Strawman Has A Point / Doctor Who

• In "The Dominators", the villainous Rago repeatedly tells Toba to conserve their power by not just murdering everyone on the island like Toba wants — clearly, Rago is a canny leader and Toba's a paranoid psychopath, fair enough. Except Rago's plan absolutely would have worked if Toba had just murdered everyone on the island (which would have included the Doctor, Jamie, Zoe, and Cully, the only people on the island who want to fight back).
• In the serial "The Invasion", aspiring glamour photographer Isobel suggests getting proof of the Cybermen's presence in the sewers by going down to take pictures. The Brigadier agrees, but intends to use his own men instead, on the basis that such a situation is no place for a lady. Isobel blows up at how backward and sexist he's being, but the Brig refuses, and both girls gang up on Jamie for agreeing with him and both she and Zoe walk away in a huff to get the pics themselves with Jamie worriedly tagging along, which ends up getting a police officer and a UNIT soldier sent to rescue them killed. While it could easily be argued that the Brig was in the wrong to assume they could not handle themselves for being women, it might have been better to let trained and experienced soldiers do the dangerous work, and neither of the girls are called out for their reckless actions getting two men killed. To add insult to injury, Isobel's photos end up being useless since she's never done any surveillance or dim-lighting photography.
• In "The Curse of Peladon", Hepesh is treated as an unreasonable nationalist willing to do anything not to deal with the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire. But "The Mutants" two serials later shows that an earlier Human Empire did to the planet Solos exactly what Hepesh feared would happen to Peladon, exploited to the point of destruction and with the native population almost wiped out. Later in "The Monster of Peladon" it's shown a lot of the miners on Peladon feel they are being exploited, and "Planet of the Ood" would give another good reason to dislike the empire.
• In "The Time Monster", Ruth Ingram is supposed to be an obnoxious Straw Feminist who treats men the way sexist men treat women. However, her initial complaint about her boss banging on about his 'male superiority' is bang on the money, since her boss goes around calling himself The Master. The Master also treats her in a sexist way (inexplicably), saying things to her that are wildly inappropriate by anyone's standards and treating her less experienced male colleague like the boss rather than her. Her one sexist line to Benton ("Just stand over there and look pretty") is also played by both actors involved as being mutually enjoyed flirting rather than an insult. All in all, she comes off as being a reasonable feminist, if perhaps a bit prone to hyperbole when talking about legitimate grievances.
• The Doctor (beginning with the Fourth) often criticised the Time Lords for sitting around being pompous instead of using their powers to intervene more, content to let whole civilisations be destroyed on their watch. However with all the dangerous renegades like the Monk, the War Chief, the Master, and the Rani running around with all the damage they cause, and the Doctor himself often centimetres away from full A God Am I status, it makes sense the Time Lords prefer not to intervene except for major problems. When they first appeared they did interfere in a reasonable manner, the Doctor calling them in to stop a plan to conquer a galaxy with an Army of The Ages assisted by a rogue Time Lord. Later the Time Lords occasionally sent the Doctor, especially the Third, to assist affairs on an important scale. That's before considering that when the Time Lords intervened in "The Trial of a Time Lord" this action almost destroyed Earth, and when they sent the Doctor to destroy the Daleks before they were created it ended up being the first shot in a Great Offscreen War that nearly destroyed the universe. The serial "Underworld" even revealed that when the Time Lords first interacted with another planet by giving them advanced technology, the planet and nearly all of the species were wiped out. Their most interventionist Lord President, Morbius, was also a dictator, cult leader and war criminal who was eventually executed for his conquests.
• Whizzkid in "Greatest Show In The Galaxy" is a cruel stereotype of the Doctor Who fans of the period, complaining that "although I never saw it in the early days I know it's not as good as it used to be." Except, as pointed out in The Completely Useless Encyclopedia, Whizkid is right about the circus, and the reasons are pretty much exactly the criticisms fans were making about eighties Doctor Who.
