YMMV / Doctor Who S11 E5 "Planet of the Spiders"

• Fanon: Although it's never explicitly stated in the story, almost all fans of the Letts-Dicks-Pertwee era assume that K'anpo is the same person as the old hermit who the Doctor described in his famous "daisiest daisy" speech in "The Time Monster".
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Expanded Universe reveals that Three's final trip back to Earth took ten years, with him slowly dying of radiation poisoning the entire time.
• Ho Yay: The Doctor takes the Brigadier to see a variety show of which one act is an exotic dancer. The Brigadier enjoys the act, but apparently because he 'will have to adapt some of those exercises for the men'.
• Narm Charm: The pointless chase scene which takes up pretty much the entirety of episode two, where the Doctor and Lupton pretty much drive or fly every combustion-engine-powered vehicle known to man with the exception of locomotives and jet fighters, and which ends with the villain vanishing anyway at the end of it, is still awesome in its own right. Of course it helps that Barry Letts wrote the sequence as a going-away gift for Jon Pertwee, who had a deep interest in motor vehicles of all kinds and relished scenes where he could get behind the wheel.
• Offending the Creator's Own: Barry Letts co-wrote and directed this story as a deliberate parable expressing his own Buddhist beliefs. He was upset to receive letters from Buddhists protesting about the use of the "Jewel in the Lotus" mantra "Om mani padme hum" in the context of villains summoning up alien monsters, although he defended himself on the grounds that the story explicitly described it as the misuse of something usually good.
• Padding: The chase scene that takes up an entire episode.
• Signature Scene: The car/Whomobile/gyrocopter/boat/hovercraft chase that takes up almost the entirety of Episode Two.
• Special Effect Failure: Where to start, from the shoddy CSO backdrop of the spider planet or the actual spiders themselves, portrayed by rubber props moved around with wires and pivots.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: The story was written by a practicing Buddhist as an allegory about reincarnation, which makes it bizarre when the villains use "om mani padme hum" as Ominous Latin Chanting to summon evil space spiders.

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