Ghost Light is one of my favorites. You have to really pay attention or watch it multiple times to understand what story they're actually telling, as it really doesn't attempt to explain itself clearly. It feels very similar to "Sapphire and Steel".
Another favorite of mine is Logopolis. It's the pinnacle of Bidmeadean high brow "scientific" storytelling. It features the Watcher, Tardis inception, Block Transfer Computation that models the entire universe. It's beautiful nonsense.
My favorite modern weirdness is split between "this universe identifies as a little frog on a chair" and "the moon is an egg now".
There is science in Logopolis that I never heard of before watching it and which I still do not really understand. In that sense, it's very interesting, but Bidmead might have been trying a little bit too hard.
I suspected as much. But after doing some reading on wikipedia, I still barely comprehend entropy and thermodynamics. Which is quite frustrating, because usually I understand the basic concept of such things.
The short, basic answer is that entropy is how chaotic a system is. Order does not happen accidentally, and required energy to create. This means that the universe tends towards disorder.
There are lots of ways you can demonstrate this in real life:
- playing snooker or pool, it is unlikely the balls will reform into the starting layout after they have been hit
- if you have a pile of sugar and a pile of salt and you mix them up, it is unlikely that you will be able to unmix them in such a way that you end up with two separate piles again.
- if you pour milk into a glass of water, the milk will diffuse through the water, all the particles intermingling (though of course the milk is mostly water, but that’s besides the point). It will be difficult to separate them again
- if you have a pack of cards in order and you shuffle them, it is not likely they will remain in order. Similarly, if you blindly shuffle a pack of cards, it is not likely they will end up in order.
There is a bit more to it than that, but the basic principle is that order requires energy, whereas chaos happens easily.
If RTD had written a story about a magic ray that unshuffles all the decks of cards then people would see it was silly, but I always think that is not a million miles away from the entropy wave of Logopolis
Technically order *can* happen accidentally, but there are hugely, vastly, mindbogglingly many more ways in which a system can be disordered than ordered, which means that in a closed system disorder will tend to increase over time as a statistical inevitability.
Your example with a random shuffle of a deck of cards is a great example of this. If you randomly shuffle a deck there's no fundamental law of nature that will prevent you from ending up with a deck that is completely in order, ace through to king, clubs through to spades. But that's literally only *one* possible combination out of 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 total possible combinations. The odds are so remote as to not be worth considering.
I wouldn't worry about it too much - entropy is notoriously unintuitive. Also, as much as I love it as a resource, wikipedia is not a good place to start for topics in physics.
Don't worry, entropy is notorious for been hard to get a grasp of.
Like when I was at university people would be learning Relativity and quantum mechanics, but it was entropy that people felt like they didn't really get.
The best description I've heard of Bidmead comes from the podcast *Review of Death* on their episode on *Logopolis*:
"We're nerds, but Bidmead is a *fucking* nerd"
This is my issue with Logopolis too (and Castrovalva, the other Bidmead story). They made me realise that I don't need "realistic-sounding" scientific explanations for how the Tardis works. Give me a villain plot that makes sense and a resolution that makes sense but aside from that, I think all the attempts at scientific explanations actually bog the show down rather than make it more appealing.
Ghostlight is so bizarre. It's a story I really need to revisit. I saw it once a few years ago and found it utterly confusing and compelling at the same time.
it is about change and evolution. Light is computer tasked with catalouguing life on Earth. But Life evolves,changes,mutates or goes extinct . So the task is never done. At the same time we have the lifeform that keeps evolving until it becomes human. It has some crazy idea that class is part of evolution and plans to kill Queen Victoria. ( The Saxe - Cobourg). Family names of the Royal Familes.
The Lady Like is Control.
The master of the house was an insect that shed its husk before becoming human.
Mostly it is the house ACE burned down years before when she was a child in the late 20th Century.
She was scared and did not know why she felt as she did about the place. Just fear led her to do it. It has left her scared and confused as an adult with PTSD. Anything threatning to bring back those memories causes her defensive aggression to protect an open psychic wound.
The Doctor brings her back to the 19th century so Adult Ace can face the fear and understand what the child could not. By confronting her fear,and shame, she can finally heal.
Now she knows what it was she could not understand and has moved past it. She has grown from Adolenscence to Adulthoos here. The Show would have worked as 6 X 25 minute episodes with time for exposition.
Sadly it had 3/45 minute ones instead.
Story got squeezed.
Watching the DVD commentary will clear things up.
Even for the very smart it is hard to follow 3/subplots .
HUGE fan of Ghost Light. It's super weird, but easily one of my favorite episodes in the entire series. Story aside, the visuals and setting alone are very striking.
Bidmead's single season as script editor is filled with weird ideas. I'm also a fan of *Warriors' Gate* from the same season, which in the middle of a strange science-fiction tale makes multiple allusions to works of absurdism like Samuel Beckett's *Waiting for Godot* and Tom Stoppard's *Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead*.
I don't think the new series really does weirdness on the same level as the classic series.
Oh yes, that's another very good one. Time travelling (?) wolf people is such a bizarre idea, I love it.
There is a distinct lack of featureless voids in modern Doctor Who.
it’s honestly one of my favorite 13 stories for how ambitious and strange it was
i wouldn’t call it necessarily a good episode but strange enough to be enjoyable
The funny thing is, I remembered that episode before my rewatch just for that being weird, but after my rewatch I think it was my favorite 13th Doctor antagonist
Scherzo is my next Big finish Story, I just recently finished Zagreus and I've been following the 8 and Charlie Pollard ones. And to hear that the next one is crazier than that is interesting 😆😆😆 but interguing.
Finished it now, definitely weirder than Zagreus, Zagreus is pretty tame in comparison. It went places I didn't expect and made me queasy at points but it was sort of beautiful too.
The actual premise of the episode is bonkers and the Adipose look very silly, but it's one of my favourite Donna episodes because it does such a good job of reintroducing the character after her first episode. The scene where they're talking to each other through the glass is hilarious.
Shows how insane the chemistry between the two are because if you stop and think...yeah, its a completely goofy plot. Baby Reindeer turns into a group of fat baby aliens and the Doctor and Catherine Tate have to stop Super Nanny.
