Episodes to skip:
- S2.10. Love & Monsters
- 2.11. Fear Her
- 3.04. Daleks in Manhattan
- 3.05. Evolution of the Daleks
- 3.07. 42
- 4.04. The Sontaran Strategem
- 4.05. The Poison Sky
- 4.06. The Daughter's Daughter
- 4.??. Planet of the Dead
- 6.09. Night Terrors
- 7.02. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
- 8.10. In the Forest of the Night
And I just remembered Chibnall wrote the godawful Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.
See this is why I always advise against anyone saying to a newcomer to the show to follow a watch list or skip stuff (and I'd say the same for Star Trek), because, for instance...
- Love & Monsters isn't a particularly great episode of Doctor Who, but it's a really sharp script that I think is a must-watch just to see what the show can do when a writer goes mad on the format
- The S3 Dalek episodes are flawed, but they are thematically the most interesting Dalek story after Dalek - and in this sense they are far superior to, say, Asylum of the Daleks, which poses a really interesting question (what about the Daleks that are so bad/insane even the Daleks don't want them?) and then answers it in the least interesting way possible (they're rusty and OLD and here's some old designs, FANWANK! oh). Like, the scenes where they turn on each other, where the subordinate Daleks huddle close to each other in the sewers to plot against their commander -- that stuff cuts to the heart of the Daleks and is worth suffering through awful accents and pig people for.
- I'd never cut the 42 or the Sontaran episodes as while they're pretty pedestrian and average, both contain important scenes for character arcs and development (Martha phoning home; the first real hint that Saxon has something against the Doctor specifically; Wilf re-meeting the Doctor again, properly; Sylvia's hatred of the Doctor, etc) - all that stuff pays off in various ways later.
I think even Dinosaurs on a Spaceship has a redeeming factor in that it has two great one-off guest stars that Moffat actually resisted bringing back and ruining (hey, Pasternoster gang).
Admittedly, Fear Her and In the Forest of the Night are irredeemably shit, and Night Terrors is bizarrely misplaced given Amy'd just lost her child at that point and yet she's flippant about the distressed kid in this episode and all that. In the Forest of the Night, Night Terrors and Curse of the Black Spot all have a unique mark of shame though in that they are simultaneously distinctly average to bad
and contribute nothing to the wider show in terms of character development, lore, etc.
Anyway, my point is, I think a key part of Doctor Who is suffering through the bad stuff, but also the nature of the show is so wildly disparate and all over the place that one man's trash may truly be another man's treasure more with this show than perhaps any other. I say this as someone who will defend Love & Monsters' right to exist vehemently. Like, even Fear Her, right - that is a rubbish episode, but it has three or four little moments and scenes where that episode exists in a way to tie a bow on Rose and the Tenth Doctor; between The Idiot's Lantern, The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit and this, you're quietly sold on these two as a couple in love even if they don't admit it, which is then crucial to Doomsday. So in this sense, it is worth watching at least once. I'd always advise people not to skip, but just to pick a start point and watch.