10 Best & 5 Worst: Steven Moffat Episodes of Doctor Who

As his time as head writer on Doctor Who comes to an end, it’s time to look back at a definitive* ranking of Steven Moffat’s episodes. 10 of the best, and 5 of the worst.

*By definitive I mean ‘as chosen by me on this particular day, ask me tomorrow and I may have a totally different opinion’

There’s a million of these on the internet already. But Steven Moffat has been properly divisive. Anyone who runs a very popular show on TV, especially as boldly as he has, for as long as he has, is going to split opinion. There are many criticisms of his time in charge, and I’m sure some will be glad that it’s over. I’ll address some of those complaints in doing this list, but should state my personal opinion that I think he’s been bloody brilliant. Not 100% of the time. But he’s written a lot, and I think he has a decent track record.

Obviously as head writer he has been involved in the commissioning, pitching, editing and rewriting of every episode since 2010, but to qualify for this list, it has to be one of the 40 or so episodes on which he is actually credited as the writer or a co-writer. For the record, as I write this The Empress of Mars is the most recent episode to air (so there will be a few more, including John Simm's return to consider later) and I included the mini-episodes that aired online or for Children In Need – Night of the Doctor and Time-Crash both did well, but missed out on the Top 10.

Here we go with the best:

10. Silence In The Library/Forest of the Dead
2008. David Tennant, Catherine Tate & Alex Kingston

A young girl called Cal dreams of a huge library. Her dad calls a psychiatrist called Doctor Moon to come and speak to her about it. As she describes the library that she sees when she closes her eyes, she gets very agitated. There’s someone in her library. Someone’s trying to break in. In her mind, in burst the Doctor and Donna.

The Doctor tells Donna that this is the biggest library in the universe, it’s literally a whole planet artificially created to be a library. But it’s very quiet, even for a Library. The whole place looks abandoned. Until a group of archaeologists arrive led by Strackman Lux whose family owned the library and Professor River Song (One of Who’s best lines: “I’m a time traveller, I point and laugh at archaeologists”). River wants to “do diaries” with the Doctor but soon realises he has no idea who she is. He’s meeting her for the first time, but – wibbley wobbley – she’s met him before.

Doctor Moon tells the little girl that “the real world is a lie, and your nightmares are real.”

River says the Library was abandoned many years ago, the last message Earth received from the Library said “4022 saved, no survivors.” Nobody knows what that means, but the Doctor soon discovers the alien threat in the Library. “Nearly every species in the universe had an irrational fear of the dark. But it’s not irrational. It’s the Vashta Nerrada.” Tiny creatures. Living shadows that hunt in packs and can eat a person in seconds.

On the run from the Vashta Nerada, the Doctor tries to transport Donna to safety back in the TARDIS but something goes wrong and Donna never materialises, instead her face ends up on one of the creepy statues/computers that are around the Library.

There’s a good mystery at the heart of this one, that is difficult to work out but not impossible, all the info you need is right there. Things that give the story an emotional weight also play to the intellectual mystery story and vice-versa. The telepathic communications circuits that capture a person’s last thoughts and get stuck on a loop when damaged are a horrible idea and a real nasty motif when someone dies. Miss Evangelista trying to get out her last thoughts after she died is heart-breaking, but then that plays later into the story when you realise a character has been repeating themselves and is, therefore, dead and has been replaced by Vashta Nerada in his spacesuit.

Donna spends the second half of this episode living out an alternative life in a fictional world that we glimpse on Cal’s TV and where time works the way it does in a TV show (ie. You say you’re going to bed, you immediately find yourself in your bedroom, just assume anything in your life that would be cut out in the movie of your life doesn’t happen). With so much going on, this is little more than a subplot that gives us a bit of information to help with the mystery in the Library – especially when Doctor Moon turns up – but it is so well done that you can get invested in it properly. The reveal that everything’s fake when someone points out all the kids have the same face is a good and nasty reveal and Catherine Tate proves to be a talented straight actor in the scene where she loses her own kids.

This is the first time the Doctor meets River, but the last time she meets him. While it was nice to get to know her and finally discover her proper relationship with the Doctor in later episodes, this first appearance is by far her most successful. She runs rings around the Doctor, and it’s nice to see him on the back foot in this relationship, but her *spoilers* death is still emotional, their relationship is nicely established in just 90 minutes. There are some clever slight of hand plot twists and Moffat’s classic “the monster is already in the room” twist (more on that later). Also how awesome is the bit where the Doctor says “I’m the Doctor and you’re in the biggest library in the universe, look me up!” and the army of shadows starts retreating?

9. The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witches Familiar

2015. Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman & Michelle Gomez

Steven Moffat writes the best opening sequences in all of Doctor Who. Sometimes those involve a beautiful assault on the senses taking in all of time and space, but the opening scene of series 9 is both smaller in scale and absolutely huge simultaneously. We start with a little child lost in the middle of a muddy battlefield, with ‘handmines’ (don’t worry for now) surrounding him that might kill him if he moves. The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver comes flying through the air as the hero music kicks in and it lands at the little boy’s feet. Out of the fog and smoke, the Doctor calls to him and promises to rescue him. The Doctor asks what the little boy’s name is and he says “Davros. My name is Davros,” and then the Doctor is gone. Leaving a little boy, alone, surrounded by handmines.

On Earth, the Doctor has sent his confession dial – essentially his will – to his oldest friend – The Master – which will open and reveal it’s contents in the event of his death. Realising that means something serious - the Doctor actually believes he isn’t coming back from this one - The Master recruits the Doctor’s companion Clara to go in search of him. Meanwhile the Doctor is hiding in medieval England, from Colony Sarff, a henchman of Davros.

The Master, Clara and Colony Sarff all find the Doctor and take him to Skaro to meet with a dying Davros.

In a way how could this episode fail? It’s like a greatest hits. The Doctor vs The Daleks, Davros and the Master at the same time. And although Capaldi brings a brilliant performance as always, it is the villains who really steal the show in this one. Julian Bleach reprises his role as Davros and brings more depth and vulnerability to it than we have ever seen before. The best bit of any story with Davros in it is the few minutes where the Doctor and Davros get a chance to sit down and have a chat. That goes right back to Davros’ first appearance in Genesis of the Daleks when after torturing the Doctor’s companions for information, he asks the Doctor to sit with him and discuss things as scientists. In that first episode Davros poses the question if the Doctor saw a child that would grow up a terrible dictator could the Doctor kill that child? That is not lost on Steven Moffat or Davros now we know the Doctor left him to die. Those few minutes chat are the best bits in any Davros episode, so here Moffat delivers essentially a whole episode of that. The other thing universally true of Davros episodes is that the Daleks are always playing second fiddle to their creator. That’s definitely the case here. With Davros, the Master and the really great design and CGI work on Colony Sarff, the Daleks really feel like little more than fancy guns. It’s all about the Doctor and Davros and there are some real touching and sad moments between the two of them in this one.

