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You do know this is a show about time travel, right?
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00:00For a show about a time traveller, Doctor Who deals with the perils of mucking around with our past and future with a surprising lack of regularity.
00:07This year's festive special, Eve of the Daleks, is the first time that the show has properly explored the phenomenon of a time loop,
00:14barring flirtations in the likes of Carnival of Monsters and Megalos.
00:18So when else in the show's 58-year history has it explored the ramifications of travelling through time?
00:24And in the wreathian genesis of the programme, what do these stories teach a young audience about cause and effect, consequences and morality?
00:31Time travel may seem like a tempting prospect. It's what finally convinced Rose Tyler to climb aboard after all.
00:37And yet, it can also provide you with a devastating moral dilemma or an insight into the horrors of history.
00:43Let's travel back across 58 years of time and space through the prism of our favourite tea-time sci-fi show.
00:49Watch out for butterflies and remember, don't interfere unless Catherine Tate asks you to.
00:54With that in mind, I'm Ellie with Who Culture and this is 10 Best Doctor Who Time Travel Stories.
01:00Number 10. City of Death.
01:03Forget Biff Tannen's almanac, the greatest use of time travel for financial gain can be found in Douglas Adams' classic Doctor Who story.
01:10Trapped on Earth and splintered across human history, Scaroff needs funding for the time experiments that will make him whole again.
01:17In what is one of the most ingenious villainous schemes in the history of Doctor Who, he plots to steal the Mona Lisa using alien technology.
01:25Not only that, but centuries earlier, he also managed to convince Leonardo da Vinci to paint six copies of the famous artwork.
01:32Once the news breaks, he intends to sell one each to the seven nefarious art collectors who covet the painting.
01:38After all, they're hardly going to brag about it, are they?
01:41It's a wonderfully inventive use of past and present communicating with each other, and clearly influenced Steven Moffat's later work.
01:48Not only that, but the accident that splinters Scaroff across time is the very spark that begins life on Earth.
01:54In one of the best jokes in the whole story, the brutish but well-meaning Duggan puts human history back on course by lamping Scaroff with the most important punch in human history.
02:04It's a simple resolution completely at odds with the tricksy time narrative, which is why it's utterly hilarious.
02:10Number 9. The Aztecs
02:12Whilst Doctor Who had visited cavemen and travelled with Marco Polo, it was the sixth serial, The Aztecs, which first attempted to deal with the morality of time travel.
02:22Travelling to 15th century Mexico, history teacher Barbara Wright is mistaken for a god and is tempted to use this newfound status to save the historic civilisation.
02:31Much to the horror of the Doctor, William Hartnell and Jacqueline Hill had great chemistry throughout their time together on the show,
02:38and their scenes where they argue about interfering in Aztec society are one of the early standouts in the show.
02:44It's also here that the rules of time travel in Doctor Who are firmed up.
02:48Over the course of the Aztecs, you can't rewrite history, not one line becomes,
02:52you can't rewrite history but you can change one man's mind.
02:56Much like the Doctor and Donna in The Fires of Pompeii, Barbara saves the life of Ortlok by opening his eyes beyond his faith.
03:02The final scene with the Doctor suggesting this to Barbara is wonderful.
03:06She has succeeded on a small scale in her attempt to end the human sacrifices at the heart of Aztec society.
03:13Number 8. Father's Day
03:15Did I mention it also travels in time?
03:17Were the words that convinced Rose Tyler to leave Mickey and run through the doors of the TARDIS?
03:21In Father's Day, we find out why that was such a deal-breaker.
03:25It starts, as universe-ending catastrophes often do, quite simply.
03:29The Doctor agrees to take Rose back to the 1980s to see her parents get married.
03:33Deciding she wants to be there for her father at the moment of his untimely death,
03:37Rose makes a choice that threatens to doom all of mankind.
03:40The first half of the Ninth Doctor's era is quite breezy, murderous Dalek and PTSD aside,
03:45but it's the long game of Father's Day that Russell T Davies begins to introduce the audience
03:50to the more painful side of travelling in time.
