Every Episode of Doctor Who Series 9 Ranked From Worst to Best

Series 9 is an odd one from a format perspective. Almost every story in this season is a two-parter, which was a bold move, but one that showed promise. Many two-part Who stories are among the best and one criticism I could level at a massive amount of episodes is, “Could’ve done with five more minutes,” so giving stories extra time to breathe sounded like a fun idea.

The result wasn’t quite what I was hoping for though. Rather than stories that have time to be carefully told, we got a bunch of stories that felt like they were floundering to fill the space. On top of that, sometimes the two parts of a story don’t even feel connected, which is why I’m ranking the final three episodes separately, even though they are technically all one story.

There is still some magic to be found though (we all know exactly which episode I mean), so let’s rank every episode of Doctor Series 9 from worst to best.

Sleep No More

I respect this episode for trying something unique, however, I will now deride it for failing miserably. I ranked Sleep No More among the worst Doctor Who episodes of all time and after rewatching it for this recap, I stand by that. The found-footage format doesn’t work as it fails to use any of the unique ideas the format allows for, instead it just feels like a regular episode filmed in shaky-cam.

The story is fairly average for the most part, but it completely screws up and ends in the middle for seemingly no reason. This was the only one-part story of the entire series, and yet it desperately needed more time.

Hell Bent

If you were to ask me what is the biggest case of missed potential in Doctor Who history, I would present you with Hell Bent. It fumbles just about everything it had going for it. It fumbles the awesome cliffhanger at the end of Heaven Sent; it fumbles the ending of the relationship between the Doctor and Clara; it fumbles the end of Me’s story; and it completely fumbles the return of Gallifrey – a moment that had been building up since the second episode of Series 1, when the Doctor first told us it was destroyed.

The idea of the Doctor “going too far” to save Clara is an interesting one, but neither aspect of the arc feels earned. The entirety of Heaven Sent is about the Doctor confronting his grief over losing Clara, but after that episode ends the Doctor seems entirely unaffected by it until he suddenly snaps out of nowhere and starts shooting people – it’s not an inherently bad emotional journey, it was just mishandled. The second half of the arc, where he calms down and confronts what he’s done, happens too quickly as well.

It’s mind-blowing to me that after creating the utter masterpiece that is Heaven Sent, the show can follow it up with such an emotionally unintelligent story. That said, the twist that it’s the Doctor who has to forget Clara and not the other way around is perfect and creates the most wonderful kind of dramatic irony – but that’s about the only nice thing I have to say about this finale.

The Girl Who Died & The Woman Who Lived

I came away from this story just struggling to form any strong opinion about it, which is definitely a bad sign. Like so many Moffat-era stories, this story gives us a really interesting character and a brilliant concept to play with, but utterly squanders it to make something boring instead.

Ashildr, or “Me” as she comes to be known had so much intrigue. Someone who was granted immortality by the Doctor without her consent and now has to figure out how to exist in a world that will always be changing around her until the end of time. I love a whole bunch of the ideas in here – the fact that she has to keep an entire library of journals because the human brain can’t physically store a millennia's worth of memories is so heartbreaking and completely fascinating. I would watch a sci-fi movie centered entirely around that concept, but instead, it’s just one scene in this story that doesn’t mean much in the long run.

I always come away from this series desperately wanting to like Me as a character (mostly because I like Maisie Williams) but all I see is missed potential, which is a bit of a theme for the bottom half of this list.

Under the Lake & Before the Flood

Once again, this is an episode where I just don’t feel like there’s much to say about it. Under the Lake does a pretty good job of building up the mystery of these ghosts and their true nature, but I don’t think Before the Flood delivers. The bad guy is cool but he gets defeated way too easily – the Doctor just runs circles around this guy – which makes a lot of the tension the first episode built up fall flat.

The Bootstrap Paradox speech is pretty iconic though, and the way the Doctor saves himself in the end is great, but a good bookend doesn’t make a good story.

The Magician’s Apprentice & The Witch’s Familiar

When an episode throws absolutely everything at the wall like this, some stuff is bound to stick, and it makes this two-part story work for me, even though I feel like it shouldn’t.

Bringing Missy back immediately after her “death” at the end of Series 8 was a bold decision, but necessary given where Moffat intended to take the character going into Series 10. The result is quite a fun adventure where not all of the ideas land. The Doctor facing the question of whether to save Davros – both in the past and the present – is a fun one, and I love that Davros even threw 4’s famous speech about genocide back in the Doctor’s face.

