YMMV / Ratched

• Jerkass Woobie: Very much so for Mildred and Edmund. It's stated that the terrible abuse and neglect they suffered contributed to Edmund's terrifyingly violent tendencies and Mildred's willingness to manipulate others and sometimes commit very violent acts herself.
• Nausea Fuel: Yes. By the bucketload, given it's setting inside a post WWII psychiatric hospital. Let's just say it's not safe to watch this with a full stomach, as there are moments in this series that will make you gag.
  • Dr. Hanover tells a story about how he and another patient of his were using LSD to treat the patient's psychosis and the patient ended up sawing off his own arms with an electric saw, thinking the arms needed to be cut off.
  • Nurse Ratched and Dr. Hanover get rid of the man hired to kill him by boiling him alive in the tub room, causing his skin to melt off!
  • Mildred recalling a time during the war when a young man's leg was badly injured in battle, to the point it just looks like a mess of pulpy gore, and he gets his leg sawn off. Later when he begs Mildred to kill him, he has Blood from the Mouth and pukes blood into a bowl next to him.
  • A man is being taken to what he thinks is a lethal injection, only for the governor to cruelly reveal he's actually getting the electric chair instead, then taunts him to "be a man and take it" - the electrical volts fry the man alive while the disgusted press watch the whole thing through a window.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In "Ice Pick", the lobotomies are quite graphic and disturbing to watch, with one of the patients still conscious and barely able to move away as the doctor starts drilling into his head. His eye lids rapidly blinking, his inaudible groans of pain and his arms frailing as he tried to escape his lobotomy procedure. It's enough to made one of those observing the procedure to faint from such a sight.
  • When the second lobotomy happens, it's on the bone located above the eye socket. It's enough to make Nurse Bucket vomit. Mildred Ratched later uses the same technique to keep a mental patient silenced.
  • Dr. Hanover performs his alternative procedure on two cadavers. He realized that the trepanning of the skull was too graphic and has resorted to the transorbital lobotomy, which refers to the drilling through the eye socket. Before the procedure can commence, Dolly is disgusted, but it is Nurse Bucket who pukes on the floor.
  • Mildred describing an erotic fantasy of a young Marine while remembering how gastly his leg was, the muscle hanging off of the bone and the leg was completely destroyed from a explosive device so she had to saw it off while blood poured from his mouth as he begged her not to.
  • In "Angel Of Mercy", Mildred takes Hanover to a diner. She asks why he is being hunted. Hanover explains that a few years ago, he met Lenore Osgood, who asked him to treat her deranged son. Henry liked to prick people with needles. It’s a sexual disorder called piquerism. But he was becoming more violent. He sharpened a leather punch and stabbed the gardener. So Hanover took Henry in as a patient. He asked for a full day alone with Henry, and Hanover introduced him to LSD. A standard dose. While Hanover was distracted, Henry poured the whole bottle into his glass of water. The drug began to take effect almost instantly, resulting in both of them feeling its effects, Hanover more so. Then Henry just started talking about a deity and how it came into his room, stole his arms, and sewed someone else’s arms into his body. He wanted Hanover to remove them. Henry left but later returned with the gardener’s arms. Hanover watched as Henry sawed his left arm off. And when he finished, he wedged his other arm behind a heavy bureau and cracked it at the humerus. Hanover panicked. So he sewed the gardener’s arms onto Henry, who sat there laughing. When Hanover finished, he ran. From what information he could gather, Henry’s system went septic. He recovered, but only after the infect spread to his legs, which also had to be removed. For this, Lenore Osgood wants him dead.
• Questionable Casting: Sarah Paulson isn't a bad choice to play Nurse Ratched, but given this is an origin story that takes place decades before the character's original appearance, and Paulson is actually older than Louise Fletcher was when she played Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, an argument can easily be made that Paulson is too old to play this role.
• Tainted by the Preview: Some found the trailer to be unimpressive, derivative of Ryan Murphy's prior work, and annoyingly over-the-top.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The atmosphere given by previews for the show has been unfavorably compared with the original realistic setting and feel of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which has been replaced with one that's completely different, being much more over-the-top. It feels like it belongs more in the world of American Horror Story than it does in the actual world it's set in.
• Tough Act to Follow: General opinion is that while Sarah Paulson is an excellent actress, Louise Fletcher's performance remains untouched.

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