Doctor Who/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


YMMVs for the TV series

  • Alas, Poor Scrappy: Adric.
  • Alas, Poor Villain: Quite a few of these.
    • In particular the Master. In "The End of Time", it was revealed the drumming in his head (that had tormented him his entire life and led to him being totally unhinged) was in fact put there by Rassilon for his own purposes. At that point, some just really wanted to give him a big damn hug, so when he went out in a vengeful blaze with that "get out of the way" it didn't help at all.
    • Even a freaking DALEK gets one in the episode "Dalek", giving one last, rather morose-sounding "Exterminate!" before blowing itself up out of self-loathing.
    • The Minotaur in "The God Complex".
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • The Tenth Doctor. Lonely, messianic, all-forgiving, pacifist woobie martyr with a Guilt Complex and a generally jovial, exuberant, happy-go-lucky and sociable personality? Or flippant, narcissist, self-righteous, self-pitying hypocrite with a god complex, serious anger management issues and a tendency to drive people away, whose manic personality and preemptive excuses (as opposed to actual apologies) are just a mask for a borderline sociopathic, ancient alien? Or both: a genuinely tragic, conflicted Byronic Hero who's too alien to receive much comfort from the love of humans but human enough to be hurt by their rejection?
      • The Eleventh Doctor. Chipper, silly puppy dog who crafts magical Christmases for children? Or violent genocidal maniac in a fez, willing to slaughter his enemies on a whim and let the Earth die if he's not in the mood to save it?
    • Christina's meant to be seen as a adrenaline junkie Femme Fatale with a heart of gold but can be more easily seen as a borderline sociopath when you notice she had no regrets about getting her partner arrested, is extremely selfish, arguably kissed the Doctor just to manipulate him and only wanted to come along because the police were about to catch her.
    • Amy. Is she simply a quirky fun-loving young woman, or secretly rather unbalanced due to her abandonment by the Doctor and the mental manipulations she's gone though? And are her wedding jitters normal for a 21 year old or a sign she doesn't really love or deserve Rory?
    • Some fans theorize that Rassilon was benevolent at one point, partially because he was one of the founders of Time Lord Society, and partly because there is canon of another Time Lord whose dark side attempted a takeover.
    • The classic series has its share of this as well. For example, the Seventh Doctor is generally considered to be The Chessmaster, but there's some evidence that suggests that he actually doesn't really know what he's doing at all but just happens to be very good at Xanatos Speed Chess, making everyone to think he's pulling all the strings for his own reasons.
    • The Bad Wolf. Is it Rose using the power of the time vortex to save the Doctor, or the time vortex controlling the mind of Rose to stop the Daleks?
      • Or given the events of The Doctor's Wife is it in fact the will of the TARDIS?

Bad Wolf: I want you safe. My Doctor.

    • The Beast from "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit". Is it actually the Whoniverse's version of the Devil, who fought before time against the followers of God, the Disciples of Light, and has inspired all the devils in every religion? Or is the Beast simply an incredibly powerful and evil being who lies to cash in on fears of religion's Satanic figures, so that the scared humans are more easy to defeat and influence? There's evidence for both, and by the end even the Doctor doesn't seem completely sure.
    • This YouTube video of a Doctor Who Confidential offers one for Madame Kovarian: a woman "of a certain age" who never had any children of her own. It seems to be suggesting that not only will Melody/River be raised to be a weapon, but also that Madame Kovarian intends to make Melody/River into something of a Mommy's Little Villain.
    • The First Doctor. Is his impatience and grumpiness and general abrasiveness because he is old and had a life hard lived, or because he is a young man trying to seem much more important than he is?
    • The series on a whole- is it about an ancient alien travelling time and space in a dimensionally trancendient box, or is it about the people who he travels with and how he changes them? Arguments could be made for both sides.
  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Bizarre example—the announcement of Matt Smith provoked cries of "That one's too young!" (to use the Doctor's own words) and "He's wrong for the role!" Then him eccentrically wiggling his fingers in a interview managed to win over the majority of those who initially objected to his casting (such as the many who were hoping for Patterson Joseph).
    • About Matt Smith again, those that weren't sold by the interview (or didn't see it) were won over by the first videos of his actual acting—specifically, this preview. Pretty much everyone who was still on the fence was instantly converted.
