Ten worst stories of all!

Folks,
a departure from the marathon over this weekend - the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. Tomorrow I bring you my top twenty stories of all time, today though let's head to the other end of the spectrum - the ten worst Doctor Who tales of all! Do you agree? Are you shocked? What do you think?

10. The Invasion of Time

A lot of stories vied for this position. Timelash. Fear Her. The Satan Pit. The Keeper of Traken and The Leisure Hive were all chances. But I can only fit ten stories in here, and number ten is season 15’s ‘The Invasion of Time’. My least favourite Tom Baker series  - equal least, with season 18, this story destroys Gallifrey as an idea well before the Time War. The Vardens are as rubbish an enemy as they ever used. The Sontarans look like idiots. But not as much as the Time Lords. The choice of a mental hospital to be the TARDIS interior was a shocking call. Cheap, nasty, bad. The perfect way to start the top ten worst Doctor Who stories of all time!

9. The Chase

Six episode plot line – the Daleks chase the Doctor and his companions. That’s it. Whole plan. Milk the Daleks for all their worth production team. You know you want to. Pure, uninteresting silliness. A ridiculous robot double for the Doctor. Saving grace – nice ending for Ian and Barbara, and Peter Purves of course. Dreadful jungle planet with a studio floor.

8. Daleks in Manhatten/Evolution of the Daleks

DREADFUL American accents. Dreadful acting by Diagarus. Stupid plot, the Daleks have converted humans to Daleks before, why do they want to create Dalek-humans now? That walk and talk. Hardly invincible like the casing the Daleks wear. Pig men? WHY? WHY? Helen Raynor, you SUCK.

7. Delta and the Bannermen

What a pointless waste of three episodes this was. Running around to Keff ‘I’ve got a drum machine on my synth’ McKulloch. That’s all it is. Green babies, green men. Eat the baby food, become a Chimeron! Awful acting from the woman playing Delta. Everyone in the bus dies. In a story which is supposed to be just fun. It’s ok, gloss over that. Looks cheap and nasty. McCoy horribly awkward in scenes with Ray. Makes light of death. Gavrock sitting there eating raw meat. No understanding of who the Chimerons, the Bannermen are (apart from incompetent). It’s actually a story about genocide, but it’s light and fluffy too. So much to dislike.

6.  Arc of Infinity

Mind-bogglingly stupid rubbish from Johnny Byrne, who wrote three stories and the BEST was ‘Warriors of the Deep’. Omega is lame. The Time Lords are lame. We’re in Amsterdam for no reason – should have had the ghost of Anne Frank, that would have been an interesting story. It’s so very 80s. Ian Collier does not look like Peter Davison. The ending is – The Doctor chases Omega around Amsterdam for a bit and shoots him. Gallifrey got worse with every story as the show progressed.

5. Victory of the Daleks

For being the biggest disappointment the new series has dished up. Plot starts brilliantly – what are the Daleks up to? Only the Doctor knows they are evil. No-one believes him. Then 30 minutes of utter shite from the pen of Mr Gatiss. Cheap looking interior for the Dalek space ship and dreadful looking new Daleks. The Doctor holds the Daleks at bay with a jam biscuit. Yet they destroyed Gallifrey? Give me a break. Tension built in first 12 minutes, destroyed in less than 12 second. This is crap.

4. Time and the Rani

A quarry instead of a jungle. Writers and script editor at logger-heads. Awful costumes. Awful monsters. Incomprehensible convoluted plot. Pip and Jane Baker dialogue with no help from Eric Saward. Equals total shite.

3. The Twin Dilemma

It’s cheap. It’s needlessly violent. The Doctor attacks his companion violently which should never have been conceived of. The police uniforms are the cheapest look they could possibly conceive. The monster is STUPID, looks ridiculous, should never have been attempted. The plot involves firing a planet into a sun to shoot thousands of eggs into the universe. Why does Mestor, who seems to have a cavalcade of powers, need a couple of boy geniuses who cannot act to calculate how to blow up a sun? Why couldn’t Azmael see it would happen? Why does Hugo’s gun look light a lighter-gun for a gas stove? So many whys.

2. Silver Nemesis

A three-episode runaround which is mind-bogglingly stupid, stealing most of the plot from the far superior ‘Rembrance of the Daleks’. We have Nazis in there for no good reason, a stupid old crone running around saying she knows the Doctor’s secrets, Cybermen at their most impotent ever, dreadful music by Keff McCulloch, it looks cheap as chips, the CSO is dreadful on the Cyber-ship, there’s no meat to the plot at all and it’s only saving grace is the couple of moments of comedy which are quite funny – the scene in the limo and the lamas. Dreadful rot.

1. Time-flight

Time-flight is without a doubt the antithesis of what makes a bad story in Doctor Who. It’s plot is extremely convoluted, the ultimate sign in my mind of a bad Doctor Who tale, it makes little sense and alienates the viewer very quickly after episode one which is ok. The Master is needlessly in disguise, but not only that, it’s about the worst disguise I have ever seen. The sets are shoddy and small, the Concorde is represented for the most part by a single wheel. They definitely ran out of money for this story. The Master’s brilliant plan to get to the hidden power behind the wall is to kidnap Concorde passengers to bash the wall down. It’s as close to unwatchable as any Doctor Who. I give you the ultimate in bad Doctor Who – ‘Time Flight’.

The Eleventh Hour, The Beast Below & Victory of the Daleks

The Eleventh Hour

Rory and Amy watch the Doctor do his thing.

