YMMV / Doctor Who S37E10 "The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos"

• Broken Base: The Doctor threatening to expel Graham from the TARDIS if he kills Tzim-Sha. Some people see this as her grabbing the Jerkass Ball, whilst others see this as using Tough Love to protect Graham from Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.
• Complete Monster: Tzim-Sha is a ruthless Stenza warrior who wants to become the leader of his species. He relishes in hunting people before murdering them, stealing their tooth, and implanting it on his face, racking up a body count of approximately thirty to forty. While targeting a man named Karl Wright, he was defeated by the Doctor, but his malicious and dishonest use of gathering coils, violating one of the few standards of his own brutal race, resulted in the death of Graham's wife Grace. Teleported to the planet Ranskoor Av Kolos, Tzim-Sha impersonates the deity of the Ux and spends 3,407 years abusing their incredible powers to steal five planets, obliterating entire populations, in order to dominate over them as a god. During that time period, he either kills or kidnaps dozens sent in the desperate attempt to stop him, climaxing with Greston Paltraki's crew. The surviving victims are imprisoned in stasis chambers as conscious trophies. He attempts to wipe out the population of Earth as revenge against the Doctor for defeating him in the past.
• So Okay, It's Average: A slice of the fanbase doesn't think this feels like a series finale — no companion departures, no game-changing stakes, no Sequel Hook for the next series or even the New Year's special, nothing anything like that. Yes, Tzim-Sha is confronted again as some Book Ends, and Earth is imperilled, with the Doctor not topping any of her previous feats. The following New Year's special did satiate this complaint, and many fans felt like that was intended as the true finale.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The series seemed to be setting up a show down between the Doctor and the Stenza Empire itself; in the end it's just Tzim-Sha, not the Empire, and a missed opportunity arises where it was established in "The Ghost Monument" that the Stenza have been engaged in genocidal conquests, something the Doctor would naturally want to stop, but the series ends with them being a Karma Houdini.
  • The Doctor getting to reiterate her strict Thou Shalt Not Kill rule early on, followed by being confronted with the unimaginably horrific consequences of leaving a previous enemy alive, seem to be setting up a story about the Doctor herself being seriously tempted to break that rule, which could work great as the finale to a series which had been pushing it especially hard... but it just doesn't happen.
  • The idea of whether to save your crew or hand over something important to the villain, all while having no idea what it does, and having lost memories? Sounds interesting, but that aspect of the story was easily resolved and could've been of some more focus.
  • The mind-altering atmosphere of Ranskoor Av Kolos is mentioned, but, apart from briefly causing Paltraki to lose his memory, it never really comes up in any meaningful way. The Doctor and Yaz make the seemingly momentous decision to give up their neural dampeners to subdue the Ux, but, other than complaining of feeling groggy, nothing comes of this, and they take back the dampeners soon after.
  • While bringing back Tzim-Sha made for some nice Book Ends for the series, Graham's "losing Grace, finally bonding with Ryan" arc was resolved in "It Takes You Away", and there were many fans who were disappointed that they didn't bring back an iconic villain for Thirteen's first series finale instead.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • The Doctor disapproving of Graham's desire for vengeance is one thing, threatening to expel him from the TARDIS for avenging his wife's murder makes her come off as a self-righteous hypocrite, especially considering her tolerance of companions like Jamie, Leela, Ace and Jack using violence when necessary.
  • The Ux, particularly Andinio, are presented as victims deceived by Tzim-Sha. Unfortunately, Tzim-Sha's claim of being the Creator, despite clearly being a normal guy, is so transparently false that it can't really justify spending thousands of years abducting planets and wiping out their populations in the process. They may restore the planets in the end, but that doesn't bring the armies back.

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