What stories would you consider to be underrated? Here are a few stories that I feel fall into that category.


The Android Invasion -The Kraals are great villians and Tom Baker is excellent in this serial as the Doctor. Plus, this was my introduction to Doctor Who.


Planet of Fire- This is the first time we get to see Peri. We also get Turlough's exit, Kamelion's demise and the supposed end of the Master. What more could you ask for?


Attack of the Cybermen- This is one of my favorite Sixth Doctor stories. The Doctor shooting the Cybermen at the end of Episode Two is one of my favorite scenes ever.


Delta and the Bannermen- I liked the scene where Mel stood up to Gavrok. I also liked the Doctor's speech at the end of Part Two. I know that this serial is silly, but I can't help liking it.


What stories do you think don't get the attention they deserve?

Attack of the Cybermen drives me nuts. The whole episode hinges on the Doctor and Peri just forgetting to close the TARDIS door and the Cybermen wandering inside. Why would they do that?

Couldn't they have found a better way to get everybody off to Telos?

Androids of Tara - just because it's such silly, fluffy Tom, and everyone is giving it their all, which is not something you can say about every story made in this era.

Terror of the Zygons - I just watched this a couple of weekends ago, and it's great! Even the Skarasen's OK, and the rest of the story is well acted, well directed and fantastically designed. I also love the way the Doctor gets into a strop when he finds out why the Brigadier has brought him back to Earth, and even though he agrees to help out, stays in a strop all the way through the story. The only flaw in the whole thing is that Mr Hubble disappears halfway through.

The Davison two parters - all three are very simple, inessential little stories, but they work. Black Orchid places Five in a context where he fits perfectly, and the rest of the TARDIS crew join in for a lark, and everyone has a wonderful time until it all goes scary stalker. The Kings Demon is such a perfect period piece you barely notice that Tegan has a better grip on Earth history then the Doctor, and the Master/Doctor stand off is fun! I even quite like Kamelion. The Awakening is all about atmosphere, and again proves that a young Doctor and an older woman make a great pairing. Apart from the silliness of yet another of Tegan's relatives stumbling over an alien visiting Earth, it's wonderfully plotted, wonderfully acted and has some fabulous location filming going on. The only problem I have with the story is that the script has so much fun with it's one story only companions, it forgets to give the two permanent companions anything to do.

The Krotons - it's not a bad story, OK fandom? Just because this was the only thing the BBC had to air during the Five Faces Of Doctor Who, it's no reason to call it awful. The monsters are gloriously silly, Zoe, Jamie and the Doctor are a wonderful threesome, and Phillip Madoc begins his tenure of playing top notch Who villains - can we have him back for the new series please? And seeing the small beginnings of a certain R. Holmes gives this story a charm of it's own.

Death to the Daleks - apparently fandom loathes this story. I think it's certainly the most fun of the Pertwee/Dalek stories, and it's yet more proof that Terry Nation was a shameless hack, ripping off the current vogue for Von Daniken-esque aliens. And Belial is so timid that everytime I see him, I want to hug him and give him a nice cup of tea and a slice of battenburg.

The Daleks with machines guns are great in that story makes a nice change from the normal extermination effects.

Fandom can be too poe-faced sometimes, I love "Death to the Daleks" especially the sequence of the Daleks using little toy TARDISes as targets to try out their machine gun arms. Also, considering that most of the story got recycled by Robert Holmes to patch up unfinished scripts with during his Script Editor tenure, it must have something going for it.

I also love "The Happiness Patrol". Fantastic concept, a script that veers from the intentionally comic to really rather dark and some great social commentary. The best compliment I can pay it, is that it could fit very easily into the New Series (in fact pretty much ALL the McCoys could work in the New Series format. Ok well maybe not "Time and the Rani") But the bertie Basset monster is horrible apparently. Even though I have several friends who were kids in the late 1980's who speak of the evil Mr. Basset as scaring the living daylights out of them! I was too old by then to be scared, but I was old enough to appreciate the not very subtexty queeny relationship between the Kandyman and his creator.

I have never understood why so many people dislike Time and the Rani. It isn't the best episode ever, but it has its moments.

I liked Seven interacting with the Rani and the Rani pretending to be Mel.