03:52We see it in Adam's greed in the long game, and we see it again here.
03:56At odds with earlier and later attempts to just save one,
03:59everything hinges on Rose's decision to save her dad's life.
04:02By giving this one man a new lease of life, time and reality begins to unravel.
04:07There are rules to saving people's lives, and you can't just do it willy-nilly,
04:11as Rose finds out to devastating effect.
04:14Number 7. The Curse of Fenric
04:16The seventh Doctor's transition from Cosmic Clown to Dark Manipulator
04:20comes to a thrilling climax in 1989's The Curse of Fenric.
04:24It's discovered that the Doctor has been playing a long game across time and space against Fenric,
04:30an evil from the dawn of time.
04:32Picking up elements from previous adventures such as Dragonfire and Silver Nemesis,
04:36it's a game that takes place in the present, the future, and concludes in our past.
04:41Wibbly-wobbly, etc, etc.
04:43Much like City of Death, this is a story that portrays time zones taking place simultaneously.
04:48The Doctor can seamlessly travel from one to the other, wherever he needs to be.
04:52It's one of the main appeals of the show.
04:54An additional time travel spin is given to the story when Ace meets widowed mother Kathleen Dudman,
04:59who is revealed to be her grandmother.
05:01It's a reveal that comes towards the end of the story, after Ace has cradled and made googly eyes at her own mother as a baby.
05:08The mother that she hated.
05:09It's a moving moment and another time travel trope we don't often see in the show.
05:13Who were these people in our lives before we met them?
05:16They were scared little children like the rest of us.
05:18Number 6. Blink
05:20Originally written as an apology for being unable to produce a two-parter for the third season,
05:25Steven Moffat's Blink has become one of the all-time great Doctor Who stories, and it barely features the Doctor.
05:31And yet, it is totemic of the fundamentals of the show.
05:34Time travel, creepy monsters, and resourceful human beings.
05:38The Weeping Angels feed on time paradoxes, and their method of dispatch is heartbreaking, poetic, and pure Moffat.
05:44They remove you from your own time, and deposit you in another time and place to live out the rest of your days with your family and friends none the wiser.
05:51Blink is the greatest iteration of this central conceit, and we see Sally Sparrow chatted up by a young policeman
05:58who's simultaneously aged and dying in a hospital bed across town.
06:01It's the same rain. A beautiful, melancholic portrayal of time being the enemy.
06:06It's a work of genius that would stylistically form the backbone of Doctor Who from 2010 to 2017.
06:13Number 5. The Ark
06:15Having unwittingly exposed a future human civilization to the common cold,
06:19the Doctor and his companions race against time to find a cure and save the day.
06:23Leaving in the TARDIS, they are surprised to materialize in the exact same spot seven centuries later.
06:29The Doctor and his companions' previous visit eventually led to a bloody uprising by the enslaved Monoids,
06:34who now oppress their former captors.
06:36Would any of this have happened if the TARDIS hadn't arrived?
06:39Well, possibly yes, but it's the virus that has exposed the inequality on board the Ark ship.
06:44This 1965 story is a real underrated classic, and has increases in relevance as we continue to deal with the pandemic.
06:51Steven's concern over what else the travelers have exposed other civilizations to is one of the most chilling moments in all of Doctor Who.
06:58The very fact that the Doctor has a time machine allows us as an audience to experience the world that the Doctor leaves behind once he's saved the day.
07:05It's a shame the series doesn't do it more often.
07:08Number 4. The Pandorica opens and the big bang.
07:11Amy's not wrong when she says this is where things get complicated.
07:15In the finale of Matt Smith's debut series, there is a lot of zipping about and general mucking around with time.
07:21Little Amelia is thirsty, so the Doctor steals a drink from an earlier version of Little Amelia.
07:25The Doctor's trapped inside the Pandorica, so zips back to give Rory his sonic screwdriver to release him after he's already freed.
07:31It makes mincemeat of causality and is having an absolute ball.