With a very serious, ponderous Doctor, it’s up to Michelle Gomez to pick up all the funny lines. In plot terms, she keeps Clara busy while the Doctor is chatting, but some of those gags are great. “Davros is your arch enemy? I’ll scratch his eye out!” This story establishes how unhinged her version of the Master is. Crazy, unpredictable and completely amoral, she may not do much in this one, but she still owns the screen.

There are some rushed bits at the end and more talk of this hybrid I never cared much about, but how cool to have a whole 45 minute episode based almost entirely around established characters? And that sunrise scene is excellent.

8. The Impossible Astronaut/The Day of the Moon
2011. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill & Alex Kingston

Series six gets off to a cracking start in this one. All of our heroes are bought back together at Lake Silencio in Utah, where his friends witness the Doctor being shot and killed by an unseen figure in a space suit that came out of the lake. They burn his body on the lake in a Viking style funeral.

Later, they meet the Doctor at an earlier/younger point in his life. Keeping his future death secret they head to the White House in 1969, where a scared little girl has called President Nixon because a spaceman is trying to eat her. Meanwhile in the toilet Amy sees one of the Silence, and then forgets it as soon as she looks away. The Doctor and his team – joined by former FBI agent Canton – track the girl to Florida. Where Rory and River find a whole group of Silence, and forget them as soon as they look away. While a spacesuit – the one that killed the Doctor – comes towards The Doctor and Amy, sensing an opportunity to save the Doctor’s life, shoots the spacesuit, only to see too late that it’s occupant is a little girl.

Part 2 opens 3 months later with another really exciting opening scene. Amy is on the run and Canton and the FBI are chasing her. She had strange marks, like tallies, on her skin and a marker pen around her neck. Canton shoots Amy. Across the country, he chases Rory also covered in makings too and shoots him. And River Song is at the top of a New York tower block when she encounters a couple of the Silence and takes a marker pen and adds them to the tallies on her arm. She soon forgets them when Canton arrives threatening to shoot her, to escape him she jumps out of the window.

At Area 51, the FBI are building an impenetrable box around the Doctor, and the two body bags with Amy and Rory inside are bought in and the prison is sealed with The Doctor and Canton inside. Once it’s closed and no one can get in or out, Amy and Rory get up from pretending to be dead and they escape in the invisible TARDIS, saving River halfway down the building. 

The Silence are everywhere. You can only remember them when you see them, and while you’re looking at them you can be influenced by them, but as soon as you turn your back you forget all about them. They’re a brilliantly scary idea for a monster and the look of them is terrifying. They share some commonalities with the Weeping Angels but there’s so much uniqueness in the idea that it’s never a problem. The way some scenes are shot from a character’s perspective so you don’t actually see the Silence, but you notice the tally marks on their arms is so well done and genuinely creepy. Speaking of creepy, who doesn’t like an abandoned orphanage in a horror story? Everybody, everybody hates that. They track the little girl to an abandoned orphanage swarming with the Silence, where the owner has seen them and forgotten them so much he has lost his mind. There’s thunderstorms, messages in blood on the walls and Silence everywhere. One of the best scenes has Amy walk into a room with no pen on her, and get to the other side completely covered in tallies. Then she has to walk back through a room full of them to escape.

Rory had been an on/off character in the previous series but now he’s full-time and quickly establishes himself as the best character. His fake-death scene at the start is the one we care the most about, because he seems so much more vulnerable than the others, and so much more normal! The companion should always be like a normal person that the audience can relate to in this mad world, but any companion, by their second series, is so used to the aliens, danger and facing death they lose a bit of that relatability. Amy has by this point, Rory hasn’t and never does. Throughout the whole series he holds the Doctor to account and never falls in love with him as so many do. This episode he delivers a powerfully angry response when his wife is kidnapped, does some proper comedy when he breaks a NASA model and plays broken heartedness so well when he thinks Amy is talking about her love for the Doctor (even though it’s painfully obvious to everyone in the world, she’s talking about Rory). He is definitely the best of the regulars here.

President Nixon is played for laughs by the American magician from Jonathan Creek. A children’s TV program on Saturday tea-time isn’t the time and place to go into the full complexities of Tricky Dicky, but there are some funny allusions for grown-ups who like that sort of thing. Nixon is a great comedy character who strolls into the strangest scenes with a sense of pomposity and importance. The Doctor’s plan to stop the Silence is very clever and uses their power against them. He hides a message that mankind will forget but be influenced by in the “One small step for man…” speech that every human being will see, telling them to kill the Silence on sight. It’s a really clever bit of writing. One little idea I think they missed. They could have done it “One small step for – you should kill us all on sight – man…” which would have meant that Neil Armstrong never got his lines wrong, we just all forgot it. How annoying would that be for Neil?

7. Heaven Sent/Hell Bent
2015. Peter Capaldi & Jenna Coleman

I decided in this countdown to count any two-part episodes as one story. The reason I bring this up now is because this story makes the Top 10, but to be honest 90% of the work is being done by Heaven Sent (Part 1). (Arguably it’s a 3 part story with Face The Raven as part 1, but y’know, lets keep it easy(ish)).

Heaven Sent is an absolutely stupid idea. It’s a one-man-show with Peter Capaldi being the only speaking part (well, one line from Jenna Coleman that’s imaginary anyway). In the previous episode The Doctor has witnessed his companion die and finds himself transported to empty castle. As he appears something else appears, a hunched, cloaked, grim reaper like figure trudges through the castle towards him. Never speeding up, but never slowing down and never stopping. The Veil is surrounded by flies and it’s arrival is always effectively signalled by the sights and sounds of some flies buzzing around before it appears. It’s not a villain as such. It doesn’t do much, just walks towards the Doctor, but it’s an effective monster.

When it catches up to the Doctor he realises that if he confesses a secret the whole castle rotates and changes layout so the Doctor can start running again. He gives it a few confessions over the course of the episode, but what it really wants to know about is the hybrid. The hybrid is an idea mentioned throughout the series and a secret the Doctor is definitely not going to share. If I’m honest, I don’t care about the hybrid – which probably accounts for my not liking Hell Bent as much – but I do want to see the Doctor survive and keep his secret. So the Doctor has to find another way out of this prison/torture chamber that seems to have been created especially for him. Luckily there has been a previous occupant whose skull is attached by wires to some machinery in the transporter room and who appears to have written the word ‘bird’ in the sand in his dying moments. Not much of a clue to go on, especially when nothing else makes sense.

