THE TEN WORST CLASSIC DOCTOR WHO STORIES
What "favorite" list is complete without its antithesis accompaniment? My 50 Favorite Classic Doctor Who Stories chronicled the creme de la creme of the program during its initial 1963-1989 run, so now it is time to rank the ten stories that had the least likelihood of making that top 50 list. Sometimes we just need to vent in order to ease our suffering.
That said, sitting through every OG Doctor Who story is hardly a torturous endeavor. Usually for me, whenever I dip back into this program, I take the good with the bad. This is to say that I usually watch complete seasons or complete runs from various Doctors, sometimes going chronologically or sometimes just starting with whatever recent physical media purchases I have made. In any event, most of these stories are watchable, including a few that are regrettably showcased here. Plus, the not-so-good ones make the really good ones stand-out that much more. Such is the balance of life.
As was the case with my previous compiling, all Doctors are represented, (gotta share the dissing as much as the ass kissing), and I am still not counting any of the incomplete stories from the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton eras. Same reasoning, as I feel that they cannot be fairly compared against the complete serials that we have. Some of the fully animated, partially animated, or audio/stills reconstructions may be better or worse than the full stories that have survived, but maybe those can be ranked on yet another list. Not that I need any more excuses to nerd out with one of these.
Also, this is just concerning the "classic" era of Doctor Who, as that is still the only one that I am well-versed in. So do not be confused that your least favorite Jodi Whittaker or Ncuti Gatwa episodes are missing. I am sure that such hatred is scattered throughout the interwebs somewhere. Again, such is the balance of life. So here we go...dinosaurs, bug aliens, and Wyatt Earp!
Season Eleven
All things considered, the Third Doctor's run was the most consistently good. Having the Master to frequently square-off against, Sarah-Jane Smith, Jo Grant, and the Brigadier to work with, and the A-plus producer/script editor team of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks all helped. With such things going for it, the results were always watchable and downright great nine times out of ten, but season eleven's Invasion of the Dinosaurs is the obvious clunker. That said, there is only one reason that it is a clunker and that is the abysmal special effects. They are easily the worst in the classic serial's history, which says a lot for a program that was notorious for over-lighting its interior sets so that the bargain bin aesthetic of the rubber suit monsters was frequently apparent. Still, it never got worse than this when it came to being unable to sustain verisimilitude. The prehistoric monstrosities are just awful, the kind that make Toho's suitmation look like Rick Baker's work in An American Werewolf in London. Toy dinosaur puppets showcased in broad daylight with equally embarrassing blue screen projection to have the actors appear with them, it is face-palming stuff. Thankfully, the actual story is good and everyone behaves admirably, even if it does not have to be six parts long.
(1978)
Season Fifteen
Tom Baker portrayed the Doctor so long and under so many different production teams that it was inevitable that his run would hit some rough gravel at some point. While season fifteen has Horror of Fang Rock, Image of the Fendahl, and The Sun Makers, (all fantastic), it also has Underworld. What dooms this story is both the abysmal color separation overlay (CSO) effects which are used liberally, as well as a story that seems to be drowning in a vat of molasses. On paper, we have an enticing tale that explores the Time Lord's past, specifically why they adopted a non-interference policy throughout the cosmos, brought on with a troubled ordeal with the Minyans who overthrew the Time Lords after gaining much of their scientific knowledge. The Doctor and Leela show up in the middle of a long-ranging civil war, (and we even have things like pacifier guns that put their targets in an instantaneous good mood), but it all stalls terribly from there. Most of the serial follows the usual back-and-forth plotting, (there are lots of shots of actors strolling across a blue screen that looks about as convincing as Jon Pertwee's Venusian aikido), with an extra emphasis on characters sitting around and talking. Bob Barker and David Martin churned out some of the best serials from the classic show's era, but their work here is just impossibly dull.
Season Twenty
Next to Jon Pertwee's, the Peter Davison era was the most consistent, with some poor production aspects usually serving as the only major detriments to any of his less than agreeable stories, (Warriors of the Deep, Arc of Infinity, and Snakedance come to mind). Yet the season twenty closer The King's Demons is derailed by the lousiest script from any in Davison's run. One of three two-parters that the series experimented with during this time, never was the Master more pathetically shoehorned into a story, and this is taking into account The Five Doctors when the Time Lords inexplicably offer him full immunity and a fresh batch of regenerations to help the Doctor out all alone in Gallifrey's Death Zone. Here, the Master dons his least convincing disguise as the King's champion and ultimately reveals his scheme to thwart the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. Oh, and he steals the programmable android Kamelion to do this, trying to pull-off a double ruse that the Doctor easily stops and sees through. Why the Master went through his usual method of elaborate shenanigans just to set back feudal war for a brief time in England is never convincingly explained. So basically, this is a Doctor Who story that is meant to portray how bored the Master has become. It is no wonder then that it came out so boring itself.