I like "Time and the Rani" its sortof madcap, campery taken to the zillionth level. I just don't think its one of the McCoy plots that could fit well in the New Series. Pretty much all of s25 and 26 could. "Delta and the Bannermen" would fit well, and "Paradise Towers" would fit brilliantly (if you have seen series 3 of the New Series, you'll understand what I mean)

"Dragonfire" and "Time and the Rani" suffer from plots that are fairly light and meaningless, being a way of introducing a new companion and a new doctor respectively.

Yes it would. Watching it, you can only wonder what it would be like if the design had been logically thought out and if Richard Briers would have toned it down a notch after being possessed. Oh, and if Mel had actually had something productive to do. I'm no Mel basher, but she's doesn't work well with the story.

Wtih a few tweaks, it could have been a dark, memorable story instead the hodgepodge that we got...

And hadn't been wearing the outfit that caused people to bleed from the eyes. ;)

Though I don't quite understand what happened to all the boys in that episode. The Kangs had been sent to Paradise Towers when they were very young...I would imagine the boys of comparable age would have been too young to fight in the war....Unless they were segregated by gender and sent to a different building (which wouldn't make any sense if they were trying to preserve their species.).

I'm probably way overthinking Paradise Towers here, though. :D

I'll second the rec for Paradise Towers. The cleaners scared the crap out of me when I was little, despite the fact that they're stupidly oversize and their weaponry is really impractical. I think it's because they're so blank- even the Daleks usually stop for a chat, or at least a shout, before killing you.

I forgot to mention before that I agree with Demetrios. :)

Again, that was poor design. When you have a what is essentially a dark, satirical story, you don't make things bright! and shiny!

They made some similar designs mistakes the following year with The Happiness, patrol, although far fewer of them, thus making that story much stronger. The original idea of the Kandyman being a corpse-like creature made of candy would have been far more disturbing than what we got, although I can see how that might not have gone over too well for a family show.

Nice to see some McCoy luvvin' I always maintain the show was on an interesting course those three seasons. Creative uses of continuity and good multi-layered stories, even if it took the props department a while to catch up with them.

If we're talking about genuinely underrated episodes rather than ones considered bad. I think "Image of the Fendahl" is a truly underrated one. I find the Williams production era to be pretty crappy overall, but "Fendahl" is great, its got a really strange Quatermass style atmosphere and a monster that gave me the heebie jeebies as a child just from the picture on the target novelisation!

I just thought of another reason why I liked Time and the Rani: the ending for episode one. Now that was one of the best cliffhangers ever.

Gee, I thought Kate Orman and I were the only ones who liked "Time and the Rani." Not sure why I liked it, and it might not hold up well for me if I watched it again today. But those floating sphere traps seemed like a really cool idea, and a nicely-realized special effect for once. To me, "Time" wasn't one-tenth as insipid and unbelievable and cornball as "Paradise Towers" which is probably my second-least-favorite DW story ever.

I don't think most of S24 would fit in with modern Who, but I loved S25 and S26 and those are not too far off from the RTD era. A lot of those episodes were very underrated.
The last time I saw that, I felt like the cast weren't taking it seriously enough. It needed more gravitas. A lot of it seemed tossed-off.
Well that's not saying much! Ha! But yeah, this one's not bad. It has some fun moments. It's certainly 10 times better than "Planet of the Daleks" which is so bad that I never even minded much that I never got to see episode 3 of it (due to the original color version being lost, and therefore, for some reason, the BBC wouldn't give episode 3 to PBS stations... even though they could've provided a B&W version).
I think this one's genuinely good and well-written. Maybe it's full of cliches but I liked it. The intelligence tests and the tube/snake-like surveillance devices were unsettling.

And yeah, I must agree on "Android Invasion" too. The idea of a fake Earth town built as an alien invasion training ground was wonderfully weird and creepy. It all fell apart a bit at the end though. As for "Terror of the Zygons," I never got the impression that a lot of fans disliked that one. It seems like a long-standing favorite for a lot of Whovians actually.

I always thought "Horns of Nimon" was underrated too. Romana got some interesting things to do, and the Nimon didn't seem any more ridiculous to me than most of the show's other monsters, viewed from the perspective of a teen-ager seeing the show for the first time circa 1990-91.

I think a lot of the later Tom Baker stories are underrated. The Invasion of Time had a big job to fill, filling Deadly Assassin's shoes - but it managed to keep the twists and tension going right the way through. Destiny of the Daleks was excellent as well.

Oh, I'll chip in a vote for Frontios, too.

