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YMMV / Doctor Who S4 E2 "The Tenth Planet"

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  • Harsher in Hindsight: A major element of the serial's plot is the loss of an American spaceship with all hands in 1986. Come the actual year 1986, and America would indeed lose a spaceship with all hands in the form of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding mid-takeoff.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: Watching this one is quite a different experience after watching "Twice Upon a Time", knowing that between the First Doctor walking off on his own and Ben and Polly catching up, he helped the Twelfth Doctor through his own regeneration.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The following from Ben, while preparing for a "Die Hard" on an X situation:
    Ben: Aw, just imagine trying to tackle one of them geezers [the Cybermen] with a screwdriver!
  • It Was His Sled: When it first aired in 1966, the Doctor suddenly turning into a different person was a hugely shocking twist ending that riled up audiences and resulted in a great deal of skepticism over the show's future. However, once this concept, later dubbed regeneration, became an established part of the show's premise in later decades, the ending became the first thing most people bring up when discussing "The Tenth Planet" (when not mentioning its status as the debut serial for the Cybermen, one of the Doctor's most iconic foes).
  • Narm Charm: The Cyberman costumes are very clearly No Budget, with the tape holding the handlebars on the head being very visible in some shots, and their hands are visible due to the designer forgetting to include gloves, making them seem less like robotic people and more like humans in suits. Their sing-song voices aren't very threatening either. Despite this, the design is well-liked among fans since their cloth masks and human hands make it clearer that the Cybermen were once just like humans and they also medically just look unnerving, unlike later designs made them look more like pure-blooded (oiled?) robots or masked bionic men in spacesuits. They were a big favourite of Peter Capaldi, resulting in them being brought back in his final season (albeit slightly updated) as a parting gift.
  • Padding: Episode Three, which is spent waiting for a new Cyberman attack after the first round of Cybermen were defeated at the end of Episode Two. The Cybermen do not return in force until Episode Four.
  • Special Effect Failure: The Cybermen are obviously just made of surgical tape, paper and wires. However, this fits their nature as once-human creatures who had been altered through primitive cybernetic technology, and a common complaint in the fandom is that the more uniformly metallic Cybermen from later on are not as scary as the originals, who fall firmly into the Uncanny Valley.
  • Values Dissonance: The 1976 novelization refers to astronaut Glyn Williams (played in the TV version by Bermudan actor Earl Cameron) as a "Negro" and "coloured." While these were still considered relatively neutral terms in the UK at the time, they were already being recognized as racially insensitive in the US, and Britain would eventually come around to the sentiment after a while. Today, "African" and "black" are considered the proper terminology on both sides of the pond.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome:

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