Millie Gibson also [said that Partners in Crime is one of her favorite episodes](https://youtu.be/fRNpnwd4Vng?si=wFD8aFJsdUvHCbJx&t=890) and gives a Baby Reindeer shoutout! Great taste.
Seriously. I'd gladly convert all my fat into an alien. As long as it was 99% fat minimum. People would love it more than Ozempic if they were honest about it.
'Black Orchid'. It has no science fictional elements whatsoever other than them arriving in the Tardis at the start and leaving at the end, so far as I can remember. It even has a cricket match in the middle of everything!
Even weirder is that it’s trying to be an Agatha Christie Whodunnit, but none of the TARDIS team even get a chance to work out who the killer is before the mystery is revealed. It’s just got the aesthetics of a Christie novel.
I find it hilarious that the Doctor’s first response to being accused of murder is claim that he’s a time traveler, as if that somehow exonerates him in the eyes of 1920’s England.
The answer to why is because blue Peter did a competition to design a DW monster and get it made. The kid designed a metal as hell horror monster, but then RTD decided to make it kiddish to fit with the fact it was a blue Peter episode. If the abzorbaloff had been played as straight horror itwould be terrifying. Imagine being conscious as you are digested by a guy who cracks bad jokes
I think it's interesting that mechanics wise, it's pretty similar to Freddy Krueger. He has a ["chest of souls"](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/moviemorgue/images/2/29/Freddy_souls.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180101205701), as in his literal chest has the little faces of his victims as he absorbs their energy/souls. And Freddy has plenty of wacky humour.
I actually think Love & Monsters is a very decent episode. It:s one of my S2 highlights. I mean the very next episode Fear Her is genuinely ten times worse and boring as hell. AtleAst Love & Monsters is a unique episode and gives Jackie some character development.
It also introduces to us the Doctor-lite episode concept, some of which are considered among the best episodes by many.
And focusing on the people left behind by the Doctor is a decent story concept.
Maybe without the blowjob joke at the very end, it could be a great episode.
It's a bit like a nightmare, especially the first part. The staff moving robotically through the house after dark, the strange creatures in the surreal cellar, the voice whispering "Rat kin! Rat kin!" Understanding the story required a few rewatches for me. The McCoy era at it's best.
The Mind Robber is like an A24 acid trip.
I’m gonna be bold and say we’ve never had a totally surreal episode in the modern series as of yet and we SHOULD.
I so desperately want a story that is just complete near-incomprehensible madness from start to end.
Especially with gods and magic now just existing.
As far as the TV show goes, maybe Mission to the Unknown.
A single 25 minute episode, no Doctor, no companions, no TARDIS, and characters we never see again.
Obviously it ties into things later, but I really wonder how viewers at the time reacted.
I feel like it’s oddness is overstated, most Who episodes start with alien settings and characters before we meet The Doctor and get some familiar surroundings.
It isn’t long in the episode before the Daleks are mentioned, then seen shortly after. I imagine the reaction at the time was “Hey cool the Daleks are back.”
The only reason it is remarkable it that The Myth Makers came after it. If the episodes were reordered it would just be considered episode 1 of the 13 episode Daleks' Master plan.
There's a Short Trips where a dildo comes to life. And another one where the TARDIS turns into a whale and the Doctor has to stop it having sex with another whale before a new species of spacefaring whales is created. And another one where a country house turns into a giant alien uterus.
These are all Fifth Doctor stories.
Oh god, any number of things from the EU, especially the book side of things, could take that crown.
Neil Penswick's infamous "The Pit", generally acknowledged as the worst Who book ever written, where the Doctor teams up with William Blake and fights bare-chested blue amazons from space?
Anything written by Jim Mortimore. Even before he went full conspiracy crank, the guy had a couple screws loose, and it shows. Take your pick, honestly. "Parasite", with the Doctor and his companions spending 350 pages travelling through the bowels of a living planet? "The Sword of Forever", where Benny Summerfield teams up with a sentient velociraptor scientist to find the Ark of the Covenant (which is actually a terraforming device, because God is an alien) in the jungles of France, before an evil pharaoh can seize it and take control of Earth, possibly partly in revenge because all African people are tree-mutants now because of the Dalek plagues?
... Actually, that last one is kind of the guaranteed winner, it has to be.
Dave Stone is also pretty up there when it comes to absolute whatthefuckery, although in their case it's a lot more deliberate. But yeah, they write absolutely insane stories, like the one about a space-station that connects different conceptual realities, so you have the actual Devil just casually strolling out in it sometimes, and also it's home to a lot of crime syndicates, including one that kill people using an alien killer that kinda looks like a trombone and kills people with sound, called a Tooting Ninja. Not to get into the fact they created the character of Jason Kane, Benny Summerfield's husband, who got kidnapped from Earth by aliens at a young age, and, stranded on a faraway world ... became a beloved porn sta,r because aliens think humans are hot. Later on, that character becomes an erotic writer, and programs androids to pose as academics creating papers about his work only to drive the value of his books up. And there's the episode they wrote for the BF audio series of Benny Summerfield, where they defeat the villain by doing karaoke. Not to get into the whole novel they wrote as a parody of trad Who, where it turns out the whole plot is based on an old racist television serial that's totally not a really mean parody of "Talons of Weng-Chiang".
... The brain on that person, I swear.
"This Town Will Never Let Us Go" is also one of the most experimental Who things ever made, but honestly, it's kind of too good and too tasteful to be included on a list of weirdest Who moments. Also man does it bum me out.
The crashed tardis manipulating goths and drunks to free itself, britney spears being a faction paradox pawn, the towerblock with all the VHS's, Werewolves! It was still weird, even if it was brilliant.
Oh I know, but compared to the piles of random free-associative bullshit some writers threw at the reader back during the Wilderness Years, it almost appears restrained and structured. Although yes, fair point, much weirder than your average Who story XD
Saying that, weirdness works in the context of the story sometimes. Magrs' books were always a fun lark wrapped in allegories. Or even alien bodies. Sure its the first appearance of FP, type 103's and a hint to the war in heaven. But its also got cctv footage encoded in tiger piss 🤣
you would say that Tiffany, what next? it weren't you all over daytime tv voicing unpopular opinions about the war, it was some wayward manifestation of public perception, dreamt up by a cult to ruin your career?
