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YMMV / Doctor Who S13 E6 "The Seeds of Doom"

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  • Harsher in Hindsight: Most of the first episode, and especially the abortive attempt to slow the Krynoid infection by amputating Winlett's arm (which leads to Moberley's death), to anyone who's listened to the Eighth Doctor audio story "Hothouse", where that version of the Doctor confirms that amputating Winlett's arm wouldn't have done a damn thing unless they did it immediately after he was infected. By the time Stevenson and Moberley found Winlett passed out on the floor with green growths on his face less than a minute after the pod infected him, he was already beyond saving.
  • Narm: The DVD behind-the-scenes subtitles mention that at least one reviewer found mirth in the visual of Keeler being turned into "a giant cocktail gherkin."
  • Narm Charm: Harrison Chase: "You know, Doctor, I could play all day in my green cathedral."
  • Retroactive Recognition: Scorby is played by John Challis, who would later be best known for playing Boycie in Only Fools and Horses and The Green Green Grass.
  • Special Effect Failure:
    • While most of the Krynoid's forms are scarily effective, the penultimate one is rather less impressive, looking like just a sack sprayed green with a few tentacles glued on.
    • When the first Krynoid pod hatches and infects Winlett, the shoot that emerges from the pod just flops unconvincingly onto Winlett's arm. Fortunately, the production team apparently realized how bad this looked, and managed to show the second pod's shoot latching onto Keeler's arm much more convincingly.
  • Spiritual Successor:
    • This feels like The Avengers with the trappings of a Doctor Who serial, with the Doctor and Sarah Jane in place of John Steed and Emma Peel. It was even loosely based on the episode "Man-Eater of Surrey Green".
    • The Antarctica segment is a successor to Who Goes There? and its first film adaptation, The Thing from Another World. Incidentally, the execution of the homage also serves as an eerily prescient predecessor to the 1982 adaptation.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: The exchange about the seeds "travelling in pairs like policemen" — a normal safety precaution then, since discarded as inefficient.note 
  • The Woobie: Winlett and Keeler. Imagine being transformed into a crazy plant with a Utopia Justifies the Means instinct. It's even worse for Keeler because his boss wanted to see what would happen, and he remains definitively conscious until his mind is eliminated at the end of the initial transformation (Winlett at least seemed to be out cold during the comparable part of his own change).
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: The final mature form of the Krynoid wrecking the model mansion is very well realised.

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