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Rough sketch of Quickstart guides:
Crash course for new viewers who just want to start with the 60th
Doctor Who is a British Sci-Fi show spanning 60 years focusing on an alien, The Doctor, who travels through space and time in a time machine that takes the form of a police box that's bigger on the inside than the outside, often accompanied by humans in their adventures. When The Doctor is about to die, they can avert death by changing their face and slightly alter their personality, allowing the show to continue onwards as actors and writers change.
Going into the 60th anniversary The Doctor has reverted to one of their past faces for the first time ever, one of the most prominent actors in the role, David Tennant, returning for a trio of specials.
Also returning are the well-loved Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, a previous traveling companion of Tennant's Doctor who has had her memory erased in order to save her life and Bernard Cribbins, who passed away in 2022, in a posthumous appearance as Wilfred Mott, her grandfather.
Section for getting up to speed for those who left after Tennant (just plot - change name)
If you're coming back to the show for the first time since David Tennant left, let's really quickly go over the basic outline of the plot points you've missed during this time.
After regenerating into The Eleventh Doctor, played by Matt Smith, our Time Lord protagonist meets his newest companion, Amy Pond, during her childhood and helps her solve a problem, a crack in her house, a tear in time and space. He tries a short hop into the future - but finds himself flung years further than he thought, and reunites with Amy, played by Karen Gillan. The two travel on a few minor adventures, encountering River Song yet again, as more of these cracks in the universe menace them - even erasing a horde of Weeping Angels from ever existing. Amy's fiancé Rory Williams, played by Arthur Darvill, joins the group, before eventually becoming erased by a crack - Amy forgetting all about him. As The Doctor attempts to prevent the opening of a prison spoken in legend, the Pandorica, it becomes clear that the setup is a trap, the opening was timed to lure The Doctor so that he could be imprisoned. While he's in the Pandorica, his TARDIS explodes, creating the cracks in time, wiping out most of the universe. The Doctor escapes from the Pandorica, and uses the fragments of information stored within it to reboot the entire universe, using his exploding TARDIS as a power source, before showing up in this newly rebooted universe on Amy and Rory's wedding day.
Not too long later, Amy and Rory, after celebrating their honeymoon in space, settle into married life and receive vague letters with a time and location. Upon arriving in Utah on that date, they find both River and The Doctor present, reminiscing about their shared adventures. Not too long after, as the group has a picnic by a lake, an astronaut rises from water and strikes The Doctor dead. The other three head to a nearby diner where they find The Doctor earlier in his own timeline. The group travels to 1969, not long before the moon landing, and encounter a young girl in an astronaut suit, manipulated by menacing figures in suits who leave the memory when not being seen. These figures are forced to leave Earth by the group, and they continue to have adventures. Throughout these, Amy is unsure as to whether or not she is pregnant. She thinks she is at first, but then doesn't, and the TARDIS scanner cycles back and forth on the issue. This is explained when it's shown that Amy was kidnapped by those figures in suits some time before, replacing her with a duplicate. They're part of the same organization that blew up his TARDIS and wish to use her baby as a weapon. The Doctor assembles a coalition of allies and storms their base, attempting to rescue the two. He does so, but the baby was once again a duplicate, and has been spirited away to be raised by this organization. Not long after The Doctor finds Amy and Rory's child, fully grown as an assassin trained to kill him, River Song. Upon meeting him for the first time she has a change of heart, and defects. Nevertheless, that same organization kidnaps her once more, and forces her into a mechanized astronaut suit, forcing her to kill The Doctor. The Doctor, however, prepared for this, and used the entire situation as a way to fake his own death due to his ever expanding reputation.
The Doctor, Amy and Rory continue to adventure for some time before Amy and Rory become separated from him, trapped in a particular time. The Doctor is only shaken out of his grief by a mystery - a woman has been constantly appearing in his life, in different times and places, living completely different lives but intersecting with his each time, and he's only just realized it. Upon bumping into this woman once more in the 21st century, Clara Oswald, played by Jenna Coleman, he decides to take her with him, but chooses locations specifically to covertly investigate her - attempting to figure out what this phenomenon means. In the end, an old enemy of The Doctor's, The Great Intelligence, finds The Doctor's grave, containing inside it The Doctor's unravelled timeline. He manages to walk inside, and begins to subvert all of The Doctor's successes, unravelling them. In order to counteract this, Clara enters it as well, saving The Doctor throughout all of his life. And right before she leaves his timeline she finds one of The Doctor's greatest secrets, an incarnation of himself that he's tried to repress. A warrior who fought in the trenches of the Last Great Time War.
