YMMV / Doctor Who S28 E2 "Tooth and Claw"

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Retroactively applied. Due to Jenna Coleman (who plays companion Clara Oswald in later seasons) portraying Queen Victoria in the 2016 TV series Victoria, and due to Clara being established as having splintered herself into countless "echoes" existing to help protect the Doctor throughout his lives - all of whom resemble Clara (ergo Coleman), a popular school of thought in Who fandom is that Queen Victoria, as seen here, and who in this story directly assists the Doctor, is, in fact, a middle-aged echo of Clara Oswald.
  • As noted below, how much of Rose's attitude towards danger is a coping mechanism, and how much is her being a Nightmare Fetishist?
• Common Knowledge: The conclusion that viewers often come to when recounting this episodes ending is that the Doctor suspects Queen Victoria was bitten by the werewolf, and that her future offspring are also werewolves. This misinterprets several aspects of the episode:
  • Firstly, Queen Victoria's suspicious behaviour (often cited as damning evidence of a bite) is not unusual in-context. She's repeatedly annoyed at the Doctor and Rose's gung-ho adventurer antics throughout the episode, so it's very believable that she'd be cagey and would get annoyed at being doted on because of a minor hand wound by those who she, in the very next scene, considers enemies of the state.
  • Second, the conclusion the Doctor and Rose come to was in jest; both Rose and the Doctor were simply running a thought experiment about the mystery of how haemophilia entered into the royal family — it was never meant to be taken seriously or as a fact in-universe. Both of them even laugh at this idea when entering the TARDIS, pulling an "Everybody Laughs" Ending, making this obvious to the viewer.
  • Third, as mentioned under Beethoven Was an Alien Spy on the main recap page, Victoria had already given birth to all her children, so the whole argument is a moot point.
  • And finally, there's the fact the werewolf doesn't actually get close enough to harm Queen Victoria in the episode. The werewolf does try to harm her during the runtime, several times in fact, but is paralysed by focused moon light, or gets distracted each time.
• Special Effects Failure: The Werewolf is clearly CGI, though given it was made in the mid-aughts, the technology at the time, coupled with the shows' limited budget would've made anything close to a realistic werewolf unviable, something fans have grown to accept as time has passed.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The werewolf recognizes that some aspect of Rose's "Bad Wolf" persona is still in her, but it doesn't prove to be relevant and isn't mentioned again for the rest of the episode.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: When people are getting torn to pieces by a werewolf, Rose's main priority still seems to be winning a bet with the Doctor that she can get Victoria to say she is not amused. While it could be taken as a coping mechanism, she can come across as a Nightmare Fetishist, and it isn't surprising Victoria is so unsettled by Rose and the Doctor's enjoyment of these horrific events. Though, going by how much they tone down their laissez-faire attitudes from this point on, Ten and Rose may have actually realized this.

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