The 13 Best Episodes Of Modern 'Doctor Who'

"Look at you pair. It's always you and her, isn't it? Long after the rest of us are gone. A boy and his box off to see the universe."

Even before "The Doctor's Wife" aired in 2011, it was the source of much hoopla thanks to its celebrity writer, Neil Gaiman. Doctor Who has had famed sci-fi writers take a stab at the time-traveling alien —The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams famously wrote for Classic Doctor Who. But Neil Gaiman's macabre stylings and Doctor Who's madcap stories seemed like a match made in heaven. And thankfully, it was that and more.

The season 6 episode follows Matt Smith's Doctor and his companions Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) as they end up on an asteroid outside the universe after the Doctor receives a distress call from a fellow Time Lord he thought to be long dead. But when they land, the Doctor's trusty time and space machine, the TARDIS, suddenly goes dead, its "soul" transplanted into the body of a woman named Idris (Suranne Jones), one of the four inhabitants of the asteroid. However, the Doctor and his friends soon find out that this asteroid is more than just a piece of rock: It's a living being called "House" who controls these four doddering inhabitants and has lured the Doctor to his bubble universe in order to take his TARDIS.

Grungy, creepy and wildly entertaining, "The Doctor's Wife" works perfectly as a piece of episodic storytelling while giving us insight into what Doctor Who has been and will be. The Doctor's flirtatious banter with his TARDIS rendered flesh is classic Gaiman: snappy, weird, weirdly sexy, and ultimately touching.

Anyone who was uncertain about accepting Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor probably stopped in their tracks when "Dalek" aired. The fifth episode of season 1, "Dalek" introduced the darker elements of the Doctor that the season had been teasing up until now. Why was Eccleston's Doctor so tortured? What was the story of the Time War, which left the Doctor the last surviving member of his race?

We get those answers in a tense, slow-burning episode that follows the Doctor and Rose Tyler (a wonderfully empathetic Billie Piper) following a distress call to an underground bunker in Utah. Surprised to find a collection of alien artifacts, the Doctor and Rose are quickly captured by the bunker's owner, who ask for their help in identifying the prize of his collection: a mysterious alien that first sent out the distress signal. The Doctor is eager to save the alien until he realizes with horror that it is his sworn enemy, the titular Dalek. The reveal hits like a ton of bricks, despite the episode's spoilery title and the Dalek's famously low-budget appearance, thanks to a frenzied performance by Eccleston, who explodes with a righteous fury. To this day, "Dalek" is the only episode in New Who to make the Daleks seem like real threats, not only because of Eccleston's performance but because of how the Dalek is portrayed as an unavoidable horror, mowing down everyone in its path like a creeping, indestructible Terminator. "Dalek" is a portrayal of the infamous Doctor Who monster that we have yet to see again, and helped the Doctor Who revival finally find its footing in the modern sci-fi era.

Another Tennant episode in which his Doctor barely appears, this season 3 two-parter nevertheless features one of Tennant's best performances. How could that be? Well, in "Human Nature" and "Family of Blood," we're introduced to not the Doctor but John Smith, a mild-mannered English professor at a boy's school on the eve of World War I. Sometimes he has odd dreams about a mad man who travels the universe in a blue box, but his maid Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) is quick to dismiss them as nothing more than dreams. It's soon revealed that the Doctor was forced to turn himself into a human to hide himself from an alien family that fed on the life force of Time Lords. Martha has been tasked to look after him, but after three months her patience begins to wear thin, especially when John Smith begins to fall in love with the school nurse Joan Redfern (Jessica Hynes). But soon their hiding spot is discovered by the aliens, who descend upon the school and its nearby village, possessing a few humans that they encounter along the way.

The monsters are kind of secondary to the fascinating ethical dilemma "Human Nature/Family of Blood" presents Doctor Who fans with: is a human being real if he's just a collection of false memories? To John Smith, he is a human with real emotions and real loss, which makes his inevitable sacrifice to save the day all the more tragic. "He was a braver man than you," the nurse tells the Doctor once he has returned to his Time Lord self. And those small feats of human bravery are what make this episode, and the best episodes of Doctor Who, so strong.

Like if Alien met The Omen, "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit" is a blend of religious horror and sci-fi horror that shouldn't work. Yet somehow, it does. The season 2 two-parter follows the Doctor and Rose as they land upon a space station where they find scrawled on the walls, "Welcome to Hell." Mystified by the ancient symbols also graffiti'd on the walls, the Doctor and Rose venture further to investigate, where they're greeted by a suspicious skeleton crew confused as to how they arrived on the station. The Doctor is shocked to learn that the crew had built a space station on a faraway planet revolving a black hole — which should be virtually impossible — to investigate this very phenomenon. But their research soon unearths something that was better left buried: the Devil himself.