This proves to be an omen of things to come, as echoes of the Time War begin to come back to The Doctor. He finds himself interacting with other versions of himself, and ends up traveling back into the Time War. However, with years of hindsight, and the help of past incarnations, he makes a different choice. Gallifrey is trapped in a single instant of time, appearing to be destroyed, but is saved instead. It later tries to re-emerge through one final crack in time, broadcasting a signal that lets others know it's there. With the Time War about to break out again, The Doctor stands guard over the crack for hundreds of years. At the end of his life, with no more regenerations left, Clara comes and sees that he's on the brink of death. She goes to the crack and begs Gallifrey to save him. The crack closes, regeneration energy flows to him, and he regenerates again, to the Twelfth Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi.
After his regeneration into a starker, slightly more alien incarnation, Clara finds herself questioning her continued journeys with the Doctor. The problem is compounded as she finds it difficult to keep a healthy balance between her travels and her personal life, a new boyfriend. These issues come to a head when her boyfriend dies, and she begins to unravel. At the same time, The Master returns, in a female incarnation, Missy, and tries to convert all of the world's dead into Cybermen as a way to hold the earth hostage and force The Doctor to conquer the universe. Ultimately the crisis is averted by those same Cybermen, some of which didn't fully shut off their emotions.
The Doctor and Clara continue on their adventures, with Clara stepping up and taking a more active role, and The Doctor becoming more protective of her. This culminates when Clara dies, and The Doctor becomes trapped in a time loop for billions of years, killing himself over and over again to find a way out. When he does so, he finds himself on Gallifrey, freed from the bubble universe where they were trapped, and uses the technology present to extract Clara from right before her death. The two steal another TARDIS and fly away. But during their flight it becomes clear that Clara's death isn't being reversed, and The Doctor decides that to prevent the Time Lords from tracking her through their memories he'll erase hers. Clara refuses, insisting that her past is her own, and instead randomizes the device that The Doctor would use to do this. The Doctor instead erases his own memory, and Clara flies away in the new TARDIS, leaving him on Earth.
Years later, The Doctor finds himself lecturing at St Luke's University, and notices a young woman who audits a class of his without being enrolled, Bill Potts, played by Pearl Mackie. He offers to tutor her, and she finds herself drawn into his world slowly but surely. The Doctor, for his part, has been guarding a vault with Nardole, played by Matt Lucas, and uses trips with Bill as an excuse to travel discretely off world, shirking his duty. In the end it's revealed that the vault contains Missy, and The Doctor has sworn to guard her for one hundred years, slowly trying to reform her, little by little. She finally accompanies Bill, Nardole, and The Doctor on a test run - an adventure on a colony ship, and everything goes wrong. Another incarnation of The Master is present, as are Cybermen, and while Bill ultimately manages to make it off the ship the group is on, Missy and her earlier self wound each other lethally, and The Doctor forces himself to the brink of regeneration saving the colonists. He insists, however, back inside his TARDIS, that he won't change again. He's done becoming someone else, and just wants it to end. His TARDIS takes him back to meet his first incarnation who's wrestling with much the same dilemma. Eventually, they both decide to take one step more. And The Doctor regenerates into the Thirteenth Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.
