10 Most Questionable Storylines in Doctor Who

Doctor Who is widely considered a very good show. But it’s been on TV for over 60 years, and in that time it’s racked up more than its fair share of controversial storylines. Sometimes, the writers simply don’t think about how a particular issue is framed. Other times, the attitudes of the time bleed into certain episodes.

Therefore, there are plenty of Doctor Who stories that a fan might take offense to. So certain episodes from both the classic and modern-day series have been relentlessly analyzed, argued over, and mocked. It ultimately falls to the individual viewer whether or not they choose to revisit these controversial storylines.

10The Doctor Turned The Master Over To The Nazis

In 2020 Sacha Dhawan became the first person of color to ever play the Master, the Doctor’s fellow Time Lord and great enemy. Unfortunately, the writers highlighted his race in the worst way possible. During the “Spyfall” two-parter, the Master throws his lot in with the Nazis. The Nazi period of history always needs to be dealt with carefully and the writers simply did not do so in this case.

The Doctor realizes an easy way to get the Nazis to turn on the Master. She deactivates the perception filter that the Master has been using to present himself as white and the Nazis see him as an Indian man. Even though the Master is categorically an evil person, audiences were appalled that the Doctor went so far as to weaponize Nazi prejudice.

9Amy’s Crush On The Doctor Wasn’t Handled Well

When Amy Pond first meets the Doctor as a young girl, she’s awestruck by him. By the time she’s an adult, this has developed into a full-blown crush. Despite being engaged to Rory Williams, she’s very much sexually attracted to the Doctor, and this culminates in her attempting to get him into bed at the end of “Flesh and Stone.”

This was all very clumsily handled. Amy doesn’t take the Doctor’s “no” for an answer and keeps trying to kiss him, and it’s extremely uncomfortable. Steven Moffat, the writer of the episode, later said in an interview that he regretted writing the scene that way and he shouldn’t have “played it for laughs.”

8One Racist Episode Received Backlash

“The Talons of Weng-Chaing” is an episode from the Tom Baker era of the show, and most Doctor Who fans wholeheartedly agree that it hasn’t aged well. Written by Robert Holmes, it’s a pastiche of Victorian murder mysteries but its portrayal of Chinese characters is shocking by modern standards. For a start, one of the main “Chinese” characters is a white actor in yellowface.

In 1980 the Chinese Canadian National Council for Equality condemned the episode for its use of racial stereotypes and got the episode pulled from Canadian airwaves. In the present day, the episode is available to watch on streaming services but goes out with a trigger warning at the beginning.

7Love and Monsters Had A Controversial Ending

Some fans thought Love and Monsters was a great unconventional episode, while others hated it. It focused on a group of people whose lives had been touched by the Doctor. They were all sympathetic characters, but they got killed off one by one by a giant monster called the Abzorbaloff. It seemed like writer Russell T. Davies gave these people—stand-ins for real Doctor Who fans—pointlessly humiliating deaths.

However, it was the ending that garnered the most criticism. One member of the group, Ursula, survives her run-in with the Abzorbaloff but can only live from that point on as a head stuck in a paving stone. Her boyfriend Elton holds up her head inside the stone and tells the camera, “We even have a bit of a love life.” For many people that was a crude and unnecessary joke.

6  Doctor Who Did Nothing With Its First Black Doctor

The Jodie Whittaker era of Doctor Who was full of change. And in the episode “Fugitive of the Judoon” a positively show-stopping change takes place: it turns out another Doctor was running around. This was the Fugitive Doctor, played by Jo Martin, and she was the first Black person to play the role in the show’s history.

And yet, the show didn’t do very much with the Fugitive Doctor after that. As another Doctor, she was a strong enough character to carry her spin-off series, but it never happened. Instead, she showed up in a handful of episodes where Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor was the main focus and then disappeared from the show entirely when Ncuti Gatwa’s tenure as the Doctor began. Many fans were disappointed that the first Black Doctor was cast aside in that way.

5  The Doctor Appeared To Dismiss Graham’s Cancer

Graham O’Brien, companion to the Thirteenth Doctor, is a cancer survivor. But in the episode “Can You Hear Me?” this aspect of his character is handled poorly. At the end of the episode, Graham speaks to the Doctor, a woman he considers a friend, about his fears that his cancer might come back. The Doctor responds with, “I should say a reassuring thing now, shouldn’t I?”

She continues, “I’m still quite socially awkward, so I’m just going to subtly walk towards the console and look at something. And then, in a minute, I’ll think of something that I should’ve said… that might’ve been helpful.” Fans were shocked that the Doctor didn’t even try to reassure Graham, and the BBC had to put out a statement saying, “The intention of the scene was to acknowledge how hard it can be to deal with conversations on this subject matter.”

4  One Cybermen Concept Terrified People

The episode “Dark Water” sees Missy, the female incarnation of the Master, put a horrible plan into action to turn dead bodies into Cybermen. This is especially bad for Clara, as her boyfriend Danny Pink has recently died in a car accident. But the most painful concept in the episode was the idea that dead bodies could feel pain and were afraid of being cremated.

People were shocked that such an idea was being put forward in a family show, and hundreds of viewers complained to Ofcom. The BBC responded to the complaints by saying that the “painful afterlife” idea was part of Missy’s ploy and not actually true in the context of the episode.

3  Amy’s Pregnancy Storyline Was Unsettling

The Amy Pond pregnancy arc wasn’t much liked by people who had been fans of Amy before season six. After being replaced by a “ganger,” she woke up in a white room visibly pregnant and about to give birth. After that, in the very next episode, she had the newborn baby taken from her. For parents everywhere, the whole story arc must have been bone-chilling.

And when Amy and Rory finally meet their child, River Song, they don’t seem to particularly mourn the lost years or attempt to go back and put things right in the timeline. They just carry on with their lives and adventures with the Doctor as if they never had a daughter at all. It’s a confusing, problematic storyline.

2  The Sixth Doctor Got Off To A Bad Start

In the episode “The Twin Dilemma” audiences met Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor for the first time, and they weren’t very impressed with what they got. The Sixth Doctor was very different from the Fifth, and it wasn’t just his fashion sense that was the problem. One of the first things he did was try to strangle his companion Peri.

The Doctor’s actions were explained away as “regeneration sickness” but it still made audiences very uncomfortable to see such an act of violence. It took a long time for the Sixth Doctor to recover as a character and to this day “The Twin Dilemma” is considered one of the very worst stories Doctor Who has ever produced.

1  Kerblam! Seems To Side Against Exploited Workers

“Kerblam!” sees the Doctor and her companions follow a distress signal to the Kerblam warehouse, where the workers are exploited and replaced by robots. This has parallels to real-life labor disputes, but the episode handles this in the worst way possible. An underpaid employee turns out to be the villain of the piece, not the mega-corp.

In the episode’s most criticized and widely mocked line, the Thirteenth Doctor declares that “systems aren’t the problem” and leaves the villain to die. The audience was shocked that Doctor Who, usually thoroughly on the side of the downtrodden, had released an episode that seemed so much like pro-capitalist propaganda.