07. The Dominators
(1968)
Season Six
Granted, several of Patrick Troughton's stories are either entirely missing or only available in mangled form, and accounts vary as to the lack of quality in The Highlanders and The Space Pirates, per example. Out of the serials that have survived in their initial broadcast form though, season six' The Dominators is a clear dud, hindered by the common setbacks of being formulaic, repetitive, and featuring top-to-bottom lousy secondary characters. Arriving on another planet that is being repressed by bad guys via deadly robot assistants, the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe spend the majority of time bouncing between two bases, that of the humorless and one-note villains of the title, and that of the stupid hippy pacifists that do nothing to stop them. Standing in for the Daleks are the Quarks, clunky mechanical muscle henchmen who look silly and are easily thwarted. Troughton himself was absent from all of the location shooting, and amazingly, the story was originally commissioned to be a six-parter. A saving grace is the fact that it became all too obvious that it was going to work even less with another twenty-odd minutes tagged-on to it, so the last episode was jettisoned and the whole thing was mercilessly wrapped up in a mere five segments. Unfortunately, this is still five segments too long.
(1968)
Season Six
Granted, several of Patrick Troughton's stories are either entirely missing or only available in mangled form, and accounts vary as to the lack of quality in The Highlanders and The Space Pirates, per example. Out of the serials that have survived in their initial broadcast form though, season six' The Dominators is a clear dud, hindered by the common setbacks of being formulaic, repetitive, and featuring top-to-bottom lousy secondary characters. Arriving on another planet that is being repressed by bad guys via deadly robot assistants, the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe spend the majority of time bouncing between two bases, that of the humorless and one-note villains of the title, and that of the stupid hippy pacifists that do nothing to stop them. Standing in for the Daleks are the Quarks, clunky mechanical muscle henchmen who look silly and are easily thwarted. Troughton himself was absent from all of the location shooting, and amazingly, the story was originally commissioned to be a six-parter. A saving grace is the fact that it became all too obvious that it was going to work even less with another twenty-odd minutes tagged-on to it, so the last episode was jettisoned and the whole thing was mercilessly wrapped up in a mere five segments. Unfortunately, this is still five segments too long.
Besides the continued redundancy of throwing Davros into every Dalek story post-Genesis of the Daleks and making him a less formidable foe each time, Revelation of the Daleks has the distinction of featuring the worst supporting character in any Doctor Who story. While comedian Alexei Sayle has done memorable work on The Comic Strip Presents... and The Young Ones, his turn here as a DJ who plays 1950's and 60's rock music for people in suspended animation whose brains are being harvested to create a new Dalek race is a moronic one from front to back. First of all, Sayle puts on an insufferable American accent when broadcasting, staring into the camera and mugging it up to eleven. No wonder Davros found him irritating. Secondly and far more stupidly, he makeshifts a "rock and roll" gun that destroys two Daleks while he is trying to help Peri. At least the third Dalek that shows up kills him. Saying that a Who story is one of the worst simply because of a lone character may seem melodramatic, but consider the same season's even more grim and violent Vengeance on Varos which was actually enhanced by one of its supporting players, the excellent Nabil Shaban as Sil. Sometimes the cast makes all the difference when going for dark comedy laughs, and here, it just makes the viewer wanna punch the goofy guy in the face.
05. Time and the Rani
(1987)
Season Twenty-Four
The second botched Doctor debut in a row, Time and the Rani introduced Sylvester McCoy to the lead role in nearly as awkward of a fashion as they did with Colin Baker three years earlier in The Twin Dilemma. While this story is comparatively not as terrible as C. Baker's inauguration, it still gets plenty wrong. First of all, Baker refused to return for the obligatory regeneration scene, leaving no choice but to put McCoy in a wig and quickly obscure his face. Adding insult to injury is the non-explanation that we are given as to the Doctor's transformation in the first place since he just collapses after the TARDIS crashes on the planet Lakertya, though never before had anyone on board suffered any substantial injuries from a rough landing. After all, Mel certainly seemed unphased. From here, the abysmal production values shine through with the type of horrendous SOV location work that the program adopted to save money during the previous Trial of a Time Lord season onward. Worse though is a weak story involving the female version of the Master, the Rani abducting scientists to make a time manipulator. McCoy embarrasses himself in his post-regeneration confusion, bumbling around like a doofus and getting easily tricked into helping his returned enemy, merely by her putting on Mel's outfit and accentuating her already-bombastic mom hair.