Section for getting up to speed for those who left after Tennant (suggest episodes - change name)
Series 5: The Eleventh Hour, The Time of Angels, Flesh and Stone, (last 5-10 minutes of Cold Blood), The Pandorica Opens, The Big Bang
Series 6: The Impossible Astronaut, Day of the Moon, The Doctor's Wife (not necessary, generally regarded as very good), (last 5-10 minutes of The Almost People), A Good Man Goes to War, Let's Kill Hitler, The Girl Who Waited (not necessary, generally regarded as very good), The Wedding of River Song
Series 7: Asylum of the Daleks, The Angels Take Manhattan, The Snowmen, The Bells of Saint John, The Name of the Doctor, The Day of the Doctor
Series 8: The Time of the Doctor, Deep Breath, Listen (not necessary, generally regarded as very good), (last 5-10 minutes of Kill the Moon), Mummy on the Orient Express, Flatline, Dark Water, Death in Heaven
Series 9: Last Christmas, The Magician's Apprentice, The Witch's Familiar, The Girl Who Died, Face the Raven, Heaven Sent, Hell Bent
Series 10: The Husbands of River Song (not strictly necessary, but it's generally liked, and it's helpful for both resolution + context), The Pilot, Oxygen (at least the last 5-10 minutes, but the rest is well liked), Extremis, The Pyramid at the End of the World, The Lie of the Land, (last 5-10 minutes of The Eaters of Light), World Enough and Time, The Doctor Falls
Series 11: Twice Upon a Time, The Woman Who Fell to Earth, The Ghost Monument, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos
Series 12: Spyfall part 1 and 2, Fugitive of the Judoon, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, Ascension of the Cybermen, The Timeless Children
Series 13: Revolution of the Daleks, The Halloween Apocalypse, War of the Sontarans, Once, Upon Time, Village of the Angels, Survivors of the Flux, The Vanquishers, The Power of the Doctor
Section for getting up to speed for those who left after Smith (just plot - change name)
Series 8: Deep Breath, Listen (not necessary, generally regarded as very good), (last 5-10 minutes of Kill the Moon), Mummy on the Orient Express, Flatline, Dark Water, Death in Heaven
Series 9: Last Christmas, The Magician's Apprentice, The Witch's Familiar, The Girl Who Died, Face the Raven, Heaven Sent, Hell Bent
Series 10: The Husbands of River Song (not strictly necessary, but it's generally liked, and it's helpful for both resolution + context), The Pilot, Oxygen (at least the last 5-10 minutes, but the rest is well liked), Extremis, The Pyramid at the End of the World, The Lie of the Land, (last 5-10 minutes of The Eaters of Light), World Enough and Time, The Doctor Falls
Series 11: Twice Upon a Time, The Woman Who Fell to Earth, The Ghost Monument, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos
Series 12: Spyfall part 1 and 2, Fugitive of the Judoon, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, Ascension of the Cybermen, The Timeless Children
Series 13: Revolution of the Daleks, The Halloween Apocalypse, War of the Sontarans, Once, Upon Time, Village of the Angels, Survivors of the Flux, The Vanquishers, The Power of the Doctor
Section for getting up to speed for those who left after Smith (suggest episodes - change name)
Section for getting up to speed for those who left after Capaldi (just plot - change name)
Series 11: The Woman Who Fell to Earth, The Ghost Monument, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos
Series 12: Spyfall part 1 and 2, Fugitive of the Judoon, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, Ascension of the Cybermen, The Timeless Children
Series 13: Revolution of the Daleks, The Halloween Apocalypse, War of the Sontarans, Once, Upon Time, Village of the Angels, Survivors of the Flux, The Vanquishers, The Power of the Doctor
Section for getting up to speed for those who left after Capaldi (suggest episodes - change name)
Section for getting up to speed for those who've never seen the show (just plot - change name)
If you're completely new to the show, and you really want a recap of the entire plot of the modern series up until the latest episodes, this is the place for you! It's probably not the optimal route to experience the franchise, as it's greatly simplifying a ton of context, and at times outright slightly misrepresenting what happens in a story because the actual plot is a little too complicated to explain in a few sentences. But if you don't have the time or inclination to watch the entire show, or would prefer to get your background knowledge through text, this can be a substitute. We also have a list of the plot relevant episodes for each season, so you can sort of speedrun your way through the new series if you would like. Or you can mix and match, watch some seasons if you vibe with them, and read about others if you don't. It's all up to you. Whatever you decide, we're really happy you're thinking about watching Doctor Who and joining the community.
[Write summaries for S1-S4]
After regenerating into The Eleventh Doctor, played by Matt Smith, our Time Lord protagonist meets his newest companion, Amy Pond, during her childhood and helps her solve a problem, a crack in her house, a tear in time and space. He tries a short hop into the future - but finds himself flung years further than he thought, and reunites with Amy, played by Karen Gillan. The two travel on a few minor adventures, encountering River Song yet again, as more of these cracks in the universe menace them - even erasing a horde of Weeping Angels from ever existing. Amy's fiancé Rory Williams, played by Arthur Darvill, joins the group, before eventually becoming erased by a crack - Amy forgetting all about him. As The Doctor attempts to prevent the opening of a prison spoken in legend, the Pandorica, it becomes clear that the setup is a trap, the opening was timed to lure The Doctor so that he could be imprisoned. While he's in the Pandorica, his TARDIS explodes, creating the cracks in time, wiping out most of the universe. The Doctor escapes from the Pandorica, and uses the fragments of information stored within it to reboot the entire universe, using his exploding TARDIS as a power source, before showing up in this newly rebooted universe on Amy and Rory's wedding day.
