The Doctors From Doctor Who Ranked Worst To Best

Arguing about which version of The Doctor is best on Doctor Who is nearly as old as the half-century-plus-running BBC series itself. It's a timelord-honored tradition that has been going on since William Hartnell laid down the mantle after four seasons (or "series" as they're called in the Doctor's adopted home of Cardiff). There's almost no doubt that fanboys of the distant past were yelling from opposite camps across the Troughton Divide.

Fighting over the minutiae is one of the best parts of fandom, and decades of television have built up plenty of fractures among a massive and ever-growing legion of fans. It's likely somewhat true that your Doctor allegiances are shaped by age and initial exposure — like fellow television dinosaur Saturday Night Live, you come to think whatever you saw first was best — but that doesn't mean we can't try to put our rational brains on to make an effort at creating a real, official and unimpeachable ranking of the Doctors.

We followed Stephen Moffat and spent years creasing our brows over interdimensional astronauts while plotting out timelines with red twine. It shouldn't be much harder to strain our brains and put the Doctors in their proper order.

So, let's get to it. Allons-y!

Poor Paul never had a chance. He only appeared onscreen as the Doctor once, in a reviled made-for-television movie that undermined attempts to bring back the Time Lord for years. While McGann's performance as a romantic, frilly take on the Doctor could be seen as a precursor to the nu-Who love stories, his time as the Doctor amounted to little more than a failed pilot episode, a footnote in the long history of Who.

His time inside the TARDIS can be easily counted in minutes, so he has to land at the back of the pack.

(For those thinking that McGann got short shrift, or who loved his ruffled iteration of the Doctor, it's worth noting that the Eighth Doctor got quite a bit of play in the show's extended universe. Audio dramas, novelizations and comic books delve into his confusing and fractured timeline. But those aren't what we're discussing here.)

The Doctor knows more about most things than the people around him, but he should never be above it all. That's a lesson that Sylvester McCoy and the creative team behind Doctor Who learned the hard way as they rode the series into the ground.

McCoy's erudite and self-important take on the Doctor rubbed viewers the wrong way and they abandoned the show in droves. The BBC did the formerly unthinkable and put the show out of its misery in 1989. To make matters worse, the Doctor was unceremoniously killed by gang members in a future San Francisco, playing into some of the grossest aspects of media during the period's crime panic.

While the Seventh Doctor got a second life in novelizations that sated Who fans during the interregnum, McCoy would go down as the actor who went down with his police box until Russell T. Davies revived the series in the '00s.

Stern, stentorian and grandfatherly, William Hartnell's Doctor Who came off as an intergalactic Mr. Wizard. He launched the series and is deservedly beloved for being the first person to don that mysterious moniker that lends us the title of the show, but no one thinks of him first when they try to pull up "The Doctor."

Hartnell made the series a success, allowing it to continue well past its sell-by date and stick in the brains of a younger generation of creatives who helmed the New Who years. For that alone, he should be praised.

However, he was followed by his granddaughter and two schoolteachers, and early episodes were appropriately schoolmarmish. The series was a long way from dinosaurs on a spaceship, leaning into the educational nature of the show. His stilted and cold take on the traveling alien emphasized the latter half of that phrase and left the warm, human-loving parts to be fleshed out by actors that followed.

What if the Doctor broke bones as well as he set them? That's the conceit at the heart of Jon Pertwee's Doctor, a savvy and dapper martial artist who read like a sci-fi twist on Britain's most recognizable cultural export.

Pertwee's tenure upped the action and laid the groundwork for big blowout episodes that would come with larger budgets in the aughts. Pertwee played the Doctor as a scrapper and a scientist, making him equally quick with a gadget or a fist. The Third Doctor was angry due to being forced to hang around Earth, venting via Venusian Aikido and diving into his off-Earth adventures with all the more gusto.

His tenure is an important building block in several other ways, marking the first appearance of Sarah Jane Smith as a companion, introducing the Doctor's Gallifreyan nemesis the Master, and reviving the Daleks as primary antagonists. Still, his tenure is firmly in the middle of the pack, reversed neutron flow or no.

Live by the Moffat, die by the Moffat. Matt Smith's eccentric and noodly performance as the Doctor rode the highs of his head writer's penchant for stirring speech, front-loading his run with memorable standoffs and scenery-chewing shouting matches. However, Smith was also in the main role when Stephen Moffat spiraled the series into a convoluted mess that couldn't just be waved away with "wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff."

For many of the episodes, Smith is a perfect first Doctor for the show's intended audience: children. His giddy joy over dinosaurs on a spaceship and his wonder at seeing the perseverance of people well into the future makes him an ideal hero for a child. However, much of that goodwill is squandered by byzantine plot lines that can be difficult to square even as an adult.

To follow the story of the Doctor, Amy and Rory late in Matt Smith's tenure was a good way to risk a nosebleed, but the highs of his first appearance and a chills-inducing staredown between the Doctor and every major villain were worth the headache.

Christopher Eccleston gives us some idea of how a longer run for John Hurt's War Doctor would play out. The first Doctor of the Doctor Who revival played the character with all the weight of the Time War on his shoulders. His outfit reflected his brooding nature, suiting the alien traveler up in a leather jacket and topping it off with an angry stare. His take on the Doctor preceded the grimdark era of genre movies, but his performance can be seen as an early adopter of that gritty style of reimagining.

In particular, he earns his dour attitude in the modern classic episode "The Doctor Dances." His harsh demeanor cracks when he learns that his crew has managed to set things right without causing death and destruction. In an instantly iconic moment, Eccleston turns to the camera with a maniacal grin on his face and shouts "Just this once, everybody lives!" His tenure on Who brought the show back to life and that one crack allowed light to shine into the series as they barreled toward one of the series' most adored leads.

Tom G.D. Baker. What can we even say? If you're over a certain age, his wooly hair and long scarf are bound to be the image in your mind's eye when you recall the Doctor. He's lodged there for more reasons than the fact that he held the position longer than any other actor, though that certainly doesn't hurt his case for  "Best Doctor Ever."

Tom Baker hit the perfect balance between a compassionate and human-loving leader and an odd outsider with a whimsical view of the universe. Baker handled everything from the creeping horror of his early seasons to the zippy and fantastical scripts penned by legendary author Douglas Adams. In all ways, from the comical horror camp of "The Brain of Morbius" to the high weirdness of "City of Death," from K9 to Romana, Baker's tenure highlighted what the series does best. Even better, he did it with a grin on his face and jelly babies in his hand.