Moffat's Who RANKED (54-41)

Fun fact: this portion of the ranking originally started with me saying something along the lines of "Oh thank goodness we're getting to the good ones now, what a relief" (probably because I was feeling lazy and couldn't think of a better way to begin). But then Series 11 started airing and hoo boy, what I wouldn't give for one of these newest episodes to be even half as imaginative and witty as some of the worst episodes I've covered so far on this ranking. I mean, 'Nightmare in Silver' is largely considered a bit meh by even the person who wrote it and I would bloody sprint to watch that before rewatching 'The Ghost Monument'. Anyway, sorry for coming out of the gate so harsh. It's been a weird week.

ALSO: I screwed up in my earlier placing of The Beast Below, so just pretend that it's actually somewhere in this section here. Many thanks.

54. Nightmare in Silver (S7E13)

Written by Neil Gaiman

Series 7's reputation for being the most mediocre season of Nu-Who sort of precedes itself by this point. For whatever reason (stress caused by the 50th, probably), no-one really seemed to be keeping their eye on the ball for this overstuffed batch of episodes. Not even Neil Gaiman left it unscathed, with a disappointing second go at bat that he only recently decried as the reason he didn't return to the show.

Which is a shame, because Nightmare in Silver is not a disaster, or even really that bad. It has some weird decisions (making the Cybermen indestructible sort of misses the point of how they can be interesting) and some story beats land with a thud (Porridge's reveal and basically everything to do with the kids), but it also has a lot of really great stuff in there as well. Matt Smith's dual turn as The Doctor and Mr. Clever is pretty goofy but undeniably enthralling and the episode gets most of its mileage out of mining this battle raging in The Doctor's head. It's not often the Doctor is repurposed as the antagonist of the story, but 'NIS' is probably the one episode that commits to this idea in the most overt way possible, forcing Matt Smith to scream and scheme his way to domination and reveal some particularly twisted elements to his performance in the process. It never really comes together as a whole (the sonic screwdriver element feels like the first draft attempt at what should be a much better conclusion), but this is still fascinating in its own right.

53. A Town Called Mercy (S7E3)

Written by Toby Whithouse

A Town Called Mercy is so close to being boring. It's another patented 'let's have an ethical debate' episode that, in Doctor Who's case, usually end up being entertainment-death. And yet, somehow it never crumbles under its own monotony. That might be because the debate is actually fairly interesting (do you send a murderer to his death and save a town, even though he has been silently trying to absolve himself for years?) but also because it funnels Matt Smith's Doctor through a lens of fury and immovability that has only been glanced up to this point. Sure we've seen him send armies scuttling and become so big he has to be erased from the universe's database, but the harshness and unpredictability that lines the edges has so far been partially neglected. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship had the Doctor leave Solomon to die (a decision where I can't decide whether it is intentionally setting up this episode or is just bad characterisation), but A Town Called Mercy finally calls him out on it. "This is what happens when you travel alone for too long" Amy chastises him at one point, cutting right to the core of the Doctor's isolation. It's a state the Doctor really doesn't know how to cope with ('Listen', anyone?) - with even partial distancing resulting in the actions we see here. The episode arguably sanitises the grittiness here a bit too much by reducing the town and genre setting to what is essentially 'Western shorthand', but this is probably the first episode in Series 7 to really feel like there's meat under the surface gristle.

52. Let's Kill Hitler (S6E7)

Written by Steven Moffat

Let's Kill Hitler is kind of glorious in how much it revels in its own madness. Rory punching Hitler! River Song as an evil assassin! shapeshifting robots piloted by miniaturised people! There's a lot going on here and just grabbing on for dear life is honestly where all the fun comes from. The problem is that there's so much going on and happening so quickly, that none of it really lands as much as it should do. This is one of those rare yet damning occasions where Moffat starts offering payoffs that aren't really properly setup and so we start getting moments like Mel turning out to be River when she'd never been mentioned until about five minutes before her regeneration. Honestly, there's an argument to be made as to how people's negative reactions to Moffat's run really trace back to this episode, as his main showrunning weakness fully reared its head for the first time. Still, what a fucking trip, eh?

51. The Wedding of River Song (S6E13)

Written by Steven Moffat

Should TWORS be two episodes? There probably isn't enough material inherent within the story to really stretch that far, yet its hard to shake the feeling that there are two separate parts to this finale rubbing up uncomfortably against each other. One of them is a single-hander featuring Matt Smith as he roams the galaxy coming to terms with his eventual death, whilst the other is the final thesis on River Song's soul; whether she's the woman who marries the Doctor, or the one who kills him. That second idea is what clicks the episode into place as a whole, yet it's so buried amidst the spinning plates that Moffat has to keep whirling that its hard to really attach onto it in a particularly meaningful way. Even the episode's final setup - that the Doctor must retreat into the shadows in order to not succumb to his own grandiose mythos never goes anywhere particularly impactful. Still, the invention on display is staggering ("Winston Churchill has returned to Buckingham Palace on his private mammoth") and the character moments can be rich enough to preserve the episode as worthwhile (Amy leaving Madame Kovarian to die is a shockingly brutal look at where she is after a Season of utter madness).