• "The Parting of the Ways" has the Ninth Doctor decline from destroying Earth along with the Daleks, claiming it's the morally better choice to not wipe out humanity. However the episode had just a moment before shown the Daleks attacking Earth so heavily they have probably wiped out at least nearly all of humanity. By the time the Daleks confront the Doctor he is quite possibly the only non-Dalek in range of the Delta Wave and the Daleks will exterminate him anyway. The Doctor even points out earlier that the human race has traveled to other worlds and will survive. The Daleks surviving means they'll attack more worlds and give humanity much less chance of surviving, and it's only a literal Deus ex Machina from Rose that saves the Universe from the Daleks.
• In "The Sontaran Stratagem", the Doctor insists that he is going to handle the situation and that Colonel Mace of UNIT should listen to him and not attack the Sontarans who has already killed several dozen people and are warming up a full force invasion. While the Doctor is right that something fishy is going on with the Sontaran tactics and that UNIT could easy be crushed if the Sontarans actually tried, Colonel Mace is dealing with an alien invasion; he knows that attacking that building may end with all of his men dead, but he points out that they cannot simply sit around and wait to be conquered.
  Colonel Mace: "Thank you, Doctor. Thank you so much for your lack of faith, but this time I'm not listening." He pulls off his gas mask and dons his badass hat.
  • As a subversion of usual usage of the trope, this becomes a Big Damn Heroes moment where UNIT successfully counters the Sontaran's advantages and wipes out the ground forces while the Doctor takes care of the superweapons and the ship in orbit. The Doctor actually ends up looking like somewhat of an idiot when, after unsuccessfully attempting to convince Mace that "you can't! Fight! Sontarans!", Mace promptly leads UNIT to successfully! Fight! Sontarans!
  • In this particular instance, much of Colonel Mace's trenchant personality is a response to the Doctor's outright antagonistic attitude towards the UNIT soldiers' use of guns. Colonel Mace probably would've been more inclined to listen to the Doctor's warnings, and hence, minimize deaths on his side, if the Doctor had a companion around to rein him in. However, Donna was still onboard the Sontaran spaceship, and Martha had been replaced by a clone. There were smarter ways to play it, and those would've happened if the Doctor hadn't antagonized Mace for the last hour.
• Both Harriet Jones and Torchwood One are presented by both the Doctor and the script writers as being entirely in the wrong for activities such as harvesting alien technology. Problem is that the Doctor is reckless, and treats death like a game and he is someone who is not likely to be there when the Earth needs him and he is responsible through his indirect actions for a good portion of the threats the Earth encounters.
• This is done even worse in "Journey's End", where the Doctor is disgusted when his clone destroys the Dalek fleet and treats him like a monster, the narrative using him to demonstrate how much the Doctor has morally improved since travelling with Rose. Even though the Daleks are fanatical mass-murderers who never negotiate and letting them live would inevitably lead to countless more deaths. They had just come close to destroying the Universe and it probably wouldn't be too difficult for them to try again, and from what we see the Doctor was just willing to leave them like they were.
• This is possibly acknowledged in "The Day of the Doctor". Originally the future Doctors treated the War Doctor like a monster for destroying Gallifrey with the Daleks. Later 10 and 11 meet him just before he does so and realise he wasn't evil and there was genuinely no other way for him other than the universe being destroyed. Of course they then proceed to save Gallifrey with a Tricked Out Time gambit but acknowledge that one Doctor couldn't have done it alone.
• In "Day of the Doctor", Ten and Eleven criticize Kate Stewart for being willing to blow up the Black Archive (and a good chunk of London with it) in order to keep the Zygons from using the technology stored in the Archive to conquer Earth. Sure, the Doctors came up with an alternate solution, but it is literally one that could only be enacted by a third party.
• In "Arachnids in the U.K.," the 13th Doctor savages the villainous hotelier Jack Robertson for shooting one of the dying giant spiders to death and dismissing it as a "mercy killing." However, even though the hotelier's heart was unquestionably in the wrong place, it's not at all clear that the Doctor's approach (letting the thousands of spiders slowly asphyxiate due to their overscaled breathing physiology) was any more merciful ... or even remotely as merciful.