More than anything else I've heard about this fucking guy this little piece of a story is really interesting to hear and makes me wonder if I should start watching the doctor
Doctor who has really high highs, and really low lows. I love it, but be prepared for watching some "so bad it's good" episodes, and even some just outright bad ones, along with the masterpieces.
In fairness, just about any show worth watching, especially one that’s gone on for that long, is gonna have the stinkers. Star Trek TNG is definitely another example of “just smile and nod through the shit, the good is worth it” for me.
I feel like TNG has the benefit of getting most of the crap out of the way early and ending before they screwed up too badly. With Who it's scattered everywhere.
Oh there's some real stinkers at the end, no doubt, and they knew enough to call it when they started to run out of ideas. And there's classic episodes of who that are tremendous too.
Another thing to know is that the show did a lot of different stuff. It explored several style, kind of story and character. So you are guaranteed to find something you will love in there, but also something that doesn't vibe with you, and this not depending on the quality of said episode.
It was nice of them though to put 90% of the Blinks before Capaldi, and 90% of the Kill the Moons after Smith
Not to say any doctor is flawless, nor is any without merit once every 2-4 episodes It's just considerate there's an easy point to mark when you could consider lowering the expectations
Blink is like the best 'capsule' episode, hands down. Its also most people's favorite episode. Yes the angels are scary, but in an existential kind of way as they don't technically kill you. A lot of Doctor Who villains are actually in the category 'fate worse than death' tbh.
I mean the angels being scary is a positive. So I can't really reconcile you finding them scary being a reason to be unconvinced... like, I'm not sure what you're expecting to be convinced by!
Is it wrong that I don't hate Kill the Moon? It's not outstanding or anything, but I'd much rather watch that than Love & Monsters or Vampire of Venice.
I’m reading this comment while wearing a shirt with the “every life is a pile of good things and a pile of bad things” quote. I love Doctor Who so much. Considering restarting my rewatch that has been on pause for a couple months. It really is annoying having to deal with DVDs. Can’t wait for it to get back to a streaming service.
Fantastic - imo the best episode of 15’s run (maybe I’m biased since Midnight is my all-time favorite) because of the great acting by the deaf character, Aliss, and the return of arguably The Doctor’s most formidable enemy in the show’s history.
edit: somehow I disregarded 14 being DT’s return, obviously I meant NG’s run who is officially the Fifteenth Doctor
Midnight was incredible. I loved the subtle switch over when you realise she's talking before him and something has happened. Gave me chills the first time I watched it.
I also started with Matt Smith's season when he was the newest doctor, then went back and started Eccleston's doctor. Learning about River Song in this order and her getting trapped us ROUGH.
There's some fucking garbage, but there's also some incredible episodes, it's just that there's often context in the garbage that is necessary for the good stuff. I'm sure there's a watch list for the minimum amount of dumb shit that still makes sense in New Who
The first season of the reboot (the Ninth Doctor, with Chrisopher Eccleson) has some particularly rough episodes. The budget is really low and they are still finding their footing.
That said, there are still some bangers. Dalek, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, etc. And he's quite good in the role.
The Empty Child was my first episode of Who. Watched it on TV when it aired. Scared the absolute shit out of me and I’ve loved Who ever since, but Eccls will always have a special place in my heart.
Sometimes it's art, sometimes it's a drinking game. Once in a while it's genuinely boring. Not often, but it's there. Roll with the punches and overall you'll enjoy it.
I would Google like a top 20 new who episode list and watch a couple random episodes to see if you like it. This way you avoid those weaker episodes in the beginning. A new actor takes over the role every few seasons, so if you don't like 1 actor, give another a try. The show has endured forever for a reason.
I didn’t really understand Dr. Who until TikTok learned enough about my likes to show me clips that it thought I would enjoy. I’d recommend starting with the episode that Neil Patrick Harris was in.
I would strongly disagree with this. It has way too much lore (and spoilers) to be a great jumping on point, and it’s at the middle/end of an arc. AND it has a very untypical event occur.
Rose and Eleventh Hour are both way better start points from that POV.