Most of all, TWORS is arguably the most focused look at Matt Smith's Doctor yet. The episode has its sights trained on him for the entire episode and doesn't let him go until the very end which, ironically, is the only time we find the truth. "The Doctor lies," as always, which made Eleven a much trickier and darker Doctor than most like to admit. It's almost fascinating and Smith's performance is a rock amidst a raging sea of insanity, but it's a lot to swallow for the ultimate goal of being tricked once again. Moffat would later develop his introspection of the Doctor to spine-tingling results (yes in that one, but also in his Day of the Doctor novelisation). For now, it's both thrilling and a little disheartening to spend almost an hour with the Eleventh Doctor, only to find him as inscrutable as when we started.

50. The Lie of the Land (S10E8)

Written by Toby Whithouse

PSA: The Lie of the Land is not as bad as everyone thinks it is. In fact, it's actually kind of good and almost almost great. Its problems are inherent and nebulous (I have no idea whether this should have been two episodes or not and I don't think behind the scenes did, either), but Whithouse's ability to connect it together is so god damn admirable it becomes impossible for me to dislike it. Yes the Doctor's fake regeneration is the embodiment of dramatic blue balls and yes we have another 'love conquers all' resolution (which wouldn't really be a bad thing if 'Closing Time' hadn't gone and fucked that trope up) but none of those problems register whilst actually watching it. This is the work of a writer working as magician; telling the audience to look one way whilst turning the cogs elsewhere. It might be frustrating as all heck, but respect craft when you see it.

Also, those Missy scenes are so great. Don't even try to deny it.

49. Asylum of the Daleks (S7E1)

Written by Steven Moffat

I wonder if Moffat consciously tailors each Season to be a direct reaction to the last. We see it throughout his tenure but nowhere is it more present in Series 7. Where Series 6 took the successful formula of 5 and amped it to preposterous levels, 7 seems to be a hyper self-aware reduction in complexity, wherein every story is utterly self-contained away from the larger narrative. What might have seemed like a good idea at the time (Series 6 had gotten a lot of grumbling from people who "couldn't follow what was going on") eventually gave way to reveal Series 7 as nutrition-free and forgettable and is generally looked upon as Doctor Who's most underwhelming run of episodes. 'Asylum' sits on the needle point of this creative decision; somehow managing to embody the narrative failings of the Season (Amy and Rory's divorce), whilst also being the kind of slick action-adventure movie that most Hollywood writers would kill for.

48. Flatline (S8E9)

Written by Jamie Mathieson

You can practically feel Flatline straining at the reins to become the new 'Blink'. All the ingredients are there: we've gone Doctor-lite, the direction is a bit odder and artsier than it usually is and the monster is a deliberate riff on an everyday object (in this case, graffiti). And yet, I tend to forget it even exists. At this point in Series 8, a bizarrely large portion of the fanbase had decided that Clara had become too much of the main character (I will never understand why this complaint was a thing) and Flatline is the clearest examination of her standing in the show. So it's weird that the episode doesn't so much explore and further her increasing presence, as much as it does just reiterate what we already know. It sort of feeds back into the episode's apparent ambition and the result is to almost cancel itself out of existence; which is a shame because Flatline is still an interesting 'filler' episode. It's just not a particularly definitive one.

47. The Pyramid at the End of the World (S10E7)

Written by Peter Harness & Steven Moffat

So, this episode kind of rules? I remember when it aired how it sort of came and went, hopelessly scrabbling for footing after Extremis had fucked us all up the week before. But, separated from the residual hype of the previous episode, 'Pyramid' is actually pretty darn good. There's a smattering of really funny lines (me and Rob now use 'Secretary General of the UN' as innuendo, much to the confusion of everyone around us and, presumably, you the reader) and the conflict makes for one of the bizarrest alien-invasion stories in the modern run. I don't particularly buy that everyone (including Bill) would be so eager to jump at the Monk's offer, but I tend to view it more as a weird roadblock than anything that actually dismantles the episode entirely. Isn't it enough to just say an episode does it's job well and then gets the hell out whilst it can?

46. Robot of Sherwood (S8E3)

Written by Mark Gatiss

I'm not going to convince anyone that this episode is good, am I? I mean, one of my friends recently called this the "worst-written episode of Doctor Who ever", which isn't just harsh, but categorically, cosmically incorrect. Ignore the fact you probably didn't find it funny (I did, though) and that sandwiching it between 'Into the Dalek' and 'Listen' might be one of the more questionable episode scheduling decisions Moffat made during his tenure, because unlike a lot of bad Doctor Who episodes (and a lot of Mark Gatiss episodes, too), Robot of Sherwood is clearly, definitively, trying to say something and fit into the overarching themes of the Series. That's probably a low bar to clear, but it does clear it, unlike a lot of actually-worse Doctor Who episodes. And it does it whilst getting Ben Miller to name-drop Derby. Plus - as mentioned previously - I laughed, so there.

