YMMV / Doctor Who S2 E4 "The Romans"

• Designated Hero: The Doctor ends up being unintentionally responsible for burning down Rome and this is treated as something to Squee! about. It says a lot about how cleverly-written the story is that it comes across as a genuine moment of celebration and a turning point for the Doctor's character, but think of all those people who died because of him!
• Harsher in Hindsight: As stated above, the show takes the Doctor's role in the burning of Rome fairly lightly. It won't be so funny when he's forced to incinerate the people of Pompeii forty years later.
• Special Effects Failure: The burning of Rome. It was added late in production when the budget had run out and nobody was happy with how it looked.
• Stock Footage Failure: Ian is taken to fight in the arena, and peers out of the bars of his cell to see what it is he's going to fight. What follows is a poorly-edited sequence of lots of different lions in clearly very different zoos, none of which look remotely Roman.
• Values Dissonance: The Doctor finding Nero's sexual abuse of women funny and harmless (saying "what an extraordinary fellow!" as he sees Nero chasing an underdressed, screaming women down a corridor) is something that would never fly in a children's programme nowadays. It works well today as Black Comedy, though.
• The Woobie: That female slave. Also Tigellinus. And super-woobiedom is likely in store for Tavius, as well, in the form of a Cruel and Unusual Death at his master's hands.

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