The best Doctor Who episodes don't feature the Doctor at all

Whether that’s due to the Scooby Doo-style opening, the Northern villain with exc-zema (played by Peter Kay), or the, um, implications that come with Ursula (Shirley Henderson) ending up as a paving slab, I don’t know. But for far too long this episode has been considered a blot on an otherwise faultless season.

The thing is though, Love and Monsters is actually one of the most grounded episodes of them all. Through Elton Pope (Marc Warren), LINDA, and Jackie Tyler (Camille Coduri) we get a perfect blend of sci-fi madness and kitchen sink drama – one where he even literally ends up working under the sink.

The episode is based around Elton Pope, a man whose “perfectly normal life” gets disrupted by repeated encounters with alien lifeforms. In the first five minutes we get a quick flashback sequence of the last two seasons told through Elton’s perspective, which shows him and the rest of London being impacted by the arrival of Autons, Slitheen and The Sycorax.

In this short sequence, we instantly get to the crux of what makes this episode so vital. First, it completely supports the continuity of the last two seasons and helps to build a world beyond the walls of the TARDIS that remains throughout Russell T Davies’s era.

Second, arguably for the first time in the show’s history, we leave the bubble of the Doctor’s world and get see the effect these events have on real human beings. Doing what so many disaster movies and Avengers films fail to do, this episode actually stops and shows that the Doctor and the aliens leave a path of hurt for those “left behind”.

This message is only made stronger by the performance of Coduri as Rose’s too-often jilted Mum. Through her, we get to see Doctor Who as more than just a fun sci-fi romp, but a true human-led drama, with family bonds at the centre. Also… she really rocks a mini skirt.

Love and Monsters also has a very important legacy, as it launched a new breed of episode where we didn’t need The Doctor at all. These episodes are now known as “Doctor Lite,” a term that was adopted after Steven Moffatt called Blink "the cheap, no CGI, Doctor-lite episode” in an interview with Doctor Who Magazine.

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According to Moffat, these episodes and their sister “companion-lite” stories were "purely a scheduling issue” that came as a result of such a long and expensive shoot. But whatever the reason, these episodes prove one simple thing: that Doctor Who always flourishes under its limitations.

Blink, Turn Left, The Girl Who Waited and Flatline. All of these Doctor-lite stories are highlights of the seasons they appear in. Though they vary in plot, location, and tone, they all have two things in common: one, they feature the Doctor stuck or just wandering somewhere else, and two, they’re massively tense.

There’s a reason why no Weeping Angel episode has ever matched the terror of Blink, and it’s not just because we’re forced to see the angels move in Flesh and Stone – I mean seriously, why did they do that? But it’s because we don’t have the comfort blanket of The Doctor.

That brief glow of safety we get when Sally and Laurence talk to The Doctor on the DVD turns to sheer terror when it ends. Even worse is when the protagonists finally get into the TARDIS, only for the walls to start disappearing around them.

Then we have Turn Left. In the parallel world of this story, The Doctor dies and the events ripple out until almost all his companions are dead, a nuclear explosion destroys London, and Donna and her family are left without hope as the world falls apart.

For me, this episode is even more frightening than Blink, because aside from the aliens, can anyone honestly say that the events of it don’t feel scarily realistic? Suddenly, we get to see what the world would be like for us in this situation and it’s horrifying.

Once again, the show goes beyond the fantastical premise and becomes a raw, artful piece of drama completely led by its human protagonists – by the way, full props to Catherine Tate and Jacqueline King for carrying the episode with their performances.

In the end, it’s no secret that Doctor Who is always best when it’s told through the human lens – that’s why he always needs a human companion – but these Doctor-lite episodes take it a step further. Because we don’t have an omniscient eternal alien in our real lives, the human lens in these stories is so much realer and closer to home, which is why it’s so much more powerful.

If you’re a sci-fi fan or not, these stories are so worth watching as they expose what Doctor Who really is: a powerful, poignant drama for everyone. And, whether you like it or not, Love and Monsters was the start of that.

So, if you think Doctor Who is all laughs and farting aliens, I’ll leave you with the words of Elton Pope: “It’s so much stranger than that, it’s so much darker, it’s so much madder, and so much better.”

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