45. The Eaters of Light (S10E10)

Written by Rona Munro

The worst thing that can really be said about The Eaters of Light, is that it's just kind of underwhelming. I'm not sure whether this is because of the episode itself, or because it comes just before Capaldi's earth-shattering final two-parter, but the fact remains. Even in the face of that, TEOL might just be one of the richest episodes of Series 10 and a much worthier examination of warring factions than 'The Empress of Mars' managed to be. "You sound like children" the soldiers realise as the TARDIS' translation matrix kicks in (maybe the most poignant use of that device in the show's history) and the two sides are unified forever. It's an unabashedly idiosyncratic episode and a brilliant champion of how Doctor Who can avoid anonymising its writers even in the shadow of 50 years of lore and history.

44. The Girl Who Died (S9E5)

Written by Jamie Mathieson & Steven Moffat

I have noticed that the Doctor Who episodes that put themselves out there as sillier or more comedic romps tend to be the ones that people are quickest to call the 'worst ever'. Maybe it comes back to what Film Crit Hulk pointed out about The Last Jedi backlash: "If the film says it is being silly, then the audience feels silly too" (parapahrased). So yeah, here's an episode about Vikings with Monty Python Odin heads in the clouds and the bad guys getting pranked to the Benny Hill theme.

It's also an episode about the impassive fury of time, the ripples made to save a life and The Doctor following his own self-appointed nature to potential oblivion. Series 9 really does age like a fine wine and as time goes on, the thematic coherancy of its individual pieces click ever more satisfyingly into place. It's a strange one to look at in the context of an episode ranking, as the Season is definitely operating more successfully as a whole than on an episode-by-episode level, so I can't really reflect it in the numbers. But I suppose that's why I do these write-ups.

43. The Power of Three (S7E4)

Written by Chris Chibnall

I think that The Power of Three might just be the episode that tipped the scales allowing Chibnall to become Moffat's successor. Specifically, The Doctor's speech to Amy about how he runs to things "before they flare and fade forever." It's a gorgeously written piece of dialogue and comes at exactly the right moment to deliver maximum impact. Tellingly, Chibnall has never even come close to matching the beauty of that one moment, but The Power of Three still represents his strongest writing effort yet. There's working comedy beats and an actual unifying point being made (I think this is what the kids call "throwing shade"). Most importantly the episode has life - something that I feel tends to be sorely lacking from a lot of his other episodes. I don't even give a shit that the ending is a rushed piece of nothing. What I do care about, however, is that the cubes as an invasion plotline are utterly wasted as mere facilitators of the action. They don't actually say anything in and of themselves - this isn't the Tesselecta in 'Let's Kill Hitler' wherein it fed back into the episode's ideas of justice via time travel brought to the point of insanity. Other than that, though, this is a good time.

42. Face the Raven (S9E10)

Written by Sarah Dollard

Lol at the people who think Clara should have actually died in this episode. I'll get into why later (much later), but until then, I suppose we can just admire Sarah Dollard's abilities as a writer to deliver Clara's final stand so well that it convinced a ton of people that the buck should have stopped here. As a standalone, Face the Raven would probably be a fairly underwhelming installment in the show. Funnelled through the lens of examining Clara's ever detached psychological state, FTR is eye-opening in ways that family television rarely is. The moment where the episode suggests that Clara has been growingly increasingly suicidal since Danny's death is such a brutal literalisation of the show's previously implied subtext that I'm still not sure the show actually went there.

41. The Woman Who Lived (S9E6)

Written by Catherine Treggena

This might be Doctor Who at its talkiest - but only because it has something it needs to say. If The Girl Who Died found the Doctor "holding himself to the mark", then The Woman Who Lived shows him what must happen next. The duty of care doesn't stop once the life is saved; especially when you have bent the rules to do so. Ahsildr/Me comes to represent many things to the Doctor and Clara throughout Series 9 and this episode might contain the most complete role she has to play (though perhaps not the juiciest). Given the incalculably long life that Me will go onto lead, it's hard to say whether the first second of eternity has truly passed for her, but she still remains a grim foreshadow of where the Doctor will eventually find himself and a morbid reflection of the Doctor's tendency to leave behind the ones he saves.

40. The Name of the Doctor (S7E14)

Written by Steven Moffat

Truth be told, this is a much better finale than Series 7 probably deserved. Bolted on to probably the fluffiest and most unfocused Series of the revival, The Name of the Doctor is a funereal march through the edges of the Doctor's soul that climaxes not just the running arc set up at the end of Series 6, but offers the first culmination of the Doctor and River Song's relationship (I'll get to the second culmination later). It's honestly kind of a mess to the point of becoming essentially redundant as the series progresses. But it is electric to behold and contains one of the most insightful revelations into the Doctor's character that the show had managed up to that point - that the Doctor's name is besides the point and that the title he chooses is a promise he has to hold himself to.

A bafflingly bleak capper to the seventh series.

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