Even stretching across two episodes, "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit" is a taut, suspenseful horror story that grows more exciting with each new twist thrown into the narrative. And surprisingly, it takes a turn for the pensive in the last third of "The Satan Pit," with the Doctor musing over his own religious beliefs in a scene featuring one of the most striking imagery of the series: the Doctor in an orange spacesuit, dangling on a rope and surrounded by the pitch-black darkness. The entire episode is full of indelible images and stunning set designs — lending to an eerie atmosphere that feels worthy of a feature film.

Introductory episodes to new Doctors are more often miss than hit, but "The Eleventh Hour" managed to give Matt Smith's Doctor an explosive introduction while whisking us away on a whirlwind adventure. And to this day it remains not only one of the best Doctor introductions but one of the best episodes of the Doctor Who revival.

"The Eleventh Hour" introduces us to an 7-year-old Amelia Pond praying by her bedside to Santa Claus about the ominous crack in her wall, when suddenly she hears a crash in her backyard. Outside she finds a blue police box smoking from the inside, from which a disheveled Doctor emerges. Intrigued by this strange man who demands that she give him food and ask no questions, she inquires if he's there about her wall. The Doctor immediately jumps to investigate and discovers that the crack in her wall is actually a crack in time and space, but must rush out to fix his damaged TARDIS before he can solve the mystery. Promising to return in 5 minutes, the Doctor accidentally comes back 12 years later and must convince a disbelieving grown-up Amelia (Karen Gillan), now calling herself Amy, that the world will be destroyed without his intervention.

Briskly paced and thoroughly enchanting, "The Eleventh Hour" fizzles with energy and humor, switching from sitcom-style comedy to creature-feature horror at the drop of a hat. But Smith's buoyant Doctor and the endearing supporting cast lends this episode a starry-eyed feeling that makes it feel like something out of a fairy tale.

This quietly devastating episode barely features a monster — at least in the Doctor Who sense of the word. Instead, it focuses on the internal demons that Vincent van Gogh battles from day-to-day, in one of the most touching on-screen depictions of the famed painter yet.

"Vincent and the Doctor" follows the Doctor and Amy as they visit a Van Gogh exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay, where the Doctor spots something unnatural about one of the paintings. Traveling to Van Gogh's time on a hunch that the painter may have painted an alien creature, the Doctor and Amy meet the troubled painter who confirms that there is an invisible beast terrorizing the village. Played by Tony Curran, Vincent is a tortured, melancholic figure who at first bristles at the two strangers interrogating him, but soon happily invites them into his home. Curran is obviously the standout in this episode, delivering an unpretentious, emotionally naked performance as the manic-depressive painter. But it's not all tears and cut-off ears — "Vincent and the Doctor" is a positively lovely episode that features some beautiful homilies from Smith's Doctor and charming banter between Vincent and Amy. Written by Richard Curtis (Notting Hill, Love Actually), it could verge on schmaltzy for some, but "Vincent and the Doctor" paints a delicate, tender picture of a great man. Plus, who can hate an episode where Bill Nighy wears a giant bow-tie?

You knew this was coming. "Blink" graces the top of every Doctor Who ranking, and as much as I debated whether it deserved that top spot all those years, I can't deny that it's a damn good episode. But the interesting thing about the best episode of Doctor Who is that it's not really a Doctor Who episode. It's a Twilight Zone episode set in the Doctor Who universe.

A pre-Oscar nod Carey Mulligan leads "Blink" as Sally Sparrow, a plucky photographer who, while exploring an abandoned mansion, finds something inexplicable. Beneath the peeling wallpaper, she finds a message addressed to her warning her about the "Weeping Angels." Suddenly, she finds herself pursued by stone angels that seem like they move when she's not looking. That's the brilliance of "Blink": it turns its monster of the week into a sort of urban myth, a boogeyman that could exist in reality. And in turn, Tennant's Doctor becomes a near-mythical figure, only appearing in video "Easter eggs" uncovered by internet forums and message boards trying to piece together the case of a strange, unaging man. It's almost a meta-textual take on the place that Doctor Who holds in pop culture, as a legendary figure who saves the world unbeknownst to us. Because otherwise, what would you do when you think you see something move out of the corner of your eye? It's this brilliant and truly scary approach that keeps "Blink" at the top spot of every Doctor Who ranking.