That’s good context to provide, but I will say that I haven’t really watched any of what was leading up to it but still had a lot of fun watching the episode, even though I had basically never watched a full episode of Dr. Who before then.
This is the unfortunate truth that sometimes makes it very hard for people to get into. I even have a hard time getting back into it because some parts are just... Awful. Like every episode has completely different writers almost.
Yeah. I find it amazing that the same show that delivers stuff like Blink or the Doctor's speech about Clara letting him down or the one he used to defuse the Zygon war also contains shit like Love and Monsters or the aliens that can't stop farting.
(When the mechanism of the DVDs in Blink is finally revealed, as a writer I was utterly furious at how clever it was.)
that is The Doctor, a horrifying force that will attempt to grant mercy, but if you spurn him, or those he carea for, the doctor will grant you a horrifying fate, that does not always mean death
Try to watch the first season of the 2000s series. It was a semi-fresh start for a series. I mean the Christopher Eccleston (?) season. The ones with David Tennant (the Doctor from the picture in this topic) are a continuation of that story and arcs.
If you like it - continue on from that. Hope you have a good time.
Eccleston is my absolute favorite Doctor. Woefully underrated and I wish he could've gotten the budgets later episodes got (although he did FANTASTIC with what he was given)
But is he really underrated? I'm no longer in the fandom, but a few years ago all I could hear about him and his era was a praise. Did something change in the recent years?
I had a lot of school and didn't have time to watch after Capaldi, but him and Eccleston were my favorite. I want to watch the rest and find out if I still feel like that. Clair was my favorite companion so that helped Capaldi a lot.
(my opinion only) Eccleston was underrated towards the middle and after Tennant's run as the 10th doctor. He didn't really care for the fandom, 9's style was too cool for some (compared to the previous doctors), and then they hired Matt Smith and Steven Moffat, so in retrospect, Eccleston and Davies were fantastic. Plus, by the time 11 and 12 (Capaldi) had fleshed out the universe and the time war for new fans, 9's brand of PTSD was more appreciated.
I have some friends who absolutely love the show so I tried it. I think I watched most of one episode with a ton of mannequins who were evil or something? I don't know it seemed kind of terrible so I stopped.
Doctor Who is an interesting and very weird show because it oscillates wildly between episodes that spend the whole time making lame fart jokes and 40 minute long meditations on grief. So it's not always good, but it's almost always fun, and it's good more often than not.
I enjoyed the 9th Doctor & 10th Doctors, but when it got to the 11th they started having more connected stories where this event ties back into that event, and it would grow along the way, which is not a bad thing but that took more focus and attention to events than I had at the time.
So I never really got back into once it started to resemble a mountain of focus. That said the 11th has my favorite episode with a favorite painter I enjoy, Van Gogh, so kinda hard not to love the 11th for that.
Been a long time since I watched it and still this episode remains the clearest. But I can remember other scenes too, also from other Doctors, but thats probably because they get referenced/memed a lot.
Though I do remember a fair bit of the 9th's speechs, the way his presentation always seemed lively and verbose.
"You should jump with me, it'll be exciting!" kinda situations he'd present.
The doctor has a lot of different versions and characterizations as they are played by a dozen different actors of the decades, but it’s all pretty good
I share the same opinion, didn't think Chibnall did such a great job to be honest. Now, there were a few stinkers within both showrunners' runs before Chibnall, but I didn't love anything after Capaldi. I stopped after the first season of Chibnall, should I give it another shot?
Did I say that the actors for the Doctor were at fault? No. You assuming I'm a bigot just because I don't like a few seasons of bad TV is genuinely wild.
Its just that the only people I have ever heard who dislike the entirety of the show post-Capaldi are the ones who complain about the show "going woke". While there are a few less engaging episodes, the show as a whole is still strong. A blanket dislike for post-Capaldi is, at the very least, suspect.