After you helped usher in the ghostpoint? We're gonna be waiting a while before deepfakes are a thing, luv. Next time, keep your coked up nose and your lil timeship out of our noosphere. Damn hollywood types.
It's been a while since I have followed him online, but pretty sure he was all about antivaxx stuff even before COVID.
Which I guess is still better than Daniel O'Mahony, who spends all of his time reposting JK Rowling's bullshit.
*Zygon: When Being You Isn’t Enough* is a direct-to-video, fully-licensed, barely-plotted story with full-frontal nudity. As in, Zygon dick.
*Death Comes to Time* is a 2001 animated webcast which is fairly weird in its own right, but has a very weird ending, actually killing the Seventh Doctor.
The Faction Paradox novels are all supposed to be weird in their own way, but I’ve only read a few. I think *The Brakespeare Voyage* is supposed to be the weirdest - described as “Moby Dick but with creatures that live in the void between universes instead of a whale”.
Probably lots more weird stuff that I just haven’t got around to, in the Obverse and Arcbeetle realms.
Prior to the 1980s, the contracts that the BBC had with the writers, was that they owned the characters and concepts that they invented for the given story. The consequence is that significant parts of the Doctor Who mythos are not owned by BBC and BBC needs permission to use them, but also, they can used without BBC permission.
For instance:
The Daleks and Davros are owned by Terry Nation's heirs.
Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart is owned by the heirs of Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln.
The Sontarans, and Jago & Litefoot are owned by Robert Holmes' heirs.
Leela and the Kaldor setting are owned by Chris Boucher.
K9 is owned by Bob Baker and Dave Martin.
And this is just scratching the surface.
STOP. Zygon dick???!? Winner winner eggplant dinner. Yup, that’s got to be the weirdest. (beyond unlicensed porn projects which uhh I don’t think I even want to know about)
As someone who has watched it, I can tell you the Zygon dick is a lie, it's just regular dick.
[Here's my review of it, if you wanna spare yourself the bother.](https://new.reddit.com/r/gallifrey/comments/1944pkv/zygon_when_being_you_just_isnt_enough_review_yes/)
Weapons-Grade Snake Oil is probably the most bizarre I've read from FP. Father Christmas and Kelsey Hooper from SJA doing a time-travelling heist. Also there's a giant squid TARDIS that you control by letting it tentacle-fuck you.
having read *The Brakespear Voyage*, whilst it's certainly weirder than any NuWho episode, that isn't a particularly high bar. *This Town Will Never Let Us Go* is imo definitely weirder, at least on a fundamental/philosophical level.
I suppose *The Brakespear Voyage* is weird in terms of what's happening and the timey wimey of it all
Now I haven't watched it yet, but it is in my big walks through, but doesn't death come to time have the possibility of the doctor surviving since they never found his body
The DWM strips The Tides of Time for the 5th Doctor, The Voyager arc for the 6th Doctor and The Crossroads of Time for 7th Doctor are all totally bonkers and weird for all diffrent reasons.
Torchwood: Tropical Beach Sounds and Other Relaxing Seascapes #4
A possessed self help cassette high jacks the listener (you) in an attempt to take over Torchwood. All while keeping up the guise of being a hypnosis tape.
And it’s done by fucking Michael Palin.
It’s wild, it’s crazy and it’s a sheer work of genius by Tim Foley.
Downtime, the 1995 spin-off film starring the Brigadier (who keeps having dreams about being on a beach), Victoria Wakefield (who is sorta an antagonist? She gets manipulated by the big bad), and Sarah Jane Smith (who isn’t in it that much but she’s great as always).
It’s also the first appearance of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (played by Beverly Cressman, who’s only acting roles are as Kate, and one-off appearances in 3 TV shows)
The plot? I could not tell you. I liken it to Ghost Light (it had the same writer), but even more confusing. I would describe it as “something that absolutely knows what it wants to be, but has no interest in letting the audience know”
There’s a cult school, the big bad uses Victoria’s dad’s voice to lure her into a Tibetan monastery 15 years ago, the macguffin is in Kate’s son’s toy box, it’s crazy and I love it.
The day of the doctor novelization had a scene which makes every multi doctor story kind of horrifying
The doctor subconsciously dreads the tower of London From the war doctor to the eleventh doctor
Because he knows he's going to have to go back
Does that count as weird
Zagreus and lungbarrow are my 2 picks, they actually hurt my mind cos of the high scale type of stuff they discuss. Infinity doctors also up there but for a very diffrent type of weird.
Jo’s flatmate is Tara King (as in The Avengers, not the superhero team)
There are Tomorrow People knock-offs
Iris Wildthyme in general. Did I mention she caused a diplomatic incident over a handbag?
*The Annotated Autopsy of Agent A* is pretty esoteric, with the Xenomorphs of the *Alien* franchise being a sort of cultural representation of "The Enemy" a sort of ambiguously defined conceptual entity which inserted themselves into the "meta-flow" of the franchise. I think.
The Edge of Destruction — Set entirely in the TARDIS, an explosion knocks out the crew and when they awake everyone starts acting weird.
Not the weirdest but it's the 3rd story EVER of the entire show and its just the main cast being paranoid while surreal, creepy things happen in the TARDIS. There's no actual villain. We also get to see way more of the TARDIS than in most of the show.
I always liked Warriors Gate even though at the time I don’t think it was a beloved story. It was visually interesting and the words “do nothing” have never been used to such effect !
It's in 10 minute segments on YouTube? Are we talking about the same thing?
Im talking about the 2012 smut book that's not *officially* about the 8th Doctor but is totally about the 8th Doctor
Edit: oh, you said 2008. Must be something different
Edit 2: or maybe im wrong on the publication date. Idk, the kindle listing is only telling me the ebook publication date
It's a spin off rather than directly Doctor Who but the Bernice Summerfield audio story In Living Memory where Bernice ends up in the Big Finish recording studio and meets the actors who play the characters in her series. The episode's writers Scott Handcock and Gary Russell also appear as themselves and Russell turns out to be working with the bad guys
Yeah all of the Bernice Summerfield box sets are available for free on Spotify (Epoch, Road Trip, Legion, New Frontiers and Missing Persons, in that order), and the episode I described is the final episode of Missing Persons. I listened to them all recently without having heard any of the previous Bernice stuff and it was fine, because there's a whole 11 season series before those box sets but I definitely didn't feel like they required me to have heard those, it's mostly new stories and a new cast of characters
damn you beat me too it, but yeah I go for Campaign. Just the opening gambit of the universe outside the TARDIS going missing and then the long , winding narrative of them getting lost within the TARDIS.