Steven Moffat, whose stories I love, takes over from RTD. Matt Smith takes over from David Tennant. The first clear era shift in New Who, and thus far, the only one. New credits, new TARDIS interior, new companion, beautiful HD, and the Moff starts by getting it all pretty much spot on. ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was always going to be a tough one to get right – it comes on the heels of five amazingly successful years where Doctor Who quickly became a hit in a way it had never been before. The expectations on Steven Moffat to continue the brilliance were enormous, especially considering his stories had been so good and his pedigree impressive with a list of successes under his belt such as Sherlock and Coupling.

Caitlin Blackwood is amazing.

His first episode as showrunner does not disappoint, I am happy to say. Matt Smith is the eleventh Doctor, spelt out for the first time in the title of the opening episode. He comes across straight away as very ‘doctory’, with a level of eccentricity that Tennant didn’t have, but in other ways quite similar. He talks very fast, he’s a little on the arrogant side. A little? Well, yes…

We begin with the Doctor flying over London in the TARDIS which is exploding like crazy as the Doctor

Amy (Karen Gillan) sees the thing that's been living in her house all these years.

dangles precariously. I wonder if there will be any significance to that?

Enter Amelia Pond. As a young child – they cast brilliantly for the young Amelia, Caitlin Blackwood was just perfect, charismatic, likeable. There’s magic straight away as the Doctor looks desperately for something to eat – that he likes, settling on ‘fish fingers and custard’. A wonderful scene. I

Fish fingers and custard, Matt Smith.

warmed to Smith very quickly. Now the timey wimey stuff. He says he’ll be 5 minutes, but he is 12 years. When he returns Amelia Pond is now Amy Pond, grown up and played by Karen Gillan. Dressed as a police woman with a very short skirt!

Oh well, one for the Dad’s, right? Arthur Darvill is her ‘sort of’ girlfriend. He’s great as Rory Williams. The plot itself is necessarily light, but interesting enough and one that allows us to see how the Doctor, the new Doctor, operates. Getting the smarties of the world to show the Atraxi, rather cool looking space ships with giant eyes, to find prisoner Zero. Some clever stuff. Well directed, very stylish, by Adam Smith. I really loved the use of what comes across as stop-motion capture. Ok no, I don’t know what I am talking about, I admit that. But the bits where people are taking photos of the Atraxi – very nice.

The Doctor invites Amy on board the TARDIS, leaves for a quick test flight, returns two year later. She leaves with him, as the audience discover it appears she is soon to be married as it is revealed there’s a wedding dress in her bedroom! So there’s something akin to a story arc having its seeds sewn right here.

A very effective, fun, exciting and promising start to the Matt Smith era, which I hear  is due to end at Christmas! The teaser for the next episode looks great too, very excited about this series!

9/10

The Beast Below

A 'smiler'.

I must admit to be disappointed by this episode. It looks magnificent, but I ended the episode feeling like Moffat, who wrote it, had missed a trick or two with what had the potential to be another fantastic episode. I understand Moffat has said he wasn’t happy with this one, and I can see why because it has so many elements and ideas and great moments but as a whole it just doesn’t work.

Surprisingly it under-runs at less than 42 minutes, including a lead in to the next episode and a sneak peak at it too. It starts with the scary faces, a boy being sent below, it’s a very effective pre-credits start to the episode. The space ship UK, in the future where the whole country has become a floating space ship, looks great. Matt Smith is great, and I rather like the TARDIS interior now too, better than the last one which was very good don’t get me wrong.

Sophie Okondeo as Liz Ten.

‘The Beast Below’ begins being set at school, and a child who gets zero as his score is sent ‘below’ for whatever punishment lies there. And so you think the story is going to be about kids, but it’s not. We’ve got a big space whale attached to this space ship, being tortured as the leaders of Star Ship UK seem to think that will make it go faster. It’s very sad, and the fact that Moffat wrote it saying no-one would have the guts to say ‘stop it, it’s not right’ (as they are all reminded of the truth every five years) is somewhat of an indictment on the human race. Some good bits of casting, the kids are great and I liked the choice of Sophie Okonedo as Liz Ten, but I found her choice of accents to be somewhat strange. I wonder who came up with the line, ‘basically, I rule’. Yes. Hmmm.

Amy holds on above Starship UK.

Matt Smith has to get angry, and he does a good job early on as the Doctor. Amy Pond works really well in this one, Karen Gillan is a great choice to play her. We have the ‘Smilers’, strange almost clockwork men with faces that turn around and reveal a frown when they are not happy, the whale, the whole life of Star Ship UK, there was so much that could have been explored and expanded on. I think it’s a real pity it was only the 45 minutes.

6/10

Victory of the Daleks

Ian McNiece and Winston Churchill.

Hmmmm. I’m sorry Mr Gatiss, but this was the worst Dalek story of all time, the worst new-series episode and there’s not much else to say. Well, a brilliant opening 12 minutes. But it goes to show how easily that can be undone. And it is all down to the script. The fact that the new Dalek paradigm looks like awful coloured plastic is by the by.

It lends ideas from the classic ‘Power of the Daleks’. Humans don’t realise what the Daleks are, in fact they think

the Daleks are friends. The line ‘would you like some tea’ being uttered by a Dalek is utterly brilliant. But it’s the fact that this first twelve minutes is so fantastic that makes the rest of the story such utter shite.

The plot disappears. The Doctor gets on board a Dalek space craft which looks like a low-ceiling rehearsal room somewhere, and holds the Daleks to

The new Dalek paradigm. Perfect for four year olds.

ransom with a biscuit. Their plan was to wait for the Doctor to arrive to remind them they were the Daleks so they could create new, crappier-looking Daleks. And then very little happens for the rest of the story as spitfires are sent into space, got ready from an idea within minutes it seemed, and… look it’s rubbish. Then Bracewell is a bomb, the Daleks start the countdown but by remembering what it is to be human, the bomb is stopped and the Earth saved and quite frankly, it’s all appallingly bad.

1/10