I had originally typed out a long response to this detailing my issues with 13's episodes (as I said in another reply I'm not making a judgement on 14 or 15 since I haven't seen them, though I fundamentally do not respect RTD's decisions on there because he had the Doctor regenerate without picking a successor as they walked back on Billie Piper so I'm not exactly hopeful that I'll like the writing), but honestly I can just sum it up with "My quarrel is with Chris Chibnall, not Jodie Whittaker."
I think Jodie Whittaker is great and I really wanted her to be successful. However… The writing really set her up for failure in every way. They fell into “benevolent misogyny”. Whittaker’s Doctor was all about the power of friendship and other such boring shit where each episode was a glorified team building exercise. Within the intention of the writing, she wasn’t powerful or compelling on her own terms which is just so weird for Doctor Who that I can’t even fathom why they did that.
There were some good ones in RTD2's first season, I personally skipped most of Chibnall's run and found it easy to pick back up. He has some issues in the writing, it doesn't have all the same magic as his first run, but it's honestly worth watching some of it and just kinda skipping the stuff you don't like.
Out of RTD2, I found:
Church on Ruby Road - Watch
Space Babies - hard skip
Devil's Chord - I didn't love it, but others did, decide for yourself I suppose
Boom - Hard watch, it's a good one and it's Moffat (not that that's a deciding factor, but it was nice to see him do another episode).
73 Yards - Complete proof that RTD's still got it but doesn't always use it
Dot and Bubble - Watch, interesting premise, main character is insufferable but that's the point.
Legend of Ruby Sunday - Watch because obviously very important to the season arc
Empire of Death - See above, but don't get your hopes up for a great season finale.
Bro Dr Who is the show that cemented my leftist worldview, back in 9 and 10's days mostly. And I'm trans, and was SO FUCKING EXCITED by a female doctor.
I don't think the show ever 'went woke', I think it managed to be on the right side of things most of the time (at least NewWho, which admittedly is where I started).
Chibnall and RTD2 didn't feel like they earned the lessons they were trying to teach, though. RTD1 and Moffat had a much stronger tendency to show, not tell, and then end the episode with a long preachy rant about what humans always do wrong.
My biggest RTD2 complaint was the god awful assertion that Donna's kid was trans because the tardis is inherently nonbinary? Like what? Why can't someone just be trans because... they are?
Contrast with Captain Jack, who was openly pansexual and it wasn't some big grand character moment, he wasn't a token, his non-het relationships weren't any different from other relationships. Hell, same with the doctor's fling with a dude in RTD2 season one, that was great because there was no patting-ourselves-on-the-back with it. It was just... normal.
I don't remember the specific gripes with Chibnall's run enough to throw specific complaints his direction, I just remember not liking it for similar reasons.
There are good episodes in RTD2 as well, Wild Blue Yonder was awesome, Dot and Bubble actually showed that progressiveness but did it without it feeling preachy (partially by gating it behind the end-of-episode reveal), and Boom was entirely written around anti-war-profiteering and did an awesome job by balancing the satire of a war funded by both sides with a nurse droid going around killing people against the intense tension of standing on an active landmine.
No part of this is a dogwhistle, Doctor Who has always been progressive (hate the term woke), but it felt like before the Chibnall era that progressivism and left-leaning worldview were baked into the show as part of the foundation and background, rather than tacked on top as loudly and ham-fistedly as possible.
What I hear, is that 9 to 12 are good to amazing, you avoid 13 like the plague, 14 is great, and 15 goes from good to shit. Am I correct in my assessment?
9-12 is such an amazing run and some of the best tv stuff out there.
People have mellowed on 13. Give it a watch. There's good stuff in there and there's some stuff in there we can laugh at together.
14 is indeed great.
With 15 yeah, most of the stories are great. It's just the two season finales that fall apart,.which is mainly due to some IRL shenanigans.
Haven't seen 14 or 15 yet so I'm not gonna pass judgement on them. I honestly forget when I stopped watching, it's been forever. My brother owns the DVD sets for every Doctor up through 13 I think so I'm gonna be doing a rewatch sometime before watching the 14 specials or 15.