The second part is notably weaker, though Missy and Clara’s banter carries it well. The idea that the two of them could hang around for ages on Skaro, seemingly a stone’s throw from a massive Dalek citadel is utterly ridiculous, and I’m not the biggest fan of Dalek sewers being made of decaying Daleks. It’s nice and creepy, sure, but also creates the implication of weird civil rights issues in Dalek society, which is out of place. They’re space-racist death machines, they don’t need to be that deep.

The Zygon Invasion & The Zygon Inversion

This is the point in the list where I’d like to point out a big jump in quality for these final three entries. These are the episodes that feel like they actually have that great Doctor Who magic to them, rather than a bunch of non-descript adventures.

Most people only remember this episode for one moment – we’ll get to it – but if you haven’t rewatched it in a while I recommend it, as the whole thing is laced with great discussions, fun action, and all the stuff we love this show for.

The importance of the Zygon treaty in Day of the Doctor gets glossed over a little in that episode, as it had far bigger fish to fry, so I’m glad we revisited it in a meaningful way a couple of years later. The fact that there is just a whole bunch of shapeshifting aliens living on Earth with the permission of UNIT is pretty huge for this universe, and it raises so many interesting questions, most of which this episode attempts to answer.

Not every scene lands – the jet-exploding cliffhanger falls extremely flat – but all of the important stuff surrounding the discussion of the Zygon plight and the extremist groups it’s raised really works for me.

Of course, all of it is just preamble to that speech . There’s no question that is one of, if not the greatest speech in Doctor Who history , Peter Capaldi’s acting in this moment is world-class and the dialogue about war is masterful. The Doctor always says that he’s anti-war and anti-gun, but this is a moment where you truly feel how deeply he believes that there’s always another way.

It doesn’t give us a cop-out status-quo ending either, things actually change in a meaningful way, and I would’ve been up for another follow-up story based on where this got us.

Face the Raven

After Series 8 went to a lot of effort to turn Clara’s character around with relative success, she’s much less of a focus throughout this series. That’s not to say she’s unimportant, she’s still the Doctor’s companion after all, but this isn’t a series where every little plot thread revolves around her. That makes an episode like this stand out a lot more, as it tells a very Clara-centric story to great effect.

I can’t say I was clamoring for Rigsy to return, but he serves as a good vehicle to set the plot in motion and has a prior relationship with Clara so it’s more believable that she’d risk her life for his sake. It also carries over some of the themes from Flatline. Where in that episode, Clara proved that she did understand a lot of what the Doctor does and how he thinks, this episode shows how dangerous it can be for people to do that.

Clara’s decision to take the Raven, a move which ultimately costs her her life is the perfect culmination of her character. She’s always been a little too overconfident in her abilities, and in a way, it almost felt like a matter of time before she made a truly terrible decision. That fact makes the Doctor completely powerless to help her, which makes the moment feel all the more tragic.

If Clara’s death wasn’t undone two episodes later, I’d genuinely call it one of the best companion exits ever, and how quickly the Doctor spirals after it happens makes for a terrifying scene. “The Doctor is no longer here, you’re stuck with me!” is a brilliant line that puts the Doctor in just the right state of mind going into Heaven Sent.

Heaven Sent

There was simply never any doubt that this episode was going to top this list. This is one of the greatest pieces of television I have ever seen, and I’ve never met anyone who’s disagreed with me after watching it.

It's completely different from almost any other Doctor Who episode, but is the kind of story that can only be told with a character like the Doctor. It is a monumental task to create 45 minutes of a show when there are only two characters, and only one has any lines. Both the writing and the acting are in perfect harmony. Moffat showcases all of the things about his writing that are brilliant without any flaws, while Capaldi proves that he is the best pure actor to ever play the Doctor.

The mystery of the confession dial is so expertly paced, with the Doctor solving puzzle after puzzle but never feeling like he’s any closer to the truth, leaving him to truly confront his grief over losing his best friend. To that end, the analysis of what it’s like to feel grief is so meaningful. “It’s not the day you lose someone that’s the worst…It’s all the days they stay dead” is such a beautifully morbid way to express the emptiness you feel after losing someone, that just thinking about it almost brings me to tears.

Then, once the mystery is solved, we get the most brilliant twist. The adventure we just witnessed is actually just one of several trillion times the Doctor went through these exact events, as he loops around for billions of years doing the same thing over and over again punching his way through a ridiculously thick diamond wall.

It’s heart-wrenchingly tragic, but also one of the most heroic things the Doctor’s ever done. All he had to do was reveal the secret the Time Lords wanted and it would all be over, but instead, he decides to spend over a billion years dying over and over to chip away at this solid wall of diamond and escape.