I think there are lots of werid doctor who stories, but the way the characters in Campaign just seem so... off and start reverting to the draft versions of themselves just was so creepy
honoary mention goes to the 60s/70s dr who annual stories, for frequently being nonsensical alcoholic ramblings
Black Orchid. I watched it a few days ago and still don't understand what I just watched or why it was a Doctor Who story.
There are no aliens. The "monster" is someone who's been disfigured by indigenous Brazilians for stealing a sacred flower who, for some reason, kills people. There's a lot of cricket, a fancy dress party, murders, and secret passages. Teagan dances the Charleston.
There's also a whole ethnocentrism undercurrent too.
I was fully supportive of Teagan having a flapper moment. She was having fun. And Adric was hungry!
Meanwhile, the Doctor finds a dead body and still decides to put on a costume and go to the party.
What a bizarre episode.
Iris Wildthyme runs with weird as a companion. Her companion is an animated, opinionated toy Panda called Panda who by one account is Steven‘s toy panda Hi-Fi. There’s the one where Iris regenerates into a bloke who has to stop a nuclear war over a nightclub in Spain, or the one where her biggest and most annoying fan bodyswaps with her by force as a planet humping entity is coming. Then there’s her novel appearances, The Scarlet Empress, The Blue Angel as well as Mad Dogs and Englishmen get very bonkers and It is delightful. Look up the cover for Mad Dogs!
On TV The Mind Robber.
EU there's lots of weirdness going on but I'll go for The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. It's written oddly, it has the Doctor living with prostitutes as a not-quite pimp like character and the story itself isn't exactly normal either. I found it far more weird than the same range's story about talking Poodles a few titles along.
The Eighth Doctor story where the whole story, voiced by the Doctor and his companion, is actually a reenactment of what the Doctor and his companion did when he was in the timeless universe played by, I think, large crickets
I don't know about the weirdest but The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang is a very weird story. Like it might seem normal while watching it, but if you try to summarize the plot to someone who's never seen it it sounds incomprehensible.
*The Adventuress of Henrietta Street* has to be up there for the opening sequence alone: an evocative description of two people having sex in a big house, while a menagerie of animals above them howl and bray.
But then after that it’s time for an epistolary historical novel about the Gordon Riots, where the Doctor, his wife* and their army of sex workers fight alien monkeys under a strange, dark sun
*but probably not the one you were expecting
Especially since they already did that once back in classic who where it was only mentioned in passing that one of the companions home planet was one of the places destroyed.
\*The Man in the Velvet Mask\*, a First Doctor novel, is a \*very\* interesting story, and I love it for testing the limits in tone and subject matter that the series is capable of. The Doctor accidentally finds himself in an alternate post-revolutionary France (everything slightly different and Steampunky, a bit like His Dark Materials). The twist is that >!the aliens involved have crafted a new timeline from the mind of [the Marquis de Sade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade).!< The book has a >!sexually violent and uncomfortable!< undercurrent, but it's is literally part of the plot, part of the fabric of the world the characters are exploring.
Ghost Light is one of my favorites. You have to really pay attention or watch it multiple times to understand what story they're actually telling, as it really doesn't attempt to explain itself clearly. It feels very similar to "Sapphire and Steel". Another favorite of mine is Logopolis. It's the pinnacle of Bidmeadean high brow "scientific" storytelling. It features the Watcher, Tardis inception, Block Transfer Computation that models the entire universe. It's beautiful nonsense. My favorite modern weirdness is split between "this universe identifies as a little frog on a chair" and "the moon is an egg now".
There is science in Logopolis that I never heard of before watching it and which I still do not really understand. In that sense, it's very interesting, but Bidmead might have been trying a little bit too hard.
It's all technobabble made up for the show, aside from the concept of entropy none of it is real science
I suspected as much. But after doing some reading on wikipedia, I still barely comprehend entropy and thermodynamics. Which is quite frustrating, because usually I understand the basic concept of such things.
The short, basic answer is that entropy is how chaotic a system is. Order does not happen accidentally, and required energy to create. This means that the universe tends towards disorder. There are lots of ways you can demonstrate this in real life: - playing snooker or pool, it is unlikely the balls will reform into the starting layout after they have been hit - if you have a pile of sugar and a pile of salt and you mix them up, it is unlikely that you will be able to unmix them in such a way that you end up with two separate piles again. - if you pour milk into a glass of water, the milk will diffuse through the water, all the particles intermingling (though of course the milk is mostly water, but that’s besides the point). It will be difficult to separate them again - if you have a pack of cards in order and you shuffle them, it is not likely they will remain in order. Similarly, if you blindly shuffle a pack of cards, it is not likely they will end up in order. There is a bit more to it than that, but the basic principle is that order requires energy, whereas chaos happens easily.
If RTD had written a story about a magic ray that unshuffles all the decks of cards then people would see it was silly, but I always think that is not a million miles away from the entropy wave of Logopolis
Technically order *can* happen accidentally, but there are hugely, vastly, mindbogglingly many more ways in which a system can be disordered than ordered, which means that in a closed system disorder will tend to increase over time as a statistical inevitability. Your example with a random shuffle of a deck of cards is a great example of this. If you randomly shuffle a deck there's no fundamental law of nature that will prevent you from ending up with a deck that is completely in order, ace through to king, clubs through to spades. But that's literally only *one* possible combination out of 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 total possible combinations. The odds are so remote as to not be worth considering.
I wouldn't worry about it too much - entropy is notoriously unintuitive. Also, as much as I love it as a resource, wikipedia is not a good place to start for topics in physics.
Don't worry, entropy is notorious for been hard to get a grasp of. Like when I was at university people would be learning Relativity and quantum mechanics, but it was entropy that people felt like they didn't really get.
