YMMV / Doctor Who 60th AS "Wild Blue Yonder"

• Applicability: The presentation and operation of the Not-Things has been compared to advances in machine learning and AI that were contemporary at the time of the episode's release, but would have been nascent at best when it was written. The way the Not-Things learn by absorbing the thoughts of living things is similar to language learning models and Chat GPT; their malevolence being born from the sum of the universe's influence on them is reminiscent of incidents where chatbots quickly started spouting hate speech after interacting with people on the internet; and the way they struggle to correctly proportion their limbs was quickly compared to AI-generated imagery that famously struggles with accurately reproducing human appendages and digits. If viewers read the Not-Things as analogous to AI, the conflict of the Doctor and Donna being duplicated and replaced becomes a metaphor for current concerns about industry creatives having their jobs made obsolete by programs that are potentially technically competent, but ultimately inhuman and dangerous.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The opening scene with Isaac Newton has no real connection to the rest of the plot and serves only to establish the "mavity" Running Gag.
• Hype Backlash: There were fans who ended up feeling that the high critical reception the episode received actually had them question the quality of it, rather than get caught up in the hype. While there are fans hailing it as the best episode in five years at least, there are also other fans who saw this as vastly overselling what was essentially a single location scare-fest that could've explored the characters more or could've been scarier.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Pretty much the instant the premise of the episode — the Doctor and Donna trapped alone on a spaceship, being threatened with death by identical duplicates — became known, the Internet began making comparisons to Among Us, with many jokingly calling it an adaptation of the game or lamenting their inability to escape references to it. The fact that a key plot point involves the ship's captain having been thrown out an airlock into space, the same way crewmates voted off in the game are disposed of, didn't help.
  • The premise, as well as the Glamour Failure that the Not-Things suffer throughout the episode, has drawn comparisons to The Mandela Catalogue, with one piece of fanart directly referencing the series.
• Narm Charm: The Not-Things' giant and stretched body parts should look ridiculous, but manage to be Black Comedy tinged Nightmare Fuel Body Horror instead.
• Paranoia Fuel: Now, Doctor Who even makes thinking dangerous, as it could potentially enable your malevolent Doppelgangers to learn how to imitate you more perfectly.
• Play-Along Meme:
  • The replacement of the word "gravity" with "mavity" was almost instantly met with fans engaging in Kayfabe that it was always mavity and nobody says gravity. One popular iteration of this meme shared by Russell T Davies himself was to edit the poster of the movie Gravity to read "Mavity" instead.
  • On Dec 18th, 2023, the video descriptions of several show clips on the official Doctor Who Youtube channel were edited to read the same. (e.g. The Doctor Rides Up the Shard now has "An angered Doctor sets out to the Shard (the tallest building in the EU) on an anti-mavity motorbike..." as part of its description.)
• Special Effect Failure: Whenever the long hallway is shown, it is very obvious that it's just David and Catherine acting on a green screen set with props. What gives it away is that the hallway is frequently seen at odd perspectives and angles in relation to Donna and the Doctor, making the two stick out more, not blend into the scene. Ironically it tends to look better when it's not the focus of the scene (like during the chase with the not-people).
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The really squished up Not-Doctor and Not-Donna is quite a bizarre sight, especially while they're chasing after the real Doctor and Donna, it looks as if Doctor Who had briefly entered a Cyriak animation.
  • The giant vast corridor where the Doctor and Donna cross inside the spaceship is beautifully made with CGI, on top of using virtual cinematography in a green screen set, a vast improvement on the poor CSO FX of "Underworld".

---