    • The new series as a whole received a shot of enthusiasm in the arm when it was announced that 'proper' actor Christopher Eccleston had been cast as the Doctor after a long period of worrying tabloid stories about various light-entertainment stars being rumored for the role.
    • The Russell T Davies era securing the rights to use the Daleks after their participation had been questioned by the estate of their late creator assuaged many fans' fears.
    • For some, the announcement of Steven Moffat as showrunner following Russell T Davies' departure.
    • Also, Neil Gaiman writing for Series 6.
  • Angst Dissonance: Due to the diverse nature of the show's ever-changing mixture of characters and actors, some fans react differently to angst-related scenarios than others. The somewhat angst-ridden relationships between the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler (particularly after she is trapped in the alternate earth) and the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald are not supported by some fans.
  • Angst? What Angst?:
    • The Doctor tends to ignore the fact that he just died to near-pathological levels when he regenerates.
    • Eleven in general in comparison to both Nine and Ten. It's shown in series 6 he still has guilt for what he did to Rose, Martha and Donna as well as the loss of the Time Lords, however.
  • Anvilicious: Yeah, painting the TARDIS pink in The Happiness Patrol was probably a bit on-the-nose...
    • Looking back, the 1988-1989 series in general can be a bit too unsubtle about how 'right-on' politically they are. In 2010, the producers admitted that they'd been directly opposed to Margaret Thatcher and had been working to do their bit to help bring her down—which led to a certain amount of derision, partly because the viewing audience at this time wasn't exactly a massively influential voting block (comprised primarily of kids and hardcore fans), but mostly because thanks to this trope, this was hardly a secret.
    • To a lesser extent, if you started a drinking game about how many times Rory being a nurse got brought up, you'd be drunk very quickly.
  • Arc Fatigue: With the finale of the sixth series, Moffat has run into this for River and the Silents/Silence, if critical reviews are any indication.
  • Archive Panic: Oh boy where do we begin? At the start of 2017, the TV series alone stands at a whopping 832 episodes split into 264 serials across 35 seasons. Watch (or listen to) one serial a week and you'll finish the classic series in a little over three years. Watch/listen to one serial a day, and you'll finish the entire show in just under a year. There's a reason the show reset the season and episode counters to 1 when it started up again in 2005.
  • Ass Pull: It seems the Doctor has a knack for saving the day through some trick of space, time, the TARDIS, or his sonic screwdriver about which we've never heard before, and may not ever hear of again, though sometimes, a trick might get resurrected later, just to add a bit of continuity.
    • Also, Peri's random save against existence failure. Actress Nicola Bryant didn't even know about this until years later, to boot!
  • Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: Doctors 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 11.
  • Awesome Ego:
  • Base Breaker: Depending on the fan or story, Davros is either an Ensemble Darkhorse or The Scrappy. "Genesis Of The Daleks" is widely considered one of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time, but his inevitable overexposure from being brought back in every Dalek story of the classic series since made a lot of fans wish he'd go away and let the Daleks take centre stage again.
    • Rose, although she's generally well liked in her first series.
    • Pick a Doctor, any Doctor. There will be people who love him and people who think he ruined the show FOREVER. Yes, even THAT Doctor.
    • River Song. It only got worse during series six, to say nothing of the finale, which appears to have set the internet aflame.
    • Amy Pond. There are actually people who have stopped watching the show altogether because of her, as they feel she's turned it into "Amy Pond and Her Boys". Her mistreatment of Rory and coming on to (including forcing herself on/kissing)/flirting with the Doctor is a turn-off for some people.
    • Jenny (AKA the Doctor's Daughter). Good lord, Jenny. She's either completely hated, or she absolutely has to return for another episode.
  • Black Hole Sue: Clara, to a painful degree. Intros for episodes with her even refer to her as "The girl who saves the Doctor." And she does save him, and the day... over and over and over again, essentially turning the Doctor into her Companion.
  • Broken Base: For every fan that likes something in this show, there is a fan that hates it, and vice versa. Just look at the Who entries under Awesome, Narm, Tear Jerker, etc. The overlap is something like 90%.
  • Cargo Ship: Some fans pair Doctor and sonic screwdriver.
    • The show itself pairs the Doctor and the TARDIS.
  • Complete Monster: Now has its own page.
  • Crazy Awesome: Pretty much every Doctor.
    • Also, Vincent van Gogh. He's the only person who can see the Monster of the Week. So he stabs it with his easel. It works.
    • Some of River's stunts are this. Highlights include jumping out of an airlock, confident that the Doctor would show up to save her and defacing the oldest mountain in the universe to leave a message for him. Oh, and fighting Nazis with regeneration.
    • John Simm's Master.
  • Creator's Pet: Rose was victim to this after she left Ten.
    • River is another case.
    • Adric.
  • Crossover Ship: Amy Pond has a couple of fanon Crossover Ships with some popularity:
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Has its own page.
  • Cult Classic: The Seventh Doctor's tenure, which had the lowest ratings from the series' history but a very loyal fanbase.
  • Damsel Scrappy: Tegan, Mel.
  • Die for Our Ship: The new series upped the (previously unspoken) romantic side of traveling through space and time with a heroic, dashing genius, with each companion dealing with it in their own way. Of course, everyone has their favorites.
  • Dork Age: Obviously the 16 years when the show was off the air (TV movie aside), though many fans tend to agree that "The Trial of a Time Lord" and then Sylvester McCoy's first season are the low point of when the show actually was airing.
  • Dry Docking: The fandom has "Stay away from the Doctor!"
  • Dude, Not Funny: After a while, John Simm's Master's jokes stop being funny and start being more along the lines of horrifying.
  • Ear Worm: The theme tune.
    • The Master's drumbeat.
  • Ending Fatigue: The 15-minute farewell scenes in "The End of Time".
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
    • From Classic Who, both the Daleks and Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. Both originally intended as one-off characters in the 1960's. Guess what? They've both appeared on television since Doctor Who's revival (the Daleks ongoing and the latter on the Spin-Off The Sarah Jane Adventures in 2008, fifteen years after his last televised appearance).
    • Within just one episode, the Weeping Angels were heavily regarded as the show's most terrifying villains. Even more so than the Daleks, just from the sheer paranoia factor. Time of the Angels/Flesh and Stone only increased their popularity (except among certain fans who screamed Ruined FOREVER at some of the changes).
      • Yet another creation from Blink is also widely beloved: Sally Sparrow.
    • Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead's Monster of the Week, the Vashta Narada, have turned out to be one of the most popular in the entire new run, arguably only being bested by The Weeping Angels. A loyal section of the fanbase has been clamboring for their return.
    • Eleven's Fez.
    • Despite Sharaz Jek only appearing in The Caves of Androzani and dying in the final episode, he's arguably one of the most popular side characters in the show's history.
    • Wilfred Mott. He attacked a Dalek with a paint gun. He was so popular that he was brought back as The Doctor's companion for "The End of Time".
    • Captain Jack Harkness was popular enough to get his own show after just five episodes.
    • Although thus far they've only shown up for one episode, and didn't get very much screen time within it, Madame Vastra, the Lesbian Victorian Silurian Detective and her partner-slash-servant are incredibly popular, with the fandom begging for a spin-off.
    • Canton Delaware III is another recent example. Partly due to the fact that it's very hard to forget an ex-FBI agent from 1969 who wants to marry a black man.
    • Yet another recent example is Craig Owens, The Doctor's roommate in The Lodger, who gained a lot of popularity based on the excellent chemistry between James Corden and Matt Smith. And the Fandom Rejoiced when it was announced that the Doctor would go back and visit him.
  • Epileptic Trees: Series 5 has, thus far, generated reams of fan theories, ranging from very clever, probably right ones, to the fact that the barely legible text of the library card in "The Vampires of Venice" has a slightly wrong post code on it.
    • Series 6 has followed in suit, and the Spoilers Wild Mass Guessing page had to be broken down into folders sorting the different type of speculation- e.g. the Silence, Rory's Death, who is River, etc.
  • Escapist Character: The Doctor and his companions.
  • Ethnic Scrappy: The council worker in "Fear Her".
  • Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: The Happiness Patrol is the most (over)analyzed story in the history of Doctor Who. Is it a biting criticism of Thatcher? Is it about homophobia? Is it a satire of runaway commercialism smothering society? Is it just plain crap? Or all of the above? Just about the only thing anyone can agree with is that it features a candy robot that kills people.
  • Fanon: Pretty much every question that's gone unanswered has fan theories, some more widely accepted than others.
  • Fashion Victim Villain: Eric Roberts' Master always dresses for the occasion.
  • Fountain of Memes:
    • The Eleventh Doctor has a meme now. Memes are cool.
    • As of series 5, the Angels have started becoming this.
  • Genius Bonus: The word "TARDIS" is a play on the Latin word "tardus", meaning "slow".
    • A more obscure example, overlapping with Historical In-Joke is the "Bad Wolf" arc: the first time Rose is referred to as the "bad wolf" is in 1869, a time during which she was mistaken for a prostitute because of her makeup. At the time, "she-wolf" was slang for "prostitute".
  • Growing the Beard: Being that the series has a few decades of history, it's a bit inevitable that there have been a lot of times when the show's quality gets lower a few times and then back up later. The most notable are the Second Doctor compared to the first, the Sixth Doctor's second season (Season 23, Trial of a Time Lord), Seventh Doctor's second (Season 25), and Tenth Doctor's, you guessed it, second season (Series 3/Season 29).
    • Some fans would argue that the new series in general was a beard growth compared to the eighties and nineties, and others see it as the point where the show was Ruined FOREVER.
    • The Second Doctor was a noticeable improvement on the First, making stories more action-orientated, and spreading his influence to every other Doctor after that.
      • And The First Doctor's second serial, The Daleks, is seen as where the show really took off. As opposed to the rather dull first serial involving Cave Men.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • The little girl in "Day of the Moon" being forgotten about only to find herself sick and dying in New York could be bad enough, until you realise this is a young River Song and the baby Amy was pregnant with. It also leads into the attempted murder of the Doctor.
    • At the end of The Time Monster, when the Doctor states that eternal torment was something he'd never subject anything to. About that...
    • The scene of Rory sadly playing with the dream!cot in Amy's Choice is made even more heartbreaking by what happens in series 6.
    • In early episodes, it's shown that the Doctor's worst fear is worlds burning down. See Doctor, there's this certain time war that you'll stop...
  • Hell Is That Noise: The attack prayer of the Headless Monks.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: In "World War Three", Jackie banters about how the Doctor and Rose should be knighted and wonders whether or not the Doctor even eats normal food.
    • In Day of the Moon, Richard Nixon asks the Doctor if he'll be remembered in the future. The Doctor, wishing to remain coy on the details, simply replies that "they'll never forget about [Nixon]" and "say hello to David Frost for me". Two episodes later, the Doctor has an encounter with a being voiced by Michael Sheen, who played David Frost in Frost/Nixon.
    • In a Black Comedy sense, Rory tells Alaya in Cold Blood that he trusts the Doctor with his life. That proved not to be a great idea.
  • Holy Shit Quotient: The series does outdo itself constantly in this area due to thrills and scares, but very few can compare to the sudden reemergence of the TIME LORDS in the final scene of The End of Time Part One, and their Title Drop of just what they plan to do.
    • Specifically, when the viewer gets out ahead of the plot on that one and realizes what's coming just soon enough to scream 'HOLY SHIT' about twenty times before the event actually happens.
  • Ho Yay: Has its own page.
  • Hype Backlash: Fandom example. Rose was a fine character on her own, but when Martha was frequently compared to her by both the show and the fanbase, even some of the people who liked her have come to see her as The Scrappy.
  • I Am Not Shazam: The main character's name is "The Doctor", not "Doctor Who".
  • Internet Backdraft: The reveal that the person cast as the companion for Series 7 is appearing to be another white woman had several fans upset, to say the least. It doesn't help that the previous potential companion was a woman of color who was killed off.
  • Iron Woobie:
    • Since the revival, the Doctor.
    • Amy.
    • In Series 5's "The Big Bang", Rory spends 1894 years alone guarding his in-suspended-animation fiancee in a giant metal box keeping it safe from outside influences, following it wherever it is taken and writing himself into the myths and legends of a dozen civilizations in the process.
      • Then in Series 6, he has to deal with all his memories of 2,000 years threatening to overwhealm him, the constant suggestion that Amy prefers the Doctor over him (she doesn't), his wife dissolving into goo, then his child dissolving into goo, and then the revelation that River is his daughter. Poor guy.
  • Jerkass Woobie:
  • Like You Would Really Do It: Every time The Master is killed off. Ditto for the Daleks.
    • Series 6 is hinting very strongly that the Doctor is going to die For Realsies This Time and it in fact begins with a future version of the Eleventh Doctor apparently getting shot to death and cremated. Since this would bring the entire series to an end, all but a few are pretty convinced he'll get around it somehow—the question lies in what the 'somehow' in question will be.
  • Magnificent Bastard: So very many. The Master pretty much takes home the gold, though. Davros gets the silver. Madam Kovarian gets the bronze.
  • Mary Sue: There are arguments for any number of companions, not to mention the Doctor. Take a look at the list of traits and you'll find that the Doctor has quite a few. Proof that Tropes Are Not Bad.
    • And then there's Clara, proof that sometimes they're absolutely terrible.
  • Memetic Badass: Rory "Chuck Norris" Williams.
  • Memetic Mutation: EVERYONE is a Time Lord.
    • And everyone in Series 5 is a duck.
    • Eleven has a meme now. Memes are cool.
    • Every second of the Doctor Who cast and crew's 500 Miles music video.
    • See the memes page for a more complete list.
  • Memetic Outfit: Every Doctor's uniform is iconic of that incarnation. Special mentions go to the Fourth Doctor's scarf and fedora, and the Eleventh Doctor's bowtie (which was inspired by the Second's).
  • Memetic Sex God: "There are no straight men, just men who haven't met Captain Jack Harkness" is a common line to describe the character, notable for the relatively few number of straight male fans who deny the statement. There's also a popular image macro with a nude screenshot from "Bad Wolf" captioned, "You're straight? So is spaghetti, before it gets hot."
    • Even justified in-universe. His cologne's actually a genetic modification that includes pheromones.
  • Misblamed: When Russel T. Davies and Stephen Moffat were working on the series together, fans liked to blame everything they disliked on Davies. They portrayed him as a pathetic fanboy manchild, obsessed with "epic" storylines, girlfriends for the Doctor, treating the Doctor like the source of all myths, Mary Sues, etc. Then he left and turned the series over to Moffat... and all of that promptly increased by several hundred percent, meaning that Davies had probably been holding Moffat back on all of it. Whoops.
  • Moe:
    • Jo Grant provides an excellent live action example.
    • Amy; the original entry on the Characters page compared the chibi-like fanart for her to Karen Gillan.
    • On the male side of things, Rory, with his adorkableness, Undying Loyalty and almost constantly sad eyes.
  • Moment of Awesome: Has its own page.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • In Dragonfire, Kane has the tourists, passers-through, and residents herded into a spacecraft and blows it to Kingdom Come.
    • In The Curse of Fenric, Millington locks two men up in a cellar, leaving them to their Haemovorey death.
    • In "Dalek", Van Statten is just arrogant and ignorant... until he decides to keep the Doctor as a specimen, for torturing. And later he dismisses his soldiers as "dispensible" when the Dalek massacres them. After that, there's no excuse.
    • In "The End of Time" the Time Lords themselves have gone off the deep end as they are willing to destroy the fabric of space and time to escape their own demise, in a war they started.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: The characteristic TARDIS dematerialisation sound created, according to River Song, by the Doctor leaving the brakes on. (He claims it's deliberate). Of course, this raises the question as to why Romana and the Master had it happen to them, but River could have just been messing with the Doctor.
  • Narm Charm: Often, the series manages to be cheesy while still being on the edge of your seat tense. Any non-humanoid Auton in particular.
    • In The Master's first-ever appearance, he tried to take over the world with plastic daffodils.
  • Never Live It Down: Classic series fans generally take one or two episodes from the new series and blow it out of proportion as a reason why all 80+ episodes from over twenty writers and directors suck.
    • Not to mention the fans who bash David Tennant and/or Matt Smith solely because of the now-infamous line "I don't want to go."
    • The Sixth Doctor trying to strangle Peri, which they themselves don't get over until The Mysterious Planet.
  • Nightmare Retardant: The cheaper costumes of the classic era. Sometimes pops up every now and then in the new series.
  • Paranoia Fuel:
    • "The Waters Of Mars": Don't drink the water. Don't even touch it. Not One Drop. Being turned into a monster if you touch something that your body physically needs is terrifying.
    • How about: "Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead! They are fast. Faster than you could believe. Don't turn your back, don't look away, and don't blink! Good Luck."
    • Steven Moffat seems to be determined to give the entire planet a phobia of everything. So far he's covered ticking, statues, shadows and now cracks on the wall and... whatever the Smilers are.
      • And now anything that captures the image of a Weeping Angel becomes an angel. You have one on your television screen? It might just come out and get you, so don't look away. And if you stare at it too long, you might get one in your head. "Don't blink, don't look at it."
      • Makes people scared to death of their Gran's angel collection, too.
    • Speaking of Moff, he also came up with the Silence, monsters that you instantly forget exist whenever you're not looking at them. Also, they look like Slender Man.
    • The Autons. Basically anything made of plastic could come to life.
    • Gangers. Human clones with the same memories. So how are you going to tell the original and the copy apart? Well, you can't, unless the Ganger is incomplete and has that smooth, transparent face. Just hope you won't be seeing it in the mirror. And then there's the twist of "The Almost People": who's to say that you aren't unknowingly piloting a ganger right now, separated from all your friends and family who don't even know you're missing?
  • Periphery Demographic: The classic series was popular with the gay community. As there was almost no suggestion of any sexuality at all, viewers could add their own interpretations on the various relationships between characters.
  • Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: Amy can get this rather bad. "The Girl Who Waited", for example, was treated as sexist because the older Amy wouldn't save herself until young!Amy used Rory to convince her.
    • River Song also gets accusations of this because she's obsessed with the Doctor. On the one hand, it's a Justified Trope due to her being brainwashed to kill him her entire life. On the other hand, she also broke time itself and endangered the universe because of it.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Donna Noble, thanks to a lot of character development. Unfortunately all undone at the end of Series 4.
    • Mickey Smith, from "The Age of Steel". Solidified at the end of "Army of Ghosts".
  • Robo Ship: Doctor and TARDIS. Hinted at at various occasions, especially during the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh Doctor's tenure. Now, official, in-universe canon.
  • Running the Asylum: It's the longest running Science Fiction show in existence, heavily influencing just about everyone in England who ever did anything related to Science Fiction. Its a fair bet that there's a few long-time fans on the payroll, such as David Tennant.
  • Scapegoat Creator: The series has no one creator to lay blame on, but aside from original producer Verity Lambert, legendary writer Robert Holmes and arguably Tom Baker's second producer, Philip Hinchcliffe, just about everyone who's ever worked on the show has been designated Scapegoat Creator by some segments of fandom. John Nathan-Turner (Producer, 1980-9) and Russell T. Davies (Executive Producer and Head Writer 2005-2010) are both frequent and popular targets of this.
    • Current Head Writer Steven Moffat has become the target of this, as of Series Six. Heck, the mid-season finale alone broke the fanbase like a damaged spinal cord, to say nothing of the series finale.
  • The Scrappy: Donna Noble, in "The Runaway Bride".
    • More permanently, Adric and Mel.
    • Eric Roberts' Master.
    • Francine Jones, Martha's mother. She's rude to just about everyone right from the get-go, and ends up selling out the Doctor to Harold Saxon, a.k.a. the Master. Luckily, it doesn't keep, but the fans weren't terribly happy with her for all of that.
    • Sylvia Noble, Donna's mum. Her arrogance, smugness, constant belittling of her daughter, and inability to say the words "Thank You" left a bad taste in the mouth of many a fan.
    • The Slitheen have the unfortunate distinction of being the only Doctor Who race to be almost universally despised. Shoddy costume design, out-of-place toilet humor and the fact that the characters themselves were generally seen to be more irritating than menacing turned out to not be a very good recipe for an alien race, especially one that was the first recurring alien race of the new series.
  • Seasonal Rot: The Third Doctor's last season is easily his worst, despite the arrival of Sarah Jane. Even Jon Pertwee and producer Barry Letts admitted this being the case, due to a combination of fatigue and depression over the death of Roger Delgado.
    • The Fourth Doctor's era is generally regarded to have gone downhill after the departures of Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes. Whether or not this applies to his final season usually depends on whether you're the type who thinks Doctor Who should be serious sci-fi (in which case it's usually regarded as a decent send-off) or whether you think it should be campy and fun (in which case it's where the Fourth Doctor's run completely went to hell).
    • Inverted with the Seventh's tenure - skip his first season, and he had a more than acceptable run.
  • Shipping:
    • Jamie with Victoria, Peri and Zoe. And Two.
    • Romana/Four. Especially when she was the first woman the Doctor notes as attractive. Helps that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward were in a real-life relationship at the time.
    • Nyssa and the Fourth/Fifth Doctors.
    • Chesterton/Wright. Canon as of The Sarah Jane Adventures' fourth series, which mention an "Ian and Barbara Chesterton".
    • Ben/Polly. Running an orphanage according to the above SJA episode.
  • Shipping Wars: In addition to the above, people pretty much ship Anyone/Anyone on the show. Canon or not, they can get very defensive over their ship(s).
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Sure, Vincent and the Doctor was basically a Very Special Episode about depression - even the monster that provides the plot can be read as a metaphor for Van Gogh's mental illness - but it was handled so maturely that it falls squarely into this category. Even knowing that his paintings will be incredibly famous and loved in the future, Vincent still kills himself, because it's not a matter of cheering him up: he's got a disease that nobody in his time understands.
  • Space Jews: Gibbis in "The God Complex" seems to be a deliberate parody of this trope. Hailing from 'the most invaded planet in the galaxy,' he has vaguely ratlike features, no hair, and is in charge of planting trees so invading soldiers can march in the shade. It's like the producers are deliberately trying to get the audience to scream "That's racist" without actually knowing who it's racist towards.
  • Special Effects Failure: The BBC was somewhat notorious for giving the set and costume designers of Doctor Who a shoestring budget; that is, a bundle of shoe strings that they were expected to make fifteen monsters out of. Interestingly enough, however, this has always been viewed as part of the series' charm, and the fanbase reacted negatively when the TV movie upped the effects budget.
    • The low budget also effected the Chroma Key work throughout the seventies and eighties. It pops up every now and then in the new series but very infrequently.
    • The Kamelion prop could barely move... and whenever it did move, the movements were incredibly herky-jerky.
      • Though most of the problem with Kamelion was Creator Existence Failure. The only person who knew how to control it died after its introduction but before most of its use.
      • The jarring part is that Kamelion was humanoid, so they could've easily used a man in a suit.
    • When the Doctor's army reveal themselves, you can already see Strax on screen for a moment before the sound effect, and there's no visual effect either.
  • Squick:
    • The pulsating brain in The Trial of a Time Lord: Mindwarp is nauseating. Great effect, though.
    • In "Love & Monsters", Elton mentions having a love life with a slab of concrete, with the slab rightfully telling him not to go into any more detail.
    • The Doctor gets himself and Amy ejected from a giant mouth by making the animal vomit. They go out screaming, with their mouths open.
    • The Headless Monks. All that remains of their heads is a tied-off stump.
  • Theme Pairing: There's a portion of the fandom that ships Adric/Nyssa because they look cute together as Orphaned Human Alien Teen Geniuses traveling through time and space together.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Fan reaction to almost any regeneration and companion addition, sometimes initial, sometimes permanent.
  • Too Cool to Live: The Ninth Doctor had the second-shortest tenure (12 weeks).
    • Father Octavian from The Time of Angels/Flesh And Stone. He sets a standard for Face Death with Dignity that from now on everyone's going to be struggling to match.
  • Ugly Cute:
    • The Adipose (cutest Body Horror ever!)
    • Prisoner Zero can be this when it's not trying to scare people. Especially when you hear its voice.
    • The Ood. In fricking spades.
    • Ganger-Jennifer. Her degeneration makes her look like Voldemort's younger sister.
  • Uncanny Valley: Incomplete Gangers have pale skin, visible veins, and oddly smooth features.
    • The Autons have this as their main schtick.
  • Unfortunate Implications: In "The Idiot's Lantern", the Doctor and Rose encourage Tommy Connolly to make up with his father, who was explicitly abusing him and his mother verbally and heavily implied to have been physically abusing them on top of it.
    • The one maybe transgender character in the show, Cassandra, could easily enforce the misconception that transpeople are horrific surgery freaks (and, based on the Expanded Universe book Doctor Who: The Ultimate Monsters Guide, are also just trying to con people for sex or worse).
    • The Silurians of "The Hungry Earth" and "Cold Blood" are villainous anti-human racists who are Putting on the Reich with MadScientists. Oh, and they also happen to be Zionists looking to reclaim their lost homeland. Combining Nazis and Judaism in a single villainous race? Hooboy.
      • To be fair, they aren't shown to be all evil. However, following through with the Zionist analogy, more unfortunate implications arise with the provocation for the Silurian return to their homeland was a drilling project that only accidentally hurt them (in contrast to many examples of entirely non-accidental acts of anti-Semitic violence that provoked the rise of Zionism), one of the "good" Silurians says his people have evolved less than the humans (could perhaps just be analogous to a self-hating Jew, but could also be read as Jews being less evolved), and the "solution" to the conflict is for the Silurians to return to their Diaspora until the world is more understanding. Yeah. Either it was a poorly written metaphor or a poorly thought-out one.
  • Values Dissonance: Even accepting the recons and the wonky production values, many people trying to get into the Hartnell/Troughton era nowadays find it hard due to the rather questionable portrayals of race and gender.
  • Viewers are Morons: Unfortunately seems to be an assumption that the series is making more often the longer it goes on. The first episode of the Capaldi run has a wonderfully done set of scenes where it's unclear whether the villain of the episode jumped to his death or the newly-regenerated Doctor pushed him. Since the Twelfth Doctor said that either the villain was lying about their inability to commit suicide, or the Doctor was lying about not being a murderer, this was an establishing character moment for Twelve, and its ambiguity was important. Apparently too important to leave to mushy-headed viewers to catch, so at the end of the episode they added a scene with a character loudly asking the villain in the afterlife "Did you jump or did he push you? It was a bit difficult to see!"
  • Villain Decay: The Classic Series' Cybermen went from "no known weaknesses" to "gold dust interferes with their respiratory systems" to "holy crap, anything gold kills them dead". The Five Doctors and Attack of the Cybermen didn't utilize any gold weaknesses, but they were still quickly shot down in droves, including one who forgot it was immune to ordinary bullets. The new series has actually gone some way toward reversing the effect. Although the ones that appeared from 2006-2008 weren't from Mondas, a single Mondasian Cyberman in The Pandorica Opens has more nasty tricks up its sleeve than they ever did in the classic episodes—including lasers, tranquilizer darts, Combat Tentacles and the ability to function separately as a body and a severed head when necessary.
    • The Slitheen were fairly menacing in "Aliens of London", "World War Three" and "Boom Town". By the third series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, they were quickly caught by their "cousins".
    • Arguably, the Sontarans and Ice Warriors. In the case of the Ice Warriors, them becoming less evil in general was actually part of the story, while in the new series the war-loving Sontarans have Taken A Level In Badass.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: Seriously, for all the mocking the classic series receives for its Special Effects Failures, they did manage to achieve some pretty awesome effects on pretty much no money at times. Examples that immediately come to mind include the epic opening shot of the space station in Trial of a Time Lord and the flying ships in Enlightenment.
  • Wangst: Tegan was always whining and complaining about something.
    • The Tenth Doctor may qualify.
  • What an Idiot!: Enough examples that they have their own page.
  • What Do You Mean It's for Kids?: Some fans seem completely offended at the thought this is a family show in a family show time slot. Also a number of classic and revival stories have been rated 12 by the BBFC.
    • A lot of stories from the '80s, thanks to writers and producers making the show Bloodier and Gorier. Attack of the Cyberman has a 15+ rating in Australia, but it was still shown at 6 o'clock at night.
  • What Do You Mean It's Not Political?: Pretty much every time they've shown up, there's some sort of political tie-in that can be debated with the Silurians. The old-series seemed to have a more Soviet/Communist slant to the reptilians, while the modern re-imagining almost mirrors conflicts between native peoples of a land and those who would come to settle on it.
  • The Woobie: Pretty much everyone (even many of the villains) and especially the Doctor.
  • What the Hell, Casting Agency?: Eric Roberts as the Master.
    • Nicholas Parsons' casting as Reverend Wainwright in The Curse of Fenric might appear to be an example of this at first glance, given that he was best known for being a quiz show host at the time of the story's airing. In reality Parsons was actually a pretty experienced actor, although he hadn't done any TV acting work for over a decade when the story was made.
    • Beryl Reid as Captain Briggs in Earthshock. This was due to producer John Nathan Turner's love for light entertainment.
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