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YMMV / Doctor Who S5 E5 "The Web of Fear"

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  • Ethnic Scrappy: The story opens up with a much criticised scene where Travers is trying to get hold of a robot Yeti back from the museum curator he sold it to, who is for some unfathomable reason a stereotypical Greedy Jew named Julius Silverstein. This may have been a very racist attempt to make him an Asshole Victim as he is killed by the Yeti less than ten minutes into the story. The Terrance Dicks novelization does a Fix Fic on it by renaming him Emil Julius and doing away with the stereotypical speech patterns.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: In one scene, one of the actors playing the soldiers accidentally refers to Corporal Blake as Colonel Blake.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: The Great Intelligence seems to view "revenge" as petty and beneath it, and is only interested in the Doctor again because of his usefulness. Come "The Name of the Doctor", revenge seems to be its primary motivation.
  • Hype Backlash: Just like The Tomb of the Cybermen, this serial had been lost for decades and was considered by many to be a Holy Grail among the show's missing episodes. When found in 2013 it struck many that, aside from the historical signifiance of Lethbridge-Stewart's introduction and the return of the Great Intelligencenote , the serial itself has nothing that makes it particularly extraordinary or different from any other Second Doctor "Base Under Siege" story. It didn't help that the serial was found together with The Enemy of the World, a serial that had been maligned for decades by many for a premise very different from what the series normally did, but which ironically did turn out to be a lost classic. Having said all that, it's not disliked at all - it's still considered one of the more exciting and colourful Base Under Siege stories, just not much more than that.
  • Memetic Mutation: "I WARNED YOU, JULIUS, I WARNED YOU!", thanks to the Twitch marathon of classic Who.
  • Special Effect Failure: The 2021 animation of Episode Three, which was the first to use 3D motion capture, was received rather coldly by many. Noted issues include jerky character movement, unchanging facial expressions and people clipping through their costumes.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: The Underground map shown in the serial shows when it was made, as neither the Victoria line nor the Jubilee line south of Baker Streetnote  are shown, the Piccadilly line branch to Aldwych is shown, Trafalgar Square and Strand stations show those names instead of their modern day merged name of Charing Cross, and the then Charing Cross station is now called Embankment.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • To say the least, Julius Silverstein comes across as an incredibly insensitive, anti-Semitic caricature to modern audiences. What makes it all the more bizarre is that his actions aren't actually all that unreasonable given the circumstances — he simply refuses to give the Yeti back because he thinks Travers is trying to scam him with some ridiculous story that even Travers' own daughter disbelieves — giving the impression that his ethnicity was purely an excuse for the writers to engage in some stereotyping.
    • The portrayal of Evans as a cowardly, dim-witted Welshman is also cringe-worthy to modern audiences.

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