Doctor Who 60th Anniversary: our favourite episodes from six decades of the Doctor
The top 12 episodes picked from 800.
Doctor Who is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, and the good old BBC has put more than 800 episodes of the popular time travel show with the regenerating lead up on iPlayer. New episodes are also available on the Disney+ streaming service in the US.
That’s…a lot of episodes. An absolute Tardis-full, if such a thing were possible. The Doctor’s favoured method of transport might not be actually infinite – otherwise a quarter of it wouldn’t have been able to be jettisoned in The Doctor’s Wife, as a quarter of infinity would, itself, be infinity – but it’s certainly very large and kinda reconfigurable. And 800 is a great many episodes, which can be a little daunting for new Who converts. So, to celebrate six decades of the Doctor, we’ve compiled some of our favourite episodes from across the years.
The episodes we’ve picked out here have strong, self contained stories, or give us something really tasty to chew on, like the appearance of an iconic baddie, or a regeneration scene. There are some previous anniversary specials too, which united different incarnations of the Doctor.
You could just start at the beginning, with first Doctor William Hartnell. But with over 800 episodes on offer, you’d need to spend 12 hours a day for just over a month to get through them all. Anyway, in no particular order, here’s our pick of the most iconic Doctor Who episodes, from all-time classics to more up-to-date time travel adventures.
Doctor Who is available to watch on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and Disney+ in the US.
1) Blink (2007)
Blink may be an obvious episode to begin with. David Tennant is barely in this episode, but it’s an absolute belter all the same. A plot involving messages left under wallpaper and DVD extras – which will surely bewilder anyone raised on streaming – leads to the debut of the Weeping Angels.
These statue-like enemies that move when you’re not looking at them have the ability to send you back in time so they can consume your time-potential energy. Or something. Like many Who baddies, it’s not exactly clear what they’re doing, only that they need to be stopped. We’ve never been able to look at a statue in the same way since.
2) Remembrance of the Daleks (1998)
A story from Sylvester McCoy’s second season as the Doctor, Remembrance of the Daleks coincided with the series 25th anniversary. As such, it takes the narrative back to where it started – Totter’s Lane, Shoreditch – seconds after the end of the very first episode (An Unearthly Child) back in 1963.
This time, however, there are Daleks involved, and a new companion, Ace, who gets to hit one with a baseball bat. The episode is also notable for making the Daleks a bit more interesting, splitting them into factions and introducing different models, such as the Special Weapons Dalek with its massive gun. Remembrance of the Daleks was supposed to begin a story arc that took the series through its next few seasons, but this was scuppered the following year when the show was cancelled.
Watch Remembrance of the Daleks on BBC iPlayer
3) The Green Death (1973)
AKA, the one with the maggots. Clever close-up photography aside, this is a top quality Jon Pertwee (third Doctor) series that sees our dandyish protagonist dress up as a milkman, to unearth strange going on in a Welsh coal mine. It involves miners turning green, so naturally the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) gets involved, along with a certain Gallifreyan scientific advisor.
There’s a megalomaniacal supercomputer, pools of toxic waste, and the aforementioned giant maggots, plus a bittersweet ending involving the loss of a long-time companion. All quintessentially bonkers Doctor Who fodder, then.
Watch The Green Death on BBC iPlayer
4) The Caves of Androzani (1984)
Peter Davison’s regeneration episode, this episode marked the end of the fifth and the beginning of the sixth incarnations of the Doctor.
Caves featuring corrupt leaders, a scarred scientist, strange underground creatures, guns, fighting, and a choice to save his companion all spell doom for the Doctor – this version, at least. It’s about as far from a low-stakes kids’ show as Who gets.
Watch The Caves of Androzani on BBC iPlayer
5) City of Death (1979)
Co-written by Douglas Adams – need we say more? – City of Death stars Tom Baker, who is many people’s favourite Doctor. People over 40, anyway.
The combination of his bescarfed flourish in the lead role and the mind behind Hitchhiker’s Guide leads us through a time-hopping art heist, 400-million-year-old tentacled aliens and the beginning of life on Earth itself. All in a days work for the Doctor.