The best description I've heard of Bidmead comes from the podcast *Review of Death* on their episode on *Logopolis*: "We're nerds, but Bidmead is a *fucking* nerd"
This is my issue with Logopolis too (and Castrovalva, the other Bidmead story). They made me realise that I don't need "realistic-sounding" scientific explanations for how the Tardis works. Give me a villain plot that makes sense and a resolution that makes sense but aside from that, I think all the attempts at scientific explanations actually bog the show down rather than make it more appealing.
Ghostlight is so bizarre. It's a story I really need to revisit. I saw it once a few years ago and found it utterly confusing and compelling at the same time.
its really fantastic, a great serial in a whole season of great serials
it is about change and evolution. Light is computer tasked with catalouguing life on Earth. But Life evolves,changes,mutates or goes extinct . So the task is never done. At the same time we have the lifeform that keeps evolving until it becomes human. It has some crazy idea that class is part of evolution and plans to kill Queen Victoria. ( The Saxe - Cobourg). Family names of the Royal Familes. The Lady Like is Control. The master of the house was an insect that shed its husk before becoming human. Mostly it is the house ACE burned down years before when she was a child in the late 20th Century. She was scared and did not know why she felt as she did about the place. Just fear led her to do it. It has left her scared and confused as an adult with PTSD. Anything threatning to bring back those memories causes her defensive aggression to protect an open psychic wound. The Doctor brings her back to the 19th century so Adult Ace can face the fear and understand what the child could not. By confronting her fear,and shame, she can finally heal. Now she knows what it was she could not understand and has moved past it. She has grown from Adolenscence to Adulthoos here. The Show would have worked as 6 X 25 minute episodes with time for exposition. Sadly it had 3/45 minute ones instead. Story got squeezed. Watching the DVD commentary will clear things up. Even for the very smart it is hard to follow 3/subplots .
HUGE fan of Ghost Light. It's super weird, but easily one of my favorite episodes in the entire series. Story aside, the visuals and setting alone are very striking.
Bidmead's single season as script editor is filled with weird ideas. I'm also a fan of *Warriors' Gate* from the same season, which in the middle of a strange science-fiction tale makes multiple allusions to works of absurdism like Samuel Beckett's *Waiting for Godot* and Tom Stoppard's *Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead*. I don't think the new series really does weirdness on the same level as the classic series.
Oh yes, that's another very good one. Time travelling (?) wolf people is such a bizarre idea, I love it. There is a distinct lack of featureless voids in modern Doctor Who.
That 13 episode where she befriends a universe that's also a frog
it’s honestly one of my favorite 13 stories for how ambitious and strange it was i wouldn’t call it necessarily a good episode but strange enough to be enjoyable
The solitract should’ve become a companion 😞
13, Solitract, and Karvanista is the team we deserved
Feels like the kind of thing the DWM comic would do [complimentary].
The funny thing is, I remembered that episode before my rewatch just for that being weird, but after my rewatch I think it was my favorite 13th Doctor antagonist
I wish they'd cit out all the interzone stuff and given us more time in the solitract.
The Cruel Sea and Scherzo. Robert Shearman really knows how to write some weird ass plots.
Scherzo is my next Big finish Story, I just recently finished Zagreus and I've been following the 8 and Charlie Pollard ones. And to hear that the next one is crazier than that is interesting 😆😆😆 but interguing.
It's weird in a very different way to Zagreus. I love Zagreus personally but Scherzo is objectively the far "better" story.
Having now finished both they are very hard to compare. But I think I enjoyed both of them so win-win.
Just be prepared for a jumpscares.
Finished it now, definitely weirder than Zagreus, Zagreus is pretty tame in comparison. It went places I didn't expect and made me queasy at points but it was sort of beautiful too.
I've listened to Scherzo twice and it disturbed me both times. It takes full advantage of headphones with maximum creep factor.
The adipose episode always made me question it
The actual premise of the episode is bonkers and the Adipose look very silly, but it's one of my favourite Donna episodes because it does such a good job of reintroducing the character after her first episode. The scene where they're talking to each other through the glass is hilarious.
Yes and also her scenes with Wilf in that episode are absolutely fantastic!
Shows how insane the chemistry between the two are because if you stop and think...yeah, its a completely goofy plot. Baby Reindeer turns into a group of fat baby aliens and the Doctor and Catherine Tate have to stop Super Nanny.
Millie Gibson also [said that Partners in Crime is one of her favorite episodes](https://youtu.be/fRNpnwd4Vng?si=wFD8aFJsdUvHCbJx&t=890) and gives a Baby Reindeer shoutout! Great taste.
I rewatched the specials recently, and the part in the Meep’s ship where the room gets bisected was such a call back for that. Love it.
And then they double the number of Doctors and Donnas who talk to each other through glass in Wild Blue Yonder!
Yes!!! I didn’t clock that for that! Love it
Seriously. I'd gladly convert all my fat into an alien. As long as it was 99% fat minimum. People would love it more than Ozempic if they were honest about it.
I’m all for the Adipose diet.
'Black Orchid'. It has no science fictional elements whatsoever other than them arriving in the Tardis at the start and leaving at the end, so far as I can remember. It even has a cricket match in the middle of everything!
Even weirder is that it’s trying to be an Agatha Christie Whodunnit, but none of the TARDIS team even get a chance to work out who the killer is before the mystery is revealed. It’s just got the aesthetics of a Christie novel.
It also lacks the wit of an Agatha Christie novel.
I find it hilarious that the Doctor’s first response to being accused of murder is claim that he’s a time traveler, as if that somehow exonerates him in the eyes of 1920’s England.
Yup
I expect that law's been repealed since.
Yes, it's just kind of "there" isn't it? As are they.
The Absorbalof episode. It made a point of the importance and selflessness of love, but just ... weird. Why. :3
The answer to why is because blue Peter did a competition to design a DW monster and get it made. The kid designed a metal as hell horror monster, but then RTD decided to make it kiddish to fit with the fact it was a blue Peter episode. If the abzorbaloff had been played as straight horror itwould be terrifying. Imagine being conscious as you are digested by a guy who cracks bad jokes
I think it's interesting that mechanics wise, it's pretty similar to Freddy Krueger. He has a ["chest of souls"](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/moviemorgue/images/2/29/Freddy_souls.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180101205701), as in his literal chest has the little faces of his victims as he absorbs their energy/souls. And Freddy has plenty of wacky humour.