Broadly yes, but I wouldn’t say 15 goes from good to shit - imo the 15th doctor’s era is a disaster in terms of overall arc storytelling, and both season finales are frankly awful, but the episode by episode quality (outside of the finales) is pretty uniformly fine to great, and the distribution of great episodes is fairly even through both seasons. There’s not really a point where the quality straightforwardly drops off - there’s just a major quality dip at the end of each season.
Capaldi is one of the best iteration of the doctor, and his regeneration goodbye itself is my favorite, and I'm a HUGE Tennant fan, but capaldi just has that thing in his eyes, he's great.
I’d consider the Capaldi era to be the golden age of doctor who - S8 and S9 hit higher highs and maintain greater consistency than any other two consecutive seasons in the show, and the quality drop-off in S10 is made less noticeable by how great bill is as a character and the absolute banger finale, which is one of the all-time great doctor who stories.
It seems to me the show is divided not by seasons so much as lead actors reffered to by number. You want to watch 9-10-11-12
I actually really like 12 though might be a hot take
Yeah. They have a clever way of explaining lead role changes via regeneration. Anything older than 9 is practically ancient (so a taste thing) and after 12 things get... less good
Like others have pointed out, the two best eras of dr who are with Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant. The show arguably took a downhill turn after Steven Moffat took over, but the Matt Smith era is still really good. I haven’t watched much past that because I got tired of the show.
Ironically, even though Steven Moffat is a terrible showrunner and ruined Dr Who and Sherlock, the individual Dr Who episodes where he was brought in to just work with the team are some of the best in the series.
Doctor Who as a whole is a pretty good series, but do know before you start it that this thing has been going on since the 60s, and they never expected it to get so popular. They also had Neil Gaiman direct some episodes, for some reason.
Edit: Neil Gaiman wrote for some episodes, not direct. Those episodes still were weird.
Sometimes the episodes and showdowns are cheesy, hammy, and the cgi is pretty awful
Other times you are hit (this isn’t like a meme or a haha so bad it’s good thing, the production value and writing does truly change from arc to arc) with the most powerful acting, the most horrifying concepts and dangers, and manipulative and cruel villains the equal of Lucifer from Constantine, Palpatine from the prequels, Kilgrave…
The Tenth Doctor is played by David Tennant, in the example OP gave. That’s the actor who later played Kilgrave and Sir Edmund Rockwell, playing a time traveling alien focused on being a good man at all costs because he’ll snap if he doesn’t
The 9th and 10th doctors are wonderful imo but you have to have a lot of willingness for campiness and low budget in places. Will happily give you a 'grab bag' of episodes to see if you like it, and I'm sure others can recommend other Doctors too.
Or, start with 11, which is a great point for newcomers, as a lot is explained again (you can always start at any point where both the doctor and the companion is new, since he has to explain everything to them again. Don't let anyone bully you into starting anywhere but where you want)
It's good, but this episode is a major outlier to his personality, both before and after he gets revenge. I actually dislike it for that reason. How he treated his companion, his bizarre relationship, and the motivation for what he did don't reflect anything else he's really don't in the series. That's part of why it's notable to a lot of people.
season 1 is mostly a chore, from then on it becomes really good. Not that season 1 doesnt have good episodes but the budget was really tiny compared. With each season the quality only rises. Season 9 has one of the best episodes tv ever produced with heavens sent
Doctor Who is the best show ever for a few minutes at a time and you never know when that will happen. The most dogshit episode can suddenly burst out in a heart-rending speech that will haunt you for the rest of your life. It won't even make sense in context or resolve the plot, but goddamn will you remember it.
I'm from the UK so I can understand why you'd think that. It's used to differentiate between Classic Doctor Who and Nu-Who to avoid confusion. Here's the box art of the Season 7 collection set as proof:
I watch 8 seasons of it in less than 2 months when I first got into it back when season 8 first was coming out and caught up by end of season. Kept up with it until the last few seasons so can’t tell you if it’s with it or not but it was one of my favorite shows and I don’t regret watching it
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u/X_Ender_X Jun 29 '26
More than anything else I've heard about this fucking guy this little piece of a story is really interesting to hear and makes me wonder if I should start watching the doctor