Watch City of Death on BBC iPlayer
6) Genesis of the Daleks (1975)
More Daleks! More Tom Baker! And a massive moral choice for the Doctor. Should he commit genocide? Is going back in time to wipe out the Daleks before they have the chance to become a universe-conquering menace an acceptable thing to do? Or did the threat of the extermination-happy pepperpots actually cause a lot of good to happen?
These are all questions we mere mortals rarely need to consider, but Genesis of the Daleks marks the Daleks’ creator’s first appearance on screen. In 1998, it was also voted the best Who story ever by Doctor Who Magazine.
Watch Genesis of the Dark on BBC iPlayer
7) The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964)
Also the title of a movie starring Peter Cushing, which is worth a watch if you can find it, The Dalek Invasion of Earth sees the Daleks’ plan to extract the core of the 22nd-century Earth, and install a sat-nav in its place via a huge drill in Bedfordshire. Naturally, this plan is opposed by a plucky band of British freedom fighters, who don’t want to be turned into robotic soldiers or slaves like everybody else.
It has a pretty silly ending involving doing Dalek impressions over the radio, but also sees The Doctor lock his own granddaughter out of the TARDIS so she can be happy with the man she loves, even though this makes him very sad. With silliness and sombre tenderness in equal measure, The Dalek Invasion of Earth is a surprisingly heartfelt affair.
Watch The Dalek Invasion of Earth on BBC iPlayer
8) The Doctor’s Wife (2011)
Neil Gaiman’s signature episode sees Matt Smith’s Doctor land in a junkyard on an asteroid in a pocket universe that’s close to collapse.
There’s an entity on the loose who’s murdering Time Lords left right and centre. This being can eat their TARDISes, but it also transfers the ‘matrix’ (or consciousness) of the Doctor’s TARDIS into a woman’s body, allowing him to talk to it for the first time in 48 years.
If that sounds as surreal as the fever dream of Salvador Dali, well, we’d have to agree with you. But as with a lot of the best Who episodes, there’s a bittersweet ending involving love and sacrifice that makes this unique to almost everything else the series has produced.
Watch The Doctor’s Wife on BBC iPlayer
9) The Name of the Doctor (2013)
Matt Smith’s Doctor faces his own grave in a story that takes threads from throughout the series’ history and braids them together to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. Among those parts are archive footage of previous Doctors dating back to 1964, and a new, forgotten, incarnation of the time traveller in the form of John Hurt’s War Doctor.
Watch The Name of the Doctor on BBC iPlayer
10) World Enough and Time (2017)
Some say Heaven Sent is Peter Capaldi’s best Who episode, in which he punches his way out of a castle/torture chamber over billions of years using a teleportation device to create constant new versions of himself. Standard Doctor Who, then.
However, World Enough and Time is a bit more lighthearted, and serves as a tragic origin story for the original Cybermen.
Watch World Enough on Time on BBC iPlayer
11) The Sound of Drums (2007)
More of The Master, this time getting himself elected Prime Minister by subliminally influencing the population of Britain through their phones so he can do something nasty involving aliens (or are they?).
There’s a complicated plot involving a flying aircraft carrier, the Doctor’s severed hand, and something called a vortex manipulator. But this story – actually the middle section of a three-part arc along with Utopia and Last of the Time Lords – acts as a particularly strong run for Tennant’s Doctor.
Watch The Sound of Drums on BBC iPlayer
12) The Star Beast (2023)
The first of the 60th anniversary specials, The Star Beast slots David Tennant back into the Doctor’s Converse (last seen in 2009’s The End of Time) in a classic wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey charade.
It starts with a spaceship crashing into London, and builds from there into one of the most comic-book-like episodes of Who. The BBC’s new deal with Disney shows in the production – there are lots of extras in street scenes, and definitely no abandoned quarries in Wales, wobbly walls or dodgy CGI. But there’s also an animatronic cat-alien with the voice of Miriam Margolyes and a heck of a lot of imagination at work.
Watch The Star Beast on BBC iPlayer
Ian Evenden