Peter Capaldi is obviously the highlight here, showing every facet of the Doctor. We get vulnerable, grief, anger, rage, detective, cunning, cleverness, excitement, despair, depression and that complete unpredictability we sometimes get with the twelfth Doctor. One particularly great scene sees him throw a stool out of the window and then jump head first out behind it. We then cut to him walking into the TARDIS in his ‘mind-palace,’ yes this is an idea Moffat has borrowed from his Sherlock stories, but who doesn’t want a glimpse into the mind of the Doctor? Perhaps the only real significant confession we get from the Doctor is this mind-palace where he imagines he’s talking to departed companion Clara because he needs to talk out-loud and show off to make the magic happen and come up with the plans. The Doctor works out how to get out of this as he hits the water and finds loads of skulls in the icy depths under the sea.

The reveal will be worked out by some viewers but surprise others. We get some truly bad-ass moments from the Doctor when he works out how to get out without confessing the hybrid secret, but only after another great scene where he contemplates giving up. We see some of the Doctor’s lowest moments in his mind-palace and a really cool shot where all those lights in the TARDIS go out one by one as he loses consciousness.

Hell Bent then is just a bit anticlimactic. The Doctor arrives back on his homeworld of Gallifrey, where he’s wanted to be since the show came back in 2005. The military are sent to kill the Doctor but they see him as the hero of the Time War and so they drop their weapons and help him overpower the Timelords and the president. The Timelords still want to know about the hybrid, and the Doctor tells them that in order to answer their questions he will need to consult with his friend Clara, so they pull her out of time in the second before her final heartbeat, she is now living purely between her penultimate and last heartbeat which is a beautiful and romantic notion so don’t think about it coz it doesn’t work at all. They then go on the run. The Doctor plans to wipe her memory to make it easier for her to hide (somehow) but ends up wiping his own memory instead. He tells the story to a waitress in a diner as he tries to piece together what he can about Clara, but the one thing he can’t remember is her face. The waitress of course is Clara.

There’s some good stuff in this episode, it’s good to see Gallifrey back, albiet too fleetingly and playing second fiddle to Clara and Ashildr. There’s some allusions to classic westerns and the Doctor silently staring down a firing squad is powerful. Massie Williams is good as she had been 3 times before this series, I’m just not entirely sure why she’s here in this one. I also have a new found love for the old plain-white TARDIS interior of the classic show, which I always found dull until it was revived in this episode in glorious HD.

I said my love for this story was 90% Part 1, to be honest a further 8% is Jenna Coleman in a waitress outfit, and 2% is the initial excitement of it being back on Galifrey. The second half is really not pulling it’s weight here but Heaven Sent is so good. Part 1 would easily get in the Top 5 without Part 2.

6. A Christmas Carol
Christmas Special 2010. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill & Michael Gambon

I should declare an interest. I love a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, with or even without Muppets. I have the book, and DVDs of the Muppets version, Patrick Stewarts version, the Jim Carey Cartoon, the musical with Kelsey Grammer (Yes, I don’t watch that one so much), the CD of Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Christmas Carol and two separate audiobook readings of the novel (one by Who’s own Tom Baker). It’s one of the greatest time travel stories ever told and I can’t believe it took 47 years for Doctor Who to do it’s take on it.

This is a great retelling of the story, that has a lot of fun along the way and puts it’s own distinct Doctor Who spin on it. Michael Gambon is the Scrooge, in this version called Kazran Sardick. He owns a machine that controls the cloud layer above a planet. Amy and Rory are on their honeymoon aboard a spaceship that gets caught in the planet’s atmosphere and will crash unless the Doctor can convince Kazran to turn off the cloud machine.

When Kazran is unwilling, the Doctor takes on the role of the ghost of Christmas past and travels back in time to Kazran’s troubled childhood to give him a wonderful adventure. He tries to alter Kazran’s past to make him grow up a better man. When Kazran’s school was attacked by the fish that live in the clouds, Kazran wasn’t there so the Doctor tries to bring the fish into his bedroom, but unfortunately overshoots and they end up fighting a shark in Kazran’s bedroom. (This is years before the seminal classic ‘Sharknado’ dealt with the issue of flying Sharks). The Doctor and Kazran realise that a woman’s singing calms the shark. In the vault under his house are loads of people frozen in stasis chambers that Kazran’s father takes as a deposit – when he gives a family a loan, he takes a family member to freeze in stasis until it’s paid back. The Doctor tells Kazran he hopes he doesn’t grow up like his dad. They wake up Abigail (Katherine Jenkins) and go off with her for an adventure in the TARDIS. Every Christmas Eve as Kazran grows up the Doctor returns and the three of them have another adventure. Michael Gambon has a thankless task of sitting in a dark room, as new memories form in his head, it’s a strange thing to act, but Gambon does it well.

The Doctor, Kazran and Abagail go on a series of fun little adventures. As Kazran gets older and becomes a teenager, he and Abagail begin to fall in love. Kazran gets to see how the other half live, when they spend Christmas Eve with Abagail’s poor family – the Crotchett’s of this story. But when she went into the ice, Abagail was dying. After a few years, she has just one day left to live. Kazran is angry and sends the Doctor away.

Next up it’s Amy’s turn as the Ghost of Christmas Present. She uses holographic technology to show Kazran what’s going on inside the crashing ship. Everyone is singing Christmas carols because they’ve been told it will calm the clouds. It isn’t working but no one has told them so that they wont give up hope. Amy makes an impassioned plea for their lives.

Back in the vault, an even more bitter Kazran tells the Doctor he wont save the lives of the people on the ship, because he simply doesn’t care. But the Doctor has got a surprise up his sleeve when he takes on the role of the ghost of Christmas future. The ghost of Christmas future twist is all-of-the-feels. I did not see it coming, it’s perfect for the moment, one of the best twists in Doctor Who and something only Steven Moffat would come up with. It’s also Gambon’s best scene.

This is as funny and poignant as any version of Christmas Carol should be. I especially enjoyed the long scene at the start where the Doctor comes down the chimney and is in full Doctor-fast-talking-mode. He runs around the room, having fun, quickly establishing any exposition that needs doing. It’s a great comedic foil for grumpy old Gambon to play off, and given that there’s probably a load of people who only see the Christmas episodes, it’s a good introduction to the new lead. Matt Smith is on form here and gets opportunities to play the fool throughout. Gambon plays Scrooge wonderfully sincerely no matter what the script throws at him. Katherine Jenkins is very good as the singing bits. Her character is a little too dull to be honest but perhaps that’s because Jenkins doesn’t display a great deal of acting range. That’s my only quibble with this one.

