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!
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