Love & Monsters (Doctor Who)

Love & Monsters is an episode from the second revived season of Doctor Who. Though it features David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor and Billie Piper as Rose Tyler, this is a "Doctor Lite" episode focusing on guest character Elton Pope, played by Mark Warren.

Plot
Elton Pope, who is obsessed with the Doctor after a childhood encounter, joins a like-minded group of people named LINDA. The group is soon taken over by the mysterious Victor Kennedy, who tasks them with finding the Doctor, while secretly absorbing the members as his alter-ego, the Abzorbaloff.

Why It’s Hate and Aliens

 * 1) The episode clearly has no idea how to make the "Doctor Lite" concept work, and ends up being pretty aimless. Basically nothing happens until Victor Kennedy shows up twenty minutes in, and what follows isn't much better.
 * 2) While the episode tries to be a tribute to Doctor Who fans, the LINDA members end up being shown as anti-social weirdos who have no lives outside of their interest in the Doctor. None of them aside from Elton and Ursula are very memorable, either.
 * 3) The episode begins with a stupid-looking chase scene that looks like something out of Scooby-Doo.
 * 4) The Abzorbaloff, a fat green humanoid who runs around wearing a thong and absorbing people, is one of the most ridiculous monsters in the show's entire history. If it sounds like the kind of thing a ten-year-old kid would think of, that's because it actually was, as part of a competition to create a monster who would appear on the show.
 * 5) Peter Kay's performance as the Abzorbaloff is simply awful. Even Kay himself later admitted it was the worst performance of his entire career, and that he regretted taking part in the episode.
 * 6) Jackie Tyler's attempts to seduce Elton are really uncomfortable to watch. If their roles were reversed, Elton would likely have gotten arrested for sexual harrassment.
 * 7) When the Doctor and Rose finally show up near the end, their first act is to berate Elton for upsetting Jackie. This happens right after Elton's watched the woman he loves and all his friends be absorbed and effectively killed, which is spectacularly poor timing on the episode's part.
 * 8) The ending reveals that Ursula has been brought back to life as a face embedded in a paving slab, and this is somehow treated as a happy ending, even though being a largely-immobile face was the exact same fate she'd have had if she'd stayed a part of the Abzorbaloff's body.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Elton is a decent substitute lead character.
 * 2) It was cool to see the events of certain Season 1 episodes relived from the viewpoint of an average guy.
 * 3) Writer Russell T. Davies has said that the episode should be treated as a story told by Elton rather than taken at face value, making it possible to dismiss the episode (especially Ursula's fate) as the ramblings of a mentally unstable guy.

Reception
The episode currently has the third-lowest IMDb user score of the revived series - narrowly ahead of the following story, Fear Her, and Season 9's Sleep No More - prior to Season 11 (when the revival was generally seen to have jumped the shark) and earned the lowest BBC Audience Appreciation scores of any post-2005 episode.

Several internet critics have strongly negative opinions of the episode, including Linkara of Atop the Fourth Wall and Nash of WTFIWWY, who both consider this the worst episode of the revived or original Doctor Who series.