Not too long later, Amy and Rory, after celebrating their honeymoon in space, settle into married life and receive vague letters with a time and location. Upon arriving in Utah on that date, they find both River and The Doctor present, reminiscing about their shared adventures. Not too long after, as the group has a picnic by a lake, an astronaut rises from water and strikes The Doctor dead. The other three head to a nearby diner where they find The Doctor earlier in his own timeline. The group travels to 1969, not long before the moon landing, and encounter a young girl in an astronaut suit, manipulated by menacing figures in suits who leave the memory when not being seen. These figures are forced to leave Earth by the group, and they continue to have adventures. Throughout these, Amy is unsure as to whether or not she is pregnant. She thinks she is at first, but then doesn't, and the TARDIS scanner cycles back and forth on the issue. This is explained when it's shown that Amy was kidnapped by those figures in suits some time before, replacing her with a duplicate. They're part of the same organization that blew up his TARDIS and wish to use her baby as a weapon. The Doctor assembles a coalition of allies and storms their base, attempting to rescue the two. He does so, but the baby was once again a duplicate, and has been spirited away to be raised by this organization. Not long after The Doctor finds Amy and Rory's child, fully grown as an assassin trained to kill him, River Song. Upon meeting him for the first time she has a change of heart, and defects. Nevertheless, that same organization kidnaps her once more, and forces her into a mechanized astronaut suit, forcing her to kill The Doctor. The Doctor, however, prepared for this, and used the entire situation as a way to fake his own death due to his ever expanding reputation.
The Doctor, Amy and Rory continue to adventure for some time before Amy and Rory become separated from him, trapped in a particular time. The Doctor is only shaken out of his grief by a mystery - a woman has been constantly appearing in his life, in different times and places, living completely different lives but intersecting with his each time, and he's only just realized it. Upon bumping into this woman once more in the 21st century, Clara Oswald, played by Jenna Coleman, he decides to take her with him, but chooses locations specifically to covertly investigate her - attempting to figure out what this phenomenon means. In the end, an old enemy of The Doctor's, The Great Intelligence, finds The Doctor's grave, containing inside it The Doctor's unravelled timeline. He manages to walk inside, and begins to subvert all of The Doctor's successes, unravelling them. In order to counteract this, Clara enters it as well, saving The Doctor throughout all of his life. And right before she leaves his timeline she finds one of The Doctor's greatest secrets, an incarnation of himself that he's tried to repress. A warrior who fought in the trenches of the Last Great Time War.
This proves to be an omen of things to come, as echoes of the Time War begin to come back to The Doctor. He finds himself interacting with other versions of himself, and ends up traveling back into the Time War. However, with years of hindsight, and the help of past incarnations, he makes a different choice. Gallifrey is trapped in a single instant of time, appearing to be destroyed, but is saved instead. It later tries to re-emerge through one final crack in time, broadcasting a signal that lets others know it's there. With the Time War about to break out again, The Doctor stands guard over the crack for hundreds of years. At the end of his life, with no more regenerations left, Clara comes and sees that he's on the brink of death. She goes to the crack and begs Gallifrey to save him. The crack closes, regeneration energy flows to him, and he regenerates again, to the Twelfth Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi.
After his regeneration into a starker, slightly more alien incarnation, Clara finds herself questioning her continued journeys with the Doctor. The problem is compounded as she finds it difficult to keep a healthy balance between her travels and her personal life, a new boyfriend. These issues come to a head when her boyfriend dies, and she begins to unravel. At the same time, The Master returns, in a female incarnation, Missy, and tries to convert all of the world's dead into Cybermen as a way to hold the earth hostage and force The Doctor to conquer the universe. Ultimately the crisis is averted by those same Cybermen, some of which didn't fully shut off their emotions.