I think Death to the Daleks is one of the best Third episodes overall. It's not perfect, it sags in the middle, and the whole Exillon/City stuff is pretty bland, but the main plot positively sizzles. The whole concept of putting the Daleks out of their element, depriving them of main weapons and forcing alliances is good, while also seeing some innovation, modification and renewed determination. I especially liked the Daleks following after the Doctor and forming their own way through the traps.

I loved the Machine Gunning Daleks, but they rather blundered their way through the traps relying on their casing to protect them.

A story I really liked, yet rarely seen talked about is The Visitation.

A fun story that takes a stab at answering one of histoy's questions, and is important in the long run with the destruction of the Sonic Screwdriver, which as I understand it, was its last appearance until the '96 TV Movie.

Yeah, I like that one as well. Five is in the middle of a pretty darn good season there. As I understand it, JNT wanted to get rid of all "magic" elements of the show, and that's why the sonic screwdriver bit the dust here. And why K-9 (love or hate him) was gotten rid of in the previous season.

I agree. The Visitation is great, as is the bulk of Davison's first season as the Doctor.

I would like to recommend The Time Warrior, the first serial from Pertwee's last season. It introduces us to the Sontarans and one of the more popular companions, Sarah Jane Smith.

How about Creature from the Pit? It seems that the fandom despises the story...but it's not so bad. It's quite light hearted and entertaining, even if the "monster" was so terribly realized. And Tom Baker is at his funniest in this story. The whole scene where Baker first meets Erato is pure (unintentional?) comedy gold.

I would like to add Black Orchid, the best two part story of the Davison era. It is also one of the few stories in all of Doctor Who that did not involve any SF elements, other than the Tardis itself. Plus, it is finally being released on DVD later this year.

I think Elisabeth Sladen said she thought Death to the Daleks was one of the more underrated stories she was in.

My picks for underrated would be The Mutants (the Pertwee version) and Keys of Marinus. The former is very long but builds to a wonderful climax, and the latter is usually put down for being too messy, but there are some wonderful moments in there like Barbara rebelling against her mind being controlled, and Ian on trial, represented by the Doctor.

Oh, I am so happy to hear that.

"Black Orchid" was one of my favorites at the time, too. Five sneaks in a quote from an old play called "Charley's Aunt." When someone mentions the country of Brazil, he responds, "Where the nuts come from..."

I liked "Time and the Rani" too, I don't understand why some people have rated it the worst DW episode ever, or thought it had, as one reviewer put it, a villain who wasn't "villainous" enough. I think the Rani is awesome, and really makes this ep so enjoyable for me! She's has such wonderfully restrained cynicism for most of it til she finally loses it at the Doctor, and it's hilarious. I love how asexual she is too, with hints of camp. Pretending to be Mel was great value. I thought the Lakertyans were very prettily bedecked too, and the sphere traps were cool. Mel wasn't too annoying either, she seemed quite the plucky heroine for a lot of it. The serial does suffer from quite a few flaws, like interminable "captured... escapes... oooh captured again!", but it's par for the course with multi-ep stories. And the plot is kind of silly... but DW does silly like no one else.

I can think of several other stories that are much worse than Time and the Rani.

I have also never understood why it received so many negative reviews. I assume viewers didn't care for McCoy's initial performance. Considering that this was his first story, McCoy was probably just trying to get an idea of how to play the role.

I just didn't see the Rani acting that way. It was just not how I saw her character. It seemed so bizarre for her to *pretend* to be Mel.

She certainly wasn't very happy to be doing it, but she thought it the best way to drag information out of the confused mind of the newly regenerated Seven.

I watched Time And The Rani last night, and I thought it was great.

It was obvious McCoy was trying to find the right way to play Seven, and I thought The Rani was more of a threat than The Master was in some of the admittedly few serials with him that I've seen.

She was trying to wipe out all life on a planet in order to play God and change the natural evolution of the universe. That's what I call bad ass.

Was this her last appearance? I think it's possible she could still be out there, because I'm not sure I can believe that when the Time War came, she answered the call to war.

One thing this story did so well was walking the line between the drama and the comedy. I loved when Seven was trying on new clothes, he put on Three, Four, and Five's outfits.

I absolutely love "Snakedance". It has such a lovely surreal quality to it.

Who, to me, has always been pretty good at teasing out "Big Ideas" and having lots of layers to explore. This is no exception and I am fascinated by the episode for how it explores a such a 'bored', complacent culture, one that fetishizes the past but doesn't really understand it and a monster which threatens to drag them back into it.

Also, Davison is great!