Lurker > Inviso

15. Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin)

As a distinctive character, I think the Fugitive Doctor was always going to rank low on my list, but I could see her potentially outlasting a few others if not for how egregiously bad her very existence is. Steven Moffat made some QUESTIONABLE choices with regards to the Doctor's regeneration timeline...but at least he still kept within the show's boundaries of logic. Chris Chibnall just didn't give a fuck. He destroyed entire universes and made the Doctor so monumentally important that she was actually the basis for all Time Lords and their ability to regenerate.

The Fugitive Doctor is the amalgamation of all of the Doctor's pre-William Hartnell time, having apparently served on a spec ops team and imprisoned bad guys and all that good stuff. But eventually, she fled and disguised herself via a fob watch, and the end result was a storyline that COULD have been interesting...but instead was just pointless and way too full of itself. Jo Martin carried herself with the gravitas and flair necessary to portray the Doctor, but ultimately, she just felt so pointless and tacked onto the season in an unnecessary fashion. It would've been really cool is the Doctor was crossing paths with her next regeneration of something, like a sneak peak for the fans...but instead, this wound up being an awful plot twist.

Hint for #14: Interacted with the Master.

16. Metacrisis Doctor (David Tennant)

There have been some questionable decisions with regards to the Doctor's regeneration cycle over the years...particularly under Moffat/Chibnall's tenures as showrunner. But at least some of those weird, one-off choices are given a genuine chance to shine in their single-episode (or few-episode) runs. This one, however, is inexcusable. First off, I feel like this was a retroactive choice by Steven Moffat, on top of his casting of the War Doctor, in order to make a big, flashy spectacle when Matt Smith regenerated into Peter Capaldi. The established lore was that a Time Lord only gets 12 regenerations, so in theory, the Doctor should have had two more after Matt Smith...but then the War Doctor happened, so there was only one more. But THEN this one-off plot point from the series 4 finale came back and it was the DUMBEST thing.

Don't get me wrong...making a weird, regenerated human/Time Lord hybrid was interesting, and David Tennant got to be a bit quirkier than usual opposite Donna...but this was just pointless. It made Tennant's Doctor feel extremely vain, and it felt like a cop-out so Rose could get a happy ending. I never cared much for the romantic plotline between Rose and the Doctor, so her getting her own Doctor replacement (with a mortal lifespan) was SO cheap and cheesy (and it makes Donna's ending sting THAT much more, since she got fucked harder than ANYONE else). But yeah, the Metacrisis Doctor didn't really do anything other than genociding a fuckton of Daleks and taking heat for it (oh right, that's another thing: the real Doctor doesn't have to have that PARTICULAR genocide on his conscience), and then he left to be with Rose. Whatever.

Hint for #15: Another Doctor from the reboot.

I'm gonna TRY to keep this short, but you all know me...I'll wind up doing write-ups that span multiple posts. I figured it's October and the Doctor Who special is coming out sometime this movie (I think) where we'll see Jodie Whittaker regenerate into Ncuti Gatwa, so why not do a ranking of every Doctor? Of course, this won't be EVERY every Doctor, since I'm not ranking any of the children who've played the pre-Doctor Doctor, but I'm ranking more characters than you would expect. Sixteen, in fact! So with all that being said, let's get this party started.

Hint for #16: Didn't serve a full season as The Doctor.