YMMV / Doctor Who S21 E6 "The Caves of Androzani"

• Accidental Innuendo: "Even I can't bear to see or touch myself."
• Best Known for the Fanservice: The Fifth Doctor's moving death scene is somewhat undermined by the excellent view the audience get of Peri's trembling cleavage. Davison has joked about this turn of events at times, claiming that it's the only thing he remembers from filming his final scene.
• Complete Monster: Morgus is the leading businessman of a human colony and descendant of the original settlers, whose power comes from his control of spectrox, which when refined can extend human life. He gained the monopoly with Sharaz Jek, who built the androids needed to harvest the toxic raw spectrox, then set Jek up to be killed in an eruption of boiling mud. The surviving Jek took revenge by using his android army to take control of the spectrox cave, but Morgus responded by financing a military expedition against him and then paying gunrunners to supply Jek with weapons in exchange for spectrox, deliberately prolonging the war so spectrox will remain scarce and he can charge higher prices. Morgus blows up one of his own mines just to increase the scarcity of the copper produced there, with massive loss of life, and closes down several factories, shipping the now unemployed workers to labour camps where he has just opened factories, turning them into his slaves. When the Doctor and Peri are suspected of being gunrunners, he orders them executed without trial as scapegoats. Then, learning the Doctor is still alive, he assumes he's part of a government investigation and kills the president by pushing him down a lift shaft, then spins it as an assassination attempt on himself and orders the lift maintenance man shot. Willing to murder any number of people for even the slightest personal gain, even in a complete Crapsack World, Morgus manages to stand out as a monster.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Sharaz Jek is one of the most memorable Doctor Who supporting characters of all time. The Cool Mask in particular made him quite unforgettable.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • It's considered one of the great masterpieces of Doctor Who, but just as with the praised "Earthshock", the writers of the time seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from this serial, taking most of its elements, but without the same success. The Sixth Doctor's era would be full of stories populated in depressing worlds, populated by cynical antiheroes and monstrous villains, with Peri being just the Damsel in Distress. And to make matters worse, the Sixth Doctor is a much more unsympathetic anti-hero than his predecessor (for most of his TV era), making the viewer question why spend time with these people.
  • Jek's infatuation with Peri also marks the beginning of a trend for villains to lust after her. It works in this instance thanks to Jek being written as an Anti-Villain who's more sympathetic than usual for the series, and it's believable that someone as isolated as him would become infatuated with what's likely the first woman he's seen in years. In the Sixth Doctor's era, however, this kind of thing would lead to bizarre scenarios such as Peri being lusted after by a giant slug or half-man, half-lizard, with the writing typically being handled in a way that came across as more misogynistic than anything else.
• Narm:
  • The Magma Beast not only is it terribly unconvincing, but its scenes look like they belong in another rather inferior story.
  • Chellak's womanly scream when he sees Sharaz Jek's real face.
  • The Fifth Doctor's regeneration can be summed up by three words: Nicola Bryant's cleavage.◊ Hey, even Peter Davison later admitted it.
  • At one point during one of his monologues Jek seems to anticipate that he's about to have a fit of blind rage, walking up to a conveniently-placed piece of equipment just so he can smash it against the wall.
• Retroactive Recognition: Ash "Three Socks" Morgan is Salateen.
• Sacred Cow: Near-universally considered to be the greatest Doctor Who story of Peter Davison's tenure, and one of the greatest Who stories period, coming at or very near the top of almost every list in the latter category. (That said, the final seconds, which include Six's line "Change, m'dear.. and it seems not a moment too soon", might be exempted from a lot of fans' love for this story.)
• Signature Scene: This serial is iconic enough to have several:
  • The cliffhanger at the end of Episode One, in which the Doctor and Peri are apparently executed by firing squad.
  • The cliffhanger at the end of Episode Three, where the Doctor performs as crash-landing while shouting that "I'm not going to let you stop me now!" It's heavily implied he's trying to fight back his regeneration so he can save Peri before anything else.
  • The Fifth Doctor's final moments, in which he is haunted by visions of his former companions, to the extent where a parody of it appeared in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The Magma Beast, which resembles a plastic-looking dragon-type thing. Like the Primords in "Inferno", it doesn't harm the story at all, but it could have been cut without removing anything relevant from the story.
  • We get a whacking great close-up of Morgus' hand-held computer...which is clearly a TV remote control, complete with buttons labelled "Text", "Mute" and so on.
  • Colin Baker's face is inserted into the credits for part four by pasting it atop Peter Davison's. The ripple effect gets by without much of a hitch, but the fact that Baker's face still fades into a group of stars in Davison's likeness gives away the effect.
• Tear Dryer: The Fifth Doctor's traumatic regeneration is followed by Six brashly and confidently making his mark.
• Tough Act to Follow: The story was an unexpected critical success, and widely heralded as a fan favourite ever since its premiere. However, producers wanted to capitalize on the hype for the next actor who would play the Doctor, Colin Baker, by airing his first episode right after Peter Davison's last. This put him in a very unfavourable position, as he had no time for the Sixth Doctor's character to be scripted attentively, and what resulted was, for lack of a better word, a trainwreck. With a hastily written script and little time for audiences to be let down from the initial excitement of "Caves", "The Twin Dilemma" hobbled onto the screen, and the reaction from audiences was not pretty, beginning the long, sad decline of the show over its last five years.

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