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YMMV / Doctor Who S22 E4 "The Two Doctors"

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  • Badass Decay: The last time the Sontarans appeared, they masterminded an invasion of the Time Lords' home planet, and the Doctor had to construct a forbidden weapon of enormous power to take them down. This story, by contrast, has them acting as little more than Dumb Muscle for Chessene and Dastari, and killed off halfway through the third episode.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Shockeye was already a creep to begin with, but he really crossed the line by casually murdering Oscar after eating him out of house and home.
  • Never Live It Down: The Sixth Doctor's killing Shockeye is one of his most infamous moments, despite it being very much a "kill or be killed" situation due to the Doctor being wounded and stuck in the middle of nowhere with an uninjured, vastly stronger, psychopathic cannibal. That being said, there'd probably have been a lot less outrage over it if not for the Doctor using a disturbingly realistic method of killing Shockeye, and then delivering a Bond One-Liner afterwards.
  • Sequelitis: This is widely considered the weakest of the three multi-Doctor stories from the classic series.
  • Special Effect Failure: Not only are the Sontaran masks less convincing than those worn in their 1970s appearances, but they're not fitted very well to the actors' faces — especially during the sequences shot on location in Spain, apparently due to the humidity causing the adhesive not to work properly — leaving their actual mouths visible below those on the mask.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In the first third of the serial, Sixth speculates that he might be the epicentre of a time-space embolism, one that could result in the collapse of the entire universe. He turns out to be mistaken, yet such a story seems appropriately epic for a multi-doctor story. In the end, we are treated to the characters flitting about Seville, while Second and Shockeye have a wacky road-trip and gorge themselves at the local restaurant.
  • What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The BBC always viewed Doctor Who as being primarily (if not entirely) a children's show, but the sheer amount of Family-Unfriendly Violence in this story played a big part in persuading the upper management that the show had gone so far off the rails that at the very least it needed to be taken off the air for over a year in order for a Retool to take place.

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