(1987)
Season Twenty-Four
The second botched Doctor debut in a row, Time and the Rani introduced Sylvester McCoy to the lead role in nearly as awkward of a fashion as they did with Colin Baker three years earlier in The Twin Dilemma. While this story is comparatively not as terrible as C. Baker's inauguration, it still gets plenty wrong. First of all, Baker refused to return for the obligatory regeneration scene, leaving no choice but to put McCoy in a wig and quickly obscure his face. Adding insult to injury is the non-explanation that we are given as to the Doctor's transformation in the first place since he just collapses after the TARDIS crashes on the planet Lakertya, though never before had anyone on board suffered any substantial injuries from a rough landing. After all, Mel certainly seemed unphased. From here, the abysmal production values shine through with the type of horrendous SOV location work that the program adopted to save money during the previous Trial of a Time Lord season onward. Worse though is a weak story involving the female version of the Master, the Rani abducting scientists to make a time manipulator. McCoy embarrasses himself in his post-regeneration confusion, bumbling around like a doofus and getting easily tricked into helping his returned enemy, merely by her putting on Mel's outfit and accentuating her already-bombastic mom hair.
04. The Twin Dilemma
(1984)
Season Twenty-One
Likely the most infamous classic Doctor Who story, The Twin Dilemma is an example of a bold-faced gamble that fell flat on its face. Breaking tradition, John Nathan-Turner decided to introduce Peter Davison's replacement in the season finale, though the resulting story proved to be as dramatic of a drop in quality from the proceeding The Caves of Androzani as could have been conceived. Davison's Doctor exhibited none of the alien quirks of his predecessors and "died" a noble "death" by saving Peri from a fatal disease, only to spring back to life here as an arrogant and psychotic Colin Baker. The idea was to have an unlikable Doctor that the audience would warm up to as he settled into his new form, but they went so far in this direction that it left audiences with a bad taste, begging the question of who would even want to watch the following season in the first place, if only to see if the Doctor would exhibit further asshole behavior like strangling his companion again. The absurdity of Baker's costume was another issue and yet another insistence by Nathan-Turner, a guy who did some wonderful stuff within his long tenure on the program, yet was also one whose foibles are rightly scrutinized. The story itself is serviceable, but Baker's depiction is front-to-back distracting, which is a shame since he took the blame for choices that were thrust upon him, ultimately leading to him being the only actor to get fired from the part when he initially wanted to beat the other, (Tom) Baker's run and stick around for as long as possible.
(1984)
Season Twenty-One
Likely the most infamous classic Doctor Who story, The Twin Dilemma is an example of a bold-faced gamble that fell flat on its face. Breaking tradition, John Nathan-Turner decided to introduce Peter Davison's replacement in the season finale, though the resulting story proved to be as dramatic of a drop in quality from the proceeding The Caves of Androzani as could have been conceived. Davison's Doctor exhibited none of the alien quirks of his predecessors and "died" a noble "death" by saving Peri from a fatal disease, only to spring back to life here as an arrogant and psychotic Colin Baker. The idea was to have an unlikable Doctor that the audience would warm up to as he settled into his new form, but they went so far in this direction that it left audiences with a bad taste, begging the question of who would even want to watch the following season in the first place, if only to see if the Doctor would exhibit further asshole behavior like strangling his companion again. The absurdity of Baker's costume was another issue and yet another insistence by Nathan-Turner, a guy who did some wonderful stuff within his long tenure on the program, yet was also one whose foibles are rightly scrutinized. The story itself is serviceable, but Baker's depiction is front-to-back distracting, which is a shame since he took the blame for choices that were thrust upon him, ultimately leading to him being the only actor to get fired from the part when he initially wanted to beat the other, (Tom) Baker's run and stick around for as long as possible.
03. Ghost Light
(1989)
Season Twenty-Six
Depending on who you ask, the penultimate Doctor Who story broadcasted in its original run is either a challenging and refreshing one full of unique ideas that satisfyingly dives into the backstory of beloved companion Ace, or it is an insufferable trainwreck that is impossible to follow. In fact, whatever side of the fence you are on, there can be no denying that Ghost Light is at least as incomprehensible as classic Who ever got. It jumps right into the secondary characters discussing things which was nothing new, but it proceeds to barrel through several melodramatic moments that it never bothers to set up for proper context. This makes for a head-scratching watch where we are wondering not only what everyone is even talking about, but why they are acting so vehemently to whatever the hell is going on. The abbreviated version is that the Doctor deliberately takes Ace back to a "haunted" house that traumatized her when she was a child, only to discover a collector of lifeforms who has a mad plan to assassinate Queen Victoria in order to rule over England. There is a lot more going on than that though, (probably), and repeated views are required to make heads or tails out of it, but man, the whole ordeal is more of a chore to sit through than anything else. Props for the grand ambition that was attempted here, and it definitely plays into the Seventh Doctor's more mischievous qualities, but at its best, it bites off more than it can chew.
