10 Doctor Who adventures you must watch before the show leaves Netflix

It was the culmination of everything that was great about the RTD period: offering wit, spectacle, surprise, emotion... And it brought together all the Doctor’s chums – Rose, Mickey, Jackie, Jack, Martha, Donna, Sarah, as well as Bernard Cribbins as Wilf and Penelope Wilton as Harriet Jones, and characters from the spin-offs The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood – and pitted them against the Daleks. Not only that but their creator Davros, too, in a chilling performance from Julian Bleach.

The finale was packed with memorable images. I adore that moment when our heroes unite to pilot the Tardis – and only the churlish would groan at the preposterous image of the police box hauling planet Earth back to its rightful position in the cosmos. It’s glorious!

But the shocker that got the nation talking – it was even reported on the BBC News – was the cliffhanger ending to The Stolen Earth. As David Tennant’s immensely popular Doctor ran towards his beloved Rose for a long-awaited reunion, he was lasered by a Dalek. And then back inside the Tardis he started to regenerate... It guaranteed 10.6 million tuned in for Journey’s End the following week and shot Doctor Who to No 1 in the ratings. Patrick Mulkern

2. Vincent and the Doctor (2010) [13.7%]

Even more so than our inevitable winner, Vincent and the Doctor is a story that could only ever have been told by Doctor Who. And that’s not just in the sense that it’s an episode about an alien travelling back in time to rescue Vincent van Gogh from an invisible monster; but that it’s all those silly, ridiculous things and still manages to be one of television’s most moving portrayals of depression and suicide.

For it has long been speculated what caused one of the finest painters that ever lived to kill himself in 1890, but romcom king Richard Curtis lays his interpretation pretty clear: that yes, Gogh was plagued by an invisible monster that he could only see, but it certainly wasn't called the Krafayis. It's a sensitive topic - especially for a tea-time family show - but it's one that Curtis approaches with the utmost respect, with him having let his script go through multiple revisions after opening it up to the critique of the Doctor Who crew.

There are no misguided gags, no wacky 'mad' behaviour, and yet Curtis doesn't paint living with depression as one dark colour - which is right. Yes, Matt Smith's Doctor, unable to fully compute the complexities of mental illness, finds Tony Curran's Gogh weeping in bed, unable to move, but that is not Gogh's life, merely a part of it. "I am sorry you're sad," Amy Pond says to him at one point. "But I'm not," he replies. "Sometimes these moods torture me for weeks— for months. But I'm good now." I remember watching five years ago, in the depths of my own depressive breakdown, and finding immense solace in that line.

And yet, for all of Curtis' warmth and wit, for all of his love for Gogh and his work - epitomised in a beautiful sequence in which we see the world as only he can see it - and one of Doctor Who's most emotional endings, where the Doctor and Amy try to give the artist a reason to live by showing him what a huge success he will eventually be, Vincent and the Doctor does not patronise its subject matter. It ends the way it was always going to end. And that's good. As, "every life is a pile of good things and bad things... The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice-versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant.”

Clever, funny, strange and all with something to say, Vincent and the Doctor is everything that makes Doctor Who a show like none other. Its second place in our poll is more than well-deserved. Stephen Kelly