YMMV / Doctor Who S22 E5 "Timelash"

• Ass Pull: The Borad suddenly turning up alive at the end, apparently because the one who dissolved earlier was actually a clone.
• Complete Monster: The Borad is the vain, petty despot of Karfel, whose illegal experiments accidentally mutated him into a Morlex hybrid. Ruling from the shadows, the Borad imposes a vicious regime of constant surveillance, bans mirrors, and has all dissidents executed or thrown into the Timelash, an unstable time corridor of his own creation. Caring only about his experiments, the Borad kills numerous Karfelons when he transfers all the citadel's subsidiary electricity, including the hospitals, to his lab and personally executes his own councillors at the first hint of failure or duplicity, aging them to death with his time accelerator ray. Displeased with needing to rule from the shadows, the Borad ignites war by refusing to hand over the promised grain supplies to their neighboring race, the peaceful Bandrils, who are suffering a massive famine. Kidnapping Peri, the Borad attempts to recreate his accident on her, revealing that he plans to allow the Bandrils to wipe out the entire Karfelon species, then destroy their fleet, condemning the Bandrils to starve to death, all so that he can repopulate the planet with a race of mutants underneath his rule, having chosen Peri as his mate.
• Ham and Cheese: Paul Darrow gives a performance that has to be seen to be believed. He later said that this was revenge for Colin Baker's Large Ham tendencies when he appeared as Bayban the Butcher on the Blake's 7 episode "City at the Edge of the World".
• Padding: The Doctor apparently defeats the Borad with a full 17 minutes of the second episode remaining. The remainder of the runtime is padded out by the Doctor having lengthly arguments with first Peri, then Herbert about whether or not they should come with him in the TARDIS during his attempt to stop the Bandril missile, then a second confrontation with the Borad after he reveals that he made a clone of himself.
• Special Effect Failure: The Classic series was infamous for its cheap effects that barely stood up to scrutiny at the time, yet this episode still manages to have a reputation all its own for just how awful its effects are:
  • The Borad's death beam turns people old, eventually leaving them as just a skeleton ravaged by time. The turning old effect is serviceable, but the sub-science classroom quality skeleton they become is atrocious. The way they crumple to the ground barely helps.
  • The Doctor abseils into the titular time-tunnel, which is filled with glittery crystals... which are obviously made of plastic that is visibly abraded by the friction of the rope.
  • The glove puppet Bandrel Ambassador is also memorable for all the wrong reasons.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Paul Darrow, recognising this one as less-than-classic, decided to live out his long-time dream of playing Richard III through Tekker. Even down to line-readings reminiscent of Laurence Olivier's Richard at times! This episode being what it was, they were three-quarters of the way through before someone noticed and told him to stop.

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