it. It was the one chance that the show had to show us just how deadly and terrifying the Daleks are, and why we should be absolutely terrified of them.

First of all, updating the look was essential, while the original Daleks are iconic, they certainly wouldn’t have looked very tough and terrifying by modern standard, so encasing them in a tough looking golden metal updated the look so that they actually looked the part for this episode.

Then, right at the start of the episode, the writers made a statement on how scary these things are before it was even loose, simply by putting it in the same room as The Doctor and watching his reaction. This is the first time The Doctor will have seen a Dalek since he ended the Time War, and his reaction is written and acted to perfection. That disbelief and pure terror when The Doctor realises it’s trapped in the cell with this thing, which then turns in a borderline psychopathic joy when he realises it can’t touch him.

Taunting, insulting, torturing, these things completely go against what we’d seen out of The Doctor up until this point. Seeing what the Dalek could do to The Doctor just by existing already makes it terrifying enough, and then it gets loose.

Watching it break out of the cage in an instant and then “downloads the internet”, which is a very 2005 thing for it to do, turns it very quickly from a dying soldier into a killing machine that will stop at nothing to get it wants. Once it starts killing it gets even more scary, with bullets not even being able to touch it, and it is able to intelligently overcome every obstacle that’s placed in its path; the Dalek is able to build up this aura of being completely indestructible.

Then it turns out it’s conflicted because of what Rose imprinted upon it when she restored it, with The Doctor noting that it hates its own existence manages to make it even more terrifying. Then we get a touching moment at the end, where The Doctor is so desperate to kill this thing that he doesn’t even question what’s going on, and it takes Rose once again “imprinting” on him in order to make him realise what’s going on.

The Dalek killing itself at the end is something that is able to land perfectly on an emotional level. This is pure evil, it’s killed loads of people and is a ruthless monster, but you can’t help but feel sorry for it when it feels like it has no option but to wipe itself out because it’s become impure.

This episode re-established Doctor Who’s most iconic villain as a major threat and set them up for when a whole army shows up in the finale, while also serving to be its own fantastic self-contained story.

1 – The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
(Episodes 9 & 10)

I struggled so much picking between this and Dalek for number 1.

This episode was the first one to be written by Steven Moffat, and it didn’t disappoint. Not only was Moffat able to create an iconic villain in the gas mask child, that managed to make the phrase “Are you my mummy?” terrifying, but he was also able to create an extremely clever and fully formed narrative, worthy of a Hollywood action film.

The introduction of Captain Jack added a new dynamic to the TARDIS crew and in such a short time we see him transition from a conman out to make a profit to someone who’s willing to sacrifice himself in order to save the day. Moffat was able to create a character that was truly able to stand the test of time in the Doctor Who universe, with his own spin-off series, multiple appearances in the main series and was even originally intended to be featured in “A Good Man Goes to War” if it wasn’t for Barrowman’s scheduling conflicts.

The plotline with Nancy is a brilliant part of the story too because the whole way through we know that she’s important to the solution and we get little nuggets and hints of what role she plays but it’s never revealed or made obvious until right at the end when it’s important. This episode goes to great length to create tonnes of mystery, with the pacing of when each question is answered near perfectly plotted out.

I love the level of emotion that comes out towards the end of the episode, with the utter despair of their seemingly being no solution in sight, with the complete one-eighty into absolute joy as things turn around, that pure unadulterated joy in The Doctor voice as he proclaimed that “Everybody lives!” is perhaps my favorite Doctor Who moment ever.

This episode has just about everything that a Doctor Who story should have, the mystery, the monsters, interesting and likeable secondary characters, a dash of humour here and there with the absolute joy at the end.

So that’s it! That’s what I thought of every episode of Doctor Who series 1! I hope you enjoyed, and let me know what you think of this series in the comments below and on Twitter @10ryawoo. Make sure to come back this time next week, where I’ll be ranking every game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise!