Doctor Who's Top 5 and Bottom 3 Writers

Here's a way to get myself into hot water with readers... One of the things I started thinking about while reading Time Unincorporated, with all its attacks on and defenses of various eras, is the issue of Doctor Who being sold as essentially a writer's medium. After all, even to this day, the writer gets credit right at the top of each episode. As one essay in the book says, Doctor Who is BY someone. So who, then, are the best (and worst) contributors to Doctor Who in that regard?

The following lists are in chronological order going up to the present and then back down to the past. It is not a numbered ranking. Only on-air material credited to that writer has been considered, though script editing or extracanonical novels and audios may act as deciding factors when appropriate. And while I did consider a minimum of 3 classic stories/new series episodes as a minimum contribution, I've tried to differentiate between that contribution's importance/quantity and its quality. That's why you won't find Eric Saward, Terrance Dicks or Russell T Davies in these lists even if the mark they left on the program both as writers and script editors is hugely noticeable. To me, they sit somewhere in the middle quality-wise. Of course, you can make a case for them in the comments section. And of course, all this doesn't take into account how scripts are changed by script editors, production requirements, et al. We all understand the rules? Ok, let's go.

Top 5
David Whitaker
Doctor Who's very first script editor is also credited with 8 stories, each more different than the next. So though I really love John Lucarotti's historicals from the Hartnell era, it's Whitaker who's the real maverick, keeping the show in exploration mode before more formulaic eras move in. He could deserve a place in this list by virtue of the Shakespearean The Crusade alone, but look at what else he's written. The Edge of Destruction is a surreal thriller inside the TARDIS, off putting and ultimately wonderful. In The Rescue, nonsense plot aside, he creates the first new companion and edges the Doctor closer to the role of hero. Many consider The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks the last instances of the Daleks being well used (debatable, but these do tell a story that's about more than "EXTERMINATE!!!"). The Enemy of the World is a rare 2nd Doctor story that doesn't use the base under siege trope, or even an alien monster. While all his stories aren't classics, Whitaker nevertheless delivered on variety even once he wasn't in charge of the script editing. I might go so far as to credit him for the show's ability to reinvent itself, insuring its longevity.

Malcolm Hulke
In Malcolm Hulke, we have a Doctor Who writer who refuses to paint the world in black and white. Best known for creating relatively minor but well-remembered monsters like the Silurians, Sea Devils and Draconians, it is important to note that none of these were ever shown to be "evil" (as the Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans always were). They were societies, with both good and bad elements, peacemongers and warmongers in each. Just as humanity was. Hulke often made the threat come from humans as the Doctor tried desperately to prevent a war. Even in stories that clearly don't work, like Invasion of the Dinosaurs, it's the effects that disappoint, not the characterization. The fall of Mike Yates is proof that even a good man and friend can find himself on the wrong side of an issue (the same could be said of the Brigadier in Silurians). Each of his 8 stories has some element of this, and in general, his extreme left wing politics don't get in the way of the story. The audience still gets to decide who they think is right, if anyone.

Robert Holmes
When people discuss classic Who writers, Bob Holmes invariably comes up on top. Overrated? Only if you say all his stories are brilliant. Let's not forget there's The Space Pirates and The Two Doctors in there. With some 18 credits to his name, as well as a major influence on the Hinchcliffe era's entire canon, Holmes is certainly one of the most important contributors to Who. In terms of quality too. Best known for his "double acts", characters seeded in any given story to channel the writer's ease with banter, Holmes is one of Who's wittier writers. The Talons of Weng-Chiang possibly remains the best Doctor Who story, ever. Holmes created the Autons and Sontarans (neither of which were ever used to good effect by other writers) and created the template for the Time Lords we know today. His other trademarks were retooling classic horror tropes into Doctor Who monsters and satirizing bureaucracy and television itself (going meta-textual on several occasions), all of which he did excessively well.

Paul Cornell
I'm bending my own rules here, because while Paul Cornell's work on New Who does amount to three episodes, they're only really two stories (albeit two extremely good stories). Cornell's here in large part as a representative of the wasteland between classic and new Who. His New Adventures novels are extremely well regarded, with Love and War and Human Nature consistently touted (and not at all without cause) among the best Doctor Who stories ever, in any medium. The former introduced us with one of the best and most loved companions of all time, Bernice Summerfield, who went on to star in her own books and audios. And the latter was adapted as a Series 3 two-parter! His actual on-screen credits are deeply moving, personal stories, with just the right dashes of bravado and strangeness. I don't want him to take time off the great work he's doing at DC Comics these days, but I'd love him to pen more episodes down the line.

Steven Moffat
Before he became Doctor Who's showrunner, Steven Moffat had already won a place on this list thanks to his intricate and clever time travel plots and for laying more subtext than we'd seen since Ghost Light. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is a sexual commentary on the series, and Time Crash a brief, but satisfying love letter to it. Blink is a masterpiece of plotting, and The Girl in the Fireplace a wonderful fairy tale. And of course, there's the mysterious River Song, frustrating some who don't want the Doctor to take part in sexual politics, but intriguing most (enough so my Who Is River Song? post still gets dozens of hits every day). And the fear factor! Monsters under you bed, "Are you my mummy?", don't blink or the statues'll get you! All of this he brought to Series 5 - a clever series-long (and beyond) time travel plot, a fairy tale quality, more River than ever, creepy monsters (the Cyberman head ALONE...), loving references to classic Who, and subtext up the wazoo. We're in good hands right now.

And now for the bottom. The same rules apply, though the order now descends back through time. I must say I tried to get a New Who writer on there, but even the weakest could at least match the stories of those I left in the middle somewhere. Helen Rayner, for example, saves herself with two good Torchwood stories, even if her Doctor Who 2-parters had some dodgy ideas. Again, I realize that bad scripts might have been saved by the showrunner, the production team or the actors, just as some of the writers singled out below might have been let down by the same. Still, if your credit's gonna be at the front of the episode, you're gonna get blamed.

Bottom 3
Pip and Jane Baker
The Bakers don't have an ear for dialog, which is a big part of why they're here. Even in their interviews on their stories' DVD extras, they coo and flaunt the way they like to be educational and have kids scurry off to check their dictionaries to find out what a particular word means. That's not a bad thing in itself, except they have every single character talk that way. The 6th Doctor has that in his baggage (largely because Colin Baker... another dictionary-minded Baker!), but when everyone does it, there's really no sense that the Bakers are writing for different characters. Dialog via thesaurus, and to the point where even the most mundane conversation sounds like technobabble. Not that they're guiltless when it comes to bad plotting. While Terror of the Vervoids isn't too bad an Agatha Christie mystery, fluffy though it might be, they still have to account for what most fans consider the worst Doctor Who story ever - Time and the Rani. Not that Mark of the Rani makes any sense either.

Christopher Bidmead
Chris Bidmead's particular sin is thinking that his interest in math and computing are in any way interesting to a Doctor Who audience. He's only credited for three stories, two of them - Logopolis and Castrovalva - surreal math/computer metaphors. And you know, I can't remember a single thing about Frontios. Now, these stories all have good elements, and with distance there's a certain aesthetic interest in entropy coinciding with the 4th Doctor's departure from the series. The math puzzles (TARDIS within a TARDIS, the universe sustained my mathematicians calculating the universe's equation, etc.) are intriguing, but on repeat viewings are boredom-inducing. In the same way that I praised some script editors above, I have to admit some of my distaste for Bidmead lies in his own script editing during the 4th Doctor's last season. His tack was to dial back on the comedy/silliness injected by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker, but the pendulum need not have swung so far back! He robbed the Doctor, Romana and K9 of much of their natural humor and replaced with discussions about recursion and mathematical concepts (introducing e-space and Adric into the mix). Just the wrong instincts.

Terry Nation
What?! I've got the creator of the Daleks on here?!? Why yes, I do. For one thing, it is debatable whether Terry Nation deserves as much credit as he does for the Daleks. He scribbled on a page that they should look completely inhuman, be encased inside a machine, and move without apparent means of locomotion, leaving it to the now-embittered production designer Raymond Cusick to interpret. What made the Daleks overnight sensations then? Their look or their first story? Because it's important to say that their first story is one of Nation's only stories. He repeats almost beat for beat in Planet of the Daleks, and elements from it come up again and again throughout his work. Plagues, postwar wastelands, barely characterized female characters (he once told his script editor he couldn't write for them), ramping up the danger only to resort to a cop-out solution, invisible aliens (I don't get this one, but it's shown up much too often), Flash Gordon physics and planets named after their plot function (Aridius is a desert and Mechanus is where the characters meet abandoned robots). His other "story" is the serial that has the characters running from environment to environment with barely a plot in place. The Keys of Marinus, The Chase and The Daleks' Masterplan all fall into this category. In one episode, you might have Barbara and Ian fighting a living jungle (also a common trope of his), and in the next, the Doctor is involved in a court case. Not only do these force the production crew to cut corners to achieve this production design extravaganza, but they barely keep the audience from noticing there's no story at all. According to the many DVD extras I've consumed, it seems that Nation often "phoned in" scripts, writing them in a matter of days, and often just submitting outlines for the editor to fill out. Consequently, I must assume the quality of Genesis of the Daleks is all up to Bob Holmes, and the funny bits in Destiny of the Daleks obvious Douglas Adams additions. But at some point, Nation didn't want the Daleks to be used unless he wrote them, so... we got what we got because the show's most popular monsters were held at ransom.

But you might not agree or have your own horses to praise or flog. You know what to do.