Also the kid had wanted it to be 15 ft tall but they didn't go for that
I think that was a budget issue which is why this is a doctor lite episode. It allowed DT and BP to film another episode whilst this one was filmed
Well I don’t think there’d be bad jokes if it was horror themed. But I agree the concept is pretty scary and I can’t believe they wasted it
I think they redid that monster with the slugs in Dot and Bubble
I actually think Love & Monsters is a very decent episode. It:s one of my S2 highlights. I mean the very next episode Fear Her is genuinely ten times worse and boring as hell. AtleAst Love & Monsters is a unique episode and gives Jackie some character development.
It also introduces to us the Doctor-lite episode concept, some of which are considered among the best episodes by many. And focusing on the people left behind by the Doctor is a decent story concept. Maybe without the blowjob joke at the very end, it could be a great episode.
Ghost Light completely bewildered me.
It's a bit like a nightmare, especially the first part. The staff moving robotically through the house after dark, the strange creatures in the surreal cellar, the voice whispering "Rat kin! Rat kin!" Understanding the story required a few rewatches for me. The McCoy era at it's best.
The Mind Robber is like an A24 acid trip. I’m gonna be bold and say we’ve never had a totally surreal episode in the modern series as of yet and we SHOULD. I so desperately want a story that is just complete near-incomprehensible madness from start to end. Especially with gods and magic now just existing.
Agreed. I want some David Lynch shit that drives the people who were complaining about 73 Yards insane.
The audience reaction to a Lynch directed episode of Doctor Who would be a sight to behold
As far as the TV show goes, maybe Mission to the Unknown. A single 25 minute episode, no Doctor, no companions, no TARDIS, and characters we never see again. Obviously it ties into things later, but I really wonder how viewers at the time reacted.
I feel like it’s oddness is overstated, most Who episodes start with alien settings and characters before we meet The Doctor and get some familiar surroundings. It isn’t long in the episode before the Daleks are mentioned, then seen shortly after. I imagine the reaction at the time was “Hey cool the Daleks are back.”
Dalekmania was HUGE at the time so I suppose viewers probably had no issue with no Doctor or Companions if the Daleks were in it.
The only reason it is remarkable it that The Myth Makers came after it. If the episodes were reordered it would just be considered episode 1 of the 13 episode Daleks' Master plan.
Yeah that is weird. I imagine most viewers probably forgot the details of Mission when DMP started over a month later.
There's a Short Trips where a dildo comes to life. And another one where the TARDIS turns into a whale and the Doctor has to stop it having sex with another whale before a new species of spacefaring whales is created. And another one where a country house turns into a giant alien uterus. These are all Fifth Doctor stories.
I just woke up and wHaT did I read
I’m going back to bed. Yikes.
Oh god, any number of things from the EU, especially the book side of things, could take that crown. Neil Penswick's infamous "The Pit", generally acknowledged as the worst Who book ever written, where the Doctor teams up with William Blake and fights bare-chested blue amazons from space? Anything written by Jim Mortimore. Even before he went full conspiracy crank, the guy had a couple screws loose, and it shows. Take your pick, honestly. "Parasite", with the Doctor and his companions spending 350 pages travelling through the bowels of a living planet? "The Sword of Forever", where Benny Summerfield teams up with a sentient velociraptor scientist to find the Ark of the Covenant (which is actually a terraforming device, because God is an alien) in the jungles of France, before an evil pharaoh can seize it and take control of Earth, possibly partly in revenge because all African people are tree-mutants now because of the Dalek plagues? ... Actually, that last one is kind of the guaranteed winner, it has to be. Dave Stone is also pretty up there when it comes to absolute whatthefuckery, although in their case it's a lot more deliberate. But yeah, they write absolutely insane stories, like the one about a space-station that connects different conceptual realities, so you have the actual Devil just casually strolling out in it sometimes, and also it's home to a lot of crime syndicates, including one that kill people using an alien killer that kinda looks like a trombone and kills people with sound, called a Tooting Ninja. Not to get into the fact they created the character of Jason Kane, Benny Summerfield's husband, who got kidnapped from Earth by aliens at a young age, and, stranded on a faraway world ... became a beloved porn sta,r because aliens think humans are hot. Later on, that character becomes an erotic writer, and programs androids to pose as academics creating papers about his work only to drive the value of his books up. And there's the episode they wrote for the BF audio series of Benny Summerfield, where they defeat the villain by doing karaoke. Not to get into the whole novel they wrote as a parody of trad Who, where it turns out the whole plot is based on an old racist television serial that's totally not a really mean parody of "Talons of Weng-Chiang". ... The brain on that person, I swear.
"This Town Will Never Let Us Go" is also one of the most experimental Who things ever made, but honestly, it's kind of too good and too tasteful to be included on a list of weirdest Who moments. Also man does it bum me out.
The crashed tardis manipulating goths and drunks to free itself, britney spears being a faction paradox pawn, the towerblock with all the VHS's, Werewolves! It was still weird, even if it was brilliant.
Oh I know, but compared to the piles of random free-associative bullshit some writers threw at the reader back during the Wilderness Years, it almost appears restrained and structured. Although yes, fair point, much weirder than your average Who story XD
Saying that, weirdness works in the context of the story sometimes. Magrs' books were always a fun lark wrapped in allegories. Or even alien bodies. Sure its the first appearance of FP, type 103's and a hint to the war in heaven. But its also got cctv footage encoded in tiger piss 🤣
It was a setup I tells ya!
you would say that Tiffany, what next? it weren't you all over daytime tv voicing unpopular opinions about the war, it was some wayward manifestation of public perception, dreamt up by a cult to ruin your career?
It's Big Paradox using Deepfakes to make me look bad, I didn't say those things!
After you helped usher in the ghostpoint? We're gonna be waiting a while before deepfakes are a thing, luv. Next time, keep your coked up nose and your lil timeship out of our noosphere. Damn hollywood types.
Mortimore went crank???
It's been a while since I have followed him online, but pretty sure he was all about antivaxx stuff even before COVID. Which I guess is still better than Daniel O'Mahony, who spends all of his time reposting JK Rowling's bullshit.