The Doctor and Clara continue on their adventures, with Clara stepping up and taking a more active role, and The Doctor becoming more protective of her. This culminates when Clara dies, and The Doctor becomes trapped in a time loop for billions of years, killing himself over and over again to find a way out. When he does so, he finds himself on Gallifrey, freed from the bubble universe where they were trapped, and uses the technology present to extract Clara from right before her death. The two steal another TARDIS and fly away. But during their flight it becomes clear that Clara's death isn't being reversed, and The Doctor decides that to prevent the Time Lords from tracking her through their memories he'll erase hers. Clara refuses, insisting that her past is her own, and instead randomizes the device that The Doctor would use to do this. The Doctor instead erases his own memory, and Clara flies away in the new TARDIS, leaving him on Earth.
Years later, The Doctor finds himself lecturing at St Luke's University, and notices a young woman who audits a class of his without being enrolled, Bill Potts, played by Pearl Mackie. He offers to tutor her, and she finds herself drawn into his world slowly but surely. The Doctor, for his part, has been guarding a vault with Nardole, played by Matt Lucas, and uses trips with Bill as an excuse to travel discretely off world, shirking his duty. In the end it's revealed that the vault contains Missy, and The Doctor has sworn to guard her for one hundred years, slowly trying to reform her, little by little. She finally accompanies Bill, Nardole, and The Doctor on a test run - an adventure on a colony ship, and everything goes wrong. Another incarnation of The Master is present, as are Cybermen, and while Bill ultimately manages to make it off the ship the group is on, Missy and her earlier self wound each other lethally, and The Doctor forces himself to the brink of regeneration saving the colonists. He insists, however, back inside his TARDIS, that he won't change again. He's done becoming someone else, and just wants it to end. His TARDIS takes him back to meet his first incarnation who's wrestling with much the same dilemma. Eventually, they both decide to take one step more. And The Doctor regenerates into the Thirteenth Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.
Section for getting up to speed for those who've never seen the show (suggest episodes - change name)
Series 1: Rose, The End of the World, Dalek, The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances, Bad Wolf, The Parting of the Ways
Series 2: The Christmas Invasion, New Earth, Tooth and Claw, Rise of the Cybermen, The Age of Steel, Army of Ghosts, Doomsday
Series 3: The Runaway Bride, Smith and Jones, Gridlock, Human Nature, The Family of Blood, Blink (not necessary, generally regarded as very good), Utopia, The Sound of Drums, Last of the Time Lords
Series 4: Partners in Crime, Silence in the Library, Forest of the Dead, Midnight (not necessary, generally regarded as very good), Turn Left, The Stolen Earth, Journey's End
Series 5: The Waters of Mars (not necessary, generally regarded as very good), The End of Time part 1 and 2, The Eleventh Hour, The Time of Angels, Flesh and Stone, (last 5-10 minutes of Cold Blood), The Pandorica Opens, The Big Bang
Series 6: The Impossible Astronaut, Day of the Moon, The Doctor's Wife (not necessary, generally regarded as very good), (last 5-10 minutes of The Almost People), A Good Man Goes to War, Let's Kill Hitler, The Girl Who Waited (not necessary, generally regarded as very good), The Wedding of River Song
Series 7: Asylum of the Daleks, The Angels Take Manhattan, The Snowmen, The Bells of Saint John, The Name of the Doctor, The Day of the Doctor
Series 8: The Time of the Doctor, Deep Breath, Listen (not necessary, generally regarded as very good), (last 5-10 minutes of Kill the Moon), Mummy on the Orient Express, Flatline, Dark Water, Death in Heaven
Series 9: Last Christmas, The Magician's Apprentice, The Witch's Familiar, The Girl Who Died, Face the Raven, Heaven Sent, Hell Bent
Series 10: The Husbands of River Song (not strictly necessary, but it's generally liked, and it's helpful for both resolution + context), The Pilot, Oxygen (at least the last 5-10 minutes, but the rest is well liked), Extremis, The Pyramid at the End of the World, The Lie of the Land, (last 5-10 minutes of The Eaters of Light), World Enough and Time, The Doctor Falls
Series 11: Twice Upon a Time, The Woman Who Fell to Earth, The Ghost Monument, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos
Series 12: Spyfall part 1 and 2, Fugitive of the Judoon, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, Ascension of the Cybermen, The Timeless Children
Series 13: Revolution of the Daleks, The Halloween Apocalypse, War of the Sontarans, Once, Upon Time, Village of the Angels, Survivors of the Flux, The Vanquishers, The Power of the Doctor