YMMV / Doctor Who S17 E3 "The Creature from the Pit"

• Ham and Cheese: The story features Special Effect Failure, No Budget, a kindly monster that happens to look like a giant cock and balls, and Tom Baker cracking himself up by cramming as many knob jokes and fellatio innuendos into his performance as possible.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Doctor jokes that Time Lords have 90 lives and that he has lived through 130 of them. "The Timeless Children" revealed that the Doctor has indeed lived many lives due to the Time Lords' erasing his memory to protect the secret of his true identity.
• No Yay: The creature has a staggeringly phallic character design, and Tom Baker has an outrageous amount of fun exploiting that by playing his relationship with the monster as sexually as he could get away with. Particularly when he's looking at it while licking his lips and touching his mouth, going towards it and then seeming suddenly intimidated by the size. Or caressing it with his cheek with his eyes closed in ecstasy. Or putting the end of its big tentacle in his mouth and sucking on it.
• Padding: Adrasta's death at the start of the fourth episode should by all rights resolve the story's main conflict, yet it continues with the newly-established threat of Erato's people having set in motion a plot to destroy Chloris, and then that subplot being further padded out when one of Adrasta's flunkies comes back into the story to further delay the solution to this new problem. The story could easily be edited down into a three-parter by cutting a few of the more extraneous parts from the first three episodes in order to make room for Adrasta's death and the final scene from the fourth episode, and it would lose very little.
• Replacement Scrappy: David Brierly's K9 voice is far less popular than John Leeson's, with most fans feeling it lacks the same charm.
• Special Effects Failure: The titular Creature in the Pit bore an uncanny resemblance to a giant penis and scrotum, which led the whole crew to burst into laughter when they first saw it during taping^note work on the prop fell behind schedule, meaning it was not available for rehearsals. After the first studio sessions were recorded, the Creature was hastily remodelled for the next by the simple expedient of changing its front end, but it was then easy to spot the join.
• Unfortunate Character Design: The creature from the pit — Oh God the creature! Take a look at this◊ design of the alien, and what the Doctor is doing to "communicate" with it. The first line on the recap page is in no way, shape, or form an exaggeration.

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