Doctor Who is synonymous with time travel TV shows. Its entire premise revolves around a near-immortal alien who lives in a blue box that can travel to any point in history, whether in the distant past or thousands of years in the future. After more than 15 incarnations of the Doctor and over 60 years on the air, Doctor Who has become a pop culture staple. With that longevity and a premise built around temporal adventure, considering it the go-to time travel TV series makes perfect sense.
However, while Doctor Who’s reputation as the best time travel sci-fi show out there is understandable, that doesn’t mean it is deserved. Much like Star Trek: The Original Series and small-screen space operas, there is a strong argument that Doctor Who being considered the greatest time travel series by so many viewers rests more on its legacy than how effectively it utilizes the concept. Its influence is enormous, but influence and quality aren’t the same thing.
Plenty of time travel TV shows explore wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff much better than Doctor Who ever has. Interestingly, the two best arrived within years of one another in the 2010s. Doctor Who may be a hugely entertaining sci-fi show, but when discussing time travel series, it pales in comparison to Dark and 12 Monkeys. Both make temporal mechanics central to their storytelling rather than simply a route to the next adventure and, in the process, prove that Doctor Who is far from the best time travel TV show.
Dark Is The Best Time Travel TV Show Ever Made
Doctor Who may have the reputation as the greatest time travel show as far as pop culture is concerned, but that reputation becomes much harder to defend after watching Dark. The German Netflix series arrived in 2017 and begins with the disappearance of a child in the small town of Winden, gradually expanding into an intricate story about a mysterious temporal phenomenon. What initially looks like a missing-person mystery eventually becomes one of TV’s most ambitious explorations of what happens when someone messes with the timeline.
At the center of Dark’s winding story is Jonas (Louis Hofmann), whose investigation reveals that Winden’s caves contain a passage connecting three different points in time, with each being 33 years apart. This is already an intriguing diversion from machines like The TARDIS, which dominate the genre, but Dark goes even further by treating time travel less like a convenient storytelling device and more like a system with consequences. Characters repeatedly discover that attempts to change history can actually become the events that created it, producing a tightly constructed causal loop.
That approach allows Dark to make its time travel genuinely consequential in a way it rarely, if ever, is in Doctor Who. The Netflix show moves between 1953, 1986, 2019 and other periods while gradually revealing how seemingly unrelated events connect. Later seasons expand this temporal mystery box even further, introducing parallel realities without abandoning the show’s emphasis on cause and effect. Almost every revelation recontextualizes something that came before, and to call it addictive viewing is an understatement.
That is where Dark surpasses Doctor Who and is undeniably the best time travel show ever made. The latter can use time travel to visit virtually any era and create almost any kind of adventure, but its flexibility can also make temporal mechanics feel secondary. Dark makes time itself the central mystery. Its rules, paradoxes, and consequences are inseparable from the story, creating a level of cohesion that few time travel shows have matched.
12 Monkeys Has Much Better Time Travel Rules Than Doctor Who
Pointing out that Dark is a better time travel TV show than Doctor Who makes sense to anyone who has seen the German Netflix series. It is nothing short of phenomenal, and few sci-fi shows in any subgenre can truly stand up to it. However, Dark was not the moment that pushed Doctor Who from the time travel top spot. That happened two years earlier, when Syfy’s 12 Monkeys debuted in 2015.
Based loosely on the 1995 film, 12 Monkeys follows James Cole (Aaron Stanford), a time traveler sent from a devastated future to prevent the plague that destroyed civilization. Dr. Cassandra Railly (Amanda Schull) becomes his crucial ally as the pair attempt to understand and stop the forces responsible. Unlike Doctor Who, 12 Monkeys immediately establishes firm rules for its time travel and consistently makes those rules matter.
12 Monkeys understands that changing the past should have consequences, but it also recognizes that a time travel story needs internal consistency. Events frequently appear to contradict one another before the show reveals how they fit together. Its characters can become trapped in seemingly impossible causal chains, yet those mysteries are resolved through the central mechanisms of 12 Monkeys’ interpretation of time travel rather than being ignored when the plot moves on.
The result is one of the most convincing depictions of time travel on television. 12 Monkeys delivers increasingly mind-bending temporal twists while maintaining a coherent narrative, making its apparent paradoxes part of the design instead of loose ends. Doctor Who has produced some brilliant time travel stories, but its looser approach to the science and rules behind its temporal adventures feels borderline shallow when compared to 12 Monkeys‘ carefully constructed system.
Time Travel Isn’t Even The Best Part Of Doctor Who
Time travel may be an essential aspect of Doctor Who, but taking a step back reveals that it is far from the show’s best element. The adventures where the Doctor and companions encounter famous historical figures, witness pivotal moments, or explore distant futures are often entertaining. However, those stories aren’t why the series is iconic. The show’s greatest strength is the enormous fictional universe and decades of accumulated lore that the Doctor’s ability to travel through time allows it to explore.
Doctor Who’s aliens and monsters are arguably far more important to its identity than any jaunt to a historical figure or encounter with a famous figure from yesteryear. The Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels and countless other creatures have become recognizable pieces of science-fiction culture in their own right. The same applies to the mythology surrounding the Doctor himself, from regeneration and Gallifrey to the Time Lords, the TARDIS and the character’s complicated relationship with humanity.
Doctor Who should absolutely be applauded for turning time travel into the foundation of decades of inventive TV adventures. However, that’s not enough for it to the best time travel series, especially when temporal travel isn’t the best thing about it. Its greatest achievement is arguably everything it has built around the concept: its mythology, characters and boundless sense of adventure. When thinking about the show in terms of time travel alone, Dark and 12 Monkeys make its reputation as the genre’s definitive champion considerably more perplexing.
- Release Date
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1963 – 1989-00-00
- Network
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BBC One, BBC Television
- Directors
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Douglas Camfield, David Maloney, Christopher Barry, Michael E. Briant, Barry Letts, Michael Ferguson, Peter Moffatt, Richard Martin, Chris Clough, Lennie Mayne, Pennant Roberts, Ron Jones, Paddy Russell, Paul Bernard, Michael Hayes, Timothy Combe, Morris Barry, Graeme Harper, Gerald Blake, Hugh David, Mervyn Pinfield, Rodney Bennett, Waris Hussein, John Gorrie
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Barry Jackson
Gordon Lowery
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This story originally appeared on Screenrant