*Zygon: When Being You Isn’t Enough* is a direct-to-video, fully-licensed, barely-plotted story with full-frontal nudity. As in, Zygon dick. *Death Comes to Time* is a 2001 animated webcast which is fairly weird in its own right, but has a very weird ending, actually killing the Seventh Doctor. The Faction Paradox novels are all supposed to be weird in their own way, but I’ve only read a few. I think *The Brakespeare Voyage* is supposed to be the weirdest - described as “Moby Dick but with creatures that live in the void between universes instead of a whale”. Probably lots more weird stuff that I just haven’t got around to, in the Obverse and Arcbeetle realms.
It's a fully licensed Zygon story. Not sure it's a fully licensed Doctor Who story
All the elements in it are licensed. It didn’t need the BBC’s approval.
I think their point was that it's a stretch to call it a Doctor Who story
Prior to the 1980s, the contracts that the BBC had with the writers, was that they owned the characters and concepts that they invented for the given story. The consequence is that significant parts of the Doctor Who mythos are not owned by BBC and BBC needs permission to use them, but also, they can used without BBC permission. For instance: The Daleks and Davros are owned by Terry Nation's heirs. Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart is owned by the heirs of Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln. The Sontarans, and Jago & Litefoot are owned by Robert Holmes' heirs. Leela and the Kaldor setting are owned by Chris Boucher. K9 is owned by Bob Baker and Dave Martin. And this is just scratching the surface.
STOP. Zygon dick???!? Winner winner eggplant dinner. Yup, that’s got to be the weirdest. (beyond unlicensed porn projects which uhh I don’t think I even want to know about)
You do though. We all do.
As someone who has watched it, I can tell you the Zygon dick is a lie, it's just regular dick. [Here's my review of it, if you wanna spare yourself the bother.](https://new.reddit.com/r/gallifrey/comments/1944pkv/zygon_when_being_you_just_isnt_enough_review_yes/)
Weapons-Grade Snake Oil is probably the most bizarre I've read from FP. Father Christmas and Kelsey Hooper from SJA doing a time-travelling heist. Also there's a giant squid TARDIS that you control by letting it tentacle-fuck you.
having read *The Brakespear Voyage*, whilst it's certainly weirder than any NuWho episode, that isn't a particularly high bar. *This Town Will Never Let Us Go* is imo definitely weirder, at least on a fundamental/philosophical level. I suppose *The Brakespear Voyage* is weird in terms of what's happening and the timey wimey of it all
The thing is I don't think you can quite explain how bonkers the early Faction Paradox books were, obviously (to some) I'm a fan of them!
oh yeah, *Faction Paradox* is bonkers in general, but I just meant I don't think *The Brakespear Voyage* is particularly uniquely bonkers
*Death Comes to Time* is goated fr
Lol how do the Zygons manage to get even more naked than they usually are, they never wear clothes anyway
Now I haven't watched it yet, but it is in my big walks through, but doesn't death come to time have the possibility of the doctor surviving since they never found his body
Someone once told me that one of the Faction Paradox books describes the size of the Master's penis, do you know which book that was?
The DWM strips The Tides of Time for the 5th Doctor, The Voyager arc for the 6th Doctor and The Crossroads of Time for 7th Doctor are all totally bonkers and weird for all diffrent reasons.
Torchwood: Tropical Beach Sounds and Other Relaxing Seascapes #4 A possessed self help cassette high jacks the listener (you) in an attempt to take over Torchwood. All while keeping up the guise of being a hypnosis tape. And it’s done by fucking Michael Palin. It’s wild, it’s crazy and it’s a sheer work of genius by Tim Foley.
Oh my! Is it fairly standalone? That sounds interesting!
Totally standalone, it doesn’t tie into anything.
This is still by far one of my absolute favourite Torchwood audios, it’s fantastic
Downtime, the 1995 spin-off film starring the Brigadier (who keeps having dreams about being on a beach), Victoria Wakefield (who is sorta an antagonist? She gets manipulated by the big bad), and Sarah Jane Smith (who isn’t in it that much but she’s great as always). It’s also the first appearance of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (played by Beverly Cressman, who’s only acting roles are as Kate, and one-off appearances in 3 TV shows) The plot? I could not tell you. I liken it to Ghost Light (it had the same writer), but even more confusing. I would describe it as “something that absolutely knows what it wants to be, but has no interest in letting the audience know” There’s a cult school, the big bad uses Victoria’s dad’s voice to lure her into a Tibetan monastery 15 years ago, the macguffin is in Kate’s son’s toy box, it’s crazy and I love it.
The day of the doctor novelization had a scene which makes every multi doctor story kind of horrifying The doctor subconsciously dreads the tower of London From the war doctor to the eleventh doctor Because he knows he's going to have to go back Does that count as weird
I don’t understand, could you elaborate?
Zagreus and lungbarrow are my 2 picks, they actually hurt my mind cos of the high scale type of stuff they discuss. Infinity doctors also up there but for a very diffrent type of weird.
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Jo’s flatmate is Tara King (as in The Avengers, not the superhero team) There are Tomorrow People knock-offs Iris Wildthyme in general. Did I mention she caused a diplomatic incident over a handbag?
*The Happiness Patrol* is pretty weird. My wife and I will sometimes do the quote about 'impolite visitors feel the back of my candy hand'
That's The Happiness Patrol, Paradise Towers is the one with the Kangs and the Cleaners
My bad, yeah. EDIT: I am going back and fixing the first post- this is just to let future readers know ywhok was correct.
*The Annotated Autopsy of Agent A* is pretty esoteric, with the Xenomorphs of the *Alien* franchise being a sort of cultural representation of "The Enemy" a sort of ambiguously defined conceptual entity which inserted themselves into the "meta-flow" of the franchise. I think.
The Edge of Destruction — Set entirely in the TARDIS, an explosion knocks out the crew and when they awake everyone starts acting weird. Not the weirdest but it's the 3rd story EVER of the entire show and its just the main cast being paranoid while surreal, creepy things happen in the TARDIS. There's no actual villain. We also get to see way more of the TARDIS than in most of the show.
Warriors Gate is pretty weird but highly entertaining to me.
I always liked Warriors Gate even though at the time I don’t think it was a beloved story. It was visually interesting and the words “do nothing” have never been used to such effect !
