YMMV / Doctor Who S30 E12 "The Stolen Earth"

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The Doctor remembers how someone tried to move the Earth before. Both the Time Lords and the Daleks have tried (in fact, the Time Lords did) and would be capable of stealing the 27 planets from across time and space, so his reaction of horror and disbelief could apply to either one.
• Continuity Lock-Out: Although references to other shows are kept to a minimum, both The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood characters name-drop other characters from their shows, in particular Gwen from Torchwood who pays tribute to two colleagues who recently died on the show. All this - as well as Sarah Jane's stated dislike of the Torchwood team ("Too many guns") - is lost on viewers who have not seen the spin-offs. Given also that Torchwood is aimed at adult viewers whereas The Sarah Jane Adventures is aimed at young children, there were many viewers who wouldn't have wanted or been able to go on to Torchwood to fill in the blanks.
  • Of course, this is even worse for viewers of the spinoffs who were not regular viewers of Doctor Who, given this episode and the one that followed not only wrapped up various arcs from the current season, but also touched on arcs from the first four seasons of the revival.
  • Thankfully, season two of Torchwood also aired a pre-watershed cut of each episode, so younger viewers were at least able to watch all the shows this time around.
• Fan Nickname: The Dalek that gets shot in the end is named "Dalek Fred", based on a nickname Ian gave to a Dalek in "The Chase" and the way the Cult of Skaro chose their names.
• Inferred Holocaust: Taking place over no more than a matter of hours, the Dalek invasion is nonetheless devastating. From the saucer attack on London to the fleet of mini-saucers blazing through Manhattan, the air force retreating from North Africa and Daleks landing in Japan. The Daleks' focus is clearly on pacifying potential military resistance, massacring UNIT's base in New York and assaulting the Valiant aircraft carrier, to the point that the United Nations itself ultimately makes a formal surrender to the Daleks. However, the attack on London shows that the Daleks are, as ever, not above simply exterminating humans for the sake of exterminating humans. Even after the planet is occupied, as demonstrated by the cases of Sarah Jane, Wilf, and the unfortunate family, the Daleks do not hesitate to exterminate civilians for even the slightest offense. Of course, it is later shown that the Earth was left pretty much intact.
• Memetic Mutation: The scene where the Doctor exclaims, "BYE!" to Davros and sends the TARDIS careening away through space has been weaponized on many a website as a GIF, especially for "Abandon Thread" moments and instances where people don't want to listen to someone's opinion.
• Questionable Casting: If thought about, the Richard Dawkins cameo - specifically As Himself, rather than say, a character that happens to be an astrophysicist or something - doesn't make sense as it is never explained how a biologist is one of the few people to know the Earth has moved. Of course this reaction could be partially down to Dawkins being a controversial figure even among atheists, which has increased since this episode aired. Also, Dawkins' wife was Lalla Ward, who played Romana on Doctor Who in the 1970s.
• Wangst: Rose's immediate response to seeing the Doctor regenerate is to whine about how it's not fair to her.

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