A good old fashioned Doctor Who Community
Always have a soft spot for Genesis. I remember watching the repeat showing in the 1980s and being stunned when my Dad told me that "Ronson" was his art teacher at high school.
Spearhead from Space was one of the first stories I bought on VHS and I watched it so many times, so that's a definite favourite too. Oh, and Ark in Space.
Pyramids of Mars. The City of Death. The Key to Time. Trial of a Timelord. Anytime Jon Pertwee, Roger Delgado and Katy Manning were on screen it was magical.
Oh my, let's see, top 3 stories for each classic doctor, you say?! I'm sure that's exactly what you asked for.
Caveat: these change per what day it is; let's see what we get this time!
The Ark, The Time Meddler, Planet of Giants.
Enemy of the world, The Mind Robber, The War Games.
Can I just pick Inferno three times? What do you mean that's not fair to Jo? Oh alright, The Green Death, and... This last slot is way too hard. Something with the Master in? More Liz? Carnival of Monsters?! Yeah let's go with that.
The Seeds of Doom, The Face of Evil, obviously I'm contractually obligated to include Genesis of the Daleks. Wait I left out like all of Romana. Maybe I should've done top 3 by companion?! Look, City of Death can't go unmentioned at least. There's so many more...
Frontios, Enlightenment, The Visitation
Vengeance on Varos, The Mark of the Rani, The Mysterious Planet
Remembrance of the Daleks, The Curse of Fenric, Survival
(8. The Movie)
Thought of like a dozen honourable mentions on the way, but gonna stick with what came to mind first!
I'm with you with Genesis, apart from that I love The War Games and The Caves of Androzani.. Additionally, I'm quite fond of The Time Meddler, but that is maybe due to the fact that I watched it just recently :-)
Earthshock - Great locations, scary villains, real consequences, fantastic acting.
Four to Doomsday is a close second, for me. It's got so much of what makes Dr Who great, in such a wild weird story.
And on third, beacuse I gotta have a Pertwee episode in my list: Inferno - Over the top acting, weird scifi stuff, escalations on top of escalations, and the Tardis console flying free of the Tardis.
In chronological order it's Terror of the Autons, Pirate Planet, City of the Death, Shada, Warrior's Gate, Keeper of Traken, Logopolis, Castrovalva, Kinda, Earthshock, Revelation and Remembrance of the Daleks, Happiness Patrol.
So from the list you can assume that I like stories that make me laugh and stories that feel like they were written by pretentious grad students.
Glad to see another who likes Ghostlight! Most everybody else I've met thinks it's though.
Your first is always your favorite, so mine is The Robots of Death. Runners up: Nightmare of Eden, State of Decay, The War Games, Mawdryn Undead, Dragonfire
Robots of Death and Mawdryn Undead were definitely in my honourable mentions.
Some of those (definitely Dragonfire) I've only seen once, so need to rectify that.
Too hard to narrow down the entirety of the classic series, so here's one story for each classic Doctor:
The Curse of Fenric is my favourite.
The atmosphere, the monsters, the villain, the performances, everything just comes together spectacularly!
Many have said some brilliant episodes here but I have a massive soft spot for Hartnell's Planet of the Giants. Today the concept of being shrunk down isn't all that novel and we've seen it a bunch of times, but they do some quite clever things with the episode and there is some really great framing shots.
For its time, I think it shows the ingenuity of the teams that were making the show. Even to this day, it is rare you find an episode that plays with the 'Space' part of TARDIS like this one did.
I'd love to see a modern take on this one.