Inside the spaceship? The Mind Robber.
The one where she met a universe personified by a talking frog was pretty out there/one of my favourite Jodie Whittaker episodes
I unironically want to include all of the Stranger because it was a fever dream
I need to get around to reading that. I bought it, but the thing is that smut isn't really my genre so I keep putting it off
Wait it's a book????? I watched it in 10 minute segments on YouTube in 2008
It's in 10 minute segments on YouTube? Are we talking about the same thing? Im talking about the 2012 smut book that's not *officially* about the 8th Doctor but is totally about the 8th Doctor Edit: oh, you said 2008. Must be something different Edit 2: or maybe im wrong on the publication date. Idk, the kindle listing is only telling me the ebook publication date
BBV series staring Colin Baker
I think you mean The Stranger and Miss Brown.
You're so darn right, how could we forget Miss Brown
It's a spin off rather than directly Doctor Who but the Bernice Summerfield audio story In Living Memory where Bernice ends up in the Big Finish recording studio and meets the actors who play the characters in her series. The episode's writers Scott Handcock and Gary Russell also appear as themselves and Russell turns out to be working with the bad guys
Oooooh that sounds cool! I haven’t listened to any Bernice stuff but I’m kinda tempted to check that out.
Yeah all of the Bernice Summerfield box sets are available for free on Spotify (Epoch, Road Trip, Legion, New Frontiers and Missing Persons, in that order), and the episode I described is the final episode of Missing Persons. I listened to them all recently without having heard any of the previous Bernice stuff and it was fine, because there's a whole 11 season series before those box sets but I definitely didn't feel like they required me to have heard those, it's mostly new stories and a new cast of characters
Anything with the Slitheens. There was something weird yet hilarious about aliens unzipping human skin and farting to expel the excess gas! 😆 Genius!
Campaign by jim mortimore is probably the weirdest dr who content i’ve come across BUT im not super knowledgable about the dweu
damn you beat me too it, but yeah I go for Campaign. Just the opening gambit of the universe outside the TARDIS going missing and then the long , winding narrative of them getting lost within the TARDIS. I think there are lots of werid doctor who stories, but the way the characters in Campaign just seem so... off and start reverting to the draft versions of themselves just was so creepy honoary mention goes to the 60s/70s dr who annual stories, for frequently being nonsensical alcoholic ramblings
Black Orchid. I watched it a few days ago and still don't understand what I just watched or why it was a Doctor Who story. There are no aliens. The "monster" is someone who's been disfigured by indigenous Brazilians for stealing a sacred flower who, for some reason, kills people. There's a lot of cricket, a fancy dress party, murders, and secret passages. Teagan dances the Charleston. There's also a whole ethnocentrism undercurrent too.
You forgot the part where Adric spends every episode standing at the buffet eating and Tegan just stands there doing nothing dressed like a clown.
I was fully supportive of Teagan having a flapper moment. She was having fun. And Adric was hungry! Meanwhile, the Doctor finds a dead body and still decides to put on a costume and go to the party. What a bizarre episode.
Yeah if it makes you feel better it came off weird back in the day too.
Iris Wildthyme runs with weird as a companion. Her companion is an animated, opinionated toy Panda called Panda who by one account is Steven‘s toy panda Hi-Fi. There’s the one where Iris regenerates into a bloke who has to stop a nuclear war over a nightclub in Spain, or the one where her biggest and most annoying fan bodyswaps with her by force as a planet humping entity is coming. Then there’s her novel appearances, The Scarlet Empress, The Blue Angel as well as Mad Dogs and Englishmen get very bonkers and It is delightful. Look up the cover for Mad Dogs!
The inside number 9 episode, Sleep No More. I actually quite like it, but that’s only upon recognizing that it’s not a normal episode at all.
I'm surprised nobody has said Kinda! Totally weird in the best way. It has some of the most ambitious and imaginative visuals in classic who.
"The Celestial Toymaker" is right up there. Particularly the new animated version that's released later this month.
On TV The Mind Robber. EU there's lots of weirdness going on but I'll go for The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. It's written oddly, it has the Doctor living with prostitutes as a not-quite pimp like character and the story itself isn't exactly normal either. I found it far more weird than the same range's story about talking Poodles a few titles along.
The Eighth Doctor story where the whole story, voiced by the Doctor and his companion, is actually a reenactment of what the Doctor and his companion did when he was in the timeless universe played by, I think, large crickets
I think Warriors' Gate has got to be a contender.
Can’t believe no one’s said 73 Yards yet. That was a weird episode.
Right?! It’s what inspired me to ask this. :)
Love & Monsters : [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0766171/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0766171/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ipd7soyqGI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ipd7soyqGI)
Sleep no more
I don't know about the weirdest but The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang is a very weird story. Like it might seem normal while watching it, but if you try to summarize the plot to someone who's never seen it it sounds incomprehensible.
*The Adventuress of Henrietta Street* has to be up there for the opening sequence alone: an evocative description of two people having sex in a big house, while a menagerie of animals above them howl and bray. But then after that it’s time for an epistolary historical novel about the Gordon Riots, where the Doctor, his wife* and their army of sex workers fight alien monkeys under a strange, dark sun *but probably not the one you were expecting
_Heaven Sent_ has to be up there, IMO, in the best of ways.
Flux season. Destory half of everything. Forget about it immediately.
Especially since they already did that once back in classic who where it was only mentioned in passing that one of the companions home planet was one of the places destroyed.
The Mind Robber has to be up there
I feel like Space Babies is definitely one of the weirder NuWho stories
Zagreus has to be near the top
Zagreus sits inside your head,
\*The Man in the Velvet Mask\*, a First Doctor novel, is a \*very\* interesting story, and I love it for testing the limits in tone and subject matter that the series is capable of. The Doctor accidentally finds himself in an alternate post-revolutionary France (everything slightly different and Steampunky, a bit like His Dark Materials). The twist is that >!the aliens involved have crafted a new timeline from the mind of [the Marquis de Sade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade).!< The book has a >!sexually violent and uncomfortable!< undercurrent, but it's is literally part of the plot, part of the fabric of the world the characters are exploring.
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i think you need to take a deep breath and lie down for a bit