As we hit the half way mark: lets look at the 5 worst Steven Moffat episodes

5^th Worst. The Wedding of River Song
2011. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill & Alex Kingston

Let me start by saying this: the opening 5 minutes of this episode are the absolute best of Doctor Who. The best. Some of the finest Doctor Who you will ever see.

The episode opens with a shot of a steam train coming out of a tunnel through the middle of the Gherkin on tracks in the sky. There are cars flying on hot air balloons on their way to work. In a park, kids playing are interrupted by an attack of pterodactyls. As a Roman centurion waits at the traffic lights he reads on a newspaper that the War of the Roses has entered it’s second year. On TVs in a shop window, BBC Breakfast is on as Bill Turnball asks Charles Dickens (Simon Callow) if he thinks he can top last year’s Christmas special (“All I can say now, is it involves ghosts in the past, and the present and the future, all at the same time”). On the other channel a different newsreader says “Crowds lined the mall as the holy Roman emperor Winston Churchill returned to the Buckingham Senate on his personal mammoth.” A Silurian doctor is giving Churchill a check-up while he talks about his affairs with Cleopatra. He asks the Silurian what time it is. It’s 5:02. Churchill responds “It’s always two minutes past five. Day or night. It’s always two minutes past five in the afternoon. Why is that? And the date is always 22^nd April. Does that not bother you?” “The date and the time have always been the same.” Churchill asks to see the soothsayer. A dishevelled man in chains is dragged in. Long hair, unshaven. “Tick tock, goes the clock as the old song says. But they don’t. The clocks never tick. Something has happened to time. That’s what you say what you never stop saying. All of history is happening at once. But what does that mean? What happened? Explain to me in terms that I can understand. What happened to time?” The soothsayer looks up. It’s The Doctor. He says: “A woman.”

In fact there are many great moments in this episode. The moment where Amy Pond takes her brutal murderous revenge on the woman who kidnapped her and stole her daughter is awesome. Also anything where all the characters walk around in eyepatches and wearing either black or tweed meets with my approval. That’s just a rule I have for how to make good drama. Oh and I just remembered the Doctor trying to flirt “She’d love to meet up for texting and scones.”

So how does an episode so good end up on the list of the worst? Well firstly, it says a lot about Steven Moffat’s writing that I rate an episode with so much going for it so badly against his other work. But also, all these great moments really don’t come together. And the series finale brings the whole series together badly. The 22^nd of April is when the first episode of series 6 aired, and at 5:02 the Doctor was shot and killed at Lake Silencio in Utah (see best episodes list). Now we learn that River Song was put into the spacesuit and forced to kill the Doctor, but she over powered the suit and her conditioning to save the Doctor. Sadly a paradox was created and all of time and space was damaged. The Doctor now needs to touch River to short-circuit the timeline and take himself back to the lake and die to restore history.

For one thing, even the most convoluted Bond villain would stop and go “wait, that’s your plan? Kidnap his friends’ daughter and have her kill him? That’s your best plan? I mean you have guns! Just shoot him mate, or at least put someone who actually wants to kill him in the suit.” Series 6 was split in two down the middle to make room for Torchwood series 4 to air. So episode 1 was shown in April, this was shown in October. That’s six months of trying to solve this mystery. Obviously the Doctor will survive, but how? In the end though we didn’t really have a chance. Spoilers: Earlier in the series we saw a spaceship called The Teselecter which could disguise itself as a person with a crew of tiny people inside. That ship turns up again in this one and ultimately the Doctor hides inside it and it’s the spaceship disguised as the Doctor that is shot, not the Doctor. Except that they actively tell us that isn’t how he did it. The captain of the ship asks if he can help and the Doctor says no. The scene cuts away. Later in flashback, we would see the Doctor come back and say yes. That’s not a twist. That’s just lying to the viewers. It needn’t be blatant. Maybe in the episode with the Teselecta earlier in the series it could ask if there was anything it could do to help and the Doctor says “there is one thing…” and it gets all ambiguous. River trusts the Doctor when she sees the inside of the spaceship and a little Doctor when she looks into his eyes. But again the audience aren’t given the opportunity to work that out. As it’s their wedding a simple line like “River, I need you to look me in the eyes and tell me you love me” and River suddenly trusting him would have given us a clue. Me and some Who-fan friends sat up late one night discussing theories and trying to solve the mystery only for it to turn out we didn’t really have a chance. The fact that the Lake Silencio scenes are shot on green screen instead of at the actual lake suggests they didn’t know they were going to be filming there again when they did the first episode. It feels a bit like they were winging it. The Silence were such a good concept for a monster and looked terrifying so it’s sad that they are so ineffectively used in this episode and not involved in the twist.

Oh but I just remembered the bit where the Doctor learns that his old companion the Brigadier has died, as a tribute to the actor who had died in real life. I can never hate this episode, because about every 5 minutes there’s a really cool bit, but all together it’s a bit of a let-down.

4^th Worst. The Husbands of River Song
Christmas Special 2015. Peter Capaldi, Alex Kingston & Matt Lucas

This Christmas special sees River Song become the Doctor's proper companion - although many would argue she already counted as a companion, she was always alongside someone else playing the main companion of the time - and the introduction of future companion Nardole played by Matt Lucas.

The Doctor arrives on the human colony Mandolax Dellora (prepare yourselves, this episode is packed full of unlikely and rather silly sci-fi names) where Nardole mistakes him for the sugeon his boss River Song called for. River - The Doctor's Wife (see above) - has called for a surgeon to help her with her husband, who turns out to be a giant cyborg called King Hyrdroflax. King Hydroflax has a diamond burried in his head that River wants to remove and sell. When Hydroxflax learns of her plans he removes the head and sends his body to kill her. In the ensuing struggle the Doctor steals the head and they make an escape. River at this point doesn't know who the Doctor is because she's never seen him with Peter Capaldi's face. River steals the TARDIS and heads to a ship filled with criminals to try and sell the diamond. She realises that she's been double crossed by buyers loyal to King Hydroflax, but planned for it. As the ship is hit by a meteor strike and crash lands on the planet Darillium, something she knew would happen when she arranged the time of the meeting.

Being from the Doctor's future River Song has the upper-hand on the Doctor and can often run rings around him. When we first see her in Silence In The Library this involves her hinting at things to come and being disappointed the Doctor isn't as powerful and great as she knows he will one day be. It's an interesting dynamic. And on her second appearance she pilots the Doctor's TARDIS better than him, finishes his sentences and seems to know more about the Doctor - it's a good way to show she's got the upper-hand again and over the next couple of series that dynamic gradually shifted as the Doctor started to know more about her than she did about him.

