1.1 - "Rose" 
A naïve shop girl called Rose (Piper) is rescued from her dead-end job and council estate mundanity to accompany a lonely, eccentric, time-travelling alien known as The Doctor (Eccleston) through the Space/Time continuum inside his rickety phone-box TARDIS. In this debut adventure of the revived classic, old foes The Autons (mannequins brought to life), are the boogiemen for Russell T. Davies' brisk but facile premiere. As a launch-pad, this is uninspired and leaden frivolity that leans on cultural familiarity and gratitude that Who is back after 16 years in the BBC wilderness. Whovians put up with cheapo charity sketches in the '90s, so a full episode that takes itself half-seriously felt like nirvana, but compared to episodes produced very soon after, "Rose" is trivial and weightless. That it contains one of the show's most embarrassing images (someone being "eaten" by a burping wheelie-bin) makes Who's ultimate success all the more startling. An inauspicious start, to put it mildly.
w: Russell T. Davies / d: Keith Boak
1.2 - "The End Of The World" 
The Doctor takes Rose five billion years into Earth's future, to witness the destruction of planet Earth from a nearby space station populated by alien voyeurs that include "last human" Cassandra (now just facial skin stretched across a frame.) A saboteur provides a mystery to solve, in an episode pitched at a child's sense of wonder at dress-up and CGI. There are hints of a darker underbelly to the series -- like when The Doctor refuses to prevent an alien's gooey death ("everything has its time") -- but they're outweighed by clichés like a treacherous gantry to cross (did
nobody see Galaxy Quest?), and creative headslaps like Britney Spears' "Toxic" sounding out the Apocalypse.
w: Russell T. Davies / d: Euros Lyn1.3 - "The Unquiet Dead" 
Things perk up for Mark Gatiss' Victorian ghost story, possibly because Who's on firmer footing when its stories are sutured to history. Charles Dickens (
Simon Callow) himself assists The Doctor and Rose in defeating gaseous aliens that want to inhabit human corpses, in a well-constructed story with a wintry ambience, some literary in-jokes, and sparkling dialogue. It also includes the first mention of mytharc lynchpin "The Time War", and co-stars
Eve Myles (presumably playing a descendant of the character she'd eventually play in the spin-off Torchwood.)
w: Mark Gatiss / d: Euros Lyn
1.4 & 1.5 - "Aliens Of London" & "World War Three" 
Our first two-part episode finds baby-faced, farting aliens called Slitheen posing as humans inside zippable flesh-suits, to smuggle themselves into Downing Street for reasons of global destruction. There's a memorable UFO crash into Big Ben (arguably the first time The Mill's FX work loosened jaws), and the first wholly agreeable performance from Piper, but this is ultimately another script that aims to entertain kiddywinks and cause anyone over voting age to squirm at its ridiculous, awkward and campy tone. And the least said about that "pig in a space-suit" sequence, the better.
w: Russell T. Davies / d: Keith Boak1.6 - "Dalek" 
The long-awaited return of The Doctor's famous enemy, "Dalek" owes something to Star Trek The Next Generation's "I, Borg" in its attempt to humanize a genocidal automaton. Chained up underground as part of an American billionaire's collection of extra-terrestrial artifacts (spot the Cyberman head!), the titular Dalek soon escapes and demonstrates to a new generation of kids why they should be afraid of irascible pepperpots (They dissolve bullets! They fly! They suck your face with plungers!) While a lot of the peripheral material is goofy nonsense (bastardized from Shearman's own audio-play "
Jubilee"), Eccleston and the Dalek are magnificent as the lonely survivors of a temporal war that annihilated their respective species. The script remains one of Who's best efforts in putting a fresh slant on these beloved menaces, too. It's just a shame the sense of threat re-established with the Daleks never fed into the rest of the series, as they quickly devolved back into screeching hordes of incompetent tin cans.
w: Robert Shearman / d: Joe Ahearne
1.7 - "The Long Game" 
Another unimaginably distant future, another depressingly low-rent space station. Yawn. The TARDIS touches down aboard "Satellite 5", a celestial hub broadcasting news across the galaxy.
Simon Pegg guest-stars as The Editor (a frostbitten baddie taking orders from a razor-toothed ceiling turd) in a story where his minions are being killed after they're promoted to work on the infamous Floor 500. A statement on the class system? Well,
vaguely. This plays like reheated '80s-era Who; so while there's fun to be had from Pegg's curt performance, it all feels inconsequential and dull.
w: Russell T. Davies / d: Bryan Grant1.8 - "Father's Day" 
An all too rare investigation of time paradoxes, as Rose changes the course of history by preventing her dad's death in a car accident. Winged beasties duly descend to repair damage to the timeline (don't ask...), meaning The Doctor, Rose and her parents who don't recognize their unborn daughter, are forced to take refuge in a church and find a way to set things right. Cornell's script is heartfelt and touching (albeit illogical – why doesn't Rose's mum
remember these events?), but it's just nice to follow a story with actual human drama behind it. Of all this season's episodes, this is the one where a box of Kleenex would be handy...
w: Paul Cornell / d: Joe Ahearne
1.9 & 1.10 - "The Empty Child" & "The Doctor Dances" 
The first episode to find equilibrium between daft whimsy and creepy sci-fi, future-showrunner
Steven Moffat makes his Who debut to pen an atmospheric and intelligent horror story set during WWII. A gas-masked street urchin stalks the streets of London during the Blitz ("are you my mummy?") scaring homeless kids, while The Doctor searches for a mysterious cylinder lost in time, and Rose encounters a dandy time-traveler from the 51st-century called Captain Jack Harkness (
John Barrowman, later rewarded his own spin-off.) It's disquieting, inventive, has a story grown-ups can sink their teeth into, and totally justifies its two-part format. Bravo!
w: Stephen Moffat / d: James Hawes1.11 - "Boom Town" 
An unwelcome quasi-sequel to the earlier Slitheen two-parter, The Doctor makes a pit-stop at Cardiff Bay to refuel the TARDIS using the "time-rift" he sealed in "The Unquiet Dead". While there, it becomes clear that a surviving Slitheen (
Annette Badland) has become Mayor, intending to leave the planet by harnessing a nuclear power plant's energy. More of a character piece than usual (there's a great scene between Eccleston and Badland's villain in a restaurant), it's just a shame it's all hung on another asinine plot.
w: Russell T. Davies / d: Joe Ahearne1.12 - "Bad Wolf" 
Has there ever been a more dreadful teaser than seeing The Doctor slump down in Big Brother's Diary Room chair? No doubt inspired by Davies' love of reality TV, we're back aboard another budget-saving space station and asked to believe The Weakest Link will still be on on-air (hosted by "Anne Droid", geddit?) thousands of years into the future. It's all silly nonsense that reeked of mothballs the day it aired, and only the final reveal of a Dalek threat rescues it from total failure.
w: Russell T. Davies / d: Joe Ahearne
1.13 - "The Parting Of The Ways" 
A huge leap forward in ambition and scale, the finale of Who's faltering return is the first of many
en masse encounters with the Daleks. The Doctor, Rose and Jack must protect the people of the "Game Station" from, ironically, a flying CGI assault of thousands of Daleks, led by a baritone Emperor version. Some enjoyable moments and ratcheting tension pulls you through clunking moments, while the story even manages to make hazy sense of the "Bad Wolf" motif secreted in many of this year's episodes. The real highlight is, of course, the last-minute regeneration of Eccleston into a grinning David Tennant -- hindsight proving that Eccleston's tenure was something of an expensive dry-run.
w: Russell T. Davies / d: Joe Ahearne