07:35To look too deeply into the hows and whys of everything would likely cause the whole episode to fall apart,
07:40but it's the sort of breezy, zippy, time travel humor you can achieve when you've got a vortex manipulator.
07:45Cheap and nasty time travels, sure, but also a bloody good laugh.
07:49At the time, a lot of fans complained that it was too complicated for kids.
07:53Too complicated for grown-ups, perhaps. Kids were probably having a whale of a time with how silly it all is.
07:57It's the tricksy narrative of Blink blown up to series finale proportions and is one of the all-time great Moffat finales.
08:04Number 3. A Christmas Carol
08:06Steven Moffat has riffed on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol one or two times in The Snowmen and The Day of the Doctor.
08:13His most obvious retelling of the classic tale is, of course, this 2010 Christmas special.
08:18However, it's not only Dickens that Moffat is stealing from. He's also stealing from his own back catalogue.
08:24Many years previously, he wrote a short story about the seventh Doctor changing the personal history of a miserable librarian,
08:30so that she would eventually allow him access to an important text.
08:33Smaller scale stakes than a crashing space cruise liner, but both stories tackle some incredibly deep philosophical concerns,
08:39not least whether or not the Doctor has the right to do it in the first place.
08:43If someone goes back and changes our personal history, introduces us to love and friendship that we didn't previously have,
08:49then are we still the same person? It's the classic ship of Theseus, Trigger's Broom dilemma.
08:54And speaking of Trigger's Broom, Steven Moffat also nixed the kinky roleplay gag from Only Fools and Horses.
08:59A Christmas Carol is a fun bit of Doctor Who does Dickens and is classic Moffat.
09:04High concept sci-fi, saucy jokes, and genuine heart, all delivered to you whilst you're woozy from too much quality street.
09:10Number 2. Fires of Pompeii
09:12In the first Russell T Davies era, each series had a fairly rigid structure.
09:17One contemporary Earth story, a historical adventure, and a space one.
09:21It's a structure that outlines to new viewers exactly what Doctor Who can do.
09:24Whereas the previous series' trips back in time were romps involving zombies, werewolves, and witches,
09:29the Fires of Pompeii addresses one of the show's fundamental tenets, the Time Lord policy of non-intervention.
09:35James Moran's story is a 2008 update of the themes of 1964's The Aztecs, with the Doctor once more unable to avert a historical catastrophe to the horror of his companion.
09:46Whilst the alien pyrovial plot muddies the waters, it's still an affecting insight into the burden of gallivanting through time and space.
09:53It can't all be flirting with Shakespeare or solving murders with Agatha Christie.
09:57Much like the Aztecs, the Doctor and his companion do manage to save someone.
10:01Here, it's the family of the familiar-looking Caecilius, who for reasons of people not understanding how television casting works,
10:07goes on to have a very influential effect on the Doctor's future.
10:111. Rosa
10:12It's astonishing, and more than a little embarrassing, that it took until 2018 for Doctor Who to properly explore what it would be like to travel in time when you're not white.
10:22We've had a glib aside in The Shakespeare Code and an odious racist in Thin Ice, but it's not until Rosa that the show tackles race head-on.
10:30Co-written by Chris Chibnall and Mallory Blackman, it's an all-too-plausible tale of someone who, when handed new technology, uses it to be appallingly racist.
10:39It also does something that the show hasn't done since the 1960s – present a period in history which is incredibly dangerous to members of the TARDIS team.
10:47There's unbelievable tension in the scenes where Ryan helpfully picks up a dropped glove and is refused service in the local diner.
10:54He's even threatened with a lynching in one of the episode's most shocking moments.
10:58We've rarely seen as hostile an environment in the history of Doctor Who, and it provides valuable insight into how far society has come and how far it still has to go with regards to racial equality.
11:10And that concludes our list of the best Doctor Who time travel stories.
11:14If we didn't mention your favourite time travel story, then we'd love to see it in the comments section below.
11:18And while you're there, like and subscribe and tap that notification bell.
11:22I've been Ellie with Who Culture, and in the words of River Song herself, goodbye, sweeties.
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