YMMV / Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Were the Mysterons genuinely benevolent beings turned bad by a reckless attack by Spectrum, or were they always chaotic murderers who merely viewed themselves as benevolent? We naturally don't see much of their activity besides their war on mankind, so don't know if they are any more pleasant off the clock, and on at least one occasion that Spectrum tried to make amends, they merely used it as an excuse for another attack.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Gadgeteer Genius Professor Carney spends ages managing to successfully dupe Spectrum... only to die by falling over a tripwire. With Mysterons being resilient to all except electricity or major explosions, it's unknown whether he is even killed afterwards, or is maybe taken into custody.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Mysterons could potentially be a flavour of this, though it depends on how you interpret them.
• Heartwarming Moments: A very twisted one. Captain Black resisting the Mysteron's control and letting Symphony escape from the atomic chamber in "Manhunt" at the cost of having to use the SPV he stole earlier in the episode.
• Jerkass Woobie: Captain Black. He didn't ask to be turned against his friends and comrades any more that Scarlet did; it's just that the latter got the lucky escape that he didn't. It does leave the way open for him to be rehabilitated in the same way.
• Memetic Badass: Captain Scarlet. Shot? Doesn't kill him. Blown up? Doesn't kill him. Any other sort of thing that would normally hurt a real-life human being? Doesn't kill him.
• Moral Event Horizon: There are two candidates for The Mysterons:
  • Either when they attempted to destroy Cloudbase even though Spectrum had attempted to make peace with them.
  • Or in the second episode where they made a plane (that was likely full of innocent people) crash so they could use said plane in an attempt to assassinate The Director General Of The Asian Republic.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • During the frozen bridge collapse scene from the episode "Noose of Ice" you can briefly see a human hand shaking the bridge model to make it collapse. (It's on the final part of that scene, on the bottom left part of the screen.)
  • The puppets were intentionally designed to be realistic, unlike the stylised puppets Supermarionation had before (also used in Joe 90). But the designers discovered quickly that it'd be impossible to make the characters walk and look natural, so major movements characters do occur off-screen with sound effects of walking.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Bom-Bom-Bom-Bo-Bo-Bo-Bom!
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The puppets falls into this now and again. Gerry Anderson himself noted this, and found it to be something of an uncomfortable point between realistic enough, and seemingly trying too hard to imitate human movements.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The series is perhaps the darkest of Gerry Anderson's series, with a large bodycount (for a series of its kind) in each episode, occasionally reaching double-digits; possibly triple-digits in a few episodes. Many of these deaths tend to be rather gruesome, too, and oftentimes show deaths in full gruesome detail. Hell, the first episode alone featured Captain Brown being used by the Mysterons as a suicide bomber.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: The Mysterons have also been interpreted as part of a supposed religious allegory in the series. Cy Grant and other commentators have compared Cloudbase to Heaven, Colonel White to God and the resurrected Captain Scarlet to the Son of God; Captain Black, is viewed as either an analogue of the Devil or a Judas figure in league with the "satanic" Mysterons of the planet Mars (which Grant likened to Hades). Gerry Anderson denied that any of this symbolism was intentional.
• Writer Cop Out: Some fans hated the ending of Attack On Cloudbase, feeling that it would've felt more effective if it hadn't turned out to be a nightmare that Symphony Angel was having and have the series end with the Mysterons winning.

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