(1989)
Season Twenty-Six
Depending on who you ask, the penultimate Doctor Who story broadcasted in its original run is either a challenging and refreshing one full of unique ideas that satisfyingly dives into the backstory of beloved companion Ace, or it is an insufferable trainwreck that is impossible to follow. In fact, whatever side of the fence you are on, there can be no denying that Ghost Light is at least as incomprehensible as classic Who ever got. It jumps right into the secondary characters discussing things which was nothing new, but it proceeds to barrel through several melodramatic moments that it never bothers to set up for proper context. This makes for a head-scratching watch where we are wondering not only what everyone is even talking about, but why they are acting so vehemently to whatever the hell is going on. The abbreviated version is that the Doctor deliberately takes Ace back to a "haunted" house that traumatized her when she was a child, only to discover a collector of lifeforms who has a mad plan to assassinate Queen Victoria in order to rule over England. There is a lot more going on than that though, (probably), and repeated views are required to make heads or tails out of it, but man, the whole ordeal is more of a chore to sit through than anything else. Props for the grand ambition that was attempted here, and it definitely plays into the Seventh Doctor's more mischievous qualities, but at its best, it bites off more than it can chew.
02. The Web Planet
(1965)
Season Two
An infamous and bizarre entry in the William Hartnell era, The Web Planet is six long episodes of horrendous costumes, obnoxious voices, a lack of agency, "What the hell are they doing?" mannerisms, horrendous pacing, Vaseline on the lens, (?!?), and monotonous plotting. Australian screenwriter Bill Strutton conceived of it after witnessing two ants fighting, which reminded him of his two sons fighting, (So a 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque critique that mankind is as evolved as its "lower" fellow Earth species?), and script editor Denis Spooner apparently saw it as an allegory about communism and free enterprise. Whatever good feelings the production crew may have had going in, it was also apparent that the story's more fantastical elements and alien characters would be difficult to pull off convincingly, and boy were those assertions accurate. The insect-like Menoptra, Zarbi, and Optera all look ridiculous, and some of them talk with effeminate voices and incessant, pansy-like hand waving that is never explained. Director Richard Martin had the bad idea to obscure many of the scenes with the aforementioned Vaselie effect, and the production ran into consistent problems with sets and costumes breaking down, actors fumbling their lines and not being able to see, the shooting script not being long enough, (Wait, what?), and filming going over time and budget. It is no wonder that the resulting six-parter is such a disaster.
(1965)
Season Two
An infamous and bizarre entry in the William Hartnell era, The Web Planet is six long episodes of horrendous costumes, obnoxious voices, a lack of agency, "What the hell are they doing?" mannerisms, horrendous pacing, Vaseline on the lens, (?!?), and monotonous plotting. Australian screenwriter Bill Strutton conceived of it after witnessing two ants fighting, which reminded him of his two sons fighting, (So a 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque critique that mankind is as evolved as its "lower" fellow Earth species?), and script editor Denis Spooner apparently saw it as an allegory about communism and free enterprise. Whatever good feelings the production crew may have had going in, it was also apparent that the story's more fantastical elements and alien characters would be difficult to pull off convincingly, and boy were those assertions accurate. The insect-like Menoptra, Zarbi, and Optera all look ridiculous, and some of them talk with effeminate voices and incessant, pansy-like hand waving that is never explained. Director Richard Martin had the bad idea to obscure many of the scenes with the aforementioned Vaselie effect, and the production ran into consistent problems with sets and costumes breaking down, actors fumbling their lines and not being able to see, the shooting script not being long enough, (Wait, what?), and filming going over time and budget. It is no wonder that the resulting six-parter is such a disaster.
(1966)
Season Three
Hopefully, whoever came up with the idea to not only have the Doctor and his companions visit the Gunfight at the O.K .Corral, but also have it be a musical got reprimanded something fierce, as the resulting The Gunfighters easily stands as the most poorly conceived and executed Doctor Who story. Historical liberties are taken as much as in any retelling of the famed Old West tale, with the Doctor acting against character by trying to prevent the O.K. Corral shootout after he had previously warned his companions against altering history. No matter since the script just makes up whatever it needs to happen, giving companions Steven and Dodo music abilities that they never had before, and starting things off with the Doctor having a horrid toothache, because there must not have been a less silly reason for him to meet Doc Holiday. Besides the slipped American accents by much of the cast, arbitrary behavior of the main players, and uneven tone that haphazardly throws grown-worthy comedy into the mix, "Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon" runs wild on the soundtrack, getting played upwards of what feels like nine-hundred and eighty-seven times. Science fiction elements are nowhere to be seen, (which was in keeping with other historical Who stories from the period), but here it proves that sometimes stepping so far away from home base was bound to fail.
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