In The Husbands of River Song though, we're straight back to the River we first saw in Silence In The Library  and The Time of Angels which is appropriate to when the story is set, but it does make her extremely smug. She is a smug know-it-all whose familiarity and cockiness around the Doctor is actually just rude and disrespectful. She is really hard to like in this episode, which wouldn't be a problem were she not the main companion. Her role includes a responsibility to be the eyes and ears of the viewer, and she's difficult to like here. Also the joke that she doesn't know who the Doctor is goes on far too long.

The rest of the episode is pure Panto. The plot feels more at home in a series of Red Dwarf than in Doctor Who. Though in it's defence, you should remember this is a Christmas Day episode. It's created for a full-up, tipsy audience distracted by a sack full of colourful new toys. It's also - if my home is anything to go by - being watched by family members who only see Doctor Who once a year when they're forced to. I bet those people were grateful for a silly knockabout with Greg Davies doing his 'head in a bag' routine instead of some excellent two hour dialogue about the origins of the Mondosian Cybermen. Greg Davies is excellent comedy value, but no more threatening as a big scary robot than he is as host of Taskmaster, meaning the main alien of the show isn't really a threat this week. Matt Lucas also scores some good lines as Nardole, but at the time he wrote this Moffat wasn't planning on making Nardole a regular character (that only happened when he saw how good Matt Lucas was) and so the characterisation is a little thin on the ground here, but the jokes are good.

Finally, a word on the ending, the Doctor takes River to the singing towers of Darillium, which is a reference to the moment in Forest of the Dead where she says "you turned up on my doorstep with a new haircut and a suit. The towers sang and you cried," because he knew it was the last time he would see her before she went to the Library where she died, and the Doctor gives her the sonic screwdriver she had in that story. It's a sweet moment, but completely shifts the pace and tone in a direction the episode didn't need. Some Who fans will be glad to have that gap filled in, but it didn't feel like we needed it. Also, remember those people who only watch once a year at Christmas? This scene relies on you remembering in 2015, something mentioned in a mid-season episode from 2008, otherwise it's just two people having dinner for ten minutes after the story has rounded up. It has nothing to do with the King Hyrdoflax/Head-in-a-bag gags that we've seen 50 minutes of before it. A nice moment but it could have been a seperare mini-sode online or for the DVD (in fact they already did it as a bonus feature on the series 6 DVD) but here it's just emotional baggage after 50 minutes of silly fun.

3^rd Worst. Time-Heist (Co-written with Steve Thompson)
2014. Peter Capaldi & Jenna Coleman

This one was co-written with Steve Thompson, the answer to the pub quiz question “who’s the other writer on Sherlock?” And to it’s credit is a pretty decent mystery. It’s a middle-of-the-road, middle-of-the-season episode from Peter Capaldi’s first year as the Doctor. The Doctor, Clara, and two other people wake up in a dark room and appear to have consented to having their memories erased. The Doctor, Clara, Psi (a human enhanced with technology who has lost some memories as a result) and Saibra (a shapeshifter who turns into whoever she touches) are given a mission by a strange unseen man instructing them to break into the vault of the most secure bank in the universe. The bank is guarded by a creature called the Teller that can literally take people’s minds, so the stakes are high.

The Doctor guesses that their memories have been erased so that the Teller can’t probe their minds and work out what they are trying to do. They are given six devices that appear to be suicide devices that cause the user to disintegrate. Over the course of the episode both Psi and Saibra are forced to use their devices, The Doctor even tells Saibra to use hers because it will be a less painful death. This plays into the series’ “Am I A Good Man?” theme, with Clara questioning why he isn’t more fazed by this, which might be the episodes main failing. I know they were trying to create this grey area with Peter Capaldi – is he a good man? – but it felt like this episode really went to effort to establish the fact that the Doctor can be nasty sometimes. It had already been the main theme of the first two episodes of the season and is explored much more subtly elsewhere. By this point in the season it just felt like overkill. Eventually the Doctor discovers two of the items they are sent to get. One contains Psi’s original missing memories, the other contains a medicine that will help Saibra keep one shape. The main vault is sealed, but when solar flares cause power failures the Doctor uses the opportunity to get through the door. He realises this has been planned by someone who knew that would happen at that exact moment. Inside he is captured by head of security Ms. Delphox and discovers she is a clone of the banks owner Madame Karavaxos. The Doctor tries to free the Teller realising it is a prisoner here attacking people against their will. Psi and Saibra turn up revealing the disintegration devices were transporters. When he realises he has six of them, the Doctor works out that the Teller isn’t the only one he is meant to save, and the Teller is only doing their evil bidding because they have his wife prisoner too. He saves them both but before he teleports out of there he gives Madame Karavaxos his phone number and says to call if she has regrets when she gets older. Meaning she was the one who gave them their mission and the Doctor deposited the items for Psi and Saibra in the bank to convince them to help him.

It’s part Hustle – certainly very stylish – part Oceans 11, part Wizard of Oz. It’s pull-back-reveal twist is very good but benefits from a second watching to work it all out. A little too much time is spent discussing how trustworthy the Doctor is and every time they tried to make the Doctor less likeable this series, I found myself liking him more, in a kind of Breaking Bad way. Maybe it’s because it made him a more interesting character, or maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome from years of watching Malcolm Tucker. There’s also very little room for red herrings or any bits of fun outside the main mystery. This makes for a tightly plotted episode but one that lacks any real stand-out moments. Although I’m sure the Teller makes a good action figure and the collapsing skulls is particularly grim.

2^nd Worst. The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe
Christmas Special 2011. Matt Smith, Claire Skinner, Karen Gillan & Arthur Darvill

The Doctor owes Madge Arwell a favour after she helped him when he crashed to Earth. Shortly before Christmas Madge receives a telegram saying that her husband Reg (Alexander Armstrong) – a fighter pilot – is missing presumed dead after his plane was shot down in the war. They get away from London for the Christmas period going to a mad old uncle’s house, which the Doctor has made into a huge fun house for the Children, with a special present under the tree. Madge hasn’t told the children the news yet so as not to ruin Christmas for them and the Doctor plans to give them the best Christmas ever. The present is a portal to the wintry forest where the trees are alive – I mean all trees are alive, but you know the trees are aliens. Maurice can’t resist and goes through the night before Christmas and gets lost. Forcing the others to go and look for him. The trees are looking for a pilot to help them escape the planet and Maurice unwittingly becomes that pilot. Meanwhile deforesters are planning to drop acid rain on the forest to melt it down and absorb it’s energy as a power source.

The deforesters are played by Bill Bailey, Paul Bazely and Arabella Weir who are all, of course, hilarious and their scenes – together with the Doctor’s tour of the house – are definitely the highlight of this episode. But sadly no-one would feel threatened by them. The tree’s don’t speak except through the mouth of other characters they possess. They look like wooden weeping angels, but don’t really have an agenda and aren’t very threatening. They’re wooden in every sense of the word (sorry).

