Worst Episode Ever?

[andraste]

Glancing at the Outpost Gallifrey forums before bed, I noticed that someone had finally posted the combined results of the last round of cross-medium 'what's your favourite story?' voting. The answer is still Spare Parts, while The Talons of Weng-Chiang is the top story most people have actually heard of.

The bottom story, on the other hand, was the book version of The Ghosts of N-Space. While this is a legendarily bad story, I don't think I'd say it was the worst Doctor Who in all its occasionally glorious badness has to offer. Even given the Elvis impersonator. My nominations?

If I have to stick to TV stories, Time-Flight gets the wooden spoon. Pointless, annoying, boring tripe that looks like it was made for approximately $1.50.

My least favourite of all, though? The Unbound audio Exile, one of the few Doctor Who stories that personally offends me [1]. It's is disgustingly sexist without the excuse of having been made in the last century, but far worse, it's not funny. "The Doctor regenerates into a woman and promptly becomes an incompetent drunk" is probably the least good idea for a story in the history of anything ever. Offensive on every possible level, and made me think less of everyone involved.

So, what's your most hated Doctor Who?


[1] As opposed to the absolute legion that are offensive in the more general sense. To give you an idea how hard I am to offend, I am the card-carrying feminist who owns Sin City on DVD.

Comments

[andraste]

It's a toss-up between The Web Planet (the concept's not bad, but if I never hear the ssssslowly talking bugssssss again....) and Frontier In Space, in which nothing happens for at least 3 of the 6 episodes.

I hate those! About Time offers this comment on The Web Planet:

"If everyone on Vortis acted as if this were their natural environment, and as if butterfly-people were a perfectly normal part of the terrain, then after an episode or so we might forget the weirdness of it and treat it as a place where interesting things might happen. Instead, we get showboating programme-makers constantly shouting 'look, this is alien!' at us. And we just want to shout 'no, it's stupid!' back at them."

[lizvogel.livejournal.com]

To give credit where it's due, they were at least trying to do real science fiction. I'll give them points for that. 10 out of 10 for effort, but minus several million for the insanely tedious execution of it all.