Eventually Madge wishes really hard that they’ll get home (there’s some fantasy jargon about time streams and vortexes here that I might forgive in a stronger story) and they get home.

Finally as Madge prepares to have that serious discussion with her kids, the Doctor discovers that she was distracted by thoughts of being reunited with her husband when she was wishing hard and his plane was caught in the time vortex and bought home with them. Now nobody wants to see the host of Pointless die on Christmas Day, so I will cut them some slack (second last, it would so be worst if it wasn’t Christmas!) but what was the point in this episode if he doesn’t die? It’s not a punch-the-air moment, it’s not even that joyous.

Finally, I hate Maurice. Sorry. Everything in this episode is his fault and I can’t stand the little boy actor who plays him. Sorry.

Worst. The Angels Take Manhatten
2012. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill & Alex Kingston

Oh this one. It should have had everything going for it. The departure of Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill, who had played popular characters since their introduction in 2010, the return of the most iconic modern series monsters, the Weeping Angels, and a guest appearance from Mike McShane. But somewhere it all goes wrong. None of those great things come together. Mike McShane is a member of Paul Merton’s Impro Chums – one of the best live comedy shows in the UK in my humble opinion – a brilliant comedian, great improviser and singer, none of which is put to any use in a forgettable and totally straight role. 

The episode deals with a situation where the Doctor realises he is powerless to prevent his companions’ fate because he’s already read it in a book and if that book isn’t published it would create a paradox. They get caught up in a Weeping Angel plot to send people back in time and live off their potential energy in some kind of “battery-farm” where Rory sees himself die as an old man. Rory realises that if he kills himself as a young man, it will create a paradox and the whole building and Weeping Angels within it will cease to exist, but Amy refuses to let him die alone and they jump off the roof together.

The Doctor, Amy, Rory and River find themselves all alive and back in the TARDIS in the present day. The TARDIS is in a grave yard and Rory spots his name on a gravestone. Suddenly a Weeping Angel appears and zaps Rory back in time to the 1930s. Amy is left staring at the Weeping Angel which can only move when she’s not looking at it. She makes her goodbyes and looks away so that she can be zapped into the past and join her husband and her name also appears on the grave stone.

The problem is, while I think he’s a great writer, this episode breaks one of the most important rules that anyone with half an English lesson can tell you ‘show-don’t-tell.’ When Amy and Rory are sent back in time at the end, the Doctor says he can never go back to that point in time, but without ever giving us a satisfying reason why. He can’t stop it because he’s seen their graves and that creates a paradox, but Rory just created a paradox moments before and instead of ending up as a pizza on the pavement, they all just went home, so what’s the big deal? We're told that Rory jumping off the building and creating a paradox will kill the Angels and we just have to go with that. Also in the series finale, a few months later, we would see the Doctor’s own grave and then obviously that had to be undone, so this rule seems to apply only in this episode. Amy and Rory stopped travelling with the Doctor briefly at the end of The God Complex when the Doctor sends them away so he wont have to deal with them dying at some point, Amy is heartbroken but Rory thanks him. It’s a much better ending. In the episode right before this, The Doctor moves in with Amy and Rory, Amy has been asked to be a bridesmaid and Rory is offered a great new job, they have to decide whether to stay or travel with the Doctor again. Both of these are more satisfying than this episode which has so many plot holes and unanswered questions that it makes you certain if the Doctor hadn’t been grumping and moaning about how unfair his life was for 45 minutes he could have done something.

Back to the best now and here’s the top 5 Steven Moffat stories.

5. The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang
2010. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill & Alex Kingston

Remember when I mentioned that no one does the opening five minutes of an episode better than Steven Moffat? This is one of those. This is one that spans all of time and space and takes us back to various locations we’ve seen throughout the series. In France 1890, Van Gogh (Episode 10s big guest star) is screaming and having a breakdown and his latest painting is described as “even worse than his usual rubbish.” In London 1941, that same picture has been discovered and bought to Winston Churchill (Episode 3s guest star) because “it’s obviously a message and you can see who it’s for.” Churchill gets on the blower to River Song in Stormcage prison in 5145 (where she was held in episode 4). She break out and goes to the Starship UK where she steals a painting from the royal gallery of Queen Liz 10 (location and guest star from episode 2). Meanwhile the Doctor is going to see a cliff-face on which the oldest message in the universe is written. It says “hello sweetie” and some co-ordinates. The Doctor follows them to Roman Britain, where he meets “Cleopatra” (River) who shows him a painting of the TARDIS exploding.

That’s just the opening five minutes. This is where Doctor Who presents it’s theory for what Stonehenge is. Underneath Stonehenge is a box called the Pandorica, a myth said to contain “a goblin, or a trickster or a warrior, a nameless terrible thing, the most feared being in the cosmos,” and this box – obviously a reference to Pandora’s – was built to be the perfect prison for it. Impossible to open from the inside. It even keeps the prisoner alive so it can’t even get out by dying.

It’s being guarded by an old, damaged, one armed Cyberman but it’s not long before all the Doctor’s worst enemies turn up in orbit around Earth – Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, the Sycorax, the weird guy with a blowfish for a head from Torchwood – all the costumes and CGI monsters from storage come out for a cameo as the Doctor faces the biggest army he’s ever seen. And even manages to keep them all away with a really epic speech (“remember every black day I ever stopped you”) of the kind that Matt Smith did so well. Elsewhere Rory is back from the dead. But having been completely erased from ever existing a few weeks ago, Amy has no memory of him. River has taken the TARDIS and ended up at Amy’s house, where she finds out all the Romans helping the Doctor are fictional, in a book Amy read as a kid. Her bookmark is a photo of Rory, meaning he too isn’t real. They’re Autons!

As the TARDIS is pulled off course by an unknown force, the Doctor is surrounded by Autons and the Pandorica starts to open. Spoilers. The box is empty. The Pandorica is a prison built to hold the Doctor. It’s a good twist, that I really should have seen coming. All his enemies have got together to lock him away.

 

Russell T Davies gradually increased the scale of the cliff-hangers in his finales, and Steven doesn’t take a step backwards. With Amy remembering who Rory is just before his Auton programing kicks in and he shoots her. The TARDIS is exploding and it will destroy the whole universe, the only person who can stop it is locked up inside the ultimate prison, and the camera zooms out to show every star in the Universe exploding simultaneously. It is huge! But packed with emotion, particularly in Amy and Rory’s story, that keeps the story grounded in it’s characters.

Part 2, sees all of history collapsing around them. The Pandorica has been moved to a museum with increasingly few exhibits. As have some fossilised Daleks. There’s a lot of time-travel and jumping around to deal with here, but it’s worth paying attention to because it is very cleverly plotted.

The Doctor – to steal a phrase from Red Dwarf, which I think best explains it – is going to “jump start the second big bang” by flying the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS and restoring the universe and the timeline.

This episode is a perfect summary of the eleventh Doctor’s “mad-man with a box” description. It’s his first episode with a fez, and his very clever complicated plan sees him running around like mad, but always in control. But it’s the quieter moments that really sell this episode. The Doctor reuniting Amy with the mum and dad she never had feels as important to everyone as rebooting the universe. Rory refusing to leave Amy’s side is the first of many awesome moments for him. And the Doctor’s bedside story to the young Amelia before he ceases to exist, is a beautiful scene, it’s emotional but more restrained on the weepiness than all of David Tennant’s finales – not criticising those, but it is a welcome change.

Of course, it all ends with a big wedding and that story the Doctor told Amy as a child contains all the clues she needs to bring him back, with a simple idea that’s hidden in code. It’s a big episode that finds time for the smaller moments, and references all the episodes in the series before it. Usually the penultimate episode is a lot better than the last because the last has to fix the mess the penultimate caused. Here the second half is no hanger-on. The whole thing is over-flowing with cleverness – it even reveals an earlier continuity error spotted by pedantic fans like me, was no such thing. Pay attention and this episode will reward you.

Plus, of course, I have the Van Gogh painting on my wall, because it’s a beautiful thing.

4. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
2005. Christopher Eccleston, Billie Piper & John Barrowman

This is Steven Moffat’s first proper Doctor Who script – not counting the brilliant 1999 Comic Relief spoof episode The Curse of Fatal Death – it’s also sadly the only time he wrote for Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor.

This one is a period piece set during the Second World War. Something dangerous has come crashing down to London with a very loud bang and the Doctor is looking for that particular needle in a very large haystack. There’s a genuinely creepy monster in the form of a small child with a gas mask over his face asking “Are you my mummy?” It’s nice to have an episode that isn’t built around an ‘alien’ as such, although there are a lot of questions that need raising about this child. The Doctor and Rose separate. The Doctor meets Nancy, a young lady looking after a bunch of children living rough who didn’t get evacuated. Nancy and the kids are straight from a Dickens novel. Nancy is the really important character here, but you can’t help but love all of the kids’ personalities in the short time we spend with them too. That’s true across this whole two-part story, even the smallest speaking roles reveal something of a personality however briefly they appear. The owners of the house Nancy robs get some character comedy moments and Dr Constantine (Richard Wilson) has some backstory but only two scenes (“Before this war, I was a father and a grandfather, now I’m neither but I’m still a doctor”). Everyone the little boy touches becomes like him, with a gas mask welded to their face and a scar on the back of their hand. “Physical injury as plague” is an intriguing original idea that shows a first, brand-new series where the team are having great fun experimenting. It also created a zombie like crowd with super-human strength looking for their mummies. Terrifying. “There isn’t a little boy in the world who wouldn’t tear the world apart to find it’s mummy. This one can.”

Rose has got herself stuck to a barrage balloon during an air-raid in a union Jack T-Shirt. She is rescued by the dashing and handsome Captain Jack Harkness – a former time agent turned conman – and the rest is pretty much history there. Jack is the stereotypical cool sci-fi hero, with a proper spaceship, ray gun, all the gadgets and a long flowing hero coat. The second half of this story deals with the Doctor’s jealousy as his not-so-cool weirdness is challenged by a much more conventional leading man, (When Jack pulls out his sonic blaster and asks what the Doctor has “it’s sonic ok, does it matter?”) Ultimately the Doctor’s brains save the day with the help of a little of Jack’s brawn.

The gas mask zombies are creepy, and there’s a brilliant cliff-hanger to part 1 that is resolved a week later, not with action, but with a really solidly funny joke at the start of part 2. Nobody could be disappointed with the joke resolution in part 2, but in case you are, don’t worry because the joke comes back to bite the Doctor, Rose and Jack in the arse in a great scene later. There follows a spoiler for how they get out of the cliff hanger: The Doctor and co are listening to a tape recording of the child being questioned, answering “Are you my mummy?” to any question. The Doctor and his companions are chatting and they realise that the tape finished about a minute ago but the voice is still speaking and they turn round to see the child standing there. Moffat does this reveal that the baddie is in the room already so well in many of his episodes. Its really scary. In the Girl in the Fireplace a broken clock hides a clockwork robot in the room, the Vashta Nerrada steal space suits and characters start repeating themselves and everything about the Silence is basically screaming “the baddie is already in the room!” It’s a Steven Moffat favourite and it’s particularly effective here.

Every character gets a mix of funny and serious stuff to deal with, but on the whole it’s a light hearted episode that’s full of hope and ends on a purely joyous moment, probably the happiest Christopher Eccleston has ever appeared on screen – a real departure for him. There’s not a word wasted in this script and if you put all the clues together you should work out what’s going on. It’s a straight forward mystery by Moffat’s standards, but compelling.

3. The Eleventh Hour
2010. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan & Arthur Darvill

Matt Smith’s debut is the most confident – both in the writing and acting – of any new Doctor.

Following on from one of the most popular Doctor’s and the departure of the writer who bought this show back from the dead, Moffat and Smith had a lot of pressure here. But after this first hour viewers would be asking “Who? Russell Tennant and David T Davies? Did they used to be in this?” That’s an exaggeration but it hits the ground running. But that said, it shouldn’t feel so speedy, because the whole first 20 minutes is a two-hander: The Doctor and new companion Amy (mostly as a child). It’s an inventive way for us to meet the new Doctor and companion and gets a lot of information through about both characters. And while it takes a bit of time to get to the monster, that’s not important this week and nobody would think it was dragging.

A prisoner with shapeshifting abilities has escaped through a crack in time and space and it’s guards are coming to get it. If the Doctor can’t find and return prisoner zero to the aliens, planet Earth will be incinerated. The Doctor has no TARDIS, no Sonic Screwdriver and just 20 minutes to save the world. The new Doctor is still finding himself. It’s a quirky performance, and Matt Smith wearing the tattered remains of David Tennant’s costume gives it all a bit of a shambolic quality, but after Tennant’s final episodes went very bleak and he went a bit god-like, it’s nice to have a back-to-basics rambling fun adventure story.

The Doctor and Amy are on screen – together – virtually the whole time. And Rory is bought in too. There’s a “complex” relationship between them, especially when it leaks that Amy considered the “Raggedy Doctor” an imaginary friend and made Rory dress up as him. Amy is a mix of emotions: loving the adventure, angry that the Doctor screwed with her life, embarrassed by everything around her. All her family and friends seem to reveal more embarrassing things about her.

There’s a fun cameo from Sir Patrick Moore as the Doctor joins an international conference call of NASA experts. The Doctor has a clever plan, putting together Rory’s phone which he swiped earlier and the team of experts hacking all the computers in the world. A final highlight of the episode comes after the Doctor has saved the day, and he calls the Atraxi back to Earth to have a go at them. As he strolls confidently down a corridor, he steals his new costume, and gives the Atraxi a piece of his mind in what is the first of Matt Smith’s big powerful “I am the Doctor” speeches. As the faces of all his previous incarnations flash up and Matt Smith steps through, with his bow-tie on, for the first time in full costume, it’s a really powerful moment and leaves you in no doubt the show is in good hands for the next few years.

Plus there’s a nice reveal in the last second of the episode.

2. Blink
2007. David Tennant, Freema Agyeman & Carey Mulligan

Of course this was going to be near the top of the list! Of course! It’s the episode that bought us the Weeping Angels, who are obviously the most iconic monsters of the new series and gave the world future Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan.

At the time, Doctor Who were doing a Doctor-Lite episode each series. One where David Tennant wasn’t in it much to free him up to work overtime on other episodes. Moffat was originally supposed to write the Dalek two-parter earlier in the series but had to pull out so took this one as a punishment (the previous year’s Doctor-lite episode had not been well received).

This one delivers the bare-minimum of Doctor, but just enough to hook you into the episode. It’s a haunted house episode in which Carey Mulligan’s character Sally Sparrow goes to explore an empty house, and finds a message written under the wallpaper. A message for her, from the Doctor in 1969. The Doctor has been trapped in 1969 with the TARDIS still in 2007. He’s carefully left clues for Sally to find including a strange DVD bonus feature, in which he appears to have half a conversation.

We quickly get into the characters of Sally and her friends. There’s some nice little jokes and bits of business between Sally and her friend Kathy, who is touched by a Weeping Angel and finds herself in Hull decades ago. Her transportation is skilfully written. Kathy’s really creepy grandson turns up with a letter explaining what happened, while it’s still in the process of happening. Sally meets DI Billy Shipton and there’s an instant attraction there until he’s sent back in time too. The next time Sally meets him, he’s old and dying in hospital, and Carey Mulligan has to act alongside two different actors in the same role. She and they, and the writing, sell them as the same person and – despite only having one scene each – give his death a poignancy.

The Doctor may not be present but he makes his presence felt, he feels like he’s masterminding everything. When Billy goes back in time he meets the Doctor it’s almost exactly the half way point of the show, just when we would start to get bored if he didn’t turn up. And his Doctor Who daft quirks are dialled all the way up to 11 to make him the most Doctor-ish he could possibly be. All of which makes for a great episode before you even consider how good the Weeping Angels actually are. They’re statues when you look at them and that’s maintained for the audience, we never see them move either. It makes the ordinary scary which all the best Doctor Who does.

Can you guess what won?

1. The Day of the Doctor
2013. Matt Smith, David Tennant, Jenna Coleman, Billie Piper, Jon Hurt (+ Tom Baker & Peter Capaldi)

This is the big one. The 50^th Anniversary Special. I know from reading interviews that this one drove Moffat mad with worrying but it totally pays off in a great celebration of Doctor Who.

This is full of nods to the past and in-jokes but really is just another, slightly more important, episode that stands up in it’s own right, and moves the overall story of Doctor Who along.

A first thing to note is that Steven Moffat attempted to woo Christopher Eccleston into returning, but he declined. While I would have loved to see Christopher Eccleston back, the way they got around this by bringing in John Hurt as a previously secret version of the Doctor was not just a good bit of publicity but became the heart of this episode. For the most part the War-Doctor’s story is what holds this episode together. He has had enough of the Time War and has stolen the ultimate weapon to end it all, but is given a chance to see what he will become if he uses it.

Matt Smith is on form here too. Although John Hurt is well…John Hurt, and much of the story is from his perspective, and David Tennant is so popular with the fans, Matt Smith has enough charisma to remind everyone that this is still his show at the moment.

Although it centrally revolves around an old pacifist, turned warrior, contemplating a double genocide, it’s pretty much a light hearted romp from start to finish. There’s a sense that everyone is having fun making this. It’s packed full of jokes and references for fans of all ages. The biggest joke pay-off is the tenth Doctor’s relationship with Queen Elizabeth I, a running joke first established in 2007, that here becomes a massive plot point.

When the three Doctors meet up, they have a combative relationship, starting with a joke about the sizes of their respective sonic screwdrivers, but become quick friends and find common ground more than differences. David Tennant is slightly more weighed down in the guilt and the anger at what John Hurt’s Doctor stands for. Matt Smith is a few hundred years on and recovered a bit more. John Hurt’s Doctor falls between the 8^th and 9^th Doctor, and between the old series and new, as such he represents the older fans sometimes. He comments on the overuse of the sonic screwdriver (“What are you going to do? Assemble and cabinet at them?”) and tuts at the modern Doctors snogging. Tennant gets a lot of snogging in this one too and Matt Smith is berated for wearing a fez and waving his arms around. In other words, there’s a whole load of jokes at the expense of the show’s recent past that should delight fans and those forced to sit through it with fans equally.

The Zygons are back, having only appeared in one episode of the classic show, but they’re pretty good. The Doctor kind of resolves the story with them but we’d have to wait a couple of years for them to properly resolve it in another episode as there’s so much going on that we have to move back to Gallifrey to end the Time War.

To their credit both Rose and Clara hold their own well acting alongside three Doctors. Clara especially gets enough to do, basically keeping these three aliens grounded in some kind of humanity.

The episode rounds off ongoing themes that have been present in the series since it’s return in 2005, it doesn’t delve into much that happened prior to the shows return but that’s to it’s credit too. This is no greatest hits package. It’s about where the show is now and where it’s going next. Matt Smith gives more of his triumphant powerful speeches, but this time around he shares those with David Tennant and John Hurt, finishing each other’s sentences. There’s some stylish shots, where the three Doctors are very cool, especially a moment where they step into and stride out of a picture of the Time War. There’s so much stylish action throughout this, the writing, acting and directing is so good and inventive. There’s some really good scenes of montage between the various Doctors and scenes in the Time War. And it moves between lots of different time zones and places which gives it all a huge sense of scale, appropriate to the 50^th birthday. There’s punch-the-air celebratory moments when the Doctors come up with a plan too. Plus a cameo from new Doctor Peter Capaldi which is so small but so exciting, and the line “You know, I really think you might,” will send shivers down the spine of anyone who avoided spoilers.

So those are my 10 best and 5 worst stories written by Steven Moffat. I